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“Why the shock?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking back at him. “I think it would be hard to hang on to cynicism in a place like this.”
His mouth tightened a little bit before quirking into a dry smile that could only be described as cynical. “You’ve met my mother, haven’t you?”
I stopped, furious with myself. How could I have been so stupid to assume what his childhood had been like? My own had been a disaster of epic proportions, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be worse for others.
Shame wasn’t an emotion I felt a lot, but when I did, it hit me squarely where the Good Lord split it. I looked down at the ground, trying to lose myself in the cobblestones.
A finger came down, gently tracing along my jaw and tilting my face up to look back at him.
“You know,” he said, his tone far gentler than it had been moments before, “one could say the same thing about you, being from LA.”
I blinked at him once, staring into his dark eyes before bursting into laughter.
“What?” I answered, greatly appreciating his changing the tone to something more humorous.
“You heard me,” he taunted.
“You’ve got to be joking. One might say that city is cynicism’s natural breeding ground,” I said with a laugh. “Sometimes I think growing up there is exactly why I’m so jaded.”
“Really?” he asked, raising his eyebrow at me. “You think that’s the only reason?”
I bit down on my lip once again and turned away from him. In that second, I started making my way toward the old square that marked the end of the narrow boulevard. I wasn’t sure how to get into the garbage that had made up my childhood, especially since he hadn’t exactly been forthcoming. This was bound to be a battle of vulnerability for sure. With the finger pointed toward me now—Spencer most likely knowing precisely what he was doing—it felt like I needed to crawl out of my skin to shake this bizarre feeling away.
Well, at least I knew how Spencer felt in the car when I tried to dig into the details about his father passing away.
Listen to yourself. Are you defending him now?
Bullshit. Vulnerability or not, I was just asking a simple question. But fuck me if he’d answer it, so why would I tell him about my situation, my dead mother and abusive father? Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t telling him jack shit. He hadn’t told me anything about what I was getting into with his demented mother, which was fine. But I wasn’t busting out the Natalia personal emotions card for this guy after he couldn’t be bothered to tell me there was something seriously wrong with his mother.
“Hey,” he said as I spun around when he caught hold of my arm. I looked up into the eyes that continued to crack me open with their warmth, little by little. “If you don’t want to talk about whatever keeps those walls anchored ten feet deep and twenty high, that’s fine, Nat. But don’t pretend like there’s nothing there that’s burning you and keeping you from opening up to me.”
“Opening up to you?” I countered.
“You heard me,” he said with some authority.
“Last I checked,” I said, holding back any accusations I wanted to hurl his way, “we aren’t actually married, and one would hardly call us lovers.”
“Natalia,” he didn’t break this consuming stare that suddenly ignited some fire inside of me that made me feel warm and comfortable with him. “You may want to hide from shit because of me not opening up to you. It’s just not quite my personality to throw all my emotions out there. It isn’t who I am.”
“And what if it isn’t who I am? Just because I’m a woman, do you think I’m some kind of blubbering idiot who can’t stop prattling on about her emotions? Plenty of women don’t gush about their feelings; sorry to disappoint.”
He shook his head and put his hands up as a sign of surrender. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I don’t assume you’ll be open or emotional because you’re a woman. You’ve met my mother: it’s obvious I didn’t grow up with an emotional woman to set an example.” He put his hands down again and smiled warmly at me. “But something tells me that underneath all of this exterior beauty, your beautiful soul has no problem opening up to those she trusts.”
“What makes you think I would open up and trust you, of all people, Spencer Monroe?”
“My job is to sniff weasels out for a global empire, and I’m highly successful at reading people.”
“Your point?”
“My point is that while you may not trust me right now, you also have this little, tiny thing about you that tells someone to fuck off the instant you feel they’ve crossed a boundary. I know. I’ve witnessed it on multiple occasions.”
“And you’re about to witness it again.”
He slid his hands into his pockets, confident as fuck. “No,” he smiled and chewed on his bottom lip in some incredibly sexy way. “No, Nat. You’ll trust me just enough, and with that trust, I don’t intend on taking advantage of it.”
“What exactly do you intend on doing?”
