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Of course he wasn’t. "Okay, if you say so." I grabbed my backpack and slung it over my shoulder then shoved my seat back.
He stood immediately to follow me. "Don't be mad."
I held a deep breath. "I'm not mad, Westin. You do what you want to do, and you say what you want to say. You go about it however you want to go about it. It's none of my business. You were the one who asked for this truce and for us to find a common ground, to at least not be so mad with each other all the time. You're in my space. I don't want you here. I don't need you here. You've been here for weeks, and nothing's happened."
"I am a good deterrent, you know."
"If you say so. The point is that it doesn't matter if it's all talk."
He sighed. "Look, when I left, I knew your dad wasn't going to let me go easily. I changed my name, and I very deliberately stayed off his radar. It wasn't easy. There were a lot of things I didn't get to do. There's a way to do this without having to resort to complicated schemes."
"Oh, I'd love to hear that. If you have some methods, please do share them with me. Right now, all I need is a job. A job that will take me away from here if I can make it happen."
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was soft. "You can. I have complete faith in you."
"Sure, you do."
"I do. You'd be surprised."
"And what about you? Are you going to tell me why you came back?"
"I already told you why I came back."
"No, you just told me that you did come back. Not the whys. I mean, you could have stayed away, kept running. Why didn't you?"
He shrugged then eyed me up and down. "I can't tell you that, Nissa. Just know that I am back for you and Mrs. Pembry.” More softly, he added, “I missed you."
My stupid heart leaped because, like a fool, I wanted to believe him. "Sure you did. Does that work for you, by the way?"
"What?"
"I'm sure many women have fallen for it, wanted to believe you."
He chuckled low. "I have yet to meet a single woman it worked on."
"And yet you still try."
"And still yet, I try." He laughed.
While I couldn't ask him questions about himself, he peppered me with inquiries about what I was studying, what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go. I realized that if I'd just let him ask the questions, I could almost forget that he had abandoned me. I could almost forget that he had left me to my own devices.
That wasn't an easy thing to forget though. "Just tell me one thing, Westin. One thing about your life, and I'll stop asking. This feels very one-sided."
He thought about it. His gaze searched mine. "You mean besides that I missed you?"
The chill of the London wind zinged through my peacoat. It wasn't raining, but there was moistness in the air that was causing my hair to puff up.
"All right,” he said. “I did get to go to Cambridge."
My eyes went wide. "You did?"
He nodded with a happy smile. "Yeah, I did."
"I knew you wanted to go to school, but I didn't know you were going somewhere so fancy. How did Julian never find you?"
"Well, it turns out when you hack the system, and change your name, create a whole new persona, people looking for you won't find you."
"Jesus. Is that what it takes to run from him?"
