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wrapped his life behind. Could it be?
    “ You’re not like a—a—” She clamped her lips. Seriously? She was not about to ask if he was a spy, or a secret agent. What was she? Ten years old?
    His head inclined in her direction. “ I’m a composer and songwriter.”
    “ Alexander Gerardo?” Her brows shot up in disbelief. “I’ve never heard of you.”
    “ I don’t perform,” he said, adding, “How many songwriters have you heard of?”
    “ Not many,” she admitted, searching her mind.
    Make that none.
    But a songwriter? Was that even credible? Her gaze shifted to where his hand rested on the steering wheel, fingers tapping to the rhythm of the tune on the radio. Long, nimble fingers she could easily imagine flying over a keyboard. Or strumming a guitar.
    “ Would I know any of your songs?” she asked, tipping over into belief.
    He flashed a grin at her. A grin that kicked up on one side of his mouth and stirred butterflies at her pulse.
    “ Ruins of Love ,” he said without a scrap of shame.
    Idiot. That ’s exactly what she got for her naivety.
    “ So,” she drew out sarcastically, “you wrote the song that’s been number one on the charts for the last three weeks? The song we just happen to have heard on the radio?”
    The grin stayed. “ Too much of a coincidence?”
    He was messing with her, but it didn ’t feel like a joke. Not with their track record, which, as far as she was concerned, went back three years.
    “ Forget it,” she mumbled. “Silly me, for thinking we could attempt a civil conversation.”
    “ We’re not doing too badly.”
    “ I just thought we could get to know each other a bit. You know, like normal people do when they’re cooped together for any extended time.” The glare she sent him softened almost instantly.
    There it was again, the butter-melting brain sensation that wanted to delve beneath his surface. She ’d never use this stuff for the paper. There was no justification for wanting to know.
    She didn ’t care what he was so afraid of. She didn’t care why he hid behind his walls. All she cared about was that he did and that Corkscrew Bay suffered the ramifications. Traditions severed. Tourist trade reduced in a tough economic period.
    So why couldn ’t she stop herself from asking? “Don’t you ever open up, Alexander? Show a piece of who you are without cloaks, walls and lies?”
    “ The scope and magnitude of a person’s lies reveals more than any truth.”  He gave that just enough time to sink in before clubbing her over the head with a sweetly innocuous, “Don’t you think?”
    Judged and damned. The whole of her defined by one little lie he ’d caught her out on.
    She bristled from head to toe. She felt as if her teeth had grown hair, and that bristled, too. “You don’t know anything about me.”
    She wasn ’t a saint. She hadn’t reached the grand age of twenty-five without her share of white-lies, well-meaning fibs and, yes, maybe this one was a giant whopper. And maybe it wouldn’t have stung quite so badly if she hadn’t gone off record, hadn’t reached out to him as one human to another. If he’d picked another time, picked any other of her faults—God, she certainly had enough for him to choose from—to slam her down and shut her up.
    “ An oversight I look forward to remedying,” he said. “Let’s start with you and your aunt. Are you close? Is she from your mother’s side or father’s?”
    Kate shoved her hostility aside and took the opening. “ If you want to really know and understand me, we’ll have to go back further than my aunt.”
    “ We have a few hours.”
    “ Wonderful!” She’d never needed much encouragement to share her love for Corkscrew Bay and its history. That she might shake loose his stubborn resistance to the Easter egg hunt was simply an added advantage. “Let’s start at 1741.”
    “ Let’s not,” he muttered.
    Kate smiled, her mood remarkably improved. “ Margaret Ashley, married at