“As I said. It was an honest mistake.” Time to go. She got the door halfway open. “Back to work.”

“Wait a second.” Connor’s voice sounded flat but it still came with a punch of power behind it.

She sighed at him. All she wanted was to get out of there before guilt pushed her into babbling about her entire life story. Something she never did and didn’t want to start now. “Any chance we could chalk this up to a terrible mistake and move on?”

His eyes widened. “I have four stitches.”

That explained the bandage. The guilt thumped and kicked at her. It bubbled up inside her and had her looking at Ben. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“This is my fault now?” he asked.

Okay, no. But . . . She gnawed on her lip as she returned her attention to Connor. To that bandage. To the cute way his hair stuck up a bit around the edges. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

She really thought she’d grazed his shoulder. The room was dark and her nerves had been bouncing around and all that tension had her patience pulled tight and . . . man, she really did hurt him. The thought of that made her feel sick.

“The goal was to stun you so I could run out.” Not that the explanation made his pain any better, but it was the truth.

“Well, that worked.” He sat back in his chair again, not breaking his focus. “Did you come in when I was sleeping?”

That sounded better than the truth about her being there, lying in wait and searching the place for both hiding place potential and for answers on who paid the cleaning people. “Sure.”

“Then how did you get in the door?”

Well, damn. She was hoping he’d skip over that part. “Hmm?”

“The cabin, Maddie.” The calm returned to his voice.

Are we on a first-name basis? She guessed she couldn’t really bark at him about that under the circumstances.

Her mind raced to fill in the blanks and make sense of her previous really bad choice. But that was the point. She’d messed up. Fear and panic fueled her actions and he’d paid the price. That sucked and her chest ached at the thought of hurting him.

There wasn’t a reasonable way to explain the unreasonable. So she fell back on semitruths again. “I walked through the front door. Like people do.”

“It was locked.”

She thought she saw a flicker of a smile cross his face before he shot back that answer, but that couldn’t be right . . . could it? “Are you sure?”

“I live in Washington, D.C. I lock my door like people who live in cities do.”

Okay, yeah. She was out of her league. He didn’t let things go. She needed to get out of the room now, think, and come up with . . . something. “That’s very smart. Good for you.”