“I want to, please.” He handed the girl his card and she swiped it through the machine.

The girl at the register gave him an appreciative smile as she handed his card back to him, and my stomach and chest heated. I realized I was glaring at her and mentally shook myself. What the hell? Why do I care if someone else looks at him? He’s just an overly confident detective who I must know from a past life and who’s done nothing but manage to piss me off . . . and make my heart flutter—nope! Nope . . . just piss me off.

“Uh, thanks. You really didn’t have to do that though.”

Connor took a sip of his coffee and smiled softly. “Well, maybe this way you’ll agree to sit and talk with me for a while?” My face must have fallen because he said swiftly, “I swear, no type of interrogation, I would just really enjoy your company.”

He’d been kind of an ass the last few times I’d seen him, so I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy his, but I’d certainly enjoy the view. I thought about Gage and grimaced; I really shouldn’t have been thinking of another guy like this. Especially this guy.

“If you’re busy, I understand. It’s probably awkward to talk to the detective who just questioned you regarding your parents’ death anyway,” he said quietly, and looked out the window, then back to me. His mouth opened and shut again with a hard sigh and shake of his head.

I twisted my father’s ring around on my thumb and managed a shrug. “Well, I was going to sit here for a while anyway. I just got back from the reading of the will and have nothing else going on. You can join me if you want.” I tried to act like I didn’t care either way, but his crooked grin told me he wasn’t buying it.

The guy behind the bar called my drink, and after I grabbed it, Connor led us over to a pair of plush chairs that were facing, and almost touching, each other.

“So they read the will today. How did that go?”

I studied his face to see if he was digging for information that would help with his job, but when he just looked worried, my head tilted to the side and I shrugged again. “It went. I was the only one there, so it was over pretty quickly.”

He nodded. “So now that everything is over with, how long do you think you’ll stay in California?”

“Not sure, I need to go back to Texas. I really just up and left everything, but I feel like I need to figure some things out first. Tyler went back on Sunday so I finally have time to myself. I’ll probably take another week or so, unless you guys need me for something . . . ?”

“Uh, no.” He huffed and shook his head slightly. “No, the fire and deaths were confirmed accidents. I know I already said it, but I am sorry for the way the questions went the first day—”

“Don’t be,” I said, cutting him off, “that’s your job, right? Can’t really blame you for doing that, and I’ve got to say, you’ve got it down to an art.”

Connor sat back and laughed out loud. “An art, huh?”

“You do! I remember thinking that during. You look completely calm while you’re talking, not giving anything away, but your eyes are so intense that it throws the person you’re talking to off and I can see how you could get people to start spilling stuff. I know I did . . .” I trailed off and looked to the side.

“Your eye looks much better; the bruising went away quickly,” he said, guessing the direction my thoughts had started going.

“Yeah, I hadn’t gotten hit too hard. I’d just been trying to break up the fight, and one of the guys was pulling me away as an elbow connected, so it wasn’t able to do much damage. And I know what Tyler told you. I was listening, just as he’d been listening to me. There was a reason I didn’t tell you and Detective Sanders about my past; I’ve only ever told one person, and that was Tyler. He’s known since it first started happening, and other than him I’ve never felt the need to share it. With how you were questioning me, I could only imagine how my past would make me look even more suspicious. I hadn’t meant to say anything about your knowing anything about my life. It just slipped.” I looked into Connor’s now-soft eyes and continued. “Like I said, your calm intensity makes people say too much. But I didn’t think that was a need-to-know, and it wasn’t Tyler’s place to tell you.”

“I agree completely. And for what it’s worth, since you were listening, I thought of a hundred different ways I wanted to go off on him for letting that happen to you growing up. You threatening to run away or not, you could’ve been killed, Cassidy.”

My eyes had popped open the second he’d agreed with me but narrowed into slits toward the end. “You don’t understand, Detective Green—”

“Connor.”

I sighed. “Connor. You don’t understand. Tyler was all I had. If we had told someone, they would’ve taken me away from the only person I had left. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I probably understand better than you’d think,” he said softly, and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “I didn’t need you mentioning your life or Tyler telling me about your past to know what had happened. Within the first minute of questioning you, I knew you’d had nothing to do with the fire. Even if you had a rocky relationship and weren’t close with your mother and stepfather, you would still have been upset over their deaths and the loss of your childhood home. When you were neither, I knew.”