She swallowed so hard it looked like it hurt, but she held his stare. “I didn’t realize who you were.”

“Who I was?”

“Who you work for.” She circled her hand in front of her as if that might hurry the words out of her head. “What you do. For a living, I mean.”

She’s afraid of you.

Why the thought hurt so much more the second time around he couldn’t say, but he also couldn’t blame her.

“I started digging into the details you’d given me,” she said, “then one of the guys asked me who my source was. I told them your name, and they told me you work for Sergei Petrovyh.” She grimaced as though uncertain how to continue. “It’s intimidating, you know? Frightening. When you called, I didn’t know what to do. Then the follow-up stories started pouring in and my editor took note of my work, so I ran with them. For the first time in my career, my father actually used the word impressed in a sentence about me.” She paused to take breath and studied him. “Looking back, I think I just used all the momentum and activity to ignore the fact that I was an ass, and...well, I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t lying. Not about a single word. He’d been reading people his whole life, often banking his survival on reading them correctly, and she was absolutely sincere. Not to mention offering him a glimpse into her life for the first time. “I thought you didn’t like to talk about your family.”

Her head jerked back as though his comment had come out of left field. “Excuse me?”

“The second night we went out. I asked you about your family and where you were from, and you deftly changed the topic. And yet, twice tonight you’ve mentioned your family. Were you being coy before, or cautious?”

She huffed out a tired sigh and her shoulders drooped. “Honestly, I don’t normally talk about them. Dealing with them is exhausting and depressing enough as it is. Rehashing the details with anyone else is just salt in the wound.”

“Exhausting how?”

She considered him for long seconds, reluctance swimming behind her stormy blue eyes. Whether it was her guilty conscience riding her, or that she’d decided to face her fears, he couldn’t say, but something made her decide to open up. “I’m kind of the black sheep of my family.” She wrinkled her nose again, though without the smile she’d paired it with before, the action was a bit sad. “More like the black, black, black sheep.”

“How so?”

She shrugged. “I’ve got a neuroscientist for a mom, a nuclear engineer for a dad and an experimental physicist for a brother. I tried for years to get into the heavier stuff like them, but in the end, my niche was reporting. It doesn’t matter that I finished my BA degree with Honors. Dad just says it’s a degree in bankruptcy.”

“Not very supportive.”

She snorted. An adorable sound he’d first heard her make on this very same patio surrounded by her girlfriends. “That’s a polite way of saying he’s a jerk. The truth is, he’s just wound a little tight and doesn’t seem to be capable of comprehending things outside his own world. Life is a textbook to him and, if you don’t line up with the black and white on the page, then he keeps his distance.”