“I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. About us. I’m not the relationship type.”

Though his words didn’t entirely shock her, she still felt a sinking in her gut. She rallied quickly, not allowing the sting to sink in. “Staying all night doesn’t have to mean relationship. I mean, if you want to get technical, we’ve had a relationship since the day I hired you.”

“Yeah. I’m not good at them. The man-woman kind or anything else. I screw them up.”

He’d never, for as long as she’d known him, spoken of a girlfriend before, but then he didn’t tend to talk about anything personal at work. She hadn’t known he had brothers until the night of his mom’s heart attack. “When’s the last time you were in a serious relationship?” she asked.

He reached over to the lamp on the nightstand and flipped it off, plummeting the room into darkness. If that made it easier for him to talk, she was okay with it. For now. As long as he talked.

“I’ve never had a serious relationship,” he said quietly into the dark.

“Never?” She was surprised and yet not surprised at the same time.

She felt him shake his head.

“How about sorta serious?” she asked.

He shook his head again. “I’m not good with people, Sierra. I like facts and logical, practical things. Those are easy to get right.”

Easy for a literal genius, she thought with a private grin. She sobered up instantly, glad he couldn’t see her, because he was revealing parts of himself that she suspected he didn’t show to most. “You could be good with people. If you wanted to.”

“I want to. I mean, now I want to. I used to not want to, and I ruined nearly every relationship I had—with my dad and every one of my brothers, coaches, teachers, bosses, coworkers.”

“What about your mom?” Sierra had yet to meet her, and she longed to because, just like seeing where he lived had done, she suspected meeting his mom would help her understand more about Cole.

“She’s always understood me better than most.” He scoffed. “Better than I realized she did. I wouldn’t say we’ve been close over the years, but we’ve never been on bad terms, in spite of me being a jackass in general.”

She rolled toward him, so that she was perched over his chest. Though the darkness was close to one hundred percent in the windowless room and she couldn’t see him, she hoped to get her point across to him. “You’re not a jackass, Cole. I don’t like when you talk like that about yourself.”

“You don’t know me that well,” he said in a challenge.