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“Don’t apologize,” I ordered and shifted around her to grab my desk chair.
Using it as a shield to hide my hard dick, I rolled it over to where it usually sat and remained standing behind it, my hands resting on the back.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, scrutinizing her.
I never kept my office locked. There were locking file cabinets where I kept some current case files, as well as all of the resident files, but that was the extent of the information I protected. I’d never had a reason to worry about anything else. No one came to my office unless they were looking for me.Until now.
“I’m sorry. I was just looking for some books,” she stammered, brushing her hair over her shoulder.
I tensed. The wet strands had gotten locked between us, dampening the front of her shirt to the point where I could now clearly see the outline of one nipple pebbled against the fabric. I sucked in a sharp breath, my dick punching against the front of my jeans.Dammit.I wished I could just say good night and walk away—or let her walk away—but I’d found her poking around my office while I wasn’t here, and that was the kind of thing I couldn’t just let go without explanation.
“Law books?” My brow arched. There were bookcases in the living room that had all sorts of novels, but the only kinds of books in my office were anthologies of case reviews.
“Yeah.” She was nervous, the way she shifted her weight and kept pulling her lip between her teeth.Was she lying?“Callie said she was going to leave a few out for me to grab tonight when I was done cleaning, but I didn’t see them. I thought maybe she marked them on the shelves or something…”
I sucked in a breath and exhaled a curse. “Shit.” I straightened and released the chair, striding around my desk toward the bookcase. “That’s my fault.”
Instantly, I realized exactly why she was here.
I’d gone over to pick up dinner from the Carmel Pub earlier, and when I’d come back, there’d been a stack of documents sitting on my desk Callie said she’d drop off for me to review, but there’d also been a stack of books on the very corner. I assumed Callie must’ve pulled them looking for something. I’d been a little surprised because it wasn’t like her to leave things out, but I figured maybe she’d been in a rush.
Or maybe she’d left them out for someone else to read.
“I saw the stack of books and thought she forgot to put them away, so I stuck them back on the shelves.” I scanned the shelves, trying to recall which four they were. I managed the first two before the heat of her standing next to me made me question myself. “Were these the ones?”
Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. She didn’t say, she just said she’d leave out the relevant ones.”
“Relevant to what?”
Her head snapped up, her expression like a deer in headlights.
“It’s not a big deal. I’ll just ask her next week to grab the right ones—”
“Kenzie,” I rasped, now even more curious because she was trying to brush me off.
The molecules of air seemed to buzz with the electricity of our attraction. I gripped the stack of books tighter, my fingers bruising their hard covers.
I dragged my eyes from her, looking at the spines in my hand one more time. My mind flipped through the contents of the law reviews, searching for the thread that connected them all.
And then it hit me.
My gaze whipped back to her, watching the slow bob of her throat as she swallowed hard.
“These all have custody precedent in them,” I said, my voice splintering with a deeper husk.
Was this about a child?
Her child?
It couldn’t be, I wanted to protest. We’d had plenty of mothers transition through the house over the years; I wasn’t sure there was anything stronger than a mother’s will to get better for her child. Some I’d only known about. Some I’d helped in their fight. For safety. For custody. But none had tried to keep it a secret.
Or maybe they had. I guess I wouldn’t know.
I watched her eyes drift to the books, in them, a glimmer of desperation like all she wanted was to reach out and snatch them from my hold. But she held back. Why…
Because reaching for them would confirm my assumption.Air whooshed from my lungs when I realized she didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.
She had a kid.
