Page 60 of The Christmas Tree Farm

Curiosity was killing her. ‘Uh … your phone was buzzing a lot while you were gone.’

‘Really? I let Jeanie know where I was and I canceled all my meetings for the day…’ his voice trailed off as he looked at his phone. Clearly, the messages were not from his sister or his job. He frowned at the screen and then put the phone back on the table facedown without answering whoever it was.

‘You can answer if you need to,’ she said, dying to ask more. ‘I mean, I don’t mind if you need to be on your phone.’

‘I don’t need to answer.’ His tone left no room for questions.

‘Oh.’

‘Wind’s getting bad,’ he said, gazing out the window.

‘That wasn’t your wife or anything, right?’ Kira said with a laugh, thinking maybe teasing him would get him to let her in on who was texting him. ‘I mean, nice guys don’t make out with people when they have wives back in California, right?’

Right?

Her laughter petered off when she saw the stricken look on his face.

‘Bennett, please tell me you’re not married.’ As much as she’d looked for trouble in the past, she’d never fooled around with a married man. It was a line she refused to cross. Pretty much the only line.

And now here she was, making out with a man she thought was a nice guy who was very clearly hiding something, and she was right back where she started. But this was worse. At least the guys she’d been with in the past never kept it a secret that they were assholes. They never pretended to be sweet or helpful. They never plied her with kind words and lulled her into a false sense of security.

Oh, no, the guys she’d slept with in the past had never hidden the fact that they had no intention of staying, no intention of being reliable or trustworthy or really anything other than a quick fling, designed primarily to piss her mother off. And they’d been good at it. And that had been their entire appeal.

But here was Bennett acting all … all … sweet. And good. Andniceto her. And she’d let him in, she’d started liking him. For once in her life, she’d chosen a man’s company because she actually liked him as a person and not as a means to an end. Only to have it end like this? With Bennett hiding something huge from her?

She should have known. There was no such thing as a good guy. But she’d actually thought Bennett was different.

‘I’m not married.’

‘Oh.’ She blew out a sigh, the rage seeping from her body, before another thought crossed her mind. ‘Engaged? Got a girlfriend back home? I may have been a shitty person in the past, but that is not something I would ever…’

He grabbed her wrists, his fingers on her racing pulse again. She shouldn’t care this much about him but she did.

‘Not engaged. No girlfriend.’

‘Oh. Okay. So…’ Her gaze drifted back to the discarded phone and Bennett dropped her wrists with a sigh.

‘You’re not the only one that makes bad decisions sometimes.’

‘So, it’s a bad decision calling you?’ she asked.

Bennett’s mouth tipped up in the corner. ‘Yeah, exactly.’

‘And does this bad decision have a name?’

‘Nicole.’

‘Hmm. Nicole.’

He nodded, looking more pained than she’d seen him since the ‘oh, you already have a shovel’ incident.

‘And Nicole isn’t a girlfriend or a fiancée or a wife?’

He shook his head. ‘Not anymore. Not for a long time, actually.’

Kira leaned back in the pillows, waiting for him to go on. She’d told him all the ugly bits about herself, she deserved a story or two about Bennett’s messy love life. She raised an expectant eyebrow. A part of her recognized her gesture as something her mother used to do when she was waiting for an explanation about Kira’s latest exploits, but she wasn’t going to think about that right now. Besides, the eyebrow always worked.

He sighed again. ‘It’s kind of embarrassing, actually.’