Silences were usually welcomed by him. But there was something a bit uncomfortable about this one.
He could sense Zoe’s inner struggle, sense her trying to come to terms with what had happened today. While he had no words of comfort to offer her—comforting the grieving was a skill he had never quite managed to develop—he knew there were times when just talking helped.
Not that it would have helped him, but his was not an average case and he had long since accepted he was not the average person.
Zoe, he figured, was.
“How are you holding up?” he finally asked as he turned into a residential development.
She didn’t want to talk about her feelings, didn’t even want to think about them, really. In an uncustomary reaction, she turned the tables on him and said, “I could ask you the same thing.”
Sam laughed shortly. “Yeah, but I asked you first,” he pointed out.
She blew out a breath and realized, too late, it was a shaky one. She was supposed to be in control here, not falling apart, Zoe upbraided herself. She didn’t want Sam thinking she was angling for pity.
“I’m fine,” she answered almost stoically.
He slanted a glance at her. Even a quick look told him she was in bad shape—and sinking fast. “No, you’re not.”
“Okay, I’m not,” she admitted, knowing there was no sense in trying to lie to Sam. She wasn’t that good at it. “But I will be—given time.”
“Yes, you will,” he agreed.
He wanted to leave it there, but he knew he couldn’t. Zoe wasn’t like him. She didn’t have an iron shell around her to protect her from things like this. Zoe felt things, he thought, felt things he knew he couldn’t.
“Do you want me to call someone?” he offered. “When I drop you off at your place, do you want me to call someone?” He caught her confused expression out of the corner of his eye. “To have them come over and stay with you.” he explained further.
Zoe shook her head. She couldn’t think of a single person she wanted to have stay with her—except for him, and she wasn’t about to ask him, so that left no one.
“There’s no one to call,” she told him. “Not about this. I can’t exactly say, ‘Somebody killed Celia. Can you come over and hold my hand?’”
Her wording struck him as telling. “Do you want that?” he asked her, curious. “To have someone hold your hand?”
Oh, God, did he think she was making a veiled request? Zoe shook her head adamantly. “No. It’s just a figure of speech.”
Sam pulled up in front of her house. Parking his vehicle at the curb, he surprised Zoe by getting out and crossing around to her side. She’d already opened the passenger door. He opened it wider, then took her hand and helped her out.
She had no idea why the touch of his hand would affect her the way it did. Until that moment, after she’d managed to regain her composure in the bridal room, she had exercised immense self-control, holding herself together and putting on a brave front.
But there was something about making human contact—just an innocent touching of hands—that suddenly sliced through everything. Zoe could feel herself instantly crumbling inside.
She struggled hard against showing anything, but she couldn’t seem to keep the tears from coming to her eyes. Within seconds, the facade she had managed to bravely construct was being betrayed.
Sam felt completely at a loss. He had no idea how to react in the face of tears. When he came right down to it, he would rather have faced down a gun-wielding criminal or subdued an angry, foul-mouth agitator. He was equipped for that, trained for that. He knew how to handle himself in those sorts of situations.
But tears? Who the hell knew what to do with a crying female? Especially since this female wasn’t carrying on. Zoe actually looked as if she was as embarrassed to be shedding her tears as he was embarrassed to be witnessing them.
Digging into his back pocket, he pulled out his handkerchief—carrying one had been an engrained habit he’d picked up long ago, thanks to his mother’s instruction—and handed it to Zoe.
“Here,” he muttered, barely audible.
Taking the handkerchief from him, Zoe wiped her eyes carefully. “Sorry,” she murmured. Finished, she offered it back to him.
“Hang on to it,” he told her. “You might need it later.”
She nodded, unable to offer an argument at the moment, unable to speak, really, without being afraid a sob might escape.
Taking out her key, she unlocked her door. When she turned around to thank him and say good-night, she found he was right behind her.
“You’re blocking the doorway. Go inside,” he told her.
She remained where she was, looking up at him quizzically.
“The others can handle the initial paperwork,” he told her, referring to Annabel and the officers from the precinct who had responded to his call for backup. “I’ll stay here for a while.”
Her response to that was more tears. “I can’t seem to make them stop,” she apologized.
He found himself enfolding her in his arms. Because of the situation, it began awkwardly, but he managed to get himself to relax and the tension slipped away.
Having his arms around her felt like heaven, but it also felt deceitful somehow. Zoe struggled for a second time to regain control. She didn’t want him to think she was using tears to make him stay with her. Those were Celia’s tricks. She didn’t play tricks.
Taking a step back, Zoe stumbled through an apology. “I don’t want to impose—”
Zoe was not conforming to what little he knew about women. “Will you stop being so damn noble for a few minutes? Cry, rant, scream—although maybe not as loud as you did before,” he qualified. “You’re entitled,” he told her. “She was your sister.”
He was being kind to her and it was that kindness that was undoing her, weakening her resolve to be strong. She did her best to sound blasé.
“This isn’t exactly the way you expected to spend tonight, either, is it?”
Sam never liked focusing on himself. He liked other people doing it even less.
“Never mind me,” he told her. “I want to make sure you’re all right.” And she wasn’t. No matter what she maintained to the contrary, he could see she wasn’t. “Are you sure there’s no one you want me to call for you?”
She offered him a smile. It was a weak effort at best. “No. Thanks.”
Sam shrugged. He sure as hell wasn’t leaving her like this. Who knew what she might do in her present state of mind? He wasn’t about to have Zoe on his conscience along with all the other things that haunted it.
“Then I guess I’ll stay for a while,” he told her.
She didn’t want him feeling obligated to her, or worse, manipulated by her to stay. “But—”
He held his hand up. Sam had no desire to repeat this dance again. They’d only wind up going around in circles—something that, by definition, always irritated him.
“I don’t want you to be alone,” he informed her. “So, since there’s no one you want me to call, I’ll stay here for a while.”
Again, although she was grateful for his thoughtfulness and just his very presence, which went a long way to making her feel better, Zoe felt obligated to point out the obvious.
“You can’t babysit me. You have a case to solve.”
Sam looked at her in silence for a long moment. His eyes seemed to penetrate right down into the very core of her. “You’re nothing like your sister, are you?”
Was that a criticism? Did he find her lacking? Of course he did, Zoe upbraided herself. Celia had been exciting, beautiful. She was just a mousy librarian in an awful blue dress.
“What do you mean?” she heard herself asking Sam in a small voice.
Sam felt something protective bei
ng aroused within him. It caught him completely off guard and by surprise. He hadn’t actually felt anything in a long time, least of all protective. It reinforced his feeling about how different Zoe was from her older sister.
Celia had thrived on being the center of attention. She had demanded it most of the time and she’d been known to actually act out if she was denied that attention. Even when he’d asked her to marry him, he’d felt their life together didn’t stand much of a chance of making it, given the fact that his work took him away for long stretches of time. That sort of thing put a strain on the best of relationships, and given that Celia always wanted to be the center of the universe, their marriage was pretty much doomed before it ever became a reality.
But now wasn’t the time to talk about Celia’s shortcomings. He and Zoe were both aware of them. He had a feeling Zoe was no stranger to that aspect of her sister, either.
“Just that you have a tendency to put others before yourself. Got any coffee?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject. It was a lot easier talking about nothing than about something, at least for him.
Zoe brightened at finally being given something to do. “Yes. I’ll put on a pot.” She turned toward the kitchen counter as she said it, pulling the coffeemaker closer to her.
“Why don’t you change first?” Sam suggested, nodding at the bridesmaid dress she had on. In his opinion, the wide skirt made it awkward for her to move around and reach things. “That doesn’t exactly look like the sort of outfit that someone should wear in the kitchen.”
She looked down at the bridesmaid dress. While it wasn’t the kind that could be instantly labeled as memorably hideous, it was still far from flattering, which she knew had been why her sister had chosen it to begin with. Gorgeous though she had been, Celia wanted to take no chances that anyone in the bridal party was going to be able to hold a candle to her.
“Well, it’s not like I’m ever going to be wearing this again,” Zoe commented. Especially since she would never be able to look at this dress and not immediately associate it with Celia’s murder. “But you’re right. It’s not exactly made for moving around in freely.”
Taking out a can of coffee from the refrigerator, where she kept it once it was opened, she went through the motions of measuring out the right amount of coffee to prepare a fresh pot.
Measuring spoon in her hand, she raised her eyes to his. “You take it strong, right?”
“Yes—how d’you know?” he couldn’t help asking. To his recollection, they had never stopped for coffee together, nor had he ever had any in her presence.
Zoe merely smiled shyly at his question. “You just look like the type,” she answered, measuring out an extra heaping tablespoon before setting the coffeemaker to brew.
“I thought you were going to change out of that,” he said, nodding at the voluminous dress.
“I am. I just wanted to get the coffee going.” Putting the coffee container back in the refrigerator, Zoe left the room quickly.
Alone, Sam began to move about the small living room and kitchen, poking through the magazines neatly piled on her coffee table, glancing over the titles on the bindings of the neatly arranged books on her bookshelves. She had, he observed, eclectic tastes.
As he glanced around, he absently noted that Zoe was a far more fastidious housekeeper than her sister had been. Celia, he recalled, would let clothes remain wherever they happened to fall when she took them off. Her idea of cleaning was to occasionally scoop things up and then dump them all in a heap in a room that wasn’t being used.
Even he was neater than that. But then, in his case, it came from not having very much to begin with, so each item was viewed as being precious. They were always packed up because he never knew when he would be shuttled from one foster home to another. Transfers occurred abruptly and at any time.
He’d quickly learned to husband whatever he had and to keep close track of everything because if he blinked, everything he had could easily disappear.
Zoe was back before the coffeemaker had finished its loud brewing noises. She came down wearing a pullover blouse and a pair of worn jeans. The jeans were a little tight and he caught himself staring before discipline took over.
“That was quick,” he commented.
She hadn’t thought of it as being particularly that. She hadn’t hurried any more than usual.
“Didn’t seem polite to keep you waiting around out here, especially when you’re going out of your way like this.”
Moving to the counter, she checked the coffee pot. It had just finished brewing, so she poured him a full cup of coffee, leaving it black. As for the one she poured for herself, she went on to dilute its inky color with a heavy amount of sweetened creamer.
“So,” Sam began abruptly once she had sat down across from him at the kitchen table, “what did you and Celia fight about?”
She had just gotten herself to relax and now she stiffened again. Why was he bringing that up again? Her feelings about the answer hadn’t changed. For him to know the subject of her argument with Celia would only serve to hurt him.
“You don’t want to know.”
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked—twice,” he pointed out.
She did her best to stand her ground. “I already told you, what we argued about doesn’t have any bearing on what happened to her.”
There was something there, he could swear to it, and he wasn’t about to back off until he had some answers. “Then there shouldn’t be a problem telling me,” he said to her.
“Sam...”
“You might as well tell me, Zoe. I’m not going to let up until you do.”
He meant it, she thought. She could tell by the stubborn look in his eyes. He wanted an answer and he wasn’t about to leave without it. She was stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place.
But the longer she held out, the more annoyed Sam was going to be with her. Who knew where this was going to wind up—and if he brought in someone else to compel her to talk, then that other person would wind up being a witness to his humiliation.
That was what made up her mind for her.
Zoe took in a deep breath and then started talking. “I told her I resented looking like a clown at her wedding. She got mad and said I was just going to have to live with it and it was my responsibility to be there for her.”
Sam pinned her down with his penetrating look. That was much too petty to have come out of Zoe’s mouth, he thought.
“What was the argument really about, Zoe?” It was no longer a question but a demand.
That had been her last-ditch attempt to throw him off the trail. “You don’t believe me?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, sounding more patient than he felt. “That doesn’t sound like Celia talking, it sounds more like you talking. Now, for the last time, what was the argument about?”
She looked at him hesitantly. “You’re not going to like it.”
He had already suspected as much. “There’re a lot of things I don’t like,” he told her. “Now talk, Zoe. It’s either here, to me, or at the precinct and a bunch of strangers who I promise you are not nearly as easygoing as I am.”
She would have laughed if she could have, because he was serious and believed what he’d just said.
She pressed her lips together, hating to be the one to tell him. Hating having to tell him at all. She frequently wished she was better at lying.
But Celia was the one who had always been good at that, not she. She’d always been, as Celia had taunted her more than once, “Miss Goody Two-Shoes, married to the truth.”
“She bragged to me about something, about deceiving someone,” she blurted out when he scowled at her. “I told her she had to tell that person what she’d done and she laughed at me and absolutely refused.”
“I need details, Zo
e.” When she said nothing, he looked at her more closely. And then it came to him. “It was about me, wasn’t it?”
She looked pained as she pleaded, “Don’t make me tell you, Sam.”
But he wasn’t moved. His insides had turned to ice. “Now, Zoe.”
Zoe gritted her teeth together, as if to strain all her words through them before she said them to Sam. Anything to delay the telling for even a second longer.
But then, she had no options left. Taking a breath, she told him.
“Celia said she’d tricked you into marrying her. That she wasn’t even pregnant. That you and she hadn’t even made love together, she just made you think you had.” When he looked at her, clearly stunned and bewildered, Zoe went on to explain, “She told me that she got you drunk that night you came over after killing that criminal, then staged it so it looked as if you’d had wild, passionate sex with her.
“In the morning, when you woke up, she told you that you’d made love with her. After that, she waited for a little while, then told you that she was pregnant. She bragged to me how she knew you’d do the right thing and marry her—and you did. Or would have,” she amended.
He wanted to accuse her of lying, but that was just his pride talking. One look at Zoe’s face and he knew she had told him the truth—at great cost to herself. He could see it actually physically hurt her to tell him this.
The next words out of her mouth confirmed it. “I’m sorry, Sam. I didn’t want to tell you,” she cried, clearly distressed.
He didn’t want her pity. He didn’t want anything at all from her. From anyone. He just wanted to get out of there before his self-control cracked.
“I’ll send Annabel over,” he told her as he walked out, slamming the door behind him.
Zoe could swear she felt the vibrations of the door resounding in her chest. Somehow, it made her heart ache even more. She shouldn’t have given in so easily, shouldn’t have told him, or better yet, should have learned how to lie better. But lying had never been her thing.
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