She should have been frozen, but it turned out humiliation was an effective thermal insulator. It heated her from the inside, and scalded her from the outside. She was a fool. A gullible, trusting fool. And as if that wasn’t bad enough she’d gone and spilled her feelings all over him. She could have played it cool and pretended to just be annoyed that he’d made her the murderer in his book, but over the past few days she’d lost the last of her barriers around him. Not only had she started to believe he might be interested in her, she’d actually told him as much.
So now he knew she’d read more into their relationship than was really there. And on top of that her head felt as if a rock band was having a party. She should have taken the painkiller.
“Eva?”
His voice came from behind her and her stomach dropped.
He’d followed her?
The only way to hide how embarrassed she was seemed to be to plant her face in her snowman.
“What are you doing here?”
She scooped more snow up with her gloves, but didn’t turn to look at him. How could there be so much heat in her face when it was freezing outside? “You can’t work without me there? You need some other intimate detail about me you can use in your book? Because if that’s what this is, don’t waste your time. You already know everything there is to know about me.” Oh God, if only that wasn’t true. Why couldn’t she have applied at least a tiny filter to the information that had poured out of her?
There was a scrunching of snow and his boots came into view.
“I can see you’re still angry—”
“You’re right, I’m angry and it takes a lot to make me angry, in case you haven’t worked that out in those sessions where you pretended to be interested in me. When you told me I shouldn’t trust people and should look deeper, I didn’t realize you were warning me about yourself.”
“Come back to the apartment and we can talk about this in the warmth.”
“I’m happy here. I’m hoping the weather might cool me down.” She stabbed the carrot hard into the snowman’s face and then felt Lucas’s arm brush against hers as he dropped to his haunches next to her.
“I am interested in you, Eva. And I like you. You weren’t wrong about that.”
“I suppose your character goes around threatening to fillet men if they don’t help her use up her condom by the expiration date.”
“Nothing about the night we spent together has gone into the book.” He sounded calm and for some reason that made her even angrier.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get anything useful from it.”
“That night was special, and private, and had nothing to do with research.” The carrot fell out of the snowman’s nose and Lucas picked it up and pushed it back into the softly packed snow. “You need eyes.”
“I have eyes. I don’t always use them, that’s all.”
“I was talking about the snowman.”
“Oh.” She wished he wasn’t so close to her. The jut of his knee brushed against her leg and the width of his shoulders blocked out some of the icy wind. “You need to move. You’re blocking my pile of snow.”
He shifted enough to give her access and she leaned across and scooped another handful, packing it down against the snowman’s rounded body.
“I wasn’t trying to make a fool of you. You knew you were the inspiration behind a character.”
“You didn’t tell me which character.”
“Which part of this has upset you most? Discovering you’re the inspiration behind my murderer who, by the way, is nothing like you, or the fact that you think all that time we spent talking was just so that I could find information to use in my book?”
“I’m equally upset by both parts.”
His breath clouded the freezing air. “How can I fix it?”
“You can’t. It’s up to me to make sure I don’t tell you anything else you can use against me.”
“You only read one page, Ev. If you read the whole thing you wouldn’t recognize yourself.”
“Only my closest friends call me Ev.”