Of course she wasn’t attracted to him. She would have noticed before now.
No, Natalie knew perfectly well what she was doing. John was an excuse, that’s all. What she was avoiding thinking about was her house, and especially what—who—lay upstairs, or of the cleaning job she’d have afterward. Would she ever be able to go upstairs again without her heart pounding? Would she be able to stroll into the den—stepping just where the body now lay—and sit down to use the computer without a frightened consciousness of where blood had soaked into the carpet?
Natalie was grateful for the distraction John provided when he stopped by the open car door. At the same time she noticed that he carried a brown paper grocery bag in his free arm, she caught the whiff.
“My bread!”
“It seemed a shame to let it go to waste.” His rare smile relaxed his face. “I doubt we’re going to lift a fingerprint from your bread machine.”
“Thank you.” Those wretched tears threatened again. If one more person was nice to her, she was going to start sobbing. Natalie took the grocery bag and wrapped her arms around it, the delicious aroma and warmth almost as comforting as a hug. She blinked hard. “John, I almost forgot poor Sasha. She’s going to be scared by all the strangers trooping through.”
“Actually, I just shut her in your sewing room.” John cleared his throat. “She was, uh, somewhat annoyed. I doubt you want her in there, but we can’t have her in the den.”
“No, that’s fine.” The fabric could be washed again before she cut it out, the pattern pieces taped. “Her litter box is in the garage.” As if they wouldn’t find it.
“And her food in the kitchen. I saw it. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the cat.”
As he’d taken care of her gutters and her Christmas lights and the rotten branch from the maple tree that had splintered a ten-foot stretch of the cedar board fence that enclosed her backyard.
“You’re always so nice to me.” She sounded watery.
The two men exchanged a look.
Seemingly galvanized, John slapped the roof of the car. “Geoff, you get started here. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“Then get the hell out of here.” Geoff gave her a crooked smile. “Forget the warm milk. Raid the liquor cabinet.”
She laughed through her tears as he closed her door and John got in behind the wheel.
CHAPTER TWO
NATALIE FELT John’s searching gaze as he started the car.
“You okay?” he asked again, quietly.
“Of course I am!” She wiped wet cheeks. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Well, yes, of course I do. It shook me up, and I suppose I’m in shock, a little.”
“More than a little.” The car accelerated into traffic on Neah Drive. Speaking deliberately, John said, “The first time I saw a man who’d been murdered, I stayed cool long enough to get outside and around the corner of the warehouse where he’d been gunned down. Threw up everything I’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours. I went back in and did my job, but every so often I’d find myself looking at him and just being hit by it—that’s a guy like me, flesh and blood. That’s what my blood would look like spilling out.” He gave his head a shake. “Nothing brings your own mortality home like the sight of violent death.”
“I suppose that’s part of it,” she admitted. “I don’t like to think that my head…”
His hand closed briefly on her knee. “Most of us don’t walk into a crowbar.”
“No. I know.” She bit her lip. “But he was in my house. So maybe…”
When she hesitated, he finished for her. “Next time someone will take a swing at your head.”
Her nod was tiny and slightly ashamed. Shouldn’t she be grieving for the death of even a stranger, feeling—how did it go?—that the loss of any man diminished her? Instead she felt violated because he had bled out his life in her house.
And she was afraid.
“Natalie, look at me.”
Startled, she realized that they were stopped at a light in the old part of town. An enormous Queen Anne style turn-of-the-century house on one corner was now a bed-and-breakfast; across the street, an antique shop spilled onto the sidewalk from what had probably once been a carriage house. She had been blind to the view of the bay during the drive here, to the arrival of a ferry that had disembarked the long line of cars waiting to race up the hill toward the highway. John lived here in Old Town, just a few blocks away, in a more modest restored Victorian.
She turned her head to meet his frowning gaze.
“I will not let you be hurt.” His words had the power of a vow. “I promise.”
The idea panicked her. Natalie shook her head hard. “No. Don’t promise. How can you? At some point, I’ll have to go home even if you don’t make an arrest. What if he did come back? Are you going to abandon your children to hover in my shrubbery every night? No,” she said with finality. “I don’t want to be a weight on your conscience.”
A horn sounded behind them, then another one. For a moment John still didn’t move, his electric, brooding eyes holding hers. Then he blinked, shuttering the intensity, and flung an irritated glance at the mirror.
“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses,” he growled, stepping on the gas. He drove the remaining blocks in silence, but her stolen look saw the deep lines carved in his forehead. In front of his house, he set the emergency brake and turned off the engine. Turning a near-scowl on her, he said, “All right. How’s this instead? I’ll do my damnedest to keep you safe.”
“That,” she said, smiling shakily, “I can accept. Gratefully.”
SHE WAS GOING TO ACCEPT his help gratefully?
Driving away from his house, John gave a grunt of wry amusement. Oh, yeah. Sure.
The next moment, his brows drew together. No, he wasn’t being fair. Natalie would be grateful, all right.
She would just hate having to be.
Actually, he liked that about her. His mother excepted, the women John had known well had tended to be dependent on the men in their lives. They assumed a man would fix anything that was wrong.
Not that Natalie was the prickly type; far from it. She was warm, gentle, relaxed, a comfortable voice on the phone when he felt like talking out a day’s problems. But she was also determined—sometimes infuriatingly so—not to lean on anyone, even if she was a new widow.
No matter what he did for Natalie, no matter how trivial, she’d thank him gravely but with a troubled expression puckering her brow. Then he could count on her bringing a plate of cookies to the station, or sending a casserole home with him, or buying gifts for Evan and Maddie. She had to balance the scales. Always.
In John’s book, friends did each other favors. Natalie was on her own now, and he didn’t mind picking up some of the slack. He liked working with his hands, and if painting her house meant dumping the kids at their friends’ homes, heck, they’d have a better time with their buddies than they would if he took them out to the spit anyway. It wasn’t as if his five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter didn’t get plenty of his attention. Except for work, he was with them most of the time.
He knew Stuart Reed hadn’t left any life insurance, and he was pretty sure Natalie didn’t make enough to be able to afford to put out fifteen hundred dollars or so to have her house painted. The very fact that she bit her lip, let him do the work and thanked him prettily told John that he was right: she needed him.
She just wished like