Page 62 of Tamed

Which meant what I should be doing was making nice, not being passive aggressive with my headphones. It was just… He’d set me off balance turning up out of the blue and looking the way he did, all dark and sexy and badass.

It probably wasn’t great that in the past couple of hours before he’d turned up, the WiFi had come back on and so I’d been trawling the internet for anything I could find on the Hamiltons. Which so far hadn’t been much. But I’d wasted a good amount of time looking at the vast number of pictures of Charlotte and James Hamilton — my grandparents — and wondering if I looked like them.

I’d also been trying to find contact details, because why not? Why couldn’t I contact them myself? But there were none that I could find, or at least none that were publicly available.

Oh yes, and now I’d gotten my phone back, I’d also been texting Zara, who’d been frustratingly cagey about her auction. She’d refused to say who’d bought her and how it had gone, and then she’d told me she wouldn’t be at work for the next week. But not to worry, she was fine.

I did wonder how fine she actually was, but there wasn’t much I could do but offer support if she needed it and if she didn’t need it, then too bad for me.

“Okay,” I said now, having given in and taken my headphones off, because being furious with Caleb wasn’t going to help me. “I presume you want to talk about the message you found on my phone?”

“That would be a start.” He stayed in the doorway, his expression unreadable as ever.

There wasn’t any point keeping the truth from him now. The dates I’d received those texts were right there on the phone, as were my responses. “Well.” I pushed my laptop closed. “You know when I received the texts, and you can see what I said. They were about Mom, and I wanted to know more.”

“You didn’t think to question who sent them to you?”

“Of course, I questioned who sent them. But it was obvious that I wouldn’t get answer even if I asked, so I decided not to bother.”

His black eyes glittered in the dim light of the living room like the lights out in the darkness of the park just beyond the windows. “And you went to that first meeting. On your own.”

In retrospect, it had been a stupid thing to do. But I’d had no choice.

“It was dumb,” I admitted. “But they wanted me to come alone, and I wanted to hear what they had to say.”

Caleb remained very calm, the asshole. “You only had their word it was about your mother. You didn’t have a plan for what you’d do if it wasn’t?”

“I had that little Remington,” I said. “That was my plan.”

“Right,” Caleb said expressionlessly. “Your gun was a backup plan, despite the fact that you’re a hopeless shot.”

He was the one who’d taken me to a shooting range when I was thirteen and made me learn how to fire a gun. I’d quite enjoyed it, but he wasn’t wrong. I was a hopeless shot, most of my rounds completely missing the target and hitting the wall instead no matter how hard I tried to aim.

“Fine.” I could feel myself going red. “Again, that was dumb. But I—”

“You didn’t think, not once, that you could have come to me and asked for help?” He said the words quietly and yet unlike those bullets of mine, they were all direct hits.

I’d once trusted Caleb with everything, ever since I’d been small. He’d been the first one I’d go to whenever I had a problem, the first person I’d run to for help. Unlike Dad, Caleb was always there for me. Even when he was busy, he somehow always made himself available. I could always count on him for support.

But somewhere, at some point in time, I’d decided I couldn’t trust him with this, and I didn’t even know why. I hadn’t even been conscious of the change. Perhaps it had something to do with that night when I’d realized I wanted him. Perhaps I’d been trying to distance him ever since.

I met those fathomless dark eyes now. He was so often unreadable that it came as a shock I could read the glitter in his gaze loud and clear: he was angry again. Angry that I hadn’t trusted him.

I hadn’t realized my trust meant something to him and for a second I could barely take it in. For so long all I’d thought about was my feelings for him — yeah, okay, it was self-centered of me, I’ll own that — and I hadn’t considered his feelings for me. I hadn’t considered that me not trusting him would hurt him in some way.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t recognize that he cared about me — I knew he did. But his care was more along the lines of an uncle, or an adult looking out for a child rather than anything deeper. I hadn’t realized that my trust was important to him and that the lack of it could actually hurt.

Something in my chest squeezed tight. “I did think about it,” I said, feeling suddenly awful again. “But I didn’t think you would help me. Not when it came to Mom. Dad never talks about her and whenever I asked you, you were always so cagey too. So, you know…. Maybe it’s no wonder I didn’t ask you.”

A muscle leapt in his jaw, but he didn’t speak. Then he shoved himself away from the doorframe and walked slowly into the living area, going over to the huge, plate glass windows that gave their magnificent views over Central Park.

He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and stood there silently, looking out. Then he said, without turning, “What do you want to know?”

It took me a second to process what he was saying and then, when it did, I frowned at his broad back. Last week he’d revealed a bit about her, such as which family I was actually related too, but that was it. Was there more? And why did he want to tell more now?

“What? After her being off-limits for years, you’re suddenly happy to talk about her?”

“I made a promise to Ten a long time ago, that I wouldn’t talk about her to you.”

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