“Still because of her?” she asked curiously.
“To a certain extent, yes,” he said. He turned, looked at her, and asked, “Why all the questions?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a teasing voice. “Maybe I’m checking out all the girlfriends in my head to see who’d suit.”
He rolled his eyes at that. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not gonna be set up again.”
“Ah,” she said with a smile. “Well, maybe it’ll just be the two of us then.”
“You know what? I’m damn fine with just the two of us,” he said. “Because, when you think about it, in many ways, it’s only ever been the two of us. Everybody else seemed to go off and do their own thing.”
“So did we,” she reminded him. “They just all seemed to do a better job of it.”
He laughed at that. “I hate to say it, but you’re quite right.” He paused. “We’ll go home,” he said, “and I’ll come back early in the morning and see what I can find.”
“Good enough.” As she led the way back, they detoured around the cops until they got to the vehicle. She loaded up the dogs, and, once inside, she said, “It’s kind of sad that somebody lay here dead, and nobody knew, nobody cared.”
“Well, the people who cared probably don’t know he’s dead,” he said quietly. “Leave it to the police. I’m sure they can figure it out.”
“Maybe,” she said, “it’s hard to walk away though. I want to know who he is and what he was doing here and if he had any family to mourn his death.”
“Well, that’s fine. We can stay in touch with the detective. He might tell us something.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “Just think about it. It’ll be one of those cases of ‘read it in the news.’”
“Maybe.” He looked at her and said, “You have good skills hunting down information,” he said, “just because of your job. So don’t let anybody stop you from doing what you want to do.”
She smiled. “I hear you.”
“I’m still surprised you’re at the law firm,” he mentioned, as they drove back home again.
“The paycheck’s decent,” she said. “Not as much as if I were a lawyer. But I get to walk away at the end of the day and come home and work on the house.”
“Right,” he said with a smile. “I forget the house is your current love.”
“Yep, likely to be my only one too,” she admitted.
“Nobody in your world?”
“Nope, not since the divorce.”
He gave a laugh. “We’re a hell of a pair, aren’t we?”
“Yep, like always,” she said with a smile. “We’re a great match.” And she left it at that.
Laysha’s words had a prophetic meaning to them because he had wondered, at one point in time, why the hell the two of them weren’t together. Instead they’d both gone off in different directions. There was absolutely everything to love about her. And he figured he’d been half in love with her since he was even a teenager. But then, somehow, he got hooked up with Sarah, his ex-wife, and Laysha had hooked up with Paul. It’s almost as if they were busy being busy in order to avoid what they were really feeling. He wondered if that was even true or whether that was just more made-up bullshit in his head.
One of the thoughts that did cross his mind as he drove them back to her place was that this was a hell of a time to figure it out. They just had themselves to deal with right now. No interfering family members. Sure, he would have to show up for the wedding and be good for a little while. He still couldn’t believe that he came all the way across the country because Laysha had asked him to. It had nothing to do with the wedding. But maybe him coming for Laysha said an awful lot about how he felt about her.
He acknowledged these feelings again. He didn’t want to before because he couldn’t risk ruining this perfect friendship in his life. Instead here he was, sitting with her, wondering how to take it to the next step. And even that thought surprised him because it hadn’t occurred to him, until it came up this time, what he was looking at doing. It’s almost as if he’d been biding his time all these years. And here he was now, looking at how to make something of his past that he had walked away from a long time ago—when he shouldn’t have.
Chapter 5
The next morning Laysha woke up and stretched, delighted to have some time off so that she could get back to work on her house. As she got up and went downstairs, the emptiness of the house made her feel funny. She walked to the spare bedroom door, which was open, and found the bed was empty. “Well, you said you would leave early this morning, but I wasn’t thinking you were leaving that early,” she muttered.
She hadn’t even woken up when he left. That gave her an odd feeling. It was weird to think that somebody could walk around her house, and she wouldn’t notice. She set about making coffee and feeding her four dogs. She made breakfast, all the time looking out the window to see if Caleb would come back anytime soon. Yet she didn’t want him to feel like he had to check-in because that was too pushy and nosy and clingy.
As it was, she bustled around, talking to her dogs, cuddling them a bit, then getting ready for the day’s work that she had planned to do in the upstairs guest bathroom. She was serious about getting that vanity in today, had actually hoped to have it all done before Caleb arrived but didn’t quite make it.
As she lined up everything that she needed, she heard the dogs
