booth “—and let these gentlemen have their table.” Without waiting for an answer, she returned to her seat and began eating the breakfast that had been delivered in her absence.
He slowly stood, dropped what looked like a ten on the table, then started her way. No one else from his group had paid, she realized. They’d left their plates mostly clean and walked out without so much as a quarter for a tip. Free meals and good service—two of the benefits of being a cop, Taylor the scum used to say.
Dear God, Jen had told her so much that she felt as if she knew the man.
A moment later, the air took on a shimmer of tension, then Mitch sat down across from her. She chewed a bite of ham, took a nibble of buttered toast, then sprinkled salt and hot sauce over her hash browns. “This is some job you have, Officer Lassiter. Surveilling the boss’s wife.”
“Estranged wife,” he corrected.
She allowed a small smile. Once Hurricane Jan had blown through, Hurricane Jen would have swept Taylor right into divorce court—and, hopefully, criminal court. He would have soon been her ex-husband and grateful to see the last of her. But she hadn’t gotten the chance.
“Would you like my schedule for the day?” she asked helpfully. “When I leave here, I’m going to the bank. That should take about ten minutes. Then I need to stop by the post office—five minutes or so, depending on the line. Then the grocery store. I cleaned out the refrigerator before the hurricane, so I need to restock. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you already knew that.”
She raised her gaze to his face, watching the muscles in his jaw tighten. “Truthfully, I wouldn’t be surprised if you people had been in my apartment on numerous occasions in the past three weeks. Searching for signs that I’d planned to evacuate, looking for clues, for evidence, for…oh, whatever might catch Taylor’s fancy.”
His hard gaze turned even harder as she murmured, “No, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
Chapter 2
Mitch’s coffee had long since gone cold, so he quit pretending interest in it. He was pissed off at being assigned babysitting tasks, pissed even more by Jennifer’s condescending recital of her morning plans and most of all by her implication that he’d done something wrong in checking out her apartment.
“No response, huh?” She looked as if she expected nothing more. “What is it Taylor says? ‘Admit nothing. Deny everything.’”
Yeah, he’d gone to her apartment, gotten the key from the manager, let himself in and searched the place, but it had all been part of a missing-person investigation. Taylor had met him there, and they’d looked through her closet, her drawers, her cabinets. Taylor had made a list of the obvious things missing—some clothing, two suitcases, makeup and photographs—and then he’d asked Mitch to leave him. He’d wanted time alone in the apartment.
And Mitch had left. Separated or not, Jennifer was still Taylor’s wife. He’d feared the worst from the beginning. He’d been emotional. Though not too emotional this morning upon seeing her for the first time since he’d thought she’d died.
Mitch studied her, making no effort to hide it. She looked pretty damn good in a married-minivan-soccer-mom sort of way, but he liked her better in last night’s tight jeans and snug top. There was something entirely too demure about the over-the-knee skirt and the prissy top.
Seeing that she was married, estranged or not, he should find “demure” good. He shouldn’t be thinking that she needed to show more leg, more skin in general, or that she should only wear clothes that hugged her curves.
He shouldn’t be thinking about her as a woman at all.
“You don’t have much to say about your work, do you?” Jennifer asked. “Let’s try something else. Where do you come from? You’re obviously not from around here.”
“‘Obviously’?” he echoed cynically. “I lived in Belmar from the time I was nine until I went away to college. You’d think Taylor would have mentioned that.”
Her cheeks tinged a faint pink that quickly faded. “Taylor tells people what he wants them to know when he wants them to know it. All he ever said was, ‘Bubba and I go back a long way.’ With Taylor, that can mean a month or twenty years.”
“Twenty-four years, to be exact.”
That was an accurate description of Taylor, though. Hadn’t he talked to Mitch a half-dozen times after his wedding before he’d mentioned it? Even then, he’d been stingy with information. Jennifer Randall. From California. No one you’d know. Over the next couple years he’d offered little more: they’d met on a cruise; she’d taught grade school in California; she had an older sister; she wasn’t much of a cook.
Taylor liked holding his cards close.
“Does your family still live here?” she asked.
“They never did. I lived with my grandmother. She died while I was in college.”
“I’m sorry.” She sounded as if she meant it. “So where does your family live?”
“My mother’s in Colorado. My brothers live in Georgia.”
“And your father?”
“Died when I was nine.” The child-support checks had stopped coming, and his mother had sent him to her mother. It sounded an awful lot like abandonment but hadn’t felt that way. He’d liked his grandmother and she’d liked him. Living with her had been easy.
“So you came here, but your brothers didn’t. Were you a problem child?” She asked it with a wry smile that he couldn’t read. Because she was stating the obvious or because she didn’t really believe he’d been bad enough to send away?
He smiled thinly. “I was an illegitimate child. When the old man died, his sons—my half brothers—continued to live with their mother. My mother sent me here.”
Except for the monthly checks, his father had never acknowledged him. His brothers and their mother hadn’t known he existed until Sara had come across the record of those checks when settling his estate. She had invited Mitch for regular visits, given him time with his brothers and treated him more like a son than his own mother had. She had even asked him to live with them, but he’d chosen to stay with his grandmother. Even so, he considered Sara more family than his mother.
“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said again, and he realized he’d just told her more about himself than even Taylor knew. Not good.
“Why did you come back?”
He turned the question on her. “Why did you? Half the town was betting that the storm would be the shove you needed to leave Belmar and Taylor for good.”
“And what did you think?”
“I didn’t. Frankly it didn’t matter to me either way.” A lie. He’d been curious. Had thought it one hell of a waste if she was dead. Had hoped if she was alive, she was smart enough to stay gone. Had thought she deserved better than Taylor.
“You didn’t answer,” he reminded her. “Why did you come back?”
She
