“And that means what?”
“That privacy isn’t as important as finding a murderer.” Gus sat back, moving into a slanting beam of sunlight.
I saw, in addition to reddened eyes, weary circles under them. “Right. Of course.” Quickly, I gave him all the names I could remember. “There were a few others I didn’t know.” I fiddled with my coat zipper. “It’s all my fault.”
“You killed Agnes?”
I looked up and saw the corners of his mouth twitching. “I thought law-enforcement officers weren’t supposed to have a sense of humor.”
“Don’t believe everything you read. And if you’re blaming yourself for inciting a riot by making that phone call last night, don’t. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.”
“Okay.” I’d never bought that kind of argument. It sat side by side with the but-all-my-friends-are-doing-it reasoning. “Thanks.”
“Thank you for doing your civic duty. It’s people like you who make our job easier.”
I shook hands and left, feeling worse than when I’d arrived.
I nodded to the officer at the front desk and walked out. I was head down, which was not the way to play the puck and not the way to walk down a downtown sidewalk, even if the sidewalk in question was in sleepy little Rynwood.
“Gotcha!” Firm hands gripped my shoulders, and my momentum carried us around in a small circle. “Sorry for grabbing, but you were about to walk straight into that barricade.” Evan Garrett looked down at me, blue eyes bright in a face still summer-tanned.
I suddenly realized his hands were warm on my shoulders. “Thanks for saving me.” I stepped back. “I’ll try to keep my head up from now on.”
“You’re welcome. How about lunch again?”
“What?”
“Lunch. The meal traditionally eaten at noon.” He smiled. “You are eating lunch today, aren’t you?”
“I did yesterday.” What a dumb thing to say. Not that it mattered. He was a jerk, and saying dumb things to jerks didn’t matter.
“How about now?”
A “thanks, but no, thanks” was on my lips. I had customers to cajole, invoices to pay, and Christmas books to order. I’d packed a peanut-butter-and-strawberry-freezer-jam sandwich for lunch and had intended to eat it while filling out order forms. And if I didn’t eat the sandwich today, I wouldn’t eat it at all. I hated waste, but I hated soggy PB&J even more.
As my mouth opened to say no, I noticed how fast the veins at his neck were pulsing. Either Evan Garrett had serious medical issues, or . . . or he was nervous. Which didn’t make any sense, because Beautiful People didn’t get nervous.
“You’re busy.” His mouth turned down at one corner. “I understand. Maybe some other time.”
“Wait.” I put out a hand and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. “Lunch is a great idea. I was just deciding where to go.”
He flashed a brilliant smile, and I smiled back in return, my heart suddenly and unaccountably light.
This is not a date, I told myself.
Evan and I slid into a booth at the Green Tractor—he on one side, I on the other. The waitress started to hand us menus.
“Thanks, Dorrie, but I don’t need one,” I said. “I’ll have my usual.”
“How about you, sir?” Dorrie put her pad on the table and leaned down to write my order, giving Evan an excellent view of her cleavage. Dorrie’s claim to fame was that she’d married and divorced the same man multiple times. I wasn’t sure of the current Dorrie/Jim status, but since I’d never seen her write down my order this way before, I’d say if Jim hadn’t been kicked out of the house yet, he was halfway through the door.
“What are you having?” Evan asked me. He didn’t even glance at the displayed skin.
“Fish sandwich with coleslaw.” I was in a rut, but it was a nice rut.
“Is it good?”
“All our food is good,” Dorrie said. “You look like a hamburger guy to me. We have a half-pound burger that can’t be beat.”
“You talked me into it,” Evan said. “And fries, too, please.”
“I’ll get you a big mound of ’em.” With a wink and a swish of her hips, Dorrie sauntered away.
I straightened the packets of sugar in the wire rack. “How’s it going at the store?”
“You mean, have I figured out a way to make it turn a profit for the first time in ten years?”
I started in on the fake sugar packets and tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t be inappropriate. “No one in his right mind would have bought that place” wasn’t going to work. “It’s a nice store,” I said.
Evan laughed.
“No, I mean it.” I centered the salt and pepper shakers. “Really. The wood floors and the tin ceiling, and those metal trays filled with nails you buy by the pound, and the smell . . .”
I was babbling again. What an idiot. I stopped talking and hoped Dorrie would show up with our drinks so I could bury my embarrassment in a mug of bad tea.
“The smell?” Evan asked, but he didn’t seem to be making fun of me. His voice was quiet and kind. “You mean that multilayered scent of raw wood and machine oil and fresh-cut metal and maybe . . .” He looked at his hands, and I could have sworn I saw a flush over those high cheekbones.
“The aroma of tradition?” I suggested. “Of wisdom?”
My palms tingled with an excitement I hadn’t known I could still feel. If I’d said something like that to Richard, he would have said my imagination was going to land me in trouble someday. But this gorgeous man was smiling at me, and I didn’t want him to ever, ever stop.
“Here you go!” With a double thud, Dorrie plopped tea and soda on the table. “Your food’ll be up in a sec.”
As mood-breakers go, this one worked like a champ. I remembered that I had two young children, who had been threatened by the mere mention of another man in my life, and I busied myself with dunking the tea bag.
“Did you hear about last night’s murder?” I asked.
Evan sat back against the booth’s cracking vinyl. “All morning,” he said, peeling the paper off the straw Dorrie had left. “Didn’t sound as if anyone was very sorry she was dead.”
“Well . . .” I held the tea bag above the mug and let it drip.
He grinned, and my heart did a quick tattoo against my rib cage. “You’re operating under the ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything’ theory, aren’t you?”
“Is there something wrong with being nice?” I asked.
“Cutting sarcasm is the trend.”
“Once I was trendy,” I said, “but it was an accident.”
His laugh made my breaths flutter fast. Oh, my. Oh, my, my. “It was paint,” I said. “Thanks to my daughter’s artistic talents, I needed to repaint the living room the day before a dinner party. I didn’t have time to go to the paint store, so I mixed up some different cans and slapped it up. Turned out to be the hip color of the month on HGTV.” It was the only time Debra O’Conner had ever given me a look of approval. Not that I cared.
Dorrie put our plates down. “Can I get you anything else?” She looked at Evan and, I swear, she batted her eyelashes.
“All set, thanks,” he said.
“Let me know if you need anything.” A couple more bats, and then she put her hand on her hip and waltzed
