“Witt makes you want to live again, doesn’t he?”
“He makes me want to have sex, nothing more. Maybe I should get the act over with.” She watched Witt through the windshield, the waning sunlight softening the edges of the scene in front of Bethany’s house. Witt was tall, big-shouldered, beefy-thighed, and excruciatingly blond. He was one of them. A cop. Walked the walk, talked the talk, and laughed with them despite the dead woman lying inside the house.
Yet she remembered the night he said his house was a refuge where he could close the door on all of them, on the things he saw every day, and on the things people did to other people. Inside his house he could be a different man.
“Fall in love with him, Max. You have my blessing.”
She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.”
She rolled her lips between her teeth and held them there for interminable seconds. “Are you getting ready to leave me, Cameron? Is that why you’re pushing me at him?”
The silence wrenched her heart in two.
She watched as Witt crossed the lawn, stepped over the low white fence, and chucked Mrs. Blue under the chin. With a hand on each shoulder, he leaned down to whisper something close to her ear, smiled when she laughed, then pushed her down the walk of the house Max had originally parked in front of.
She liked a man who was nice to old ladies.
He came to her car door, opening it. The close air rushed out into the late afternoon, taking a handful of her depression with it. Or maybe that was the Witt Effect, the scent of his aftershave, the dimple in his chin, and the touch of his eyes on her throat, moving down ...
“Done. For now. Ready for dinner with Mom?”
Not. No matter if she did have Cameron’s blessing. The idea was really too terrifying. She reached for the door handle, tried to pull it closed. He held it open.
“I’ll follow you over,” she offered. No, more like begged.
“Already here.”
“Huh?”
He looked to the blue lady as she disappeared through the front door. The corner of his mouth lifted. “Meet Mom.”
Chapter Four
“That’s a joke, right?”
Witt shook his head. “I never joke when it comes to Mom.”
Oh my God. Chills of mortification raced across her scalp. Witt’s mom had seen her talking to Cameron, seen her pointing a finger and arguing with ... a phantom. Damn, she wouldn’t think about that now. In fact, she’d forget about the episode entirely. She concentrated instead on the impossible. “Your mother lives next door to ... the murder victim?”
“Yep.”
“So you weren’t lying when you told the cops your mother lived in the area?”
“Nope.”
She stared at him. “You know this is way too much of a coincidence.”
“Yep,” again, without a nuance of movement or change of expression. Max couldn’t tell if he was terrified, satisfied, or just plain resigned.
“Will you quit saying yep and nope.” She put the flat of her hand against his chest and pushed. He didn’t move. She used more force, until she finally had room to get out. She climbed from the car, shimmied her skirt down, watched the way his eyes tracked the movement of her hips, and glared at him.
She was pissed. Pissed was good. Pissed was better than being depressed, and better than thinking about whether she’d wake up to find Cameron gone one of these mornings, gone for good. Pissed was also a damned sight better than the drooling lap puppy she’d been acting like over Witt for the past few days.
She stuck a finger in the center of Witt’s chest. “Why didn’t you tell me that when we first got here? Come to think of it, why the hell weren’t you running in to make sure your poor old, gray-haired mama was all right?”
“Called her on the way here.”
Damn his cell phone. Damn him for giving her a cell phone. She never would have called him if the phone hadn’t been in her glovebox. She hated phones. She hated voicemail, email, the Internet, and anything else that forced her to keep in touch with the outside world. She only kept an ancient message machine around for Sunny Wright’s sake. Unfortunately, money was a necessary evil once in a while, and Sunny’s temp agency kept her in cash.
So if she hadn’t called Witt, she would have ... what? Gone inside the house on her own? Not on her life. Not after the way that structure called to her. She shuddered simply remembering the creepy sensation. “What about the first question?”
He almost smiled, then seemed to think better of the smirk when she narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. Deadpan again, he said, “Forgot what it was.”