She shook her head. “Not possible.”
“I’ll show you my outbox if that’s what it takes. I don’t have my laptop on me, but my house is only twenty minutes outside the gate.”
Her gaze dropped to her shoes again. “I had a concussion. In December. My screen time was limited to medical consultations for the first ten days or so, but still, I’d have seen your emails later, when I was back online.”
“Someone must have deleted them.”
The same someone who sent me emails twice from your account.
He waited for her to make the connection. He couldn’t be the one to accuse her recently deceased father.
She closed her eyes. “There’s only one person who had access to my computer last winter.”
“I presume that person isn’t your boyfriend.”
She sighed. “As I said, no boyfriend. It had to be my father.”
He wanted to ask who Apollo was—when he’d received the email, her cryptic declaration when she’d been semiconscious had come to mind—but now wasn’t the time to pull the pin on that grenade.
One hot topic at a time.
“I figured as much when Freya told me about your dad’s illness. He made it clear at the hospital none of us were welcome. And later…”
“Later, when he was ill, he needed all my attention. Given that he died seven weeks after his stroke, it wasn’t too much to ask.”
He nodded. “I couldn’t…shit…I still feel awful for telling you this now. But Kira, I couldn’t let his lies make you hate me.”
Her gaze remained fixed on her feet. “I didn’t hate you.”
“You thought I ghosted you.”
She huffed out a sigh. “I was hurt. But that’s not hate.”
He placed a finger under her chin and raised her gaze to meet his. “And I hate that you were hurt. More than that, I need you to know I wasn’t the one who did the hurting.”
Well, except for her seeing him with Staci, but that was yet another grenade to save for when they had more time.
As if she could read his mind, she looked at her watch. “I need to return this key and hit the road.”
“What’s the rush? I’d like to take you to dinner.”
She gave him a sad smile. “Because you’re hungry? Or are you asking me out on a date?”
Her words were not an exact echo of what she’d said to him in December, but it was close enough to not be accidental.
“A date, Kira. I want to date you. I have since the day we met.”
If he was hoping for a similar confession from her, he was doomed to disappointment. But her smile deepened a bit, so all hope was not lost.
“Another time, maybe. I have an early morning flight out of Dulles.”
That surprised him. One of the few things she’d told him was she didn’t travel. “Where are you off to?”
“Malta.”
“Wow. When you decide to go somewhere, you don’t mess around. Why Malta?”
“My father visited there often. I’m following up on one of his passion projects, finishing his research.”
“What’s the project?”
“I’m sorry, Rand. I really need to head north. I was supposed to fly out this morning, but Diana needed me.”
Disappointment hit him in the gut. Was she telling the truth or trying to ditch him? Was he blowing it again? “Promise me we can talk when you get back. When will you be back?”
“I’m not sure. My return ticket says two weeks, but if my research is successful, it could be longer.”
The idea of waiting two weeks or more to talk to her was a gut punch, which made zero sense. He was used to long deployments and limited communication. But he’d waited six damn months to see Kira, and now that he had, he wanted more.
Needed more.
Same as it had been that first day, when he’d kept his phone at the ready, waiting for a text from her. Then the text he’d gotten had changed everything.
A single word.
Help
He wanted to touch her. Hug her. Hell, he wanted to kiss her. But she wasn’t giving any welcoming signs, and he wasn’t about to bulldoze through her obvious walls.
