Page 36 of Sasha’s Secret

Rocco shook his head. “No. It was a week before that. Nick did give me a briefing pack for the job. There were photos of you in it. You… bowled me over on sight. Then I met you, and the reality blew me away.”

“Apart from the part about the file and the photos, I could say the same about you,” Sasha admitted. “You weren’t at all what I expected.”

Rocco laughed. “Do I want to know what you did expect?”

“I don’t know—do you?” Challenge lit her gaze as she studied him. “That’s not quite true—I was partly right.”

“Now I’m worried. Which part?”

“These.” She laid her hand on his biceps.

His self-control protested. “Ah. I get it. All brawn, no brains. Very flattering—thank you for that.”

For a moment she took him at his word, until she registered the wry grin he almost succeeded in stifling. Then her expression changed. “Men. Although this… this is a Brit thing, right? The dry humor?”

He held a hand up. “Busted. I guess I inherited it from my mother. She could do sarcasm to Olympic standards.”

Her expression softened. “Is your mother still…?”

Rocco shook his head. “She died a while ago. She was an amazing woman.”

“I’m not surprised. I think her son’s pretty amazing, too. And your father?”

An all-too-familiar iron band clamped Rocco’s chest. The question was an inevitable extension of the conversation, so he’d seen it coming, but the prospect of talking about Dario—especially to Sasha—was still anathema to him. “Dario and I don’t talk.”

He hated shutting her down like that, yet at the same time was infinitely grateful when she didn’t press the issue.

“Then tell me about Rocco Equizi.”

When that question came from a woman he was dating, it usually set his inner alarm bells ringing. In his experience, it meant there was a better than even chance she was looking for more from the relationship than he was prepared to give. For Sasha, however, those bells remained silent. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything, of course.”

Still no alarm bells. Rocco groaned. “Suffer from insomnia much? It’s pretty boring stuff.”

Sasha’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think it is. I don’t think anything about you is the least bit boring. Come on—tell me something,” she pleaded.

He racked his brain for something lighthearted and frivolous. “All right, then. My star sign’s Cancer.”

“And I’m a Capricorn.”

“Hmm. That’s tropical.”

Sasha groaned and gestured toward the end of the couch. “If I could reach that cushion, I’d hit you with it. Is your sense of humor always so lame?” she asked with feigned disappointment.

He shrugged. “I usually have better material to work with.”

She rolled her eyes. “Then tell me something else.”

Rocco shook his head. For so long he’d been little more than the sum total of his work, and his work had, for the most part, not been a subject suitable for conversation, polite or otherwise. “Why don’t you tell me about you instead?”

The look she gave him conveyed caution. “What do you want to know?”

His answer to that was simple—everything that had made her the woman she was today, and that started with where she’d come from. “Tell me about your family. I know you’re an Army brat and you weren’t born in Texas. That leaves forty-nine other possibilities. Since it would be a terrible waste of an evening if I were to sit here reciting the names of all the other states, why don’t you put us out of my misery and tell me?”

She relaxed visibly. “Colorado. Dad was stationed at Fort Carson at the time. We left there when I was about seven. I grew up in a lot of places.”

“Tell me more,” he prompted.