Page 64 of Boxed In

He took a sip of chocolate, then looked at her. “I liked you the first time I met you. I wanted to get to know you better. But I knew getting involved with you would complicate my assignment from Decorah.”

“Why?”

“You’re still being pretty direct.”

“I figure we’ve been in a pressure cooker and living through the equivalent of six months together in the past few hours. That gives us the ability to cut through a lot of ordinary stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“But we still don’t understand each other. I’m guessing you don’t know how much I admired you.”

His features registered shock. “You admired me?”

“After you showed up at the office, I asked around about you. I knew you came from a . . . . disadvantaged background.”

“And I didn’t go to college,” he added, putting that piece of information squarely between them.

“Right. And I did. And to give you the short version of my life, I had loving parents who made a good home for me in Catonsville. Dad was a pharmacist for a drugstore chain. And Mom was a teacher’s aide in an elementary school. I got a partial scholarship to The University of Maryland—Baltimore County. I majored in fine arts, and I had big dreams of what I was going to do with my life. I wanted to start my own business. But my dad died while I was in college.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mom is living on the widow’s portion of his pension—which is just enough for her to get by.” She heaved in a breath and let it out. “I had to go to work for a bastard like Carl Peterbalm because I had debts to pay. So here I am—two years out of college, and I haven’t done any of the things I want to. But you have. You worked for a computer repair company. Then you got a job with Decorah.”

His expression turned bemused. “You sure know a hell of a lot about me!”

“Well, I didn’t know the Decorah part. But I was glad you came back to town. And I found out about you from Betty Custer, who works down the hall.”

“Betty went to school with me.”

“I know. And she said you were kind of wild.” She laughed. “She thinks it was because you had low self-esteem.”

The color in his cheeks heightened. “Nice of her.”

“It was true, wasn’t it? That’s why you went out of your way to be a tough guy in school.”

His face contorted. “Okay. Yeah.”

“I’ll bet your grandmother is really proud of you.”

“She was. She smoked all her life, and she died of lung cancer last year.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She had a hard life. I tried to make things better for her. She wanted to die in her own home, and I was able to get a hospital bed for her and arrange nursing care.”

“That must have been expensive.”

“You can get the bed from a hospice organization. But the nursing care set me back a bundle.”

“Even so, you gave her what she wanted in the end.”

He swallowed. “I wanted her to know how much I loved and respected her.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“I gave her a hard time when I was a teenager,” he said quickly. “Some other tough guys in the neighborhood and I used to boost cars and go joyriding.”

“I got in trouble, too.”

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