Her reminder made his arm ache even more. Thanks to her presence, he had to skip the heavy-duty painkillers and go with antibiotics and aspirin for the injury. The combination wasn’t working. Every nerve ending throbbed.
“I’ll get by.” He stared across the desk right into her dark eyes. In that moment he wondered if he really would survive a second round with her. Last time she won, but he vowed to be the victor this time.
IF HE WANTED to be some sort of martyr and plow ahead with questions when he should be in a hospital, Claire wasn’t about to argue. She needed his help. If she tried to tell him how to provide it, his testosterone would kick in and she’d never get through this uneasy alliance.
“It was three weeks ago. Phil called and asked me to come to the house,” she explained.
“Is that normal?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
Luke leaned back in his chair. Held on to his injured arm while he did it. “According to everything I’ve read, the divorce wasn’t exactly amicable.”
She had known the accusations would come eventually. Still, the idea that Luke so readily believed the absolute worst of her stung. “You mean because Phil told everyone who would listen that I was a whore.”
“I was trying to be tactful.”
“Why start now?”
“Fine.” Luke tapped his fingers against the space bar on his keyboard. “He accused you of sleeping around.”
“I didn’t.”
Luke hesitated before tapping again. “Okay.”
“You believe me?” Something deep inside her chest tightened into a hard ball while waiting for the answer. It was as if every cell waited to see what he would say.
Instead, he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “It’s not important. Not my business.”
Yeah, well, it mattered to her. But she refused to justify or explain. If Luke was so determined to judge her guilty on that point, let him. She knew she had damaged his ego when she walked out. A man didn’t forgive that sort of thing easily. But no matter how much he hated her, the important thing was that he believe in her story enough to help her.
“Why did you go to the house?” he asked.
“It was stupid.” In hindsight, the dumbest move of her life, even less intelligent than her marriage. “Phil called and said he wanted to come to a reasonable financial resolution. Asked me to come over to talk. I should have questioned the change in him, but I was so relieved. And when I got there everything was wrong.”
The scene unfolded in her mind. The dark first floor. Music playing in the background. The strong odor of cleaner. She had called Phil’s name from the front door, but no one answered. When she heard a thump upstairs she figured he was moving stuff around and couldn’t hear her. She followed the curving stairway to the second floor. There was a light on the landing and more spilling out of the master bedroom down the hall.
“I walked into our old bedroom. Something seemed off. My jewelry was on the bed, the same items Phil insisted I stole when I left the first time. He must have had them all along.”
“Anything else? Was anyone there?”
The remembered smell filled her head. It was a mix of sickening sweetness and harsh cleanser. The same wave of dizziness that hit her that night flowed through her again.
She could hear the floor creak as Luke shifted around in his seat. She knew she was safe in his office, but she couldn’t pull her mind from the memory.
“Just relax and tell me what you saw.”
Luke moved his hand over hers. She didn’t even realize she had twisted a business card in her palm until Luke slipped it out from between her fingers and put it on the desk.
As soon as the warmth of his skin came, it left again. His hand was back at his keyboard, but the touch had returned her to the present. She could finish the story. She had to finish.
“There was blood splattered on the walls and on the floor. I remember kneeling, looking around trying to figure out what I was seeing. Then I heard the sirens.”
“The police.”
“Yeah, but it still didn’t sink in. Even seeing the cleaning bucket didn’t compute.”
“And that’s where the police found you.”
“On the floor by the bloodstain.”
“They say you killed Phil and hid the body.” Luke’s hand hovered over the keys. “That they caught you cleaning up the scene.”
“But they conveniently forget that Phil made a call from the house only a short time before that.” She scoffed. “I mean, did he turn into smoke or something?”
Luke nodded. “Admittedly, the timeline is going to be the prosecution’s weakness at trial.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. Maybe you should be on my defense team.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Phil set me up with a brilliance I didn’t know he had in him. He called his brother that night and claimed I broke in.” The prosecutor depended on the delay in calls from Phil to Steve to the police to explain the problem. “The theory is that I killed a 190-pound man and hid the body within a fifteen-minute window.”
The evidence didn’t fit. The fact that everyone refused to see that made her seethe in frustration.
“I’m assuming you deny killing him.” Luke said it more as a fact than a question.
“I can’t kill someone who’s not dead.”
Luke began typing. Even with one hand, he moved fast. Images flipped by on his screen. She could see him trying to log in passwords as fast as possible. Probably feared she would somehow break into his system.
A Web site she recognized popped up. “Wait, you’re with the FBI?”
He smiled. “Definitely not.”
“But you just entered a password to get on their system.”
“True.”
Lines of information filled his screen. She leaned in closer to see.
He eyed her for a second. “Sit back.”
“But that said something about Homeland Security.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“We’re talking about my life here, Luke.”
“This is confidential information.” He said the words but didn’t do anything to hide the monitor from her view.
“Then why do you have it,
