He grinned. “I won’t apologize for what I had in mind. What’s your question?”
She had to think for a minute to retrieve it, she’d gotten so distracted. She looked around the muted elegance of his dining room, at the feast on the table. “You said you grew up poor. How come you ended up living in a mansion and driving a Porsche?”
He shoveled some of the pastry onto his plate. “Big question. Long answer.”
“You don’t have to answer. I know, it’s not fair.”
“Really not.” He ate a bite or two, and pushed his plate away. “But so what.”
“Hey, nothing you could say could make me judge you,” she said. “We all have to start somewhere.”
I’m not sure you’d really want to know how I got started.” His voice sounded flat.
Yikes. She’d hit a nerve. Caro set down her fork and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. “I’m sorry. If you’d rather not talk about—”
“My parents were con artists. Mostly small time. My dad taught my mom everything he knew. They were a team. I got taken along when they needed a prop.”
“What for?” She was genuinely shocked. “How old were you?”
“Really little. Who wouldn’t trust a nice young couple with a cute kid? Little budding confidence man, that was me. They were training me up to be just like them. Lucky me.”
“Oh,” she whispered. “I, ah, don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. I’m not proud of it. It’s just the way it was for me.”
Caro nodded mutely.
“So this went on for years. They had my brother and little sister. Sometimes we made money, but we still had to get out of town fast. I pretty much grew up on the road. We stayed in one dive motel after another. Cigarette burns on the sheets. Dirty bathrooms. Broken locks.”
There was faint bitterness in his voice. He stopped talking and just looked at her.
She didn’t reply. He could have been describing the life she’d been living for the last several months.
“Sorry,” he said. “You asked.”
“I wish I hadn’t,” she murmured.
“Oh well. You got the short version. No happy ending, though. One day, a guy my dad had swindled caught up with him. Clubbed him practically to death in a supermarket parking lot.”
She flinched. “You saw it?”
“Yes,” he said. “We had goods that fell off some truck. You do a return for cash—go in just before the place closes, say you lost the receipt. They pay up to get rid of you. Liquor store, here we come. Only we never got there. The guy must have been following us. He waited for us to come out, and jumped my dad with a baseball bat.”
She hated to ask, but she had to know. “Did he hurt you?”
Noah’s hand drifted up to a patch of thickened scar tissue that showed in the vee of his T-shirt. “He shattered my collarbone when I tried to stop him.”
“Oh, Noah.” She gripped his arm. His muscles were tightly contracted.
“It took my dad almost a week to die,” he said. “He had skull fractures, major brain damage, internal injuries. He never woke up.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head. “He was a hard-drinking liar, thief and cheat. No great loss.”
“Still. It had to hurt.”
“At the time, not that much. Not at all now.”
“What about your mom?”
He shrugged. “She took off a few months after that. Just couldn’t deal. We woke up one morning, found her gone. I was seventeen. The others were younger.”
Caro was silent for a while. It was a lot to take in. “So what happened to you guys after that?”
“We ran wild. Too bad there’s no such things as do-overs. I think about what I did back then sometimes. Can’t make amends for any of it.”
She nodded. Asking anything more seemed wrong.
His gaze met hers. There was a dark fire in the amber depths of his eyes that made her uneasy. “I’m done talking now.”
So that was that. “OK. I suppose you have your reasons.”
“I do. And you don’t get to ask what they are.”
She was taken aback. “What’s that supposed to mean?
“I spilled my guts,” he said. “I just told you some of my deepest, darkest secrets. That’s never happened with any woman I’ve ever been with.” His hand went up to the twisted scar, rubbing it as if it ached. “But did I rack up any points with you? Nope.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by points,” she said warily. “I appreciate your honesty. And your trust.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But you won’t return it.”
Caro stared down at her plate. “You really don’t want to know my secrets.”
He reached across the table and lifted her chin so that she had to look at him. “Actually, I do.”
“Noah, please, don’t start in on me again.”
“Don’t tell me no. You’re in danger. I see it on your face. Beautiful as you are, you have the look.”