The warmth in him turned icy. “Emma,” he said as she started to back up. “Maybe we shouldn’t go to dinner.”
“What?” She pressed on the brake and stopped the car. “Why not?”
“Because you just lied to me,” he said, swinging his attention out his window. “Five minutes after I kissed you.”
A few seconds passed, and she asked, “If I tell you the truth, can we go to dinner?”
“I didn’t realize we needed to negotiate to tell the truth.” He looked at her, lifting his eyebrows. “I’m not going to judge you.”
“Oh, yes, you will.” She put the car in drive and started down the lane toward the bridge.
“I just don’t want to be lied to.”
“Fine,” she said, as if he’d asked her to do something really hard. “I won’t lie to you.”
Ted wasn’t sure why she wanted to go to dinner if he upset her so much. He told himself that he hadn’t upset her—she was upset with herself.
“I went to UT Austin,” he said. “I studied economics and business before I went to law school.” And it all felt like it had happened to someone else. Someone Ted no longer was and who he no longer knew.
Emma gripped the wheel and looked both ways before turning onto the highway. Ted couldn’t help sweeping his gaze left and right, right and left, trying to take everything in. The trees, the curves in the road, just all of it.
“Could we go to the beach sometime?” he asked. “You know what? Never mind. I want to go to the beach on the first day I’m really free.”
“You’re free.”
“No,” he said. “I’m in the reentry program. I’m still a prisoner. In fact, I got a message from my parole officer today. He wants to come in a couple of weeks.” Ted didn’t want to dwell on things that made his heart sink and his eyebrows draw down. So he’d put it out of his mind. If he set the beach as a goal, he’d be able to use it to help himself stay on track should he be tempted to sway.
Emma drove for a few more miles, the town of Sweet Water Falls coming into view in that time. “I went to Texas A&M International,” she said.
“That’s in Laredo,” he said. “You said you didn’t live there.”
“No,” she said, glancing at him. “You asked me if I’d grown up there. I said no, and that wasn’t a lie. I didn’t grow up there.”
“Is that where you met Robert Knight?”
Her jaw tightened, and she focused out the windshield as she shook her head.
“The Knights did a ton of business out of Laredo,” Ted pressed.
“I met him here,” she said, her voice stiff and flat, with an undercurrent of anger in it. “He was the father of one of my students.” She delivered the line evenly, and Ted sensed there was so much more to this story. He wanted to know it all. He wanted to share the deepest, most secretive parts of himself with this woman, and he wanted to have many more kisses like the one they’d just shared, and more dinners like the one they were about to have.
Ted hadn’t known the Knights had ever been in Sweet Water Falls, and the lawyer in him wanted to fact-check what she’d said. He’d find other witnesses and people who knew Robert from that time, maybe even track down his kid.
At the same time, he didn’t want to do any of that. He wanted to trust Emma and trust in the fact that she’d tell him the truth—and all of her secrets, when she was ready.
“Did you always want to be a teacher?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her fingers relaxing on the wheel. “What about you? Was there ever anything but being a lawyer for you?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I was totally going to be in the NBA. Then an astronaut. Then an inventor. It wasn’t until my sophomore or junior year that I gave up the NBA permanently.” He chuckled at the memories that still ran through his mind. “When I didn’t make the basketball team.”
“Oh, dear,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, it was a rough reality,” he said. “After that, I realized I wasn’t going to be an astronaut or an inventor, as I’ve never really had any great ideas.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Oh, it’s true,” he said. “So I started thinking about what I’d really like to do, and well, I became a lawyer.”
Emma flashed him a smile, and Ted wanted everything to be lighter. “Sorry I asked about Laredo,” he said.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“It’s never fine when a woman uses that word,” he said. “My grandmother taught me that.”
Emma gave him another smile, and this one was definitely more relaxed. “It really is. I should’ve just told you I went to college there. You’d just seemed interested in the place, and I don’t know. I got nervous.”
“You don’t need to be nervous around me.” The idea was unfathomable to him. He was the one who should be nervous around her, not the other way around.
“I’m usually not.”
“I got too close to your secret, didn’t I?”
“A little.”
“You know, if you just told me, then we wouldn’t have to dance around it.”
“I…need a little more time.”
“Sure,” Ted said easily, because a man who’d spent almost six years in prison knew there was always more time. Another day. Another week. Another month. “So something light for the rest of the night. If you could have any pet, what would it be and why?”
She looked at him like he’d lost his mind, and maybe he had. Maybe he should press her on the tough topics and force her to talk to him. But his logical side told him that a woman like Emma would just run—in fact, he’d seen her do that once already. He didn’t want her to do it again.
“I want a teacup piglet,” she said. “Because they’re so cute, and I’d name her Petunia, and she’d
