in twenty minutes, tops.” She refocused her smile and turned back to her parents. “Can you guys stay? We’ll eat the lasagne tomorrow.”
In the midst of excuses about having already eaten and being en route to baby-sit four grandsons, Sam took his leave, feeling three sets of eyes on him.
He rolled the wheelbarrow back to the garage and out of sight before he stopped to consider his immediate, heart-slamming response to the panic he’d read in Jess’s unspoken appeal. The instant she’d turned those true blues and honest despair on him, something inside him had shifted into gear. The need to help her. To protect her. To keep her secret. The desire to grant even the simple request that he leave and take a good deal of her tension with him.
Ah, hell. He was falling under her spell. One she wasn’t even trying to cast. He was getting personal, when this job should be nothing but professional. After just twenty-four hours he was thinking of Jess as a woman. A desirable woman. Jess. Not a victim. Not the answer to the mystery surrounding Kerry’s death. Certainly not as a pawn he intended to use to uncover the truth.
“Ah, hell.” He repeated the damnation out loud and tried to concentrate on the details of what he’d just witnessed.
Sid and Martha Taylor didn’t seem overly concerned that their daughter lived alone out in the country. Or that she had a man they didn’t know living on the property. Martha had even hinted at some unsubtle matchmaking. Sid had done his best to try to figure him out, yet he hadn’t sicced the dog on him or ordered him to leave or offered to stay and chaperone.
And that didn’t even begin to address Jess’s effort to give the appearance that everything was hunky-dory and under control in her life.
Sam closed the garage door and climbed the outside stairs to his apartment, letting the possibilities simmer in his mind as he headed for a quick shower. Either Sid and Martha were the most open, trusting parents he’d ever met—which, after that fatherly grilling, Sam suspected wasn’t the case.
Or her parents didn’t know she’d been raped.
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