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“I don’t eat sugar.”
“Big surprise.” She bit into another cookie and put the plate on the nightstand. “Where’s the TV remote? We can watch a movie.”
“The TV is broken.” He sat on the other side of the bed.
“Does Mrs. Higgins know that?”
“Yeah.” He swung his legs onto the bed and adjusted the pillows behind his back. “She offered to bring in another one, but I don’t watch TV.”
“Too busy working?”
“Something like that.”
Aria brushed crumbs from her fingers and shifted to face him. “So, what do you do for fun?”
He grunted. “I don’t have fun.”
“Come on.” She poked him in the side. “Chasing Porkchop was fun.”
“I don’t have intentional fun.”
Aria laughed. “You missed your calling. You should’ve been a Victorian butler, all stoic and serious.”
Amusement flickered in his eyes. “You didn’t miss your calling, Crazy Cat Lady.”
“I almost did.” She fluffed one of the pillows under her head. “Unlike you, I never had a plan for life. I drifted a lot, going from one great idea to the next, without ever getting anything done. Part of the problem was that my parents and sisters were always there as a safety net.”
“Why was that a problem?”
“Because sometimes you have to fall. Or at least, I did. I had to pick myself up, and I realized I also had to learn how to be independent. To trust that I could actually make a plan and carry it through.”
She tucked her hands underneath the pillow and studied the austere lines of his profile, which were softened by his beautifully shaped mouth and thick eyelashes.
“Why don’t you know where your family is?” she asked quietly.
He let out his breath in a long rush, his gaze fixed on the opposite wall. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“Why?” He slanted her a narrow glance. “It has nothing to do with…anything.”
“It’s your story.”
“Not anymore.”
“Your story doesn’t just leave you.” She pushed herself to one elbow. “Neither does your history. It’s part of you, even if sometimes you wish it wasn’t.”
“You’re trying to figure out why I am the way I am?” Hunter shook his head with an abrupt laugh. “It’s pretty straightforward. My mother died when I was eleven. I was sent to live with my uncle. It was a shitty situation, but I didn’t have a choice. Getting into college meant I could leave all that behind.”
“What about your father?”
He shrugged as if it were irrelevant, but the lines of his body tensed. “He was a deadbeat. Only worked when we ran out of money, which was often. Before my mother died, we moved around a lot because they never paid rent. My father took off after leaving me with my uncle. Never saw him again.”
Aria sat up, her insides twisting. “You haven’t seen your father since you were eleven?”
“I didn’t want to. Even if I had, I didn’t know where he was.”
“What about your uncle?”
