Struggling to absorb it, she stared into her wine. “You see your situations as similar, but—”

“I recognized Gloria yesterday,” he interrupted. “A pretty woman gone brittle. Hard and sharp at the eyes, bitter at the mouth. She and my mother would have recognized each other, too.”

What could she say, how could she argue when she’d seen the same thing, felt the same? “I didn’t recognize her,” she said quickly. “For a moment I thought there was a mistake.”

“She recognized you. And she played the angles, pushed the buttons. She’d know how.” He paused a moment. “She’d know exactly how. So do I.”

She looked at him then, noted he was studying her coolly. “Is that what you’re doing? Pushing buttons, playing angles?”

Maybe it was, he thought. They would both have to figure that out before much longer. “Right now I’m answering your question. Do you want the rest?”

“Yes.” She didn’t hesitate, for she’d discovered she very much wanted to hear it all.

“When I was thirteen, I thought I had it handled. I figured I was just fine. Until I found myself face down in the gutter, bleeding to death. Drive-by shooting. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Shot?” Her gaze whipped back to his. “You were shot.”

“In the chest. Probably should have killed me. One of the doctors who made sure I didn’t die knew Stella Quinn. She and Ray came to see me in the hospital. I figured them for weirdos, do-gooders, your basic assholes. But I played along with them. My mother was done with me, and I was going to end up solid in the system. I thought I’d use them until I was steady on my feet again. Then I’d take what I needed and cut out.”

Who was this boy he described to her? And how was she to reconcile him with the man beside her? “You were going to rob them?”

“It’s what I did. What I was. But they . . .” How to explain it? he wondered. The miracle of them. “They just wore that away. Until I fell in love with them. Until I’d have done anything, been anything, to make them proud of me. It wasn’t the paramedics or the surgical team that saved my life. It was Ray and Stella Quinn.”

“How old were you when they took you in?”

“Thirteen. But I wasn’t a kid like Seth. I wasn’t a victim like Cam and Ethan. I made my choices.”

“You’re wrong.” For the first time, she reached out and, taking his face in her hands, she kissed him gently.

He lifted his hands to her wrists, had to concentrate on not squeezing her skin the way that soft kiss had squeezed his heart. “That’s not the reaction I expected.”

It wasn’t the one she’d expected to have. But she found herself feeling pity for the boy he described to her and admiration for the man he’d made himself into. “What reaction do you usually get?”