I took a deep breath, aware that he was trying to blow me off. It was late, but I wasn’t going to let him off that easily.

“You’re right. It’s too late to work.”

He quirked a sad smile. “It’s never too late—”

I shot a significant look at the laptop sitting on the desk. “If I leave, you are taking that to bed with you. So which is it, that or me?”

His watched me with hooded eyes but remained silent. He was actually considering choosing the laptop over me! Heat rose in my face. “Okay. I see how it is.” I was getting too close. I was making him uncomfortable, so now he was getting rid of me to work on his computer. I wondered if he took that damn thing to bed with him every night. Maybe he habitually kicked whatever fuck buddy he had at the time to the curb after sex and ran back to his laptop.

I turned to leave.

“Emilia,” he said, reaching for my arm and closing his strong hand around my wrist. “Stay.”

I clenched my teeth. “Only if that thing stays on the desk.”

He gave a long, resigned sigh. “It’s late—early. Let’s get some sleep.”

Without another word, I went to the top of the bed, pulled back the covers and slipped in. He watched me, his handsome face impassive, but the light of something in his eyes said he was not unmoved by the gesture. I rolled over on my side, my back to his side of the bed.

He went around to the other side, turned off the light and after a moment, I felt the weight of the bed shift. We were still some distance apart, as the bed was a massive king-size. Another long pause before he reached out, hooked an arm around my waist and pulled me back flush against him. His legs curled under mine. We were spooning. I never took Adam for the type of guy who would spoon. And here, this display of affection was for me alone. There was no potential girlfriend or ex here to deflect. This was just him and me. Us. Curled together.

In this safe environment in the darkest hour before dawn, I turned my head toward him. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He didn’t answer for so long that I thought he wouldn’t. Or that maybe he had fallen off to sleep when I hadn’t noticed. “She was all I had. She was a sister and she was a mother when our mother was incapacitated, which was most of the time.”

His hand slipped under my shirt to rest atop my belly. Despite my fatigue, a curl of excitement tightened there in response to his touch. I put my own hand on top of his, lacing our fingers together. He curled his fingers inward, locking them in a tight embrace.

“But things between her and my mother got bad, really bad. My mother couldn’t stand the sight of her and drove her out of the house when she was fifteen. We were homeless shortly thereafter—bouncing around from shelter to shelter.”

“Shit, that’s horrible.”

“It’s worse. She ran away, hit the streets—the same old cliché. She was soon addicted to drugs and selling herself to support the habit.”

My breathing froze and I went cold inside. That hung in the air between us for a few moments before he drew in a deep breath, the cool air rushing past my neck. His sister had sold herself for money, drugs, to her ultimate destruction. Intuition told me he had drawn a parallel. I’d sold myself, too, for money. An ominous feeling covered me like a shroud. Was this the reason Adam had been putting things off between us?

He spoke again, his voice quiet and a little groggy. “Last time I saw her, I hopped a bus when I was twelve and went down to Seattle to find her. She looked horrible. I begged her to come back with me but she wouldn’t. Threw me back on the bus and yelled at me to get the hell out of the city. I never saw her again.”

I turned around in his arms so that I was facing him. The watery light of predawn was just starting to seep into the room. I couldn’t see his eyes, but stared into them anyway, his face inches from mine.

“There’s nothing you could have done otherwise.”

He was silent.

“Adam…” I said and on impulse, laid a hand on his whisker-roughened cheek. My courage died out along with my voice. I was going to tell him that my feelings for him were now growing to an inappropriate level. But to say those words was to believe that these feelings were true and right and I just couldn’t trust them. I could never let myself be vulnerable again. Every time I had in the past, I’d been stomped down. This was business. My heart thudded at the base of my throat.

“What?” he said, his voice thick with emotion, his warm breath scurried over my cheeks.

“I’m so sorry about what happened to her. It’s a terrible, tragic thing. You can’t blame yourself.”