The Wildcard

Chapter Twenty Seven

Live in? As in live... with Cayden?

I must've looked like an absolute idiot – my jaw was still hanging open even as he came around the island and caught a dribble of ketchup from the corner of my mouth with a smile, even as he then proceeded to take the forgotten sandwich from my hands and devour it, as though he hadn't just turned my world upside down with a couple of words ... I couldn't just up sticks and move in with him, could I? What about Ryan? What about the mortgage we'd all but sold our asses for? We'd been lucky enough to get it – I couldn't just desert him!

"We'll talk about it later, we've got plans today ... I was thinking the beach ..."

His enthusiasm was contagious – he seemed so much younger in that moment, with that wide, boyish grin softening hiss angular features.

"The beach?"

He nodded, dragging the second sandwich across the island and carefully cutting it in half with a butter knife, sliding one over to me between looking thoughtfully at his own.

"I've never been to the beach, have you?"

How did someone never get to a beach? Cayden was 28 years old ... surely he'd been to some sort of a beach ... somewhere?

"I went with Ryan a few years back, we saved up to go to Marbella but he ditched me on the second day to hook up with a holiday rep ... did you never take a holiday?"

"Never really saw the point before," he wiped his mouth on a paper towel, "I was always working anyway."

"What about when you were a kid then? Or with your mates when you were younger?"

Surely, at some point, he'd have had some kind of down time – driven as he was, I could understand him never taking that time out of his schedule when he was working so hard to break away from his family legacy – but surely somewhere along the way he'd been able to kick back and just be Cayden? I felt him tense beside me – his eyes steeling over as he cleared our plates away – my own sandwich left abandoned after those first few bites.

"Like I said, I was always working."

I felt like he was avoiding something – busying his hands with mundane tasks that I was pretty sure he probably had staff for anyway.

"As a child?" I hedged quietly – did Cayden have a childhood? I tried to imagine him as a child – all dark, startling features, it was so hard to see him as anything other than the hard and powerful sexy bastard in front of me ...

"Until I got sent down, yeah."

Oh.

I saw the uncertainty flash in his eyes; I never would have if I wasn't so attuned to his every movement, but he'd been nervous to tell me that part. I hadn't expected that, I probably should have done, given the stories I'd read on Google, but it did come as a shock.

"What did you go down for?" I busied my hands around the mug of coffee he'd given me – not wanting to disrupt his own confession time. Everything in my life had been so upside down that I had never really gotten to know Cayden, all I really knew was that I needed him more than my next breath, but I'd never truly broken through the enigma that was my man, and I realised right then that I quite desperately wanted to.

"Drugs," he shrugged, "Sins of the father and all ... I don't want to talk about this, not today. Do you have a swimsuit?"

I couldn't push him to give me answers – not after he'd had to fight as hard as he had to get me to open up to him – it would be completely hypocritical. It hurt a bit, that he was reluctant to divulge his secrets, but I guess that was just a taste of my own medicine, I would have to deal.