He complimented her scrambled eggs as they sat at the table. But sitting at the table had an inescapable effect: the files stacked at one end drove DeeJay’s thoughts back to the case. She sensed by Cade’s silence that he was also thinking about the case again. Well, it had been a nice break.
They didn’t talk about it, however, not even as they washed the dishes and made more of the inevitable coffee. DeeJay checked her tablet and found the police wireless was still down. Same for the cell phones. They hadn’t heard a plow yet, and DeeJay finally looked out front to take in a world that had become almost formless under a deep blanket of snow. Oh, she could see the houses across the way, but drifted snow rode up onto porches and covered roofs thickly. Even the trees that lined the street looked as if they had donned heavy white coats.
Cade came to stand beside her. “Hard to say how much of that is snow that fell during the storm and how much is snow that was blown until it found a relatively windless place to land.”
“Does it make any difference?” she asked.
“Only when it starts to melt over large areas. Ten inches would only cause light flooding. Even two feet over a large enough area could swamp some places if it melts fast enough. But for now the problems are the same, ten inches or ten feet, we’re snowed in.”
“I’m honestly surprised we didn’t lose power.”
“Me, too. We lost just about everything else, though.”
Including email. She was impatient to see what Lew had sent them, but there was no way to get to it. She wanted to talk to Gage, and to Craig Stone, but she couldn’t imagine that either of them had a magic carpet to bring them here. They were definitely on hold.
She wondered if she should go through the files again, then decided against it. Cade’s nearness at once aroused and troubled her. She felt relief when he left her side to return to the couch, a relief that was tinged with disappointment. Caution lights flared in her brain, but the rest of her didn’t seem to want to listen.
Maybe she was having some kind of reaction to all the years she’d refused to dip her toes into a possible relationship. She’d buried a part of herself because it just wouldn’t fit safely in her career. Oh, some managed it, but she hadn’t even been willing to try. Nothing more miserable than having to see a guy every single day when you’d just broken up. It could create other kinds of problems, too.
She had dated, well outside her unit, but had always broken it off because she was wary and uneasy. She couldn’t say exactly why, unless maybe it was that rape so long ago, but she found it hard to trust that any relationship would endure. Especially when life had sent her all over the world.
Now she’d gone and done the very worst thing: she’d had sex with her partner. Great sex. The kind she would call lovemaking. But where did that leave them now? Confined to a house together, with a difficult, haunting case to work on, and trying to ignore the fact that they’d crossed the lines?
Cade seemed to be fairly comfortable but how would she know? Neither of them mentioned last night. It might as well have been erased.
Except that she couldn’t erase the memory, or her tingling awareness of him. Couldn’t wipe away a hunger to tumble back into bed with him. The only way to live with that was to pretend it didn’t exist even as the memories dogged her. Maybe that’s what he was doing. Or maybe it had been utterly meaningless to him.
She half hoped it had been, because it would be easier to pretend she felt nothing if he was unaffected. All they had done, really, was scratch an itch. Now they could move on.