“That is a long time to have something lorded over you,” she admitted. She felt like she was learning quite a bit about Jonas. He was fun loving. This problem—how to keep his car—was a game to him.
It was all quite charming. But buried in there was a larger message, the reason for the bet in the first place, the reason it had become a problem at all. The man was commitment phobic.
It would be best to accept this ride home from him and call it a day. Tangling with him in any way—particularly in a phony engagement way, fraught with the potential for complication and emotional catastrophe—was inviting peril into a life she had made deliberately safe.
Too safe, she chided herself. Strawberry milkshake safe.
“Are you close to your family?” she asked.
There was a long pause. She glanced over at him. She could see a sudden tension in his shoulders and around his mouth.
“What’s left of them,” he said quietly. “My parents were killed in a car accident when my sister and I were in our late teens. I think it made Theresa and me closer. And now that family includes Mike. And two monster nephews.”
His voice was ragged with both pain and affection.
In the muted light of the dashboard, Krissy saw the utter torment of a man who had loved completely—and lost—cross his handsome features. It was far from the playboy image that she generally would associate with commitment phobia, and somehow it made him so much more compelling.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“It was a long time ago,” he said brusquely. “I’m not sure why it came up at all. I guess thinking about the excursions to the ice cream parlor brought it to mind.”
In a moment of madness, egged on by the purr of the car engine and deep leather seats, heady scents, and most of all, by his unexpected vulnerability, Krissy took a deep breath.
Her aunt had always told her life could be an adventure, and here she was. Despite all her efforts to avoid it, the unexpected had found her. This morning the closest Krissy had come to excitement for a long, long time was stepping in dog doo.
But now, she was in a gorgeous car with an even more gorgeous man, and life for the first time in a long, long time seemed like it held the potential for… What? Almost anything.
“I’ll do it!” she blurted out before she could change her mind.
She tilted her head to look at him, waiting for him to smile. Or laugh. She thought the twinkle would return to those deep sea blue eyes, and that he’d turn to her with gratitude and say something cool and approving like, Thatta girl, say yes to the adventure.
Instead, humiliation flared to life and then deepened as the silence stretched out between them, and he looked straight ahead. There was a faint frown around his mouth.
Jonas obviously had decided she wasn’t suitable!
Krissy debated, briefly, leaping from the moving car. It was barely moving, because they had just stopped at a traffic light. But she couldn’t even order a Triple Chocolate Volcano Sundae, let alone jump from a car to save her wounded pride.
Besides, there was no point letting him know how wounded her vanity was. And on a practical side there were the boxes stowed in the back to think about. She couldn’t just abandon Aunt Jane’s things over a point of pride.
So instead of making the dramatic escape she longed for, Krissy sank back in her seat and followed his example by looking straight ahead. She tried not to gasp when he changed lanes, and the car shot forward as he passed a truck.
See? The hard beating of her heart told her the sad truth. It was too late. She had gotten herself into a strawberry milkshake kind of rut, and you couldn’t just decide to get out of it. You couldn’t change who you basically were—and nor should you want to on the basis of how damnably attractive a man was.
She just wasn’t a take chances kind of person.
CHAPTER FIVE
JONAS SLID KRISSY a look. She had her hands folded primly on her lap, and was looking straight ahead. Still, exactly because of her schooled lack of expression, he knew how deeply he had hurt her feelings.
Which was precisely why she would not work as a fake mate!
He couldn’t have a woman whose feelings were easily hurt. Or a woman who made him blurt out his secrets, either. Why had he told her about his parents? He rarely mentioned the family tragedy to anyone. His pain was intense, and it was private.
But it also made him the man who most understood the desolation of loss, and he wanted her to know she was not alone with all those feelings. Jonas also found he could not be the kind of man to be responsible for hurting her more deeply than she already was. He had to break the silence that was causing her so much pain.
“I think you’re just too close to your aunt’s death,” Jonas said carefully. “Obviously, it’s too much to ask of you right now.”
“All right, I understand,” she said, clearly unconvinced of his sincerity, clearly determined to take his rejection of her as fake mate personally and as an insult.
“Good,” he said, knowing he could only make this worse if he kept trying to convince her.
Then she said quietly, “Though I have to say, the last hour has been the most respite I’ve had from that awful swarm of feelings since I got the news my aunt had died. Her death feels like a nightmare I just don’t wake up from.”
Jonas remembered oh, so well the intensity of that awful swarm of feelings, that sense of having entered into a nightmare that wouldn’t go away.
Don’t do it, he ordered himself. But human decency required more of him. He’d known
