Page 211 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

A knot formed lower down in her belly as he shifted back in his seat and the crooked smile curving his mouth deepened a fraction at the corners. ‘When I came downstairs, she guessed we’d had a row about where you were sleeping. I think it’s fair to say that she was surprised, but also pleased. She thinks I have things too easy. With women. She thinks it’s bad for me.’ His smile twisted. ‘She doesn’t say so to my face, but she has a way of conveying her opinion with an eyebrow or the slightest of shrugs.’

‘And do you? Have things too easy? With women?’ she blurted out before her brain could apply the brakes.

Her whole body tensed, the reaction both a learned response and a survival instinct hardwired in her DNA to the sudden tautness in the air that followed her question.

Tiger shifted in his seat.

‘I like women. And they like me,’ he said, putting down his fork. ‘Or they think they do until they realise that I’m not in it for the long haul.’

‘And that’s a problem, is it? The long haul?’

He nodded. ‘I think relationships are best kept simple.’

She agreed. Simple was good but safe was better. Not that she was interested in relationships. For any relationship to work there had to be trust and outside her family she didn’t trust anyone. And yet she was having this surprisingly frank conversation with Tiger.

‘By simple, I’m guessing you mean that you just want sex?’

He laughed. ‘That’s maybe putting it a little too simply. But yes, I suppose in an ideal world, I think it would be easier for most people if they accepted that sex was all they wanted a lot of the time. Only humans seem determined to make things more complicated, so we have marriage and romance and love.’

Been there, done that, she thought bleakly, and once was enough. And for her it had not been complicated at all.

Marriage was a cage; romance was a hoax. As for love?

Love was the most dangerous of them all. So much more dangerous than you were told. It was a promise that got broken every single day.

‘I’m not interested in any of that.’ He pushed the empty plate away from him as if to underscore that sentiment.

‘I’m not interested in any of that either.’ She hesitated for a moment then, putting her fork down, she said quietly, ‘What does interest you, then?’

Her heart slowed to a crawl as silence stretched between them.

‘Work. Building my business. And the moon. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go there—’ He glanced past her to the dark square of sky outside. ‘It always felt like it was watching me, seeing me.’

It seemed like an odd thing to say. She couldn’t imagine a situation where Tiger wasn’t seen.

‘I suppose it would be quiet.’

He nodded and there was another long, shifting silence and then abruptly he leaned forward, his eyes suddenly very golden. ‘So, was it the truth?’

She stared at him, confused, not just by his question, which made no sense at all, but by the way he was looking at her so closely as if she was a puzzle he was trying to figure out. ‘Was what the truth?’

‘What you said about your family being strict. Are they?’

No, she thought. Her childhood home had not quite been lawless, but there had been very few rules. And she had hated it, because every morning when she’d woken, anything could have happened. Maybe that was why she was so good at hacking. She accepted the impossible, the random, the topsy-turvy and she had learned to let it flow round her while she restored order.

But she could imagine how that would sound to Tiger, how he would react. She had heard it so many times already, some version of the ‘apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’. She didn’t need to hear him say it too.

‘They’re not strict,’ she said slowly. ‘But they have lines they won’t cross.’

Her family might turn a blind eye to selling car parts that might be stolen. But they weren’t violent or controlling or abusive. For example, they wouldn’t bang someone’s face against a steering wheel because they had missed a spot of dirt on the windscreen.

The memory had crept in uninvited, but she couldn’t look away. One tiny little tooth, white like a pearl, and blood, red, slick, gleaming in the Nevada sunlight. So much blood.

She shoved the memory back forcefully into the margins because obviously she wasn’t going to tell Tiger any of that.

Or could she?

The question shocked her almost out of her skin. She was definitely suffering jet lag, she told herself, if she thought that was an option. It was the only possible explanation for why she was considering something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

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