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Flynn nodded and leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table, all of his attention focused on her. Too bad it was because he wanted her story. Not her.
The bed was at her back and she was glad she’d chosen her seat first. Having Flynn in front of her was making her want all kinds of things. Some things she’d never had a chance to experience. Seeing the bed behind him would be too much. And she was focusing on her attraction to the man in order to avoid talking about the hard stuff.
She closed her eyes to focus, then opened them. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
His expression showed he was serious. He already knew a lot about her past. Telling him the rest and the after-effects wasn’t going to change much. She could still disappear if she needed to do that.
“Okay. My first memory after the explosion is of waking up in a hospital room. I didn’t know it at the time, but the room was in a secured basement below a hospital in Dallas.”
“Dallas?”
“They’d moved me. It was months before I knew that they’d told people I hadn’t survived when the house blew up.” It had taken her a while to remember who she was and that the explosion had even happened.
“How did you survive?”
That was a time she didn’t like to remember. “Apparently I was blown out the window and bounced a time or two before landing in the pool. I landed on some debris and more landed on top of me. The water put out the fire and the debris stopped me from drowning.”
Flynn swore harshly. “That’s horrible. Do you know what caused the explosion?”
She frowned up at him. “I rarely got answers when I asked any questions, so I eventually stopped asking. I assume it was one of my father’s competitors.”
“Do you know what business your father was in?”
The familiar ache started in her gut. Was this another person who wouldn’t believe her? Another person who would look at her like she was nothing but a liar?
“We were never close. As I got older, I wondered if he was into something illegal, along with my grandfather and my uncle. My mother’s brother.” Below the table, she squeezed her hands together, a trick she’d learned to help her keep the words steady, so the interviewer wouldn’t realize how his doubts affected her.
“What made you think that?”
She couldn’t look at Flynn. “When I was little, we had a two-part assignment. We had to draw our parents at work and then draw ourselves at a job we wanted to do in the future. I realized I didn’t know what my father did. When I asked him, he said it wasn’t any of my damn business and that if my teacher wanted to keep her job, she’d better change the assignment.”
“What did you do?”
“I drew him as a cowboy.”
Flynn grinned but she couldn’t. Anyone who knew where she’d lived would have known it was a lie. The house she’d lived in was fancy and maintained by staff. Not a horse or a bull in sight.
She’d kept quiet and worried about her teacher’s job. And she’d kept right on worrying about her father. Tessa drew in a slow breath to quiet the familiar panic. “I never asked him again. He mostly ignored me, so that was easy.”
“That sucks, Tessa. Did you ever find out anything else?”
Why was he digging so hard at this? Was he another one who thought she was a partner with her father?
But this was Flynn and she didn’t have any real reason not to trust him yet. “Not really. But that last day, I came home from school to find my uncle in my room screaming that I’d betrayed them all. That I’d been giving details of their business to the cops. He was waving around a journal. It wasn’t mine.”
Her stomach and head ached. Jetson’s head appeared in her lap and she unclenched her hands to pat the dog.
“Needless to say, no one believed me. They dragged me up to a room on the third floor and started to interrogate me.” No need to go into the horrific details.
“Then there were a couple of booms and fire and screaming. The next memory I have is waking up in a hospital.”
“When?”
She looked up to find his eyes piercing into hers. “What?”
“When did you wake up in that hospital bed?”
