Page 16 of Imperfect Saint
She huffed, “Stop calling me cute.”
“Not a chance. You are cute as hell, Mills. It’s one of the reasons I like you so much.” He winked and when she scowled he held his hands up innocently, “The best lies come from the truth, babe. That’s one hundred percent true. Just like it’ll be true when they ask how we met and I tell them through work and when they ask about the first time I asked you out they’re going to laugh their heads off about how you turned me down flat.”
Millie bit the inside of her cheek to keep back a smile as she thought about that. He’d had the nerve to ask her out during his interview for God’s sake. It had been completely unprofessional and she’d told Lemon all about it. She still swore their boss had insisted on hiring him just for the fun of seeing the shocked look on Millie’s face.
She sighed, “That’s not enough.”
“Fine. Throw me some other questions.” He shrugged.
“What’s my middle name?”
“Evelyn. You’re named after your mother.”
She narrowed her eyes at that last bit, wondering how he knew that. Her middle name was on some of the paperwork at the office. It was also online if he’d done some digging. But he’d have had to do a lot of digging to get her mother’s full name.
“Where do I live?”
“Really, Mills? I picked you up there today.”
“Fine. Who’s my favorite artist?”
“Are we talking music or paining?”
“Either. Both?” She shot back when he smirked.
“You tell people Dolly when they ask because it’s Nashville, but in reality you listen to Beyonce more than anyone except maybe Lemon when it comes to music. And as far as paintings go, I’m a dumb ex-military grunt that wouldn’t know one name from another and nobody is going to ask me that question anyway.”
She smiled a little at that, “I like Pollock.”
“Pollock? Really?” Hunter scratched his head, “The guy that threw paint on a canvas on the floor and called it art?”
That made her giggle, “Yes. Exactly. It’s absolutely insane and perfect and when I was about seven or eight I used to put my sheets on the ground and throw paint everywhere and say I was going to be famous just like him.”
Hunter laughed, the sound throaty and loud, “In this house?”
“Yep. It’s one of the reasons they moved me up here to the attic, where I couldn’t do as much damage.” She grinned back at him. “If you look at the baseboards really closely you can still see some of the speckles of paint they couldn’t get out of the indentations in the wood.”
“You little troublemaker.” Hunter joked, leaning over to examine the floorboards.
“Nah, not really.” She shook off the laughter of a moment ago and returned herself to the seriousness of their situation, “Look, this might seem silly to you but I’m really close to my brother. He’s going to ask questions. He’ll want to know why I didn’t tell him about you. I need him to think this is real. I don’t want to ruin his big day by causing a scene just because you don’t know something as simple as my birthday.”
Hunter rose back up to his full height and looked at her. He looked serious again and she hoped that she was getting through to him, past all of the jokes and the laid-back attitude of his exterior. She knew he was a good man. He was smart and kind and funny. He’d agreed to come along this weekend and be her date and help her keep her ex at bay and her family off her back and yet, she needed him to understand that if they failed to convince them this relationship was real that it would only make things a thousand times worse for her.
“Millie…” Hunter sighed.
“Hunter.” She shot back but he held up a finger and began to speak over her.
“Millie, I know when your birthday is. It’s December 12th. I also know that you don’t mind that it’s so close to Christmas because you don’t like being the center of attention and Christmas distracts people from celebrating you instead. I know that you love classic movies but you think Casablanca is overrated. I know you have a teensy, tiny little bird tattooed on the back of your shoulder because your favorite book is Jane Eyre and it has that quote about not being caged. You got it a few months ago, with Lemon, and I didn’t understand why at the time but I think I do now.”
“Hunter…” She gaped at him but he stepped closer to her and kept talking.
“I’m not done.” He raised his voice, “You hate pineapple on your pizza, and you think people that enjoy it are monsters without taste-buds. You listen to audiobooks while you work, mostly psychological thrillers, but sometimes you listen to those sexy bodice ripper romances when you’re alone and working late. You have a cat named Simmons after a character on that Marvel TV show you and Lemon both DVR and then watch together. The cat is spending the weekend with your neighbor who keeps her for you when you’re out of town. You want a dog too, but you think they require more time and attention than a cat and you work too much right now. You’d also like to have a place with a yard before you adopt a dog, and you will adopt, because the number of unwanted pets in the shelters makes you wish you could save them all. Do you want me to keep going or do you think that maybe, just maybe, I know you better than you think I do?”
Millie stared at him, mouth gaping and eyes wide. He’d just listed off things he knew about her like he’d been slowly gathering information and storing it in a file all this time. These weren’t the kind of things that he could have found in her paperwork at the office or even online if he’d done his research. These things were personal and strangely intimate and important to her but should have seemed completely unimportant to someone else.
Only Hunter knew them, which meant that all these months they’d been working together, he’d been paying attention. Not just to Lemon, but to her, specifically. He didn’t just know big things like her birthday either. He knew little things that came up during a random luncheon, like the time she’d called pineapple pizza lovers monsters and the shows she liked to watch, and even the kind of books she listened to, even though she couldn’t ever remember talking about those books while he was in the vicinity.
He knew her. Knew things that she hadn’t realized he could possibly know. And in that moment, she felt overwhelmed but also so, so guilty for not knowing all of those same things about him.
