Her Secret Life. Tara Taylor Quinn

right on ahead without taking the time to think everything through.

      Her first instinct was to tell him she had to leave. And yet if she and Michael really were friends, if she was going to be the type of friend—the type of woman—she wanted to be, she had to be willing to sit with him no matter what he had to tell her.

      To listen.

      And to work through whatever issue he had. Or they had. Anything else was not enough.

      “The point of friendship, Michael, is to trust. I trust you with my failings. I trust you not to judge me as a spoiled and selfish bitch who’s so desperate for attention she falls for gorgeous men who fawn all over her.”

      He cocked his head and his eyes sharpened. “You are not—”

      She held up her hand. “This isn’t about me, Michael. Now, please, tell me...and trust me to know what kind of person you are.”

      “I don’t want pity.”

      “You think I don’t know that? And here’s a news flash. The only thing pitiful about you is your fixation with being pitied.”

      He pulled back, but in the next instant grinned. “And that is what you do for me, my friend. From the first day we met, I saw a different side of myself in your eyes and I like that guy. That’s what you do for me.”

      Shaking her head, Kacey frowned. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I just...”

      “You treat me like a man who has no reason to be pitied.”

      “You are a man who has no reason to be pitied.”

      “I know that,” he told her. “I truly do know that. But even the people I know, and those who meet me for the first time...they take one look at this—” he flipped a thumb toward his lower left jaw and the obvious evidence of plastic surgery, “and suddenly they’re talking to me like I’m a rescue dog.”

      This was news to her. She’d only seen him at the Stand—where he was clearly hero material. And with the owner of the little diner they attended. Or alone.

      She had no idea what to say.

      “From day one, you’ve stood up to me, put me in my place. And treated me with respect all at the same time.”

      Wow. She hadn’t planned it that way or done it on purpose. He was giving her more credit than was her due. “I was just being myself.”

      “And it’s that self that I chose to take as a friend,” he returned.

      “You have a successful business,” she said, needing the truth to be different and trying to convince him that it was. “You have governmental and police clearances, and obviously your clients respect you...”

      “Of course they do. They respect what I can do. And it’s not as bad as it was just a few years ago,” he told her. “But there are still times when I go for a first face-to-face meet that I see the quick look away and hear that tone of instant compassion rather than the more restrained and distant tone of strangers.”

      “People care that you suffered. That’s a good thing.”

      Fingers crossed on top of his desk, he stared at her for a long moment.

      She stood her ground, metaphorically speaking.

      And he smiled. “You’re right. And this is what I’m talking about. Everyone else in my life—including my family—is afraid to talk to me about my deformity. You just barrel right in.”

      “I don’t see a deformity.”

      “You see skin that won’t ever grow a beard.”

      “Personally, I can’t stand beards, or mustaches, either.” She really did fall for men with clean-shaven faces but was afraid he’d think she was just saying so. “I mean...it gets me, you know...thinking about him blowing his nose and... Ew.” She broke off, embarrassed by her rambling.

      “And anyway, do men ever think about how soft a woman’s skin is? And how scratchy those things can be? You want whiskers poking your nose when you kiss? Or poking other parts of you when...”

      Oh. My. God. What was she doing? She could not be talking to Michael about how much she hated the feel of a beard during sex. Lacey, yeah, she could talk to her about such things.

      But here was one area where Michael wasn’t like Lacey.

      She couldn’t talk to him like she could her sister when it came to...sex. Or periods or hormones, either, she added just in case her psyche hadn’t yet fully grasped the magnitude of the revelation.

      And then it dawned on her. She was busy thinking about herself, her own gaffe, and Michael had just opened the door she’d been knocking on all these months.

      As kind as he was, he sat silently. So him, not making her outburst worse by responding to it.

      So her to focus so intently on herself.

      But he was giving her a chance to get over herself.

      “Will you tell me about it, please?” she asked. Not with pity. Not with curiosity, either, but because she cared. “You seem to think it somehow defines you, Michael. And maybe it does. But I can’t know that if I don’t know what happened in your past to make you what you are today.”

      Realizing that she was talking about so much more than looks, Kacey held her breath.

      And prayed that if Michael granted her request, she wouldn’t fail him.