He sat back, his brow furrowed. “I’m sorry. Laurel once mentioned a trailer park, but are you telling me you actually grew up in one?”

She nodded. She didn’t like to think about the year she hadn’t lived in that rundown trailer park. Not ever. “Yes. We couldn’t afford anything else.”

A hand ran over his head as though he couldn’t quite process the information. “You. You and Laurel and Lila and Will came out of a trailer park?”

That made her smile. It wasn’t the first time someone questioned her background. “Hard to believe?”

“Damn near impossible. Those shoes you had on tonight are worth more than a lot of people make in a month.”

She waved that off. “I didn’t buy those. Bridget gets bored with shoes and I get hand-me-downs. Bridget did grow up wealthy, but my side of the family? Hell no. We worked our asses off. My mom was in and out of prison and Will raised us. He was the one who taught us that our grades had to be damn near perfect if we wanted out. He made sure there was food on the table and all our school forms were properly completed. He would do odd jobs after school and that was how he’d buy us stuff. My brother is the single best man I’ve ever met. He’s the reason we’re all alive and successful. Even my mom. She got married to a man she met in AA and they’re doing well. Will made that happen. He paid for her to stay at a house that helps recovering addicts from prison ease back into the real world.”

He stared at her as though seeing her for the first time.

She found herself sitting up straighter. “Does the fact that my mom is an ex-con shock you?”

“In ways you can’t understand, ma crevette.”

She should figure out what that was, but it sounded sweet coming from his mouth. “Well, she is and I’m not ashamed of her. I’m not ashamed of how I grew up.”

“Why would you be? You bloomed without water. You became something more than you should have, according to our society. I thought you were some kind of rich girl who’d breezed through life.”

Holy shit. Was that why he hadn’t been “interested”? Oddly enough, she could forgive that. She wasn’t interested in over-privileged men who couldn’t understand the world she’d grown up in. She might run from that, too. “Because my brother’s a neurosurgeon? Not all surgeons come from wealthy families.”

“Your brother is a neurosurgeon. Your sister-in-law is a best-selling author. Your sisters work in legal and medical professions that require college degrees, and your brother-in-law is Harvard educated. His brother and sister-in-law own a massive corporation. All in all, those family ties don’t scream I grew up in a double wide.”