“So tell me about your family.” The wine is making me loose, both my body and my tongue. I picked at the antipasto plate, so my stomach is mostly full of wine as we wait for our dinner, which is taking for-freaking-ever.

Rhett keeps trying to get me to talk, but I dodge all of his questions, doing my best to turn them back on him. Or I give him vague answers without ever really saying a thing.

He asked if I had any siblings and I wanted to say so badly, I’m sitting across from one right now, but I knew that wouldn’t go over well, so I told him I had none.

Now it’s his turn to answer my questions.

“What do you want to know about my family?” He raises a brow and it’s so sexy, when raised eyebrows shouldn’t be that sexy. I don’t even know what’s the matter with me. I’m not acting right.

I blame the wine.

“Everything.” I prop my elbow on the table and rest my chin on my curled fingers, shooting him an adoring look. It’s not really a lie either, because right now, in the flickering candlelight, his lips stained by the fancy wine he ordered, he’s adorable. “Do you look like your dad?”

“Not really. My older brother looks like my dad.” He shakes his head, then pushes his hair away from his forehead with an impatient shove of his fingers. “I look more like my mother.”

“Oh.” I didn’t want to bring up a sore subject, but here I am, blundering right into the topic of his dead mother.

“She died when I was five.” He frowns. “Or did I already tell you that?”

“No.” I shake my head. “You didn’t. You just mention that she passed, but I didn’t know you were only five.” I pause, take a sip of my wine. “How awful.”

“Yeah.” He smiles, but it’s weak. “I guess we have the dead parent thing in common.”

I return the smile, my body tingling with triumph. That had been the plan all along. Finding common ground with Rhett about our dead parents. But I should probably change the subject. “Are you close with your brother?”

“Yeah, we’re pretty close.” His smile grows. “And there’s my little sister. I’m really close to Addie.”

It’s like my brain short circuits at hearing her name. I always forget about the little sister. That’s because I don’t want to remember her. The daughter my mother stuck around for. The one who doesn’t even belong to my mother, yet she raised her anyway.

“It must’ve been so hard.” I swallow past the lump in my throat. “Your sister losing her mother at such a young age.”

He tilts his head, contemplating me. “How did you know about that?”

My stomach drops. Oh God. Did I mess up and reveal too much? “I, um. I just assumed, I guess. Or does your sister belong to your stepmother? Is she your half-sister?”

My heart is racing and I pray I didn’t say the wrong thing. I need to keep my mouth shut and let him feed me the information.

“My mom died after giving birth to my sister,” Rhett says quietly, his gaze going turbulent. “Let’s change the subject. I don’t want to get depressed over dinner. Let’s talk about you.”

Yeah. That’s a depressing subject. “You already know everything there is to know about me. There’s not much else to tell.”

“Uh huh.” His eyes are sparkling as he studies me. “More like you want to keep up the mysterious air.”

“You think I’m mysterious?” I’m truly shocked.

He nods, reaching across the table to grab my hand. “You either dodge my questions completely or you give me short answers. You don’t want to tell me anything.”

He’s so right. “That’s not true,” I lie.

“Whatever. It’s cool.” He squeezes my hand, and I swear he’s amused by me. “I like mysterious girls.”

My heart skips a beat at his words, at the way he’s looking at me. His thumb is sliding gently over the top of my hand, and I’m caught up in the spell Rhett is casting over me. He makes me want to forget. About my fucked up life. About my plans for revenge. None of it matters if I can just sit here for the rest of the night and stare into his beautiful brown eyes.

“Have you always been so independent?” he asks when I still haven’t said anything to him.

“I guess.” I shrug, uncomfortable with how closely he’s watching me. I’m not used to someone paying attention to me like Rhett does. “I’ve always had to take care of myself.”

“No parents? You just magically appeared?” He’s teasing me, but it rubs me the wrong way.

“My father is dead,” I say bluntly. “And my mother left when I was very young.” I clear my throat, so much emotion forming there it’s difficult to speak. “Like, I-don’t-even-remember-her young. I was practically a baby.” I pause, checking on Rhett’s reaction and he’s enthralled. I continue. “My parents got into a terrible fight.”

“Did he hurt her? Did he ever hurt you?” Rhett breathes. His nostrils flare and his eyes blaze with anger. He’s squeezing my hand so tightly I have to carefully pull away from his grip before he accidently hurts me.

“No, no. Nothing physical.” I think of the few moments when my father did actually hit me, but it never amounted to anything. He was too scared, too weak. “My parents hurt each other with words. Or at least, my mother hurt my father with words. He claims he never did anything wrong.”

He had to have, though. No one’s perfect. And while it still hurts that he’s gone, and his pain has become my pain, I know he was in the wrong sometimes too.

But my mother was worse. She never came back.

“Emotional abuse can be more painful than physical,” Rhett says, and I’m tempted to scream at him, What do you know about abuse? But I don’t.

“Words hurt.” I offer up a grimace of a smile. “And I guess the words my parents tossed at each other that one particular night were spectacularly painful. My mother packed up a few things and left.” Another pause, to let my words really sink in. “She never came back.”

“Never?” Rhett sounds so doubtful.

I slowly shake my head. “I haven’t seen her in twenty years.”

“She’s never tried to find you?”

“No.” My voice is sharp and I clear my throat again. “Never.”

“Have you tried to look her up? Seems like anyone can be found through a Google search these days.”

“Oh, I’ve tried, but I can’t find her. There’s no trace of her.” His question, the skeptical expression on his face, he’s making me feel stupid. Who wouldn’t try to find her long-lost mother via Google? “I believe she changed her name.”

“What’s her name?”

Nerves make my stomach flutter and twitch, the consumed wine suddenly threatening to rise. Has she ever admitted her true name to her current husband? Her stepson? Her new family? “Why does it matter what her name was? That’s not her name now.”

“Maybe I could help you.” He leans forward, full of eagerness. “I could do some extensive searches, maybe even hire a private detective—”

I hold up my hand to stop him from saying anything else. “I don’t want to find her.”

Rhett frowns. “But you just said you tried to find her.”

“Years ago, in my early teens, I was desperate to find her. She became almost…mythical to me, and I thought she could, I don’t know, rescue me. Like I’m living in some sort of wretched fairytale and I need my long-lost mama to save my life.” I’m trying to make a joke, but Rhett’s not even cracking a smile. “But after all the searching and coming up with nothing, I realized she doesn’t want to be found. Not by me, not by anyone.”

“Do you think she scrubbed her name?”

Now I’m frowning. “What do you mean?”

“You can scrub your identity from the Internet. Pay someone to get rid of any and all references about you until…poof.” Rhett snaps his fingers. “You don’t exist anymore.”

Oh. Right. I know about this, considered doing it myself, not that I had much of an Internet footprint. With no phone and no real social media trail, Jennifer Fanelli didn’t have much of an existence. I didn’t participate in any activities at school, I had no real friends…yeah. I’m like a ghost.

“That’s probably what she did.” With a sigh, I grab my wineglass and drain it. It’s like I don’t even care any longer. The “I need to be on my best behavior so he’ll like me” veneer has been completely washed off by wine.

There’s no reeling it back either. Even though I know I should. The panic races through my veins as I contemplate the nearly empty wine bottle sitting in the middle of the table. I want to lunge for it, bring the bottle to my lips and drink it dry. I know I need to restrain myself and play my part, but I can’t. The alcohol has made me melancholy, the fact that this boy knows my mother yet we sit here and pretend that she’s this fuzzy myth…

It’s fucking with my head. My emotions.

My heart.

“So sorry for the delay.” The stressed-out server is standing beside our table, a plate balanced in each hand, and he sets a plate in front of me before doing the same for Rhett. “It’s extremely busy tonight. Do you need anything else?”

I think about asking for more wine, but Rhett answers for the both of us, telling the server we’re fine.

“Very well.” The waiter bows, like we’re royalty, and then takes off.

“I’m sorry if I made you upset,” Rhett says quietly. “I was just trying to help.”

His apology throws me off guard. “I—no, it’s fine. You didn’t upset me.”

“Clearly you’re lying.”

My heart threatens to explode from my chest.

“Because I know what I said about your mom made you upset,” he continues, his expression pained. Like he hates that he hurt me. My heart swells and for the quickest moment, I wish this night, this date with Rhett, was real. “I just, I don’t know, I wanted to help. And sometimes I overstep my place. So I’m sorry for that.”

We both go quiet, choosing to start on our meals so we can avoid conversation. At least, that’s what I’m doing. Maybe he’s giving me time, space, whatever you want to call it, and I’m sort of floored. As in, I don’t know how to react. He’s just so nice. And respectful. He’s unlike any other guy I’ve ever been with before, and I’m drawn to his polite manners and kind gestures. It doesn’t feel fake.

The way he treats me feels all too real.

“Thank you for apologizing,” I finally say, causing him to glance up from his plate, our gazes meeting. “It means a lot to me.”

“Honestly Jens, I didn’t want to see you cry,” he says, his voice tender, his brown eyes full of concern.

My eyes fill with tears at his words and I blink them away. I drop my gaze, concentrating on the plate of food in front of me, letting my growling stomach remind me that yes, I should keep eating. “You’re too good to be true,” I murmur.

Maybe he does actually like me. And God, maybe I…actually like him too.

That thought is too terrifying to contemplate.