Finder's Keeper (19 page)

“…Teresa was my dreamer. She was my little princess who always believed in true love and everything was supposed to be perfect for her. It was my job to make sure everything was perfect for her, wasn’t it? To protect her belief in soulmates and happy endings?”

Mia sucked in a silent breath, surprising herself with how sharply she wanted to hear Chase say that yes, true love was possible. Why was it so important he say that? Why did she want so badly for him to believe it if she couldn’t?

Mia held her breath, waiting to hear what he would say.

“She still believes in those things,” Chase replied finally. “But sometimes our happy ending doesn’t look the way we expect it to. Doesn’t mean it won’t be happy.”

The piece of her heart that had hollowed out when Teresa screamed
fuck the watch
filled up with something warm. Immediately followed by a sinking sense of dread.

I’m getting in way too deep
. Chase was a slippery slope and she was already halfway down.

“Hey,” Mia said with forced casualness from the doorway as if to say
See? I wasn’t eavesdropping on your conversation at all
. “You ready to go, Chase?”

Chase glanced to her mother and she flapped a soapy hand at him. “Go on. I’ll finish up here.”

Chase nodded, set down the towel and hesitated a moment before turning and walking toward Mia. “Hey,” he said in a voice just for her as he approached. “How’re you doing?”

The question was a minefield she wasn’t prepared to cross. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t move, but she felt him pull away from her all the same at her curt response. She regretted the non-answer instantly, but felt helpless to fix it. Social ineptitude strikes again.

The drive home was awkward and silent. She spent every mile trying to figure out what to say—something she’d never been very good at and never cared that she sucked at before. Chase was supposed to be the smooth-talker, so why was he so quiet? Was something wrong? She should ask him, shouldn’t she? Or would that be invasive? Men didn’t like to talk about their feelings, or so she’d been told. So asking him would be wrong, right? But was not asking him insensitive to his needs? The male of the species needed a damn instruction manual.

She hated this feeling of uncertainty. She didn’t like not knowing the right answer.

Mia pulled into her parking lot and parked next to Chase’s Subaru. He was out of the passenger side almost before the car had stopped moving. Mia flinched at how eager he was to get away from her, putting the car in park, turning off the ignition and unbuckling her seat belt.

The door at her side opened and Chase’s hand appeared to help her out.
Always the gentleman
.

Mia slid her palm across his and let him tug her out of the car. He didn’t release her, shifting his grip to clasp her hand more solidly in his as he started walking her toward her door. Glancing down at their linked hands, she couldn’t help thinking of Teresa and Martin and the way they had clung to one another at the table as Teresa made her announcement, presenting a united front, the two of them against anyone who would threaten their happiness.

I want that
, Mia realized.

She didn’t just want to procreate. If she had, there was frozen sperm just waiting to be purchased. She wanted more. She wanted the husband, the man who could put all her pieces back together and stand beside her when everything was falling apart.

The fear hit again. Sharp and utterly terrifying.
Too deep
. She was getting in way too deep. Would she even be able to find her way out again? Especially if he wasn’t there with her to fish her out. She was falling alone, fool enough to believe in the fantasy they’d constructed for her family and his friends.

He released her hand at the door, waiting as she unlocked it, and then turned to leave. Mia heard the words leave her mouth before she even realized she’d had the intention to speak, desperately forestalling his departure.

“Do you think I could have caused this? Mom and Teresa at odds, everything feeling wrong… Is it all because I lost the watch?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Do you want me to try to find it?”

She noticed he hadn’t answered her question. Mia held out her hand. “Please.”

She tried to focus on wanting the watch, but as always she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about all the
reasons
she wanted it. She wanted Teresa’s happiness, a healthy baby for her sister to take home and love, and for her mother to apologize to her sister and accept that not every happy ending was a cookie-cutter of hers.

Chase released her, rubbing his hands together as he backed away. “Still nothing. Sorry.”

“No, it’s me. I should be the one apologizing.”

He cocked his head to the side, and Mia had the powerful feeling he wanted to say something, but whatever flirty, charming, oh-so-Chase thing he was going to say was smothered by the weight of the space between them.

He rocked on his heels. “G’night, Mia. Six o’clock tomorrow evening, right? For the tests?”

Mia nodded. They’d agreed she could run her test on his ability the following evening after official work hours, but talking about it felt strangely formal. Like they were only business associates.

Were they really only business associates?

Chase feinted forward, as if he might lean in for a good-night kiss, but instead he just caught her hand and gave it a squeeze before bounding down the steps and across the parking lot.

Mia watched him go, leaning against her door, once again filled with the subtle regret that lingered in the wake of a kiss that should have happened.

Chapter Nineteen

Commando Skydiving

“Try not to think.”

Chase snorted at Mia’s absent—and one hundred percent sincere—command, and swallowed back the plethora of biting come-backs that lingered on his tongue.

She probably wouldn’t have heard him anyway.

Dr. Corregianni was in her element tonight, engrossed in her monitors, muttering to herself as she tapped keys on her computer and periodically issuing absent commands like “Don’t move” and “Relax, dammit.”

Tonight was about getting a baseline, she’d explained. She didn’t want him engaging his gift just yet. First she had to see what his brain did when he wasn’t using it. He’d let the tempting cracks about not using his brain much anyway slide by, feeling the perverse urge to punish her with his silence.

A week ago he would have been charmed by her total focus, laughing and teasing her about her ability to block out the rest of the world as she worked, but not tonight. No, tonight he was jealous of a damned screen. Pissed that she was so comfortable with him now she
could
block him out completely. He wanted to prod her, rile her, get a reaction.

Only the fact that he knew it was his own ornery mood rather than anything she’d done kept his tongue in check.

His mood hadn’t been helped by the sucky waves this morning or the weather that had shifted so he’d nearly frozen his balls off in his wet suit.

Chase studied the line between her brows as she frowned over the computer screen, her nose practically smudging the LCD. The room was about the size of a doctor’s exam room and that’s what she’d called it, but there was no exam table in sight—thank God—just the large black leather chair that resembled a massage chair where he sat, a desk with a battalion of computers and bleeping machines, and a poster on the ceiling of the universe with a yellow “You are Here” arrow pointing toward a tiny dot.

He was hooked up to a machine which she called a modified EEG—“
of my own design, patent pending”—
that could have doubled for a torture device with all its electrodes and suctioned sensors, but so far her claim that this would be painless had been largely true. The only pain had been the excruciating awkwardness that filled every silence between him and Mia.

He’d fucked up the spark.

The vivid, alive feeling he’d had when he was with her last week had deadened as soon as he told her about his past, everything sweet and easy and fun about them sullied by the sudden complexity, muddied by his issues. He watched her studying his neural activity. Could she see the mark the accident had left on his brain on that scan? Would her beloved science have told her even if he hadn’t hacked open his chest and showed her the empty space where his heart used to be?

“Stay still,” Mia muttered without looking up, making Chase realize he’d begun to squirm in the chair.

He forced his muscles to relax. It wasn’t her fault things were weird between them. She hadn’t changed. It was all him.

He’d never told anyone about what happened to his family before. People who knew him at the time already knew and with people he’d met since he just avoided any contact that would require him to share anything of himself.

Except Karma. He’d told his boss, but she was the kind of person you could drop a bomb like that on and she would just nod, accepting the information with a complete lack of emotional response that he’d found soothing. Safe.

Telling Mia hadn’t felt safe. It had felt like sky-diving without a parachute. Naked. He’d been waiting for the ground to hit him ever since, bracing for impact.

He never should have told her. Never should have met her family or kissed her in the pantry so he remembered the exact taste and texture of her lips when he dropped her off on Thursday night and she looked at him with those wide why-don’t-you-kiss-me eyes. He never should have let it get that real. 

“Mia.”

“Hm?” She didn’t even glance in his direction, scribbling something on the pad at her elbow, oblivious as ever.

“Look at me.”

Her gaze stayed locked on the monitors. “I am.”

Irritation flared hotter. “I’m not just a neural scan, Mia.”

“Hm?”

Frustration—with himself, with her, with the whole damn situation—welled up in an angry rush. He wanted to push her, to stoke her temper until it was a wall between them, needing the distance of a fight. He reached up and the sensor at his temple came free with a suctioned pop.

The computer blipped a high-pitched warning.

“What the…” Mia’s frown of concentration morphed into one of equal parts irritation and confusion, but her eyes stayed locked on the screen as she frantically tapped at the keyboard. She checked the wires connecting the sensors to the computer, wiggled the mouse, thumped the side of the monitor and even half-crawled under the desk to check the power plugs before
finally
lifting her head to look at him.

Her gaze landed on the sensors dangling from his hand and then swiveled, seemingly in slow motion, to lock on his face. The glare she turned on him would have lit a lesser man on fire. Her mouth pressed into a line.

“Why did you do that?”

Because he was sick of playing guinea pig for the night. Because he wanted her to actually
see
him. But mostly because he was done being the only one off-center and he wanted to piss her off, get under her skin and fire her up. Make her throw up her hands like a true Corregianni. He loved her temper. It fascinated him. Her frustration was a living thing—passionate and intense. So uncontained for someone so buttoned up.

If he could just make her lose her cool, maybe he wouldn’t feel so raw.

He wanted her eyes shooting sparks and he knew the perfect thing to say to accomplish just that. “
Because
.”

Mia’s glare intensified to life-threatening levels. Hell hath no fury like a scientist thwarted.

Because.
Because
.

Mia had always thought the phrase
seeing red
was a stupid metaphor, but now crimson seemed to seep into the edges of her vision, blanking her periphery until all she saw was the surfer in front of her with challenge in his freakishly blue eyes.

She could have let slide the fact that he pulled off the sensors—the scan was complete, after all, and she’d already saved the data for further analysis. Besides, today was just the baseline. Easily repeated. She could have shrugged it off, if not for that
because
and the fact that he’d been in a pissy mood all day. These tests had been
his
idea.
He
was the one who’d devised the stupid bet and all but bullied her into taking part and now he was bitching about being here? He didn’t have to respect her, but to disrespect the science… Mia had no words.

Or, to be precise, she had six.

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“There has to be a problem just because I’m not bending over backward to accommodate you? I thought you wanted to penetrate my layers of bullshit. What’s wrong, Mia? Don’t you like what you found?”

“If I’d known you were an asshole under all that charm, I would never have tried to look further,” she snapped, even as realization shuddered through her brain like a rickety train barely keeping to the tracks. She
missed
his bullshit.

Chase may exist to make sure the world’s supply of bullshit didn’t run out, but she
liked
that about him. She liked how smooth and slick and polished he was. She envied him his ease. She’d been jealous of the way he’d charmed her family. The way he’d charmed her. The man could talk her into anything, and then he’d just stopped talking.

“Sorry to disappoint you, sweetheart.” His tone was brutally unapologetic.

Why had he gone quiet? Mia’s brain kept fixating on that one question. Always the same one:
Why
?

“Did I do something to piss you off?” she asked, mentally retracing the origin of his crankiness. Her mother had noticed something was wrong on the weekend… “Is this about my family? About the adoption drama? Because I’m sorry about that, but I did warn you that everything is a catastrophe in my family. Drama is mother’s milk to them—”

“And God forbid you let yourself be one of them. You’d have to stop looking down on them for five minutes to do that.”

Mia flinched, hating his words and how they stabbed so close to the truth. “That’s ridiculous. I don’t look down on them,” she insisted, but the lie tasted like chalk on her tongue.