flashed briefly across his face. “No girlfriend,” he said emphatically. “Too many other things going on in my life.”
And what would they be? Sophie wondered as the waiter interrupted them to take their orders. After ordering a lamb shank braised in red wine, she wasn’t at all surprised to hear Zach order the eye fillet steak. He looked like a man who liked his red meat.
“Lamb?” he said to her after the waiter had taken their orders and moved away from the table. “You come to what is essentially the best steak house in Texas and you order lamb?”
Sophie shrugged. “It’s what appealed to me at the time. At least I ordered a domestic wine, not some fancy imported beer. And here I thought you were proudly American all the way?”
“Fair point.” Zach nodded slowly, then smiled as said fancy imported beer was put in front of him and her Californian white zinfandel placed before her.
She watched as he took a long pull of the chilled lager, her eyes mesmerized by the muscles working in his throat and then by the smile of satisfaction on his beautiful features as he put the glass back down in front of him. Oh, how she wished that she could be the reason behind a smile like that from him one day. The second the thought formed, she beat it to the back of her mind again. That way could only lead to trouble.
“Now that makes a hard day at the office worthwhile,” he said with a soul-deep gratification that brought another smile to her face.
“Simple pleasures, huh?”
He looked at her as if to check if she was still teasing him after the imported beer comment, then gave another nod of acknowledgment. “Yeah, when it comes down to it, it’s the simple things that matter the most. Don’t you agree?”
“Totally. For me it’s home and family. One day I hope to have both.”
“You’ve made a lovely home out of your apartment.”
“Thank you, but it’s still not mine, y’know? Soon I hope to be able to put a deposit on a place of my own. Something small, with a bit of a garden. Somewhere that I can truly call mine.”
And that was another reason why she was so darned worried about Alex Santiago. What if he didn’t come back? Would Zach continue to keep the business running or would he fold things up and go back to where he’d come from? Where would she be then? She earned good money now and her options within Royal to earn the same weren’t bountiful. If she lost her job, that could be the end of her dream of owning her own home—she’d never earn enough to make mortgage payments and to afford extras like the private investigator she’d hired to find her sister.
“And that’s important to you because?” Zach coaxed.
She took a moment to think before answering. “Stability, not being at someone else’s whim or mercy.”
“Sounds like there’s some history there.”
She shrugged. “Isn’t there always?”
“Can you tell me?”
Sophie sighed. It wasn’t something she tended to bandy about, but there was something about Zach’s gentle questioning that made her actually want to tell him.
“Nothing spectacular. My dad died when I was a baby and my mom remarried. They had my sister and life was great for a while, but then a few years later my new dad died in an accident at work and our lives turned upside down. We had to move out of our home and my sister went to live with her aunt, because Mom couldn’t cope with us both with the hours she had to work to make the rent. It was hard for her,” Sophie added just in case Zach felt inclined to be judgmental. “We had to keep moving around, which I hated, but even then I used to keep house to help Mom out. She’d usually juggle two jobs, or pull double shifts when she only had one source of income. Things settled down a bit after I finished college. She met someone new, they married and I moved out and got my own place.”
“They kicked you out?”
Zach sounded defensive and Sophie rushed to disabuse him of that. “No, not at all. But I was ready to stand on my own two feet. Mom and Jim marrying didn’t make any difference to that. No, that’s not entirely true. I felt better about moving to a place of my own, knowing she’d be taken care of.”
* * *
Zach looked at Sophie across the table. She’d talked more personally to him tonight than she ever had in the time they’d worked together, but there was a huge amount she wasn’t saying. Listening to her, he could begin to understand why she was so good at what she did. She was used to keeping things together, keeping things calm. It was a sure bet that she’d done her best to help her mother out at home from an early age—that capable manner of hers was second nature now, but there had probably been a time when it was all about security.
His own upbringing had been completely the opposite. At least up until his dad had been laid off from his job. Even then, forced to take on a menial position at a much lower wage, his father had insisted on paying Zach’s way through college. It was one of the reasons Zach worked so hard now. He didn’t ever want to be in the position his parents had been when his father’s job had been downsized. And he’d made it up to them for all the sacrifices they’d made to ensure he’d had the best opportunities available to him. It didn’t sound like Sophie had been so lucky.
“And your sister? She’s the one in that photo you had with you on Monday, right?”
Sophie inclined her head, her cap of hair swinging gently forward to caress her cheek. His fingers itched to do the same and he reached for the dewy glass in front of him instead.
“You said you don’t stay in touch. How come?”
“Her aunt formally adopted her several months after she took Suzie to live with them. She told Mom they didn’t think it was good for Suzie to continue to have contact with us. Said it was too disruptive.”
There was a world full of hurt and loss in her simply chosen words.
“And your mother agreed to that?” he said incredulously.
Sophie’s eyes flamed. “You have no idea of what it was like for my mother. Don’t you dare judge her.”
Zach put up both hands in surrender. “Whoa, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve there.”
After Anna’s car wreck, he’d fought tooth and nail to keep his son—arguing with doctors and specialists until he was blue in the face. But after Blake had been on life support for six weeks and the doctors had repeatedly told him his son had no brain activity, Zach and Anna had had to let him go. For the life of him he couldn’t understand how a parent could give up a child the way Sophie’s mother had, not when she had every reason to fight to keep her.
“Mom couldn’t work and take care of us both at the same time. I was in school. Mom couldn’t afford day care and Suzie, well, she was a bit of a handful. She had been a demanding baby and that didn’t change as she got older. She was always just that bit more vulnerable than I was, needed that much more attention. Giving Suzie up wasn’t Mom’s first choice, not by any means, but she had to do what was best—for all of us. And Suzie’s aunt, well, family money aside, her late husband had been a very wealthy man. She didn’t have to work and she was childless. Mom knew that Suzie would be the center of her world, that she’d be loved and cared for
