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And they’d talked.
He loved listening to her. She’d told him about her first few jobs, about her sisters—her incredibly beautiful sisters, she called them. About her first apartment, and about Horace. How she’d spotted him languishing in a dingy pet-shop window, his feathers all dirty and mussed. How she hadn’t intended to buy a pet at all, but how she couldn’t possibly have left him there...
“What were you like, as a little girl?”
Emily blinked. Jake had interrupted her in the middle of a sentence and it was as much a surprise to him as it was to her. But, all of a sudden, he wanted to know about the Emily who’d existed before she came to New York. He wanted to be able to see her, in his mind’s eye, although he thought he already could. She’d have been delicate and shy, with a mane of untamed hair and a stack of books always in her arms.
“Well...” She hesitated. “Well, there was nothing special about me, Jake. Compared to my sisters, I—”
Jake reached for her hand. “You’re the one I want to hear about.”
“I was, um, I was small.”
“Delicate,” he said, and smiled.
“I was quiet.”
“Shy,” he said, and lifted her hand to his mouth.
“And I always had my nose in a book.”
Jake grinned and laced his fingers through hers. “Tell me more.”
“No, it’s your turn. Tell me about you.”
“There’s nothing much to tell.”
“Ah. You mean, Jacob McBride was born in a well-furnished office, wearing a custom-made suit?”
Jake thought of the tiny house he’d been raised in, of the patched clothes he’d worn until the fabrics were too worn to fix, and he laughed.
“Not by a long shot.”
“Well, what then? Was your father a banker, or... What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Jake said. “Hell, it’s not funny at all. It’s just the thought of my old man as a banker in a custom-made suit. I never saw him wear anything but overalls and a flannel shirt except on Sundays.” His smile tilted. “His day of rest, you know? And he’d spend it trying to figure out how to pay the bills...”
“Jake.” Emily’s fingers tightened over his. “I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s okay. He was a good man. I just don’t usually...” He shrugged. “I don’t talk about him much.”
Emily nodded. Jake didn’t talk about himself much, either, even though she’d tried to get him to do it. She yearned to know more about him.
“Was your dad a farmer, then?”
Jake shook his head.
“I just thought... You said you’re from Pennsylvania. And you said he wore overalls...”
“He was a miner,” Jake said tonelessly. “At least, he was until he got buried under a few tons of coal.”
“Oh, Jake. I’m so sorry.”
“No need to be. It was a long time ago.”
“It must have been awful for you to lose him.”
“Yeah.”
Emily heard the world of meaning behind the single word. Her fingers pressed Jake’s.
“Losing your father... it must have turned your life upside down.”
“Yeah,” he said again. Carefully, he withdrew his hand from Emily’s, curved it around his coffee cup and lifted the cup to his mouth. “Well, I was just a little kid, you know? But my mother had never thought of herself as anything but a wife. She married the first guy that showed any interest. My stepfather and I...let’s just say, he’d signed on for a wife, and the rest was baggage.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, is right. As soon as I was old enough, I took off.”
“For New York?”
“For the army, for Wall Street, for a little of this and that.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Life is life, Em. You deal with whatever comes out of the box, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh.” Emily looked at him. “And now you’re light years from the coal mines.”
“Light-years, is right.” Jake flashed a brittle smile.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, that’s my life story. Now, can we get back to talking about other things? The kitchen here turns out an apple pie that—”
“I just wanted to know more about you, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Because I—because I...”
Emily bit her lip. Whatever she said next would be a mistake. Because I love you? Because I like you? Even that would be disastrous.
She felt her heart break.
She was having an intimate little dinner with her lover, except Jake wasn’t her lover. He was her—her instructor. And when had an instructor ever wanted to share his life story with a pupil?
