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I exhaled a wry laugh. “I’m too damn busy to feel anything along those lines. I live about half a mile away from my parents, so I’m there most nights to make sure they don’t need help with anything. My dad’s sick, and my mom can only handle so much around the house and property. My sisters are constantly up in my business, and my brothers are somehow even worse.”
She tilted her head. “You love them a lot.”
“Don’t tell them that,” I said.
Ivy laughed. “I do believe your secret is safe with me, Cameron.”
My name on her lips was potent.
Powerful to an irrational degree.
The impulsive side of me wanted to surge forward and capture it with my lips, no matter how insane that might seem. I hardly knew her, but attraction didn’t always factor in those mundane details.
You could want someone at a single glance. Or after a single conversation.
I’d always been aware of the truth of it, even if I’d never personally been knocked on my ass by that type of instant desire.
I was now, though.
No, there were no blinders on. I was seeing everything about this clearly. The stark details of how impossible this was wasn’t lost on me. Probably not on her either.
“It is safe with you,” I murmured. “I’m sure we could tell each other all sorts of things in here, knowing they’ll never see the light of day.”
There was subtext in that too, and I wasn’t sure she’d heard it.
We were skirting an invisible line—two strangers stuck in an untenable position. But no matter how beautiful I found her, how certain I was that we ended up here for a reason, I would never be that man who’d push too far, too fast.
But if Ivy stepped a single toe over that line, I was no fool.
I’d meet her there without hesitation.
“So,” she said. “No wife at home.”
“Nope.”
“No girlfriend waiting by the phone.”
I smiled. “Nope.”
She inhaled slowly. “And no family pressure to marry someone you don’t love because it benefits them financially?”
Her subtext was a bit different from mine, but it was there.
Remember that white knight syndrome? Everything inside me screamed to tell her she shouldn’t ever have to do that, that she deserved better than a business deal for the rest of her life. That she deserved the chance to fall in love, and if her father loved her, he’d want that for her too.
But I swallowed it down because even though she might be younger, Ivy was a stranger. I knew nothing about her life besides these few little details she’d given me.
“No,” I answered. “I can’t say my family is big on pressuring us kids for anything of the sort. Besides, no one’s even asking if I’m ready to settle down because I’ve got one sister and one brother married, one sister engaged.”
“And the two nieces,” she added. “With hopefully more on the way.”
“Exactly.”
“What is this family business?” she asked. “That keeps you from being stuck inside and doesn’t expect you to take a wife to keep it running.”
There was something about the clipped way she asked things, the precise way that she spoke.
There was just something about her, I supposed.
