“I think so, don’t you? We probably look quite… convincing.”
Ahead of us, another couple was walking our way. Was it anyone we knew? I glanced at his face as he registered them too, then I slipped my hand into his.
“Better safe than sorry,” I said.
“I can get behind that.” He looked down at me with a smile.
Somewhere nearby, bees were working their way through a patch of lavender.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said. “About Bonnie and you. The way she’s been with me, I don’t understand it. I mean, I know she had this issue with serviettes and whatever”—Ilaughed. It just seemed amusing now—“but is there something more?”
I really had the sense she didn’t like me, like it was personal.
“Ah, right, fair enough.” He held my hand a little tighter. “Bonnie’s always looked out for me, since we were kids. But when I left the RAF, she saw me struggling with some… stuff. She still worries about me. Sorry you got the brunt of that.”
My mind flashed to the scars on his body. The box in his room.
“I’m sorry, Liam. It sounds… a bit much.”
“Oh, I’m used to it. She worries about everything. She’s also convinced I’m a target for certain types of people because I’m—” He cleared his throat.
“Rich?”
“Yeah. Something like that.” He laughed, but it didn’t quite land. “I’ve had the odd… issue in my dating life, too. It’s difficult to know sometimes, if someone’s with you because—”
“Right.” I felt myself flush. Fuck, that must have been awful. Never knowing if someone liked you for who you were or what you had. HadImade him feel like that? With the NDA, and the ten thousand pounds, and the designer dresses, and the rides in the private jet? If I had, I hadn’t meant to.
“I never thought of it like that before,” I said. “Like wealth was a handicap.”
“Why would you? It’s not exactly something you can talk about. It would sound rather—”
“Yeah.”
Spoiled, ungrateful.Entitled. Exactly what we’d thought of him at first.
Liam wasn’t any of those things.
“But… how can you ever know?” I asked. “If something’s real, when you have all this… money.” He must have felt like hewas trapped inside a nightmare where every smile could be fake, every touch calculated, every woman mentally assessing his worth.
He laughed again. “You can’t, that’s the problem. You can never live life like that again, once you’ve got it. Unless you met someone who didn’t—”
“What?”
“Someone who didn’t… know.”
I felt a wave of warmth radiate from my stomach to my chest. Maybe what we’d had together that first afternoon had felt so special because… it was?
We walked along in silence for a few minutes, his hand warm around mine.
“Anyway, enough about me,” he said. “Who worries about you? I’ve met your sister, but I get the feeling you do more of the worrying there. What about your parents? Do they micromanage you like Bonnie does me?”
“Oh yeah. Well, not exactly.” Mum was warm and lovely, but she’d pretty much stopped looking after Eliza and me when Dad passed away.
“No?”
“My dad died in a car crash when I was fifteen.”
I heard him draw in a soft breath.
