The rest of Hugh. What a horrible way to think of it. Of him.
“That wouldn’t have surprised me,” Grant said. “I wouldn’t have bought it, though. I’m not that stupid, Kat.”
“Oh.” Reassured, still she said, “Whoever this is took the house key, too, for a reason.”
“I don’t like that,” he admitted. “Call me as soon as you know when the locksmith can come. I’ll pick you up and take you home. I want to walk through your house.”
“Yes. Okay.” She hesitated. “Nobody has spotted my truck?”
“No.” That was all he said, but she got a chill. It had disappeared.
Just like Hugh’s.
She’d wait until nine to call locksmiths. Joan could cover for her today, so she didn’t have to come back… No, Joan would be left shorthanded—way shorthanded—without Tess. All right. See who else could come in today.
James could, thank goodness. He promised to be there within an hour. By the time Kat spoke briefly to Joan, it was nine and she started calling locksmiths. The second one agreed to fit her in today, so she called Grant back.
“Three o’clock. Does that work for you? If not, I can have one of the employees run me home…”
“I’ll be there in plenty of time to get you.” He paused. “Tess’s hour up yet?”
Kat looked at her watch. “Just about. Great. This has been a perfect day.”
“And it’s not over yet.”
At ten, she checked in with Joan, who shook her head. Kat asked Tess to come to the office.
“You’re fired,” she said bluntly. “I’ll pay you for the hours you’ve worked, even though I suspect you’ve made plenty off me in other ways.” She had the check ready and extended it across the desk.
Tess widened her eyes in shock, but the reaction hadn’t come quick enough. “What have I done wrong?”
Kat started the security camera feedback playing and swiveled the monitor so that Tess could see it. She stared.
“It was just the once.”
“Sure it was.”
She snatched up the check and left.
Kat realized her head was throbbing. There was a bottle of ibuprofen in the break room. Caffeine and drugs were what she needed. She’d give Tess five minutes to collect her things and be gone. Joan would watch to be sure she didn’t take anything else on her way out.
She let the two other employees working today know that Tess had left, rearranged the staffing for the week and all but hugged James, who agreed to work another extra day. Then she called several of the people who’d sent résumés and arranged interviews. One came later that day and seemed adequate, if not exciting. A maybe.
Grant picked her up shortly after two-thirty. She was dismayed by how glad she was to see him. How could a man who wasn’t handsome look better to her than anyone else ever had?
“Anything on my truck?”
“No,” he said tersely.
It had disappeared into thin air, just like Hugh’s had.
When she got in his official vehicle—in front, thank goodness, not in back behind the cage—Grant asked gruffly, “Did you have lunch?”
“No.”
“There’s a grilled chicken sandwich in that bag.” He gestured at one that sat on the floor. She’d already smelled it and realized her mouth was watering. “Your lunch?”
“No, yours.”
She looked at him in perplexity. “You keep feeding me.”
“You’re losing weight before my eyes,” he said bluntly. “Eat.”
She gobbled the sandwich during the short drive. She and Grant had barely arrived at her house when the locksmith pulled in behind Grant’s vehicle.
He and Grant consulted, and the guy went to work replacing the locks and adding dead bolts on both front and back doors as well as adding one to the side door of the detached garage that Kat rarely used. She was embarrassed not to have thought of that. She had a garage door opener, but parking in there wasn’t a big advantage even when it rained because she’d still get wet between garage and house. Mostly it held the lawn mower, tools and clutter Hugh had never gotten rid of and she hadn’t bothered investigating.
Grant started in there, poking around in random boxes, climbing a stepladder to see what was stowed on a couple of sagging sheets of plywood that spanned rafters.
“You won’t lose anything if you burn the garage down,” he reported finally. “My mower…”
He booted the rusting machine with his foot. “Does it actually start?”
“Yes. What do you have, the shiniest, state-of-the-art ride-on?”
He grinned, a flash of merriment she had rarely seen. Good thing, too, because it almost stopped her heart.
“I have a reel mower. No engine. I get a workout, it’s quiet and ecological, and it doesn’t need any care but an occasional sharpening of the blades.”
“I did you an injustice,” she said lightly. “I figured you for a guy who’d like his toys.”
“I carry a Glock. I don’t need any other toys.”
He’d startled her into a laugh, something she would have sworn wasn’t going to happen today of all days.
Grant smiled with what she thought was satisfaction.
They walked to the house together, and he began there by inspecting the window locks. When he started muttering about them, Kat rolled her eyes.
“What difference does it make, when someone could break a pane of glass and get in anyway?”
“Breaking glass makes noise. Neighbors hear.” He frowned at her. “You’d hear, if you were home.”
Oh, good. He’d given her another chill. Not that she hadn’t already been lying awake nights listening for that exact sound, or for the creak the fourth stair always made under a footstep.
Grant’s inspection of her house was slow and thorough. It reminded her unpleasantly of the search she’d agreed to four years ago after it became apparent that Hugh really had disappeared. She trailed behind Grant, glad she’d managed to get some housecleaning done Sunday. Even so, she found she was self-conscious about the shabbiness of the house and how little she’d succeeded in doing to make it feel like home. No surprise, there. She’d never decorated bedrooms the way most kids did, because they weren’t really hers. They were just…a place to sleep. It was funny, because she hadn’t put any stamp at all on the house when she lived here with Hugh, only on the yard. She hadn’t known why then, but now she realized that the house hadn’t felt like hers, any more than the foster homes had. It was Hugh’s. She simply lived here. The nursery, strangely, was different. She’d taken almost immediate, fierce possession, as if it were her child. Hugh had indulged her, sometimes gotten annoyed with her ambition and impatience with him, but seemed overall relieved that she was willing to do the planning and work he couldn’t be bothered with.
Kat let out a sigh more heartfelt than she’d intended. Hugh had only been using her. She’d known on one level, but…not let herself see quite how it was. Because of all she had to lose.
Holding open the door to the basement, Grant turned and looked at her, his eyebrows raised.
“I, uh, keep having these minor epiphanies.” She made a face. “Ignore me.”
“I’m…not very good at that,” he said in a velvety deep voice. “In case you hadn’t noticed.” She flushed.
He kept watching her, but didn’t say anything. After a moment, he was the one to sigh and start down into the basement.
Kat sat on the bottom step and watched him explore, once again opening boxes, shaking his head over contents, brushing aside cobwebs to inspect dark corners and the space under the stairs.
“What is all this crap?” he asked at one point.
“Hugh inherited the house from his uncle. I think he went through the stuff to see if there was anything valuable, but after that he lost interest. We talked about having a garage sale—”
“Ten garage sales,” Grant muttered.
“See, that was the problem. Imagine hauling all this out, prici
ng it, taking half of it to the dump…” She shook her head. “I don’t know whether all those old magazines are worth anything or should be recycled, for example. I don’t have time to find out. The uncle worked on old cars. He collected parts, as far as I can see. I don’t even know what they are. That’s what’s in most of the boxes in the garage.”
“Yeah. I saw.” Grant came toward her. Dust streaked one cheek, and a cobweb had caught in his dark hair. “Kat, I can’t swear that a serious search wouldn’t find a few bones tucked in some damn box or other, but I can’t find anything.”
“No. I’ve been looking, too,” she admitted. “Telling myself I was paranoid, but—”
“You had reason.” He braced a hand on the stair rail above her head and looked down at her. “You know how weird all this is.”
She let out a huff that was almost a laugh. “You think?”
His eyes were dark, intent. “Kat…”
“Shouldn’t we go see if the locksmith is done?”
Lashes veiled the heat in his eyes. “Probably.” He gestured. “Ladies first.”
The locksmith was done and waiting. She paid him, and after he left, said, “Thanks for coming, Grant.”
He stood beside her in the foyer, making no move to go. “It’s almost five. Any chance you’d like to invite me to dinner?”
Stupefied, she said, “What would it look like to other people if…if…”
“We seemed to be friends?” He stood a step closer. “Or more than friends?”
She had to stand her ground. Had to, even if her heart was acting as if she’d run a half marathon. “Yes.”
“I don’t care.” The words were underlaid by steel. “I’ve waited a long time for you, Kat. I won’t ask for more than dinner right now. We do need to figure out what’s going on. But I want to know you better. The other day, when I brought lunch out to the nursery, it occurred to me that I don’t have any idea what you like to eat. Stupid little thing like that, and it bothered me.” His voice softened. “Can we spend some time sharing the little stuff? Becoming friends?”
She closed her eyes on a tide of longing. Yes. Yes. She wanted to know his favorite food, too, his favorite color, his pet peeves. Whether he’d ever been tempted to return to the greater excitement of big city law enforcement. Whether he had sisters or brothers, whether his parents were alive, whether he was close to his family. She wanted to know him.
“All right,” she said. “You’re in luck. I froze spaghetti sauce the last time I made it. If you like Italian?”
“I like Italian.” His voice sounded scratchy, and he had to clear his throat. Had he expected her to say, “Thanks, but no thanks?”
“I’ll make a salad, too.” She led the way to the kitchen, where she had concentrated most of her remodeling efforts to date. She had stripped the old cabinets—a horrible job—and had new vinyl laid after discovering that the wood floor beneath the ancient, peeling linoleum had been too damaged to be refinished. She usually ate out here, too, at the farm table set in front of a small-paned window with a view to her back garden where early bulbs and a fragrant viburnum carlesii were blooming.
She put him to work buttering a baguette and rubbing it with a crushed clove of garlic while she put water on to boil for the pasta and gently heated the sauce on the stove. Grant opened a bottle of wine while she put together a salad.
Neither of them was a vegetarian; he was fonder of red meat than she was, but they both agreed they didn’t like sushi. He admitted to a sweet tooth; Kat didn’t have much of one. He made a hell of a potato salad, he said, and yeah, one of the few “toys” he did enjoy was a fancy grill. His favorite color was green, hers purple.
“That rich, reddish purple of some of the hybrid lilacs,” she said.
He nodded as if he had any idea at all what she was talking about.
When Kat asked about family, he said, “One sister. She’s in Texas. My parents, too. I worked for the Dallas P.D. before I came here.”
The water was boiling. She dumped in the spaghetti. “You gave up being near your family so Rachel could be near hers?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“How did you meet?”
He gave her a glance in which she read wariness, but answered, “On the job. She worked for Macy’s, had accepted a transfer there. Didn’t know anyone. One of her coworkers was assaulted and Rachel was a witness. After we wrapped up the investigation, I gave her a call.” He shrugged. “She was apparently a fan of television cop shows. She thought my job was sexier than it turned out to be, at least from a wife’s standpoint.”
Kat discovered she didn’t like talking or even thinking about his ex-wife. And yet, she wanted to know what he’d felt, why the marriage had been troubled long before his eyes had met Kat’s at that city council meeting all those years ago. He knew all about her problems with Hugh. In fact, Grant knew more about her than anyone else ever had, and that made her uncomfortable. She was entitled to ask some questions, wasn’t she?
But…not that one, she decided. Not yet.
Instead, as they carried dishes to the table and sat, she said, “Did you think about moving back to Dallas after you and Rachel separated?”
“No.”
The answer was so unexpansive, Kat looked up in the middle of reaching for a slice of the baguette. Grant was watching her.
“I’d taken the job here not that many months before. The department was understaffed and under-trained. I felt some responsibility to finish what I’d started.” He paused. “And then there was you.”
“Me.” Her throat felt constricted. He meant it. He’d been waiting for her, all this time.
“You.” He calmly dished up salad for himself. “This smells great.”
“Grant…”
He smiled, a curiously tender curve of his mouth. “Why don’t we put the big stuff on hold for now, and stick to the little stuff. That might be safer.”
“Yes.” Gulp. “You’re right. Uh…are you close to your parents?”
“Reasonably. My dad and I have always butted heads. He’s in construction, a contractor. Of course he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. Me, I signed up for the marines the minute I had a high school diploma in hand. Mom and Dad weren’t thrilled.”
Kat didn’t blame them. They were probably scared to death.
“I served four years, decided it was time to come home. Law enforcement seemed a logical way for me to go. I haven’t been sorry.”
“What does your sister do?”
“She has a quilting shop. Babies, too.” His grin deepened the lines on his cheeks, making them less grim. “Her husband works with Dad sometimes, but otherwise he’s a professional bass fisherman. Go figure.”
“I didn’t know anyone was.”
“Oh, yeah.” Grant chuckled. “Did I mention that I not only don’t like sushi, I don’t like to eat fish? Leads to some spirited discussions at home.”
Kat laughed, and felt the day’s tension fall away. She liked the idea of being friends with Grant. She never had been with a man before, although she’d believed at first, with Hugh… No. She wouldn’t think about Hugh tonight.
“How many babies?” she asked.
“Three to date. The youngest, Susie, is two. Won’t shock me to hear Reggie is pregnant again.”
“Reggie?”
“Regina.”
“Oh.” She had been twirling spaghetti on her fork, but didn’t lift it to her mouth. “I always wished I’d had a sister or brother.”
“There’s something to be said for families.” A couple of creases had formed between his dark eyebrows. He reached across the table and laid his big hand over hers. “Why didn’t you and Hugh have children? Didn’t you want any?”
“I suppose… We were putting it off. Until we were on better financial footing, we said. I don’t think Hugh actually wanted kids. It took me a while to realize that.” Kat smiled with difficulty. “He’d have had to be a lot less footloose, wouldn’t he? And m
e…” She shrugged. “Like I said, part of me knew something was wrong. I was thinking earlier today that this house was always, in my mind, Hugh’s. It’s only been in the past couple of years I started to think of it as mine.”
He nodded. She was too stoic to let the compassion in his eyes make her weepy, but there was a moment. Just a moment, when she came close.
“It didn’t take Rachel six months to decide I should find a new career. She claimed she’d be doing all the work if we had a baby.” He grimaced. “Probably she would have been. But I liked my job. I told myself she knew what I did going in. Making the move out here, that was my compromise.” He took a swallow of wine. “It didn’t work.”
“You tried.”
“Yeah.” His face was unreadable now, his eyes turbulent. “But maybe not hard enough. Got to say, though, she didn’t, either. Compromise is good, but there has to be acceptance, too. Of who the other person is.”
Kat understood, although that hadn’t been the issue for Hugh and her. It was the fact that whatever she’d labeled as love early on wasn’t. Whatever needs each had met for the other had been unspoken. Love or real passion hadn’t been among them.
With Grant, though… Her eyes were drawn to his. He wanted her, but did he love her? Could he?
Was that what this ache she had in her chest every time she saw him meant? How was she supposed to know?
It would be better, wouldn’t it, to wait and see? To give each other time? To be able to bury Hugh, and be sure Grant didn’t have to consider her seriously as a suspect in Hugh’s death?
Of course it would be.
She couldn’t look away from him. She wanted, oh, she wanted, to find out what it would be like to make love with this man. They had waited so long already. Would it be so bad, if she stood and took his hand, if she led him up the stairs to the bedroom where she’d moved after Hugh was gone?
Kat wasn’t sure she was capable of saying a word. The decision wasn’t conscious. She knew that she was pushing back her chair, standing. That he was doing the same. One or the other of them groaned, and then, halfway around the table, their bodies collided and both reached to hold on tight.
Bone Deep Page 13