AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The question was innocent enough but Alexa knew what her mom was getting at, knew it from the careful tone of her words, spoken too casually to be truly casual, knew it from the way her dad studied his next bite of cake like it held a fascinating new discovery.
Her mom would never come out and ask if Alexa was seeing anyone. She was too modern to think a woman needed a partner to be happy, but she also had a nose for Alexa’s hang-ups — maybe all moms did — and her concern over Alexa’s lack of a love life was palpable.
“Not much,” she said. “Just the usual.”
“Have you been out with Maggie again?”
“Not recently,” Alexa said.
Maggie was a coworker two years younger than Alexa who spent nearly every Friday and Saturday combing clubs or swiping through dating apps for hookups. It was true that Alexa’s own sexual encounters had come from similar venues, but they were a lot fewer and further between, the search undertaken only when Alexa’s hormones got the better of her.
Then she would find someone suitable, get to know them well enough that it didn’t seem totally gross to go to bed with them, have an orgasm or two (if she was lucky), and disappear into the night. Sometimes she went months between encounters. She didn’t have the stamina — or the interest — to keep up with Maggie.
“Did you finish that book?” her dad asked. “The one about the boy and the painting?”
She sent a silent thank you to her father for returning them to safer ground. “I did, and I loved it. Did you?”
She often read the same books as her parents. It was nice, like their own private book club.
“I’m almost done,” he said.
“The ending was so good,” Alexa said. “You’ll have to tell me what you think.”
They made small talk while they ate the rest of their cake, but Alexa could feel the remnants of her mom’s unspoken question hanging in the air. She had a flash of Nick Murphy, sitting across from her at The Friendly Toast, his dark hair flopping over his forehead, his eyes probing hers, digging for all her secrets.
She’d been surprised by him, by his warmth and intellect, his humor and his ability to keep his cool. She’d also been surprised by the impact of his physical presence. She’d seen him the one time she’d visited the MIS office, but that had been brief, her focus on the office, on reading the atmosphere and on playing her own cards close to the vest.
His presence at breakfast had been almost overwhelming, his gaze too direct, his lips too full, his hands too easy to imagine on her body.
She sucked in a breath and took a giant bite of cake. She was being ridiculous. Her mom was right: it was time to log back in to those dating apps, arrange a night out with Maggie.
There was no future with Nick Murphy. And she didn’t want one anyway.
Not with him. Not with anybody.
9
Nick looked at the little house through his windshield and second-guessed his decision to come. Maybe it was stupid, a product of the fact that MIS had been keeping operations extra clean since Alexa Nash’s visit to their offices two months earlier. Nick had too much time on his hands. Time to think about the information Kyle had given him about Alexa’s accident. Time to be bored, to be reckless.
Time to think about Alexa Nash.
He’d thought of little else since they’d parted on the street outside the restaurant on Saturday. Her face had drifted through his mind at the oddest times — when he’d been out running, when he’d been in the kitchen listening to everyone else in the house laugh and argue, sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to change.
He saw her blue eyes, shining with otherworldly light, and her smile when she couldn’t keep it at bay even though she tried. He saw the way she fidgeted with her coffee cup or her fork, the only outward sign that she was nervous. Most of all he’d replayed the stricken expression on her face when he’d asked about her personal life, the way she’d stood so abruptly, the way she hadn’t met his eyes after that moment.
She was in pain, and not just the physical kind that came from a catastrophic accident like the one she’d survived.
Emotional pain. Real suffering.
He was almost sure of it, felt it lurking around the periphery in all the things she didn’t say like the bite of fall in the days before summer came to an end.
“Fuck me,” he murmured under his breath.
He was off-balance. Chasing down leads about Alexa Nash’s accident when he had no business doing so, thinking about her when he had no business doing that either. Somehow she’d gotten under his skin, taken up residence in his mind when he wasn’t paying attention.
He looked again at the house across the street from where he’d parked. The house was older, with peeling white paint and yellow trim, the walk cleared of the snow that had fallen the night before. An older Honda sat in the driveway, its windows already scraped of snow and ice.
It wasn’t too late to leave, to let the questions behind Alexa’s accident go unanswered. Kyle was right: it had all happened a long time ago. Alexa hadn’t asked for his help, and he had a feeling the last thing she would want was for Nick to be digging around in her past.
