“I’m fine.” Dizzy with unexpected sorrow, he looked anywhere except at her and pretended his most vital interest was the growth of beard on his chin. “Do you mind if I take a shower before I visit Weldon?”
She stared at him over the baby’s head as if she heard something in his voice. She might not want to care for him anymore, but concern cut a frown across her forehead. He had to be more careful. He faced her until she turned back to her task.
“The guest bath is next door to your room.” She spooned some of the fruit into a bowl. “Toward the stairs. You can take a disposable razor from the cabinet beneath my sink.”
Right. He was dying to rummage through her personal belongings. Annoyed daily at the sight of his own bare bathroom counter, the last thing he wanted to see was the face cream and toothpaste and perfume he still expected to shift out of his way.
“Why don’t you take out a razor after you finish with her and leave it by the guest bathroom door?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” His pathetic need to maintain their separate lives made her laugh. “Just get a razor. Everything else you’ll need is either in the bathroom or in the linen closet. That’s the door between our rooms on the gallery.”
Her apathy taunted him. His life should have grown easier after she’d left. He no longer owed her the emotional outlay loving required. Facing the back of her head, knowing she considered him a failure at emotional outlay, he wanted badly to prove he could still make her feel anything at all.
But what if he couldn’t? He’d learned enough about his weakness from Tessa. Why risk any more self-knowledge?
He pushed away from the table and exited the kitchen, slowing only as he all but burst through her bedroom door. The clutter pushed him back a step.
Her room was a muddle of her clothes, Maggie’s makeshift bed and stacks of books. To hell with perfume. He swallowed a groan as the books took him back eighteen months in less than a second. He knew Tessa’s stacking method as well as she did. Just looking at the piles, he knew to the book which ones she’d already read.
A bone-deep ache drove him into the small bathroom where Tessa’s sweet, sexy scent pervaded everything, the curtains, the shower, the cabinet whose door he yanked open.
Sweat poured off his face as he fished out a razor and then dug a bar of soap from a cellophaned pack of six. Why the hell did a woman on her own buy soap by the six-pack?
He straightened, meaning to grab what he needed and beat it. Instead, he stopped to inventory the rest of Tessa’s things. Nothing that belonged to a man. He wasn’t terribly surprised, except at the relief that flooded him.
This was ridiculous. She’d left him. He hadn’t asked her to go. He wasn’t the kind of needy jerk capable of mooning around Tessa’s room.
He slammed the cabinet door, pretty sure he’d lost his mind. Fortunately, the past eighteen months had taught him he didn’t need certified mental health to catch a killer.
TESSA HAD BARELY SUNG, cajoled and bribed Maggie to take a nap in her brand-new crib when the telephone rang. She grabbed the receiver and then buried it in her sweater, trying to keep the ringer from waking Maggie as she grabbed the baby monitor and bolted from her room.
Please let it be Weldon. She’d dialed his office after breakfast to ask if she could pick up some of Maggie’s belongings.
When he hadn’t returned her call by the time Maggie ate her second meal and began to scrub at her eyes with weariness, Tessa had gone out to buy a new crib. By some miracle she’d managed to set it up in her room while Maggie slept on a pile of quilts on the living-room floor.
At the bottom of the stairs, Tessa pulled the phone out of her sweater and whispered a hello, but instead of Weldon, her mother’s voice breathed her name.
“Are you all right? My neighbor just called to tell me about David. Why didn’t you call?”
“I’m fine, Mom.” How did the neighbor know the number of the bed-and-breakfast they were staying at in England? Amanda and Chad Lawlor, her parents, hadn’t left the number with her.
“Mrs. Hawkins said you found his body.”
“I’m fine,” she said again. Most of her conversations with her mother went this way. She tried to say whatever might be least likely to spawn a melodramatic reaction. Her mother drove forward.
“You have bad luck, Tessa. First you marry a guy who works with dead people. Now your best friend’s husband dies and you find him.”
Why argue that Noah tried to keep people alive, and David hadn’t gotten killed on purpose? Despite the fact the entire family had known David since he and Tessa were in kindergarten, her mom still couldn’t remember she’d met Joanna through David, not the other way around. Ladies didn’t have male best friends, unless they were hoping to date them.
“I blame it on Noah,” Amanda said.
“Mom, you like Noah, remember?”
“I’d like him better if he’d taken that lieutenant’s position. It was a much more respectable job, and I’ll bet you’d still be together if he’d stopped chasing unkempt, unfit criminals and devoted himself to you.”
“Mom, he’s here.” And who would be a kempt, fit criminal? “He came to help me because the police think I know something about David’s death.”
“What?” At her mother’s shocked bleat, Tessa scrambled to backtrack. A suspected murderess might find herself designated persona non grata in the Lawlor family.
“I don’t know anything, of course, but I was his partner, and because of Maggie, I’ll have indirect access to his assets.”
“Why ever would you not? You agreed to take care of little Megan. Why is Noah there again?”
“Maggie, Mom. David’s daughter is Maggie. And Noah came because he didn’t like the way the police treated me. I don’t want you calling here and saying something ugly to him.”
“As you said, I like the man. He’s gorgeous, after all. I just think he might have done better by you.”
“What happened between Noah and me, we did to each other.” Tessa changed the subject. “How’s Dad?”
“At a seminar at some hospital. That reminds me, dear, I have to get his tux cleaned. We have tickets for Madame Butterfly on Friday. Do you think this David thing will get you and Noah back together?”
“Mother, my friend was killed.”
“What happened anyway? Someone shot him? A robbery, honey?”
Her mother, a blasé citizen of Boston, obviously imagined a nice, clean death, a bullet that served its purpose with little or no trace. “No, Mom. He was stabbed.”
“Do you need us to come back to the States for the funeral?”
“No.” Noah was enough to face for now. “But thank you.”
“We want to be there for you.”
“Thanks, but too many people might confuse Maggie. Every time someone opens the door, she asks for David.”
“She’s another good reason for you and Noah to try again. You’re too fragile to take care of her by yourself.”
Fragile? She was anything but. “Thanks for the advice.”
“Call me after the funeral. Your father will want to know you’re fine, too.”
“All right, Mom.”
“I love you.”
“Me, too,