by Nora Roberts
“I’ll do what I can.”
She seemed to be satisfied with that, and left Nate sitting on the side of the bed, picturing himself being squeezed flat by two difficult females.
HE DIDN’T CALL HER. She might put him off or just not answer the phone. The worst she could do if he showed up on her doorstep was send him away again, and at least he’d have seen for himself if she was okay.
He drove along the tunnel of road with the walls of snow on either side. The sky had cleared some, as predicted, so there was a faint glimmer of moon and starlight. It drizzled on the mountains that filled his view, glinted off his glimpses of the river.
He heard the music before he made the turn to her house. It filled the dark, soared through it and swallowed it. Just as the lights beat back the night. She had them on, all of them, so the house, the grounds, the near trees were lit like fire. And through it, the music streamed and flew.
He thought it was some sort of opera, though that kind of music wasn’t his strong point. It was wrenching, the sort of thing that broke the heart even as it, somehow, lifted the soul.
She’d cleared a walkway, a good three feet wide. He could imagine the time and effort that had taken. Her porch was clear of snow, and a wood box beside the door was full.
He started to knock, then decided nobody could hear a knock over the music. He tried the door, found it unlocked, eased it open.
The dogs, who’d been sleeping despite the music, leaped up from the rug. After a few quick, warning barks, tails wagged. To Nate’s relief, they appeared to remember him and pranced over to greet him.
“Good, great. Where’s your mom?”
He tried a couple of shouts, then made his way through the first floor. There were cheery fires burning in both the living room and kitchen—and something simmering on the stove that smelled like dinner.
He started to take a peak—maybe a sample—when he caught a movement through the window.
He moved closer. He could see her now, clearly in the flood of lights. She was bundled head to foot, trudging back through the snow on the fat, round snowshoes they called bear claws. As he watched she stopped, lifted her head to the sky. She stood, staring up, music pouring over her. Then she threw her arms back to the sides and fell backward.
He was at the door in one bounding leap. Wrenching it open, he shot out, jumped the steps, skidded on the frosty path she’d cleared.
She popped up when he shouted her name.
“What? Hi, where’d you come from?”
“What happened? Are you hurt?”
“No. I just wanted to lie in the snow for a minute. Sky’s clearing up. Well, give me a hand up since you’re here.”
Even as he reached out, the dogs flew out and leaped on both of them.
“Left the door open,” Meg managed as one of the huskies rolled with her in the snow.
“Sorry. Closing it slipped my mind when I thought you had a seizure.” He hauled her up. “What are you doing out here?”
“I was in the shed, working on this old snowmobile I picked up a few months ago. Every now and then I go in and give it a few whacks.”
“You know how to fix a snowmobile?”
“My talents are endless and varied.”
“I bet they are.” Looking at her, he forgot all the little irritations of the day. “I was thinking I might buy a snowmobile.”
“Really. Well, once I get this one up and running, I’ll make you a deal. Let’s go in. I’m ready for a drink.” She sent him a sidelong look as they started for the house. “So, were you just in the neighborhood?”
“No.”
“Checking up on me?”
“Yeah, and hoping for that free meal.”
“That all you’re hoping for?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I’m ready for that, too.” She picked up a broom cocked by the door. “Brush me off some, will you?”
When he’d done his best, she took off the bear claws. “Take your coat off, stay awhile,” she invited and began to strip off her own.
“Hey. Your hair.”
She rubbed a hand over it as she hung up her parka and hat. “What about it?”
“There’s a lot less of it.”
It came to just below her jaw now, straight and full and thick—and a little crazed from her hands.
“I wanted a change. So I changed.” She walked over, got a bottle from the pantry. Getting down glasses, she glanced back and saw him grinning at her. “What?”
“I like it. It makes you look, I don’t know, young and cute.”
She angled her head. “Young and cute like you want me to dress in a pinafore and Mary Janes and call you Daddy?”
“I don’t know what a pinafore is, but you can wear one if you want. I’d as soon skip the Daddy part.”
“Whatever blows up your skirt.” She shrugged, poured deep-red wine into two glasses. “It’s good to see you, Burke.”
He walked over, took the glasses out of her hands and set them down on the counter. And using his hands to skim back that thick hair, leaned down, slow, eyes open, and kissed her. Soft and quiet until the warmth sparked with licks of heat. And he watched her watch him through the kiss, saw those perfect blue eyes of hers flicker once.
When he eased her back, he lifted the wineglasses again, gave one to her.
“It’s good to kiss you, too.”
She rubbed her lips together and was surprised the heat that had pumped into them didn’t spark from the friction. “Hard to argue with that.”
“I worried about you. You don’t want to hear that, puts your back up. But that’s the way it is. We don’t have to talk about any of it if you’re not ready.”
She took a drink, then another. A lot of patience inside there, she decided. And the kissing cousin to patience was tenacity.
“Might as well deal with it. Do you know how to make a salad?”
“Ah . . . You open one of those bags of salad stuff you buy at the store and dump it into a bowl?”
“Not a guy for the kitchen, huh?”
“No.”
“Still, at this point in our relationship, when you’re hot for me, you’ll learn to chop vegetables without complaining about it. Ever peel a carrot?” she asked as she walked to the refrigerator.
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“There, that’s a start.” She piled produce on the counter, handed him a carrot and a peeler. “Do that.”
While he did, she began to wash lettuce. “In some cultures, women hack off their hair as a sign of mourning. That’s not why I did it, altogether. He’s been gone a long time, and I adjusted to that—in my own way. But it’s different now.”
“Murder changes everything.”
“More than death does,” she agreed. “Death’s natural. It’s a pisser because, hey, who wants to, but there’s a cycle and nobody gets to jump off the wheel.”
She dried the lettuce, those long fingers with their short, blunt nails working briskly. “I could’ve accepted his death. I’m not going to accept his murder. So I’ll push at the State cops, and I’ll push at you until I’m satisfied. This may cool off your hotness for me, but that’s the breaks.”
“I don’t think it will. I haven’t felt hot for a woman in a while, so I’m due.”
“Why not?”
He handed her the carrot for inspection. “Why not what?”
“Why haven’t you been hot for a woman?”
“I . . . hmm.”
“Performance issues?”
He blinked, managed a strangled laugh. “Well, Jesus. That’s a question. But this is just too weird a conversation to have over lettuce.”
“Back to murder, then,” she replied.
“Who took them up?” he questioned.
“What?”
“They’d have needed a pilot, right? Who flew them to the base camp or whatever you call it.”
“Oh.” She paused, tapped her knife on the cutting board. “You are a cop, aren’t yo
u? I don’t know, and it may be tricky to find out after all this time. But between me and Jacob, we should be able to do it.”
“Whoever it is took down at least one less man than he dropped off. But he didn’t report it. Why?”
“And those are the things we need to find out. Good. A direction.”
“The investigators in charge will be asking those questions, heading in that direction. You might want to give yourself some time to deal with the more personal business.”
“You mean the custody battle and funeral Charlene’s planning.” She began to slice interesting ribbons from a hunk of red cabbage. “I’ve already had an earful, which is why I stopped answering the phone yesterday. Fighting over a dead body’s just a little too stupid for me. Especially when she has no idea if his family will object to her burying him here in the first place.”
“Have you met them?”
She got out a pot and began to fill it with water for the pasta. “Yeah. His mother contacted me a few times, and when she offered to fly me out there to meet his family, I was curious enough to go. I was eighteen. Charlene was supremely pissed, which only made me want to go more.”
After the pot was on a burner, she gave the sauce a little stir, then came back to finish the salad. “They’re okay. Snooty, highbrowed, not the sort of people I’d hang out with, or who’d want me hanging around for long. But they were decent to me. They gave me money, which has to earn them some points.”
Reaching for the bottle, she topped off her glass, held it up, eyebrows raised to Nate.
“No, I’m good.”
“It was enough money for me to put a down payment on my plane and this place, so I owe them.”
She paused to sip her wine contemplatively. “I don’t think they’re going to fight Charlene and insist on dragging him back east. She wants to think so, because she likes to hate them. Just like they enjoy disregarding her. That way they can all make more out of my father than he was.”
She got out plates, passed them off to Nate for the table. “Is staying quiet an interrogation technique?”
“It can be. It can also be called listening.”
“There’s only one person I know—well, that I’m willing to spend appreciable time with—who listens like you. That’s Jacob. It’s a good, strong quality. My father would listen to me, sometimes. But you could see him start to drift if it went on too long to suit him. He’d sit it out, but he wasn’t hearing you. Jacob always heard me.
“Anyway,” she said after a huffed-out sigh. “Patrick Galloway. He was an inconsiderate bastard. I loved him, and he was never really inconsiderate to me. But he was to his family, who, whatever their faults, didn’t deserve to have their son take off without a word before his eighteenth birthday. And he was to Charlene, leaving her to earn most of the coin and take care of the bulk of the messy stuff.
“I think she probably loved him, which was—maybe is—her cross to bear. I don’t know if he loved her.”
She pulled a clear glass container of rotini out of a cabinet, dumped some into the boiling water, continued to speak while she adjusted the heat and stirred.
“And I don’t think he’d have stuck it out with us if someone hadn’t killed him before he’d had a chance to take off anyway. But now I can’t know, and he never got the chance to make his choice. That’s what counts. What counts is someone ended him. So that’s my focus on this. Not where he ends up being put in the ground.”
“Sensible.”
“I’m not a sensible woman, Burke. I’m a selfish one. You’ll figure that out for yourself soon enough.” She got a plastic container out of the fridge, shook it, then drizzled the contents over the salad. “There’s a baguette in that drawer there. Fresh from this morning.”
He opened the drawer, found the bread. “I didn’t know you’d been into town.”
“I haven’t. I took a couple days off to burrow.” After unwrapping the bread, she cut a few thick slabs. “Baking’s one of the things I do when I’m burrowing, which prevents it from becoming wallowing.”
“You bake bread.” He sniffed at it. “I’ve never known anybody who bakes bread. Or flies a plane. Or can fix a snowmobile engine.”
“As I said, a woman of strange and varied talents. I’ll show you some more of them after dinner. In bed. Top off the wine, will you? We’re about ready here.”
MAYBE IT WAS THE ATMOSPHERE, maybe it was the woman, but he couldn’t remember a more relaxed meal.
She’d said she wasn’t sensible, but he saw good, clear sense in the way she lived, took care of her home. In how she dealt with shock and grief, even anger.
Jacob had said she was strong. Nate was beginning to believe she was the strongest person he’d ever met.
And the most comfortable with herself.
She asked about his day. It took him a while to get his rhythm there. He’d been so accustomed through his marriage to leaving the job outside.
But she wanted to hear about it, to comment, to gossip, to laugh.
Still, under the ease he felt with her, was a frisson of excitement, anticipation, that sexual buzz that heated his blood whenever he was around her.
He wanted to get his hands in her hair, to get his teeth on the nape that shorter length exposed. He could think of that, imagine that, have his belly tighten even as he felt the weight of the day slide off his shoulders.
At one point, she stretched out, laying her feet in his lap as she leaned back to drink more wine. And his mouth went dry, his mind fuzzy.
“I used to shoplift.” She tossed a chunk of bread to each dog and immediately made him think of how such an action would have caused his own mother to freak.
And how much he liked watching the dogs field the bread, like a couple of outfielders shagging pop flies.
“You . . . used to steal.”
“I don’t really equate shoplifting with stealing.”
“Taking things, not paying for them.”
“Okay, okay.” She rolled her eyes. “But it was really more of a rite of passage, at least for me. And I was too slick to get caught like those kids you bagged today. I never took anything I had any use for. It was more: Hmm, wonder if I can get away with this. Then I’d hide the booty in my room and take it all out at night and gloat over it. I’d take it all back within a couple of days, which was nearly as dangerous and thrilling. I think I’d have been a good criminal if I lived somewhere else, because I got that it’s not so much what you get as the getting of it.”
“You don’t still . . .”
“No, but now that you mention it, it might be fun to see if I still have the knack. And if I get busted, I have this in with the chief of police.” She dropped her feet, leaned over to pat his thigh while he studied her with those serious, gray eyes. “Don’t look so worried. Everybody in town knows I’m crazy and wouldn’t hold it against me.”
She rose. “Let’s get these dishes out of the way. Why don’t you let the dogs out? They like a good run this time of day.”
Once the kitchen was tidied to her specifications and the dogs settled down on the floor with a couple of tibia-sized rawhide bones, she wandered into the living room to flip through her CD list.
“I don’t think Puccini sets the right tone for the next portion of our evening.”
“Is that what that was? The opera stuff?”
“Well, I guess that answers the question of your opinion on that area of music.”
“I just don’t know anything about it. I liked the way it sounded outside when I drove up. Sort of full and strange and heart-wrecking.”
“There may be hope for you. Hmm, could pull out Barry White, but it seems pretty obvious. What do you think of Billie Holiday?”
“Ah, dead blues singer?”
She turned to him. “Okay, what do you know about music?”
“I know stuff. What’s on the radio or, you know, VH1.” Her amused stare had him stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I like Norah Jones.”
“Norah Jo
nes it is, then.” She found a number, then programmed her unit to select it.
“And Black Crowes,” he continued in his own defense. “And actually, Jewel’s new stuff is pretty hot. Springsteen’s still The Boss. And there’s—”
“Don’t sweat it.” She laughed and grabbed his hand. “Jones works fine for me.” She began drawing him up the stairs. “If you do me right, I’ll hear my own music anyway.”
“But no pressure.”
“Bet you can handle it.” At the top of the stairs, she turned into him, backed him through a doorway. “Handle me, chief. I’ve been wanting you to.”
“I think about you all the time. At inappropriate moments.”
She hooked her arms around his waist. She’d been needing him, she’d been wanting him. So strange, so new for her to need and want so very specifically. “Such as?”
“Like picturing you naked when I was going over the weekly rotation with Peach. It can be disconcerting.”
“I like you picturing me naked, especially at inappropriate times.” She grazed her teeth over his jaw. “Why don’t you get me that way now?”
“I like you dressed, too. Just FYI,” he said as he tugged her sweater up.
He liked the feel of her body under his hands and how he had to go layer by layer before he reached skin. And how warm that skin was, how smooth. And despite the fleece and wool and cotton, despite all that practicality, there was the secret, sexy scent of her under it.
She touched him, easily and eagerly, stripping those layers from him as he did from her. And she lit something inside him, something more than lust. Something that had been hibernating far too long.
He could lose himself in her without feeling lost. Let himself go without worrying if he’d find his way back. When his mouth closed over hers, tasted both surrender and demand, he had all he needed.
They circled toward the bed, lowered to it. He heard her sigh and wondered if she could be as relieved or as needy as he. She drew him down, arched and offered when his mouth roamed her throat, when his teeth nipped their way to her nape. He felt her heart kick lightly against his and the firm, welcoming stroke of her hands on his back.
She wanted him to take what he needed. That was rare for her, a woman who preferred seeing to her own needs first—and often last as well. But she wanted to give to him, to ease away that smudge of sorrow that haunted his eyes. And she knew, somehow, she could give, and he would never leave her wanting.
