One Good Man(9)

He laughed. “All of it. Well, not the ketchup. Or the salad dressing.”

“Exactly. You need condiments, I’m your girl. I can even build a mean sandwich,” she hurried on, so the girl thing didn’t hang in the air. “But I get my breakfast at Cantus’, and usually skip lunch unless Roni or Honoria pack enough for two.”

“Let me guess.” He leaned a hand on the countertop, parking his other at his hip “They take turns, and it’s been years since you’ve skipped lunch.”

“I walk to work,” she said before she realized he wasn’t commenting on her weight. God, she was not cut out for this…this…banter. Or even small talk. Not with a man who shopped and cooked and set the table, and was going to fix her upside-down life. “I guess they think I don’t pack anything so I won’t have to carry it with me.”

“And you let them think that.” He took her in as if there was much about her to be learned in what she’d just said.

She was pretty sure there wasn’t much to be learned about her at all, and so she shrugged and poured two tumblers of tea. “I don’t want to hurt their feelings. And they both pack a mean lunch.”

“Well, I hope my cooking measures up.” Kell turned off the broiler to pull out the steaks.

“The way everything smells, that’s not a worry.” She sat in her regular chair as Kell forked a rib eye onto her plate.

He slid the second onto his own and sat across the table, dropping his napkin into his lap before picking up his fork and knife. “I figured with the lunch meat in the fridge, you weren’t a vegan or anything.”

Right. Because the lunch meat couldn’t be for anyone else. She sighed—though his jumping to the right conclusion about her living alone shouldn’t pinch like a nerve. Being unmarried didn’t mean she was unmarriageable, but that was her projecting her own issues with being single at thirty, which was her problem, not his.

She loaded her plate down with fries. “One hundred percent carnivore, and this looks so good.” She squirted a big pool of ketchup between the potatoes and the meat. “It’s almost like you’re fattening me up for the kill or something.”

Kell remained silent, cutting into his steak and chewing a bite as he sliced off another, frowning all the while as if processing his thoughts as thoroughly as his food. Jamie ate two fries and watched him think, wondering if he would take this much time to respond if she had been anyone other than the sole survivor of a crime.

Finally, Kell laid his utensils along the edge of his plate and sat back, his gaze locking on Jamie’s. “Is that how you really feel? That this is all about the hypnosis?”

It was safer to think that way, not to imagine he’d done it for other reasons. Of course, the simplest one was that he’d been hungry…

“That’s why you’re here, right? And it’s not that the meal isn’t appreciated.” It was so appreciated, he couldn’t even know. “I’m just saying, if not for the hypnosis, if you’d just come here to ask me questions to further the investigation, then no. I don’t think I’d be sitting down to this feast.”

He smiled then, the sort of smile that deepened the laugh lines around his eyes, that had dimples appearing beneath the day’s growth of beard on his face. It was a sexy, scruffy look, not the look of a lawman working a case, but that of a man enjoying good food and the company he was keeping. It made Jamie’s stomach do all sorts of things, none of them conducive to getting through this meal…or the night ahead.

“If I were here to ask you questions and was making use of your guest room?” He sat forward again, arching a wicked brow. “You can bet I’d be doing then what I’m doing now. For one thing, a man’s gotta eat. For another, I’d never be able to face my mother again for fear she’d find out I hadn’t properly thanked my hostess.”

Mothers. A topic much safer than Jamie giving Kell a bed. “Sounds like your mother raised you right.”

Nodding, Kell went back to eating, looking away from Jamie and down at his food. “Mother and father both. They raised three of us boys, and lived to tell the tale.”

“Are you the oldest?” she asked, breathing better without his smile stirring her into knots.

“I am,” he said, laughing before he asked. “Do I have big brother written all over me or something?”

Brotherly was not at all how she saw him, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what he meant. “You have ‘in charge’ written all over you. I can’t imagine you being the little brother who got bossed around, or the middle child who acted out to find his place.”

“Rather deep observations on siblings, coming from an only child.”

“What can I say. I paid attention to how my friends fit in with their families while growing up,” she said, before finally taking a bite of her mouth-melting steak and barely suppressing a groan.

“And that’s why you’re working in pediatrics?”

She shook her head. “I’m working in pediatrics because it was the only job I could find after we moved to Weldon.”

“What was your major at Tech?”

“How did you know—” She stopped herself, feeling stupid. Of course he would know the details of her life. The case files probably held details not even her mother knew. “I hadn’t decided. I was in their general business program, but only because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

“And?” he prompted.

“Things took an unexpected turn before I ever got my act together,” she reminded him, getting back to her food before she confessed things he wouldn’t want to hear. He made her want to talk; she didn’t know why. But she was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to listen to her ramble on about lost dreams.

“What about now?” he asked. “From ten years away. If you could go back to school, what would you study?”

She’d thought many times what she’d give to go back to those days. Not once had she thought about her forgotten degree. “What would Jamie Danby study? Or what would Stephanie Monroe have ended up doing with her life?”

He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “Do you not think of yourself as Stephanie?”

“I don’t really differentiate between—”

He stopped her from saying more with a knowing shake of his head. “You just did. When I asked about a field of study. You made the distinction between who you are now, and who you were then.”

This was something she didn’t think she could explain. She’d been Jamie for ten years, Stephanie for nineteen. Sometimes she felt more like one than the other. But always, always, she was both. “Are you the same person you were ten years ago?”

He chuckled. “I’m older, grayer, more stubborn, but mostly I’d have to say yes.”

“You’ve always wanted to be in law enforcement?”

“Since the first time I wore a white hat and straddled a stick horse.”

She laughed at that, quickly halted the sound because it rang so strange, then laughed again, unable to help it. She laughed with her mother, she laughed with Roni and Honoria, but this wasn’t either of those giggles or girly titters.

This came from the center of her chest. It was deep and heartfelt, and brought on by the picture of Kell as a child riding a broomstick stuck into a stuffed plush head. It felt good. It felt honest.

And she realized that Kell was right. These were Stephanie moments, not Jamie moments. Jamie had been scared, and lonely, for so long. She missed Stephanie’s laughter and heart. “I’m sorry. I’m really not laughing at you.”

“I’d say that’s exactly what you’re doing. Or at least doing so at my two-year-old self dressed in nothing but hat, boots and a diaper.”

She laughed harder this time, her chest aching, her eyes wet. She didn’t know why she found the visual so funny. “Do you have a picture?”

“Even better. I have the video on a DVD. I’ll show it to you tomorrow when we’re in Midland.”

A yanked rug or a thrown bucket of water couldn’t have sobered her any faster than the mention of tomorrow’s trip. She hadn’t wanted to bring the hypnosis to Weldon. This was her home, her sanctuary. She had to keep as much of her past out of her present as she could.

The fact that she was going to have to go back there at all was unsettling, but at least she’d have this place, her place to come back to. Until she didn’t anymore.

“Sure. That would be fun.” She started to expand her less-than-enthusiastic response, to move on, but Kell reached across the table and took hold of the hand holding her fork.

She looked at his fingers where they spanned from her knuckles to her wrist, felt his thumb where it pressed into the heel of her palm. He was so big, so strong. He could overpower her if he wanted, but all he did was wait for her to meet his probing gaze.

So green, his eyes. Like spring in the mountains. Like leaves unfurling. Like life returning from winter’s dead. She felt her throat closing around the words waiting there. This man. He scared her with the way he saw what she was thinking, with the way he made her remember what she’d lost of herself and wanted back.