“I know. I’m sorry. I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not getting an argument from me about that.” The tightening around her heart started to hurt, and for a horrifying moment, she feared she’d start crying. She was too tired to deal with this emotional right hook—and she still had to face Cam tonight. “I have to go.”
Preston stepped aside and pulled open the car door for her. The perfect gentleman. “Will you think about it?”
No. Yes. God, she had no idea. “I will,” she half-lied. “But I can’t tonight.”
“Fair enough.” He waited until she slid in behind the wheel, his arm resting on the top of the door. “Can I call you?”
She shoved the key in the ignition. “I need to go now.”
“Right. Okay.” He started to lean down, but she saw the kiss coming and shifted the car into gear. He jerked backwards and she took his moment of distraction to grab the door and pull it closed. As she backed out, he stood in the middle of her driveway, his arms crossed over his chest and a frown pulling down the corners of his mouth.
She didn’t realize tears streamed down her face until she stopped at the first red light.
Chapter Ten
Eva was the absolute last person Cam expected to find on his porch when he answered the doorbell, and the unexpected punch of seeing her again after days of no voluntary contact from her left him breathless. She looked…exhausted. Her white dress shirt hung wrinkled and untucked from her jeans. Mud coated her boots. She’d given up on any semblance of a fashionable hairstyle and had pulled her straight locks back into a sloppy ponytail that had long since wilted.
She opened her mouth, but no sound emerged.
Cam pulled the door wider. “Want to come in?”
“No.” The word sounded forced, as if she had to speak around an obstruction in her windpipe to get it out. She cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders under her favorite leather jacket. “We need to talk.”
“Yeah, we do.” He scanned the street behind her, half-expecting to see snow because of the bite in the air. Nope, not yet. On its way, though, or so said the talking heads on The Weather Channel. The early winter storm was supposed to hit most of the east coast fast and hard, with The District and Baltimore sustaining the brunt of it. The roads would be a mess by morning and although it wasn’t yet eight p.m., everything was quiet, everyone tucked up cozy inside their homes in anticipation—the kind of dead stillness that only happened during the wintertime, as if even the city herself was holding her breath waiting for those first flakes to fall.
“I’d prefer to talk inside,” Cam said after a drawn out silence. He wore only his sweatpants and an old Air Force T-shirt he’d had since basic training and the cold stung his bare skin. “It’s freezing out here.”
She hesitated. “Is Vaughn home?”
“No. He’s working a case and will probably be at the office most of the night. If not all night. You know how he gets. Dog with a bone.”
After another beat of hesitation, she stepped inside. As she passed, the trace scents of recent death and clean snow trailed in behind her. No wonder she was tired. She’d probably been working since he last saw her this morning.
Eva stood in the center of his living room like a stranger who had never been here before. Swung her arms at her sides, then seemed to realize what she was doing and crossed them in front of her.
Yeah, this wasn’t awkward at all.
“Have a seat,” Cam said and motioned to the only furniture in the room, a giant, L-shaped sectional. When the doorbell rang, he’d been sitting at the end with the built-in recliners, his computer on his lap. He’d spent the day combing through his old cases, trying to figure out who’d want him dead, running checks to see if anyone he’d put away had recently gotten paroled. So far he’d only come up with two names—Arnold Mabry and Tom Lindquist. Mabry was a factory worker who killed his second wife in a fit of passion after finding her in bed with his adult son from his first marriage. He’d made some drunken threats during his arrest, but Cam didn’t see him as a real suspect in the murder-for-hire plot. Lindquist, on the other hand, basically beat the system and had all but gotten away with the premeditated murder of his next door neighbor over a property dispute. The guy was a vicious bastard, who still occasionally harassed Cam in subtle ways that stopped just short of being illegal.