Tabitha stroked him, then she put him down again abruptly. “Okay, break out the Mandarin beef.”
Cait wrinkled her nose.
“It’s for me. I brought you almond chicken. That can’t bother your sensibilities too much.”
Cait nodded. She never ate red meat. It just seemed so…barbaric.
Tabitha had already invaded the kitchen. Cait followed her in time to see her open the bag from the liquor store. “Hey, what’s this?”
Cait flushed. “I sort of got a wild hair on my way home from work.”
“You did?”
Cait pulled her spine straight. “I have unplumbed depths.”
“Who told you that?”
“Sam Walters.”
Tabitha’s brows climbed her forehead. “Tell me all about that.”
Cait felt treacherous heat trying to steal over her again. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Hmm. Well, apparently he got to know you a whole lot better in three days than I have in months.”
“He didn’t get to know me.”
“Then explain this business about depths.” But Tabitha didn’t wait for an answer. She began pulling cartons out of her own bag, then helped herself to the cupboard and got plates. “Where are your wineglasses?”
“Um, I don’t have any.” Cait hurried to another cupboard and found two jelly glasses. Buy a jar of jelly and get a glass you could use forever, to boot. Who could argue with that?
Tabitha tucked her chin as she considered them, then finally shrugged in acceptance. She plucked the cabernet out of its bag. “What are the odds that you actually own a corkscrew?”
“Excellent.” Cait pulled one, still wrapped in plastic and cardboard, from a drawer. Then she shrugged sheepishly. “It just seemed like one of those things everyone should own. It was on sale.”
Tabitha took it and attacked the bottle. Five minutes later, they were seated and dishing up Chinese food. Cait discovered the almond chicken wasn’t half-bad.
“There was one home I was in—I think I was about eight—where the husband worked nights and the woman was always shoveling takeout at us kids,” she explained. “I think that’s where I learned an aversion to Chinese food.”
Tabitha’s fork stalled on its way to her mouth. “Takeout is relatively expensive.”
“That particular family had a lot of state kids.” And they received a stipend from the government for every one of them, Cait thought.
“You never talk much about your childhood,” Tabitha said.
Cait got up for more wine. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For boring you.” She poured, topping off both glasses without thought.
“You’re not. I’ve always wondered what makes you so straitlaced.”
“I have unplumbed depths!” Cait burst out. Then she flushed.
Tabitha’s brows lifted again. “Sorry. I forgot that part.” She chomped down onto an egg roll. “You’ve been through a lot lately. What happened in that underground room, anyway? You never did tell me.”
Cait felt her skin turn to glass. “Nothing.”
“You spent seventy-two hours in there.”
“Hines was in and out. He didn’t stay, but we could hear him walking around in the house upstairs whenever he was around.”
Tabitha waited. “And?” she prompted when Cait said nothing more.
Cait kept chewing, focusing hard on her food. But Tabitha remained quiet, waiting, not willing to change the subject.
Cait sighed and put her fork down. “He already had bottled water and crackers down there in the basement. I told Jake that. Jake said that was because Hines had planned the whole thing.” Tabitha’s Jake had been the detective assigned to the hostage situation. “So we ate and we tried to figure out ways to get free. But the basement door was locked from the outside and the windows were so tiny not even I could fit through one. We tried banging on them for a while, but they faced the backyard and no one heard us.”
“What did you talk about?”
Everything but how old she was when she was potty-trained, Cait thought. She sipped wine, then suddenly found it hard to swallow. “Mostly about me. I think I was nervous. I must have talked a lot.”
Tabitha nodded. “That makes sense.”
“And he called me a sparrow. A rigid sparrow. I just felt like I had to defend myself against that.” So she’d given him her whole life story.
“You told him about the foster homes?” Tabitha looked surprised.
Cait shrugged. “No one was ever unkind to me in any of them.”
“What else?” Tabitha asked. “What else did you two talk about?”
“I don’t know!” Cait cried. “Missed chances. Lost dreams. Plans for the future. What do two people talk about when they’re stuck in a room together for hours and hours on end?”
“Talk wouldn’t have been high on my list of guesses in the first place,” Tabitha said dryly. “That’s not Sam Walters’s rep with a good-looking woman.”
“Nothing happened!” Cait shouted. Then she went still, frowning. “Good-looking? I’m not good-looking.”
“You’re cute as a button and haughty to boot. Get off it.”
“Haughty?”
Tabitha nodded. “With that don’t-touch-me air you’ve got going on.”
“How can you say that?”
“I just think it would be a real challenge for a Sam Walters-type to see if he could touch you.”
The hurt that raced through her almost stole Cait’s breath. It was very cold and seemed to numb her nerve endings. Was that all she had been? A challenge?
Of course, she thought. It was the only thing that made sense. He’d gone out of his way this morning to make sure she knew it had been a one-time thing. Why, then, had she believed that it’d had something to do with getting to know her?
“Well, he didn’t,” she said tightly. She stood quickly to take her plate to the sink.
“I’ll pass the word, then.”
Cait whipped back to face her. “Why?”
“Because
