you have to tell me, it won’t matter.”
“Won’t matter?” A familiar expression darted across her face. Irritation. “You think my past doesn’t matter? What if I said that about you? If I said stop wearing those rancher clothes—your past doesn’t matter. Stop going out for rides and hikes. Stop thinking that your upbringing made you who you are—that it’s an integral part of your identity. You live in Kiraly now. This is who you are and all I need you to be. Forget everything that came before. It doesn’t matter.”
He let go of her hand. “That’s not what I meant.”
“It is,” she said, lowered voice crisp with the Frankie he knew, even as her expression returned to soft and serene. “You can’t stand the idea that there’s something insurmountable between us. You want to ignore it. Deny it. And it’ll be easier to do that if you tell me it doesn’t matter before you even know what it is. But the thing is . . .” She trailed off to stun him with a seductive smile, so provocative and ready that it quickened his blood, slipped over his skin, and despite knowing it wasn’t real, he felt himself begin to stir. “It does matter.” She reached out, her fingers brushing the inside of his forearm in small circles, and the maddening friction only made him harder. “You’re going to need to accept that.”
“Hey.” He shifted, sitting straighter to conceal his arousal. “What are you doing?”
Her smile vanished as she withdrew her hand. “You’ll see.”
“You’ve never toyed with me before.”
“I’m not toying with you now,” she said. “I’m showing you.”
Before he could ask what, exactly, that sex-hot smile had showed him, the man in the window booth laughed. It was louder this time, and he spoke to his partner through his amusement, voice booming above the general noise of the bar. As he listened, a strange chill passed down Kris’s spine, and his attention slid to the con man.
“That accent . . .”
It was American, but that was like saying Frankie’s skin had just turned white. There was endless variation in color, just as there was in accents. Dialect, pronunciation, cadence. The man sounded generically West American, but with a slight flatness to the vowels. Nothing significant or unusual, especially if it was assumed the speaker had spent considerable time living elsewhere, subconsciously picking up variances, mimicking the locals—basically what Kris had always believed about Frankie’s accent until very recently.
Except that she . . .
In the end, she hadn’t grown up in America at all.
Her accent had been false, an act to fool him.
The world around Kris ground to a halt as the man continued talking. His blood pulsed thick in his ears. The man’s accent was—it was . . .
“It’s exactly like yours.”
Frankie sat like he’d flicked her off at the switch, expression lifeless with dread.
Heart thumping in confusion, he scanned her features. Then he eyed the man with ginger hair that might have once been rust red. With a smile that was soft and seductive and quite possibly nothing like his true grin. With a false accent learned and practiced in a country too far from the source.
The chill settled in his gut when he realized she hadn’t answered his question.
Kris curled his fingers. “Who is he?”
But he knew. He knew.
Frankie’s lips were dry beneath her lipstick; her face was the grey-white of smoke. I’m not toying with you. The deception she’d so skillfully demonstrated for him slipped as tears gathered in her eyes. I’m showing you.
“He’s my father.”
Frankie’s head spun as she relinquished her truth in three whispered words. She felt weightless in a bad way, as if someone had been holding her back all her life and they’d abruptly let her go inside her own chest. Her pulse staggered, unstable—she didn’t know how to catch herself.
She forced herself to look at Kris.
He wouldn’t help set her right.
His blue eyes were raging, his jaw set like iron. His hands were fisted so tightly on the tabletop, his forearms bulged. He was furious.
His attention was cutting between her and her father. She wanted to ask him to stop—not to give them away, but he looked one lapse away from flipping the table and her throat was too swollen from pain to speak.
Finally, he leaned forward, and in a voice so rough it sounded half-solid, he said, “He did this to you.”
His anger shredded her thoughts. She could hardly piece together what he’d said; what he meant. “He taught me.”