She stalked closer, resting her hands on the kitchen table in front of him but he didn’t flinch. ‘While you were out helping old ladies cross the street, I was caring exclusively about myself. Elaine, that housekeeper I told you about, was working herself to the bone just to put her daughter through college.’
‘Kira––’
‘No.’ She shook her head. No, he wasn’t going to convince her that she hadn’t been a shitty human. Elaine had been making Kira’s bed in between doing her two other jobs to make sure her daughter got an education. Something that Kira had completely taken for granted. Her college years had been nothing but parties and bad decisions. She never would have graduated if her family’s name wasn’t on the library. It was unacceptable.
And the worst part was, Kira hadn’t known any of this until Elaine had to call in sick for the first time since Kira knew her, and she only noticed then because she didn’t like the way the new woman made her coffee in the morning. Crappy coffee was what made her pay attention to the fact that the woman who’d taken care of her home for most of her life was missing, was home sick. Sick because she’d worked herself too hard.
Kira still hadn’t forgiven herself for that. Even after making sure that tuition and room and board were covered for Elaine’s daughter, it wasn’t enough. Elaine had washed her clothes, fed her, and bailed her out of plenty of sticky situations over the years.
And Kira had treated her like she was invisible.
‘But you’re not like that anymore.’
Kira threw up her arms. ‘You’ve known me for two weeks!’
‘And I know that you’re not that person that you’re describing. Not anymore. You left.’
She sighed, feeling the fight go out of her. It was one thing for Bennett to be a nice guy, but now he was just being delusional.
‘I had to leave. Chloe left. I couldn’t be there without her.’
Chloe had left and Kira’d become a broken half-person. A broken half-person with so little awareness of the people around her, she didn’t even notice when they were working themselves to death. Moving here was a desperate attempt to find herself without her sister, to see if there was anything worth finding. And so far, she really wasn’t sure there was.
‘What happened to the rest of your trust fund, Kira?’
‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged. ‘If you’re as rich as you say, there’s no way you’d be this broke now. There’s no way this farm cost that much.’
She tried to turn back to the soup cabinet but Bennett grabbed her wrist, holding her in place, his eyes on her. ‘What’d you do with it?’
‘I don’t want to tell you.’
‘Why not?’
She sighed. ‘You’re going to get the wrong idea.’
‘What’d you do with it, Kira?’
She blew out a long sigh. ‘I gave it away.’
He smirked. ‘Gave it away to whom?’
She rolled her eyes. He was getting this all wrong. She wasn’t some kind of saint. Giving her money away had just been a new way to piss off her mother. ‘I gave it away to some women’s and children’s charities. And a few animal shelters.’ She tried to wave it away like the donations hadn’t enraged her mother. How will this look to our friends?! her mother had asked, and by friends she’d meant the conservative folks from the country club who would not approve of funds going to single mothers and women’s healthcare. They didn’t care much about stray animals, either. Kira couldn’t help but smile grimly at the memory.
‘See,’ Bennett said, smug as hell. ‘You have plenty of good ideas.’
His fingers were still curled around her wrist, his thumb tracing distracting circles over her pulse.
‘Maybe. Sometimes,’ she conceded. ‘But it was the least I could do…’
‘Other people would have done less.’
Kira frowned. It still didn’t feel like enough, but Bennett’s warm gaze was making her feel like maybe she was on the right track. Like maybe she didn’t have to punish herself forever.
‘Okay. But let’s not pretend buying a farm, sight-unseen, and thinking I could somehow figure out homesteading overnight was a good idea,’ she said, tired of unearthing her past.
He laughed. ‘Okay, so maybe that wasn’t your best one. But you’re here now. Making it work.’
She swallowed the lump of emotion in her throat. Why was she getting choked up about this?
‘Yes, well. Can’t go back now.’
‘Brave.’
She gave a slight shake of her head and Bennett’s fingers tightened on her wrist. He stood and pulled her closer.
‘Brave, clever girl,’ he said, brushing a kiss on her forehead.
Never in her life had she been called either of those words. Wild, stubborn, reckless, yes. But never brave. Never clever.
Bennett’s fingers left her wrist. ‘So, soup?’ he asked, moving past her, leaving her reeling from his assessment of her.
Apparently, kissing wasn’t the only thing nice guys were good at.
Chapter Seventeen
The wind rattled the old windows, and from her spot on the couch the view of the outside world was a blur of white and gray. This wasn’t pretty Christmas card snow anymore. The storm lashed icy shards at the windows and the wind shook the trees behind the old farmhouse. This was shut-the-roads-down-stay-indoors-and-pray-the-power-stayed-on snow.
