Your Eyes Don't Lie by Rachel Branton Page B

going on a picnic?”
    She grinned at the hope in his voice. “You’ll see.”
    As Harrison rounded the car to get in on his side, she began asking herself what she was doing. She never exposed Nate to her dates. What was the point? She didn’t want him to get attached, especially not after that embarrassing episode in kindergarten when he’d tried to set her up with the substitute teacher.
    “So where to?” Harrison slid into the car.
    “A place called Lily’s House.”
    “I’ve heard of it. That’s Tessa’s sister?” He punched a few buttons on his phone.
    “Yeah. She’s one of those people who live to help others. She’s great.”
    “Okay, I have the address.” He set his phone into a holder on the dash. “This will tell me the fastest way to get there. Not that I don’t trust you for directions, but you do look a little distracted.”
    She stifled another yawn. “Thanks.”
    “Uh, you might want this.” Harrison leaned toward her, taking a comb from the glove compartment. He grinned. “I sort of like you with bed head, but I suspect your friends might, well, read something into it.”
    “They’d just think we had the top down.” But she took the comb and began at the ends of her hair. She noticed he kept glancing at her, as if fascinated with her movements. That made two of them. She couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off him, either. Even so, she shouldn’t have let him come. Or let him take her—whatever. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling as if they were full of sandpaper.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah.” She bit the left side of her lower lip.
    “Really?”
    She opened her eyes to find him looking at her rather than the road. “It’s just . . . I don’t know how Nate is going to take you appearing there with me. He’ll either hate you or call the preacher.”
    Harrison laughed. “We’ll tell him we’re friends.”
    “I thought we covered friends at my apartment.”
    He looked at her and back to the road, his mouth twitching with what she suspected was amusement. “Well, we have to start somewhere. Let’s fill each other in on our lives.”
    That’s why she didn’t do friends well, because it always came down to the past. But she could at least tell him the surface stuff that seemed to satisfy most people. Of course wasn’t that what she’d done last night? Anyway, if it got too bad, she’d insist that he put the convertible top down so the wind would make easy conversation impossible.
    He took her silence for agreement. “How long have you had custody of Nate?”
    “Four years.”
    “How old was he?”
    “Two.”
    “And he’s six now?”
    She nodded.
    “That would have made you nineteen.”
    “Thereabouts.”
    He guided the car to the freeway. “Why do I feel a little like we’re playing twenty questions? Why don’t you tell me what happened? I mean, if you want. That’s a lot of years between siblings.”
    “How far do you want me to go back?”
    He grinned. “All the way.”
    “Oh, you’re one of those,” she said, rolling her eyes.
    “You bet.”
    “Well, you see, about six thousand years ago there was a garden.”
    He laughed. “Not that far back. Begin with when you were born.”
    Ugh. So much for diversion. “Okay.” She took a breath. “My mother died when I was five and my father remarried when I was twelve. Her name was Fern. Good name for someone who floated around with every new breath of wind that passed by.” She gave a flat, mirthless laugh. “I didn’t get along with Fern, so after a few days I stayed with friends mostly. That was in Tucson.”
    He glanced over at her again and she saw a question in his eyes, but she was glad he didn’t ask. No matter how he made her feel, she wasn’t going to tell him about sleeping in the park or crashing on friends’ couches, or spending the occasional night locked in the high school.
    “Nate was born when I was seventeen, and I went home for six months to help Fern with the baby. But it didn’t