The Comfort of Favorite Things (A Hope Springs Novel) Read Free Page B

school?”
    “Here. There.” She shrugged. “Everywhere.”
    “Married?”
    Those eyes again. Lying. Or close to it anyway. “A long-term relationship. Very long. Too long.”
    Interesting. And a lot more than he’d asked for. “You bought the house after it ended?”
    She shook her head. Shook loose wisps of hair she then blew away with a puff of breath. “I bought it more recently. I had . . . things to take care of first. After it ended. Get my head on straight.” She shrugged again, a really bad effort at nonchalance. “Stuff like that.”
    As if stuff like that was par for the course, or not worth the words to explain. Then again, he didn’t know anything about getting over relationships. “Sounds like a tough time.”
    “Not as tough as prison, I imagine,” she said, and lifted the cup she held cradled in both hands.
    “Yeah.” He looked down into his own cup, frowning at the floating remnants of his foam leaf. “It was.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said, the words coming slowly as if she didn’t want to choose the wrong ones. And then she did. “I never came to see you. I should’ve come to see you. Especially since we spent the last free night you had making sure you could barely walk out of my room.”
    Uh-uh. He didn’t want to think about that night. Not the sex. Not Thea’s body naked. Not the way his heart had nearly torn his chest open with fear. The memory punched hard. “Don’t—”
    But she cut him off, determined. “I mean it. Knowing what you’d done for Indiana—”
    “Don’t,” he repeated, because he wasn’t interested in what she knew, or what she thought she should’ve done. The past could not be reversed. The past couldn’t even be forgotten. He knew. He’d tried. For nearly half of his life, he’d tried. “Seriously. Don’t.”
    “Fine.” She set down her cup, the coffee sloshing to the rim. “I won’t mention again how much I wish I’d come to see you while you were inside because I probably knew you better than anyone else at the time, and I thought the sacrifice you made for your sister was about the most heroic thing ever.”
    “I’m nobody’s hero, Clark,” he said, draining his coffee, then placing his cup beside hers and turning to go, her words like an anchor dragging behind him, scraping over the floor to leave a scar.
    He didn’t care that he was here on business. Keller business. His brother’s business. Since he’d come back to Texas a year ago, no one had talked to him so bluntly about prison. He didn’t want anyone talking to him about prison at all.
    But especially not Thea Clark.
    “You’re not leaving, are you?”
    It was a challenge rather than a question, and he was pretty sure she’d added on the last part to try to fool him otherwise. “I don’t know,” he said, stopping and shaking his head before looking back. “Are we going to talk business?”
    Her arms were crossed, her hip cocked, her jaw tight as if she was ready for battle. As if she needed the armor because standing up to him wasn’t the piece of cake she wanted him to believe. “I thought that’s why you were here.”
    He’d thought the same thing. Then he’d thought about looking down at the top of her head. And looking into her eyes. And prison. He glanced at the blueprint that had rolled itself up on the floor.
    He could do this. Talk business with the girl who’d been his first, though he wasn’t sure she knew that, or why he’d let the thought creep in.
    “It is,” he finally said.
    “Okay.”
    “But no talking about my past.” That was a deal breaker.
    “If that’s what you want.”
    “And no talking about yours.”
    “I can do that. Or not do that, I guess,” she said.
    He nodded and offered his hand.
    She dropped her gaze from his to look at it, fighting a smile as she did. “A gentleman’s agreement?”
    “We can put it in writing if you want,” he said, still standing there, arm extended, waiting.
    “No need,” she said, and