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What had he been doing with his life to put that sort of weariness in his gaze? And those wounds on his body?
So many scars ...
It hit her then.
Miles ...
Slowly, she sat up, her feet hitting the floor with a solid thud as a sick realization came to her.
Hoping she was wrong, she grabbed her tablet and put in a video call to Miles. She had to see his face when she asked this question. If he lied ... she’d know. Wouldn’t she?
The line rang and rang and rang.
Just when she thought he wasn’t going to pick up, his face appeared on the screen, his thinning hair disheveled, eyes heavy with sleep but clearing with each passing second.
“Bella, is there a problem?”
“No ... not that kind, at least.” She had an instinctive twitch at hearing that name on his lips, even though she’d gotten used to it years ago. Why it was bothering her now ... well, she knew. Of course, she knew. Seeing Travis threw her back to when she’d been a teenager, back to when she’d been Isabel Steele, in love with a boy who’d promised to take her away from a life she’d hated.
On the screen, Miles’ eyes flickered before his face took on a calm expression.
She knew that mask.
It was the one he almost always wore with her.
“Why are you still in touch with Travis?” she asked bluntly.
Another flicker of his lids, then he inclined his head. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t try to play stupid with me,” she bit off. “There’snoreason for you to have kept in touch with him. But he’shere—and yeah, I’ve already figured out you’re trying to meddle again. You’ve probably already heard from him, and I’m afraid I let that cat out of the bad ... he knows you’re sick.”
He sighed and looked away. “Yes, Bella, I talked to him.” He held up a hand when she would have blasted him for hiding the information—she’dseenthe shock, the pain, thehurtin Travis’s eyes when she’d inadvertently revealed Miles’s poor health to him. “I wasn’t hiding the information from him—there just hadn’t been a good time for us to talk. It’s not something you tell somebody in email and we hadn’t been able to talk on the phone for some time ... and now? Well, he’s recovering from an accident—”
“Don’t you mean a gunshot wound?” she fired back. It was a stab in the dark, but earlier, she’d done some googling as she tried to solve the puzzle of what kind of injury he had and that was the only thing that made sense.
Travis Barnes, related to a couple of famous or semi-famous guys, had one healing gunshot wound and at leastoneother that was fully healed and now an ugly scar on the side, as well as numerous other scars.
And onlyonething made sense.
Back when they’d been secretly seeing each other, and for several years after, they had been the occasional picture of Travis in tabloids or online, but not any in years—at least not that she knew of, and she’d made herself stop looking, too, although she hadn’t always been able to keep herself from clicking when she saw pictures of his famous brothers.
Her stab in the dark hit true—Miles flinched.
“How do you know about that?” he asked.
“I saw it.” She narrowed her eyes. “We had ... an altercation with my loudmouth neighbor—again—and Travis got involved. He ended up ripping open a couple of the staples holding the injury closed and starting bleeding. I followed him to the house and made him let me look at it.”
“He actuallyletyou?” Miles’ brows shot up almost to his hairline.
“Stop stalling.” She leaned closer to the screen. “Why are you still in touch with him? And why the fuck does he have agunshot wound?”
“Isabel ... ” Miles gave her a smile she hadn’t seen in some time.
But it wasn’t one she’d forgotten.
It was the one he always offered when he was about to lie to her.
Maybe if they hadn’t become friends, she never would have learned to tell that smile from the real one. But she had. Or maybe she was just too attuned to lies after a lifetime of living with her father.
