Page 48 of After The Storm

They clinked their wine glasses together and each took a drink. Both of them fell quiet and focused on eating for the rest of the meal, but Roman wanted to know more about her now.

“Since you know all about me, tell me about you, Kate Sheridan,” he said as he pushed the empty plate away from him.

She finished the last of her meal and picked up both their plates. “Me? I’m just Kate.”

He didn’t believe for a second she was just anything. Since he hadn’t felt this way about anyone in years, he knew she had something great about her.

As she rinsed the dishes at the sink, he said, “Turnabout is fair play. Tell me about you.”

Kate took her time and turned around slowly after almost a minute. “I moved to New Orleans when I was thirteen, and I graduated high school wanting to be a lawyer. But as so many of us can say, I got sidetracked by a boyfriend during college. I can’t even remember his name now. How sad is that?”

While he’d never let himself get sidetracked by his feelings before, Roman found it charming to think that Kate had thought she was so in love that she gave up going to law school. It made her seem softer in some way.

“I wouldn’t say it’s sad. You were in love.”

She quickly protested that idea. Shaking her head, she said, “I wasn’t in love. If anything, I let my hormones get the best of me. Not my finest hour.”

“So this man of your dreams didn’t pan out. What happened after that?”

“I dropped out of college because I had gotten so far behind in my classes. After a year or so, I knew I couldn’t just mope around, so I went back to school to be a paralegal. I got my associate’s degree a year later, and Jonas Flynn hired me right out of school. That was the only job I’d ever had as a legal assistant. And now, I’m on the run from the cops and making shrimp scampi for the man whose job it is to protect me.”

“So even though you got distracted, you ended up doing what you wanted after all. I can’t think of anything more Kate than that.”

Blushing from his compliment, she lowered her head and pushed the spatula around on the counter before turning to toss it in the sink. Roman hadn’t seen this shy side of her before. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking there was a lot to Kate he hadn’t experienced yet.

And he wanted to see those other sides more than he knew he should.

Chapter Fifteen

Dinner had goneover well, as she knew it would since she’d made her favorite recipe, so Kate assumed they’d continue their conversation after she got the kitchen cleaned up. She knew she’d thought wrong, though, as she turned around after washing the last dish and saw an empty chair where Roman had been sitting at the island just minutes before.

Discouraged, she wondered if she had said something wrong again. It seemed like she was always doing or saying something that made him back away. Just when she thought they were past the point where whatever about her that made him uncomfortable bothered him, he turned into a ghost once again.

Maybe he didn’t feel like she did. The thought had crossed her mind. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for someone like him who helped women in need as a job to have a hard and fast rule about getting involved with a client. It probably made sense for him to keep every woman he worked with at arm’s length. How effective could he be at protecting someone if he had feelings for her?

Kate slumped against the kitchen island and wondered if she should just be honest with him. She quickly dismissed that idea. The mere thought of trying to have that conversation—trying to tell him that even though she knew they were complete opposites that she had developed feelings for him—just the thought of it made her cringe.

Never in her life had she heard or seen that kind of honest admission of how someone felt turn out successfully. Only in the movies and in books did that happen. In real life, you told someone you had feelings for them and they more often than not sat with a forced smile as they mentally scrambled to find a gentle way to let you down easy. While she’d never herself admitted she had feelings to a man before he did, she’d witnessed enough emotional car crashes with girlfriends to know a session of true confession wasn’t what she wanted to do with Roman.

Even if the image of him staring at her with his mouth agape as she told him how she felt made her think it might all be worthwhile just to see him like that.

But no, that’s not the kind of woman she was. Independent, yes. Courageous in the face of people after her, maybe. Emotionally brave, though? No way.

She knew her limits, and bearing her soul to a man who routinely turned away whenever she got close was at least three steps past her hard line. Kate had no illusions about the kind of men she found attractive.

Tough, quiet, even sullen, they tended to be the brooding kind of guys other women ran away from like they were on fire, and for good reason. Those men required a strong woman who didn’t need to be fawned over day and night. They never failed to be there when you needed them, but they weren’t exactly sweetness and light, and they rarely remembered birthdays and anniversaries.

Roman was exactly the type of man she’d always wanted. Looking around the living room and not seeing him anywhere in sight, she couldn’t help but think that every time anyone had ever said to her to be careful what she wished for in a man, they’d been more right than they could ever know.

Pushing the idea of actually telling him how she felt about him out of her mind, she resigned herself to continuing dropping subtle hints and hoping he reciprocated at some point. It wasn’t brave or brash, but it was her style and she couldn’t change it for him or anyone else.

No matter how much she wished she could.

Kate looked around at Butcher’s home and shrugged. “Another night at home alone. Oh well. At least I know the terrain of that landscape.”

She wasn’t tired, but still she headed for the bedroom she’d claimed earlier in the day. At least if she spent her time in there it didn’t feel like she was constantly chasing after Roman trying to get him to speak to her. That’s not how she wanted to spend her night.

Instead, she settled into bed and prepared to watch back-to-back episodes of Dateline. She’d never really been a huge fan of television shows devoted to solving mysteries of lost people or murderous boyfriends or girlfriends, but recent events in her life now made them more interesting. She just hoped she didn’t end up as the subject of one of them someday.

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