style="font-size:15px;"> She’d showered and shampooed her hair and tied it up with a piece of twine into a fat, glossy ponytail. The blue sweatshirt she was wearing intensified the blue of her eyes, and when he looked for her freckles, he couldn’t find them. She had a finished, almost glamorous look—despite the sweats. And she was giving him that smile.
He felt himself wanting to go back outside and drive away. He knew this woman could be dangerous, and not just because she was being chased. Still, he’d sometimes been stupid, but he’d never been a coward. And she needed help.
“Hi,” he made himself say with an answering smile as he went to the counter with the other bag of groceries. “Mariah must have been here.”
“She was.” She pulled canned soups and vegetables out of the bag and lined them up on the counter. “Thank you. It was thoughtful of you to scrounge a wardrobe for me. And she brought me shampoo and makeup.”
He nodded. “I noticed the freckles were gone.”
“Not gone, just undercover. Mariah and Haley also brought three casseroles so I wouldn’t have to cook—because everyone seems to know that you don’t.”
“That’s because every time we have a gathering and I have to bring something, I get it from the deli. Dead giveaway.”
“You’re lucky to have friends who want your company.” She folded the now-empty paper bag. “Anyplace in particular you’d like these things?” She opened a cupboard and analyzed its meager contents. “Is there a system?”
“No. There’s seldom anything in there. Just put it wherever you like.”
“Okay.” She began putting things away with a swift confidence that spoke of experience. She paused to grin as she held up a jar of peanut butter and a box of grape Kool-Aid that were already in the shelf. “Do you like your peanut butter with jelly or marshmallow cream?”
He put the bags in a recycling bin at the edge of the counter and pulled off his jacket. “I don’t like it at all,” he answered. “I baby-sat for Cam and Mariah one night at the last minute, and Mariah, knowing how I am, sent those things with the kids so they’d have something to snack on. We went out for pizza, instead.”
“I love peanut butter,” she said, placing it back on the shelf and collecting canned goods around it. “I practically lived on it when I was first on my own because it’s so economical and nutritious.”
He thought it strange that they were talking about peanut butter and groceries, when just this morning she’d been bedraggled and hunted and holding a bat on him. Tonight she seemed like any well-adjusted young woman performing the simple domestic duty of stocking her shelves.
Only they were his shelves. And neither one of them should forget that.
The timer rang and she closed the doors on a very orderly cupboard, picked up two kitchen towels to use as pot holders and pulled the casserole out of the oven. It smelled wonderful.
He poured water and coffee, and they sat across from each other at the table. For the first time since he’d walked in the door, he felt tension. He ignored it, sure it must be just his own reaction to having a strange woman in his home after a year of comfortable solitude.
“Where’s your family?” she asked companionably, passing him the basket of rolls. “Were you born in Boston?”
His family. He missed them, but he’d tried hard not to think about them since leaving home. He’d dealt with and accepted what had happened, but he couldn’t find his place in their circle anymore. It was easier to put them out of his mind.
“I was born in the Midwest,” he replied. “We still have a lot of family there. But my mother moved us to Boston when she married my stepfather.”
“I love Boston,” she said chattily as she buttered a roll. “I was born in Buffalo. We moved to Boston when my mother remarried after my father died.” She took a dainty bite of the roll. “But that didn’t work out and she married a third time, then a fourth. The last husband was a banker, an older man who seemed very steady and solid, but she got sick, and I guess that wasn’t what he’d planned for his golden years, so…” She made an awkward little movement with her hand. “He left, she died, and I…stayed in Boston.”
“How old were you?”
“Eighteen. Old enough to be on my own.”
He remembered himself at eighteen, mouthy and brash and confident in his mind and his body. Until he went to college and met better minds, stronger bodies, and felt all his confidence shrivel. He wondered if she’d had to take the few steps back that eventually brought maturity.
“At least, I thought I was,” she admitted after a moment, as though she’d read his mind. “Then I discovered how much parents do for you that you’re unaware of until you have to do it for yourself. And that supporting yourself has a million hidden expenses that keep you too broke to have lunch out, or meet your friends after work for a drink.” She sighed and gave him a frail smile. “And that being alone 24/7 is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life. To remedy that, I spent the year I was twenty-one on a determined search to find a soul mate. I went to a lot of parties, but was selective about whom I dated. But I still managed to get it wrong.
“I had narrowed my choices to two men I really liked. Turned out one was already engaged to a girl in California, and the other got arrested for insider trading.”
He had to smile. “Tough luck.”
She nodded with an answering grin. “True. So I gave up on the search, but I need company, noise, activity. I get so tired of the silence.”
“I came here to find silence,” he said. “After being a cop for twelve years, my head is full of noises I’d rather not hear again.” And after he’d been here for a while, he’d stopped hearing the crash in his head.
She studied him worriedly, and he stopped with a bite of casserole halfway to his mouth. “What?” he asked.
“Is it going to be hard for you to have me here? I mean, I know you invited me to be kind, but you’re beginning to regret it, aren’t you. I can see it in your face. When you walked in the door tonight, I could almost hear your thoughts. Oh, that’s right! She’s here. Well, I’ll have to make the best of it.”
Guilt made him defensive. She was absolutely right. “I thought nothing of the kind,” he denied, “so just relax.”
“I shouldn’t be here long at all.”
“I know that.”
“And I’ll work for my keep.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll try not to pollute your space—but I sing when I’m working, and sometimes I talk to myself, and I like to have the radio—”
“You’re making a lot of noise,” he interrupted, “promising not to make a lot of noise.”
She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “So you’re not the sweetheart you pretend to be, are you.”
Sweetheart? “I never pretended to be any—”
“No,
