“I know.”
“I’m just not convinced he’s the one who left them here.”
Owen tightened his arms around her. “You don’t trust any of us, do you?”
She slid out of his embrace without answering and got bowls down from a cupboard. He noticed the pull of her shirt against her skin. She’d taken off her purple bandanna and cleaned up, but she’d still managed to get plaster dust in her dark curls.
She let the bisque simmer until it was heated through but not boiling.
“Abigail, I want you to trust me.”
She turned the heat off under the saucepan, keeping her back to him. “I’ve been fighting for answers on my own for a long time.”
“We should have done more to help you. All of us.”
She ripped open a drawer and pulled out a dented soup ladle. “I tell myself that everyone wanted to give me the space to get on with my life. And you had your own grief. You all knew Chris longer than I did.”
“We weren’t married to him,” Owen said, making a face. “Hell.”
She gave him a small smile. “Fair enough. I have got on with my life, but—I want to find his killer. I want answers. I know I probably should have sold this place that first year after Chris’s death, but—” She shrugged. “I didn’t.”
“The pictures.” He sighed. “They’re tough to look at.”
“If we’d gone to Ellis’s party that day…” She shook her head, making it almost a shudder. “We were invited, but we didn’t go.”
“You were on your honeymoon.”
“When I saw those pictures, I felt the breeze off the water and smelled the salt and the roses in the air as I went into the back room and got my head bashed in. It all came back.” She switched the heat off under the pan. “Was that what it was like for you, seeing the photo of your sister?”
He nodded.
“At least I was an adult when Chris was killed. Twenty-five.” She kept her tone even as she dipped the ladle into the bisque. “You were a little kid when your sister drowned. I can’t imagine. Or maybe I can, somewhat. When you’ve lost someone close to you that young, that tragically—people treat you differently. It’s like all of a sudden there’s a circle around you that people have to step into before they get close to you. Where before there was no circle.”
“Abigail, don’t—”
She swore, dropping the ladle, and spun around at him, into him. His mouth found hers, and if he was tentative, she wasn’t. She took his hand and placed it on her breast, and he found her nipple with his thumb, even as their kiss deepened. Her urgency fired his own. She lifted his shirt, and he felt her fingers cool on his back, inside his belt.
But he felt her tears, dripping onto his cheek, hot, and pulled back, his heart breaking for her. “Abigail—I’m sorry.”
“It’s not you.”
He knew it wasn’t. But he was sorry, anyway, and didn’t know how to explain it even to himself.
Without a word, she fled from the kitchen.
Owen stared at the simmering bisque. What the hell was wrong with him? Why not carry her upstairs and make love to her? He wouldn’t be taking advantage of her. It was what she wanted as much as he did.
He walked into the front room and stood in the doorway of the torn-apart back room where she’d been attacked so long ago. “Bisque’s going to get cold.”
She kicked at the debris on her floor. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, making this mess. I should get Bob and Scoop up here.” She smiled over her shoulder at Owen. Self-deprecating. Tears dried. “Have you met Bob and Scoop?”
“Cops?”
She nodded. “My upstairs neighbors.” She gestured to her pile of debris. “They’d be like Doyle and want me to stay out of trouble, to keep knocking out walls. Well, maybe I will. I’ll head to the hardware store in the morning and order some wallboard. Buy a new hammer.”
As if she wasn’t going to think about the call, the articles, the pictures. Mattie Young. As if she would just switch off her cop mind, her sense of obligation to her murdered husband.
Owen kept his expression neutral. “Sounds like a plan.”
She blew out a breath and angled a look at him. “I was this close—” she held up two fingers, a quarter inch apart “—to throwing you over my shoulder and carrying you upstairs. You know that?”
He laughed. “It would have been a fight, then, for who carried whom.”
“Nah. I’d have let you win.”
But when she hooked her arm into his and walked him back into the kitchen, Owen realized what had just happened.
Abigail wanted to make love to him.
But not here, he thought. Not in the same house where she’d spent her short-lived honeymoon.
“Owen…”
“It was a very nice kiss, Abigail. We’re not just distractions for each other. We both know that much now, don’t we? But let’s leave it at that.”