been sitting on earlier. But at his touch Sara Morgan turned to him, and then she was in his arms, crying her heart out on his shoulder.
He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that—what was proper, what was not; what was procedure and what was human. He went with his gut and held her, and let her release the pain and the sadness. He couldn’t help but feel compassion for her. And when she looked up at him through those impossibly blue eyes magnified by tears, he couldn’t help but feel something more.
He wanted to lean down and kiss her. The invitation was on her softly parted swollen lips. Instead, he pulled a clean handkerchief from his hip pocket and pressed it into her hand.
“You should try to get some rest,” he murmured.
She nodded as the moment slipped away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, embarrassed, dabbing the handkerchief against her cheeks.
“No, don’t be. Don’t be,” he said softly, resting a hand between her shoulder blades. “Come on. You’re going to bed.”
“And what are you doing?” she asked as they walked toward the door.
“I’m spending the night on your sofa.”
38
“Would you like a cup of tea or coffee or something?” she asked him as she led the way through the house to the kitchen.
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Mendez said, taking in the surroundings: cream-painted cupboards and a hand- painted border of grapes dripping from vines around the ceiling. Her handiwork, he imagined. Down along a right- angled crease where a cabinet met a wall, she had painted a bright-eyed mouse peeking out of a hole in the baseboard—so realistic he almost startled when he first saw it.
“Please, call me Sara,” she said as she filled a mug with water and stuck it in the microwave oven that seemed to take up half the counter. “I’ll feel less embarrassed about having a nervous breakdown in front of you.”
“Sara, then,” he said, thinking it maybe wasn’t such a good idea to blur that line. “Do you have any family nearby?”
“I’m from the Seattle area. My parents are there. And my sister.”
“Are you close?”
“We used to be,” she said. She hit the Cancel button on the microwave before the timer could go off. “She’s got a family and a career. She’s busy. I’m busy.”
“You know, it’s none of my business—what’s going on in your marriage—but it just seems to me you shouldn’t try to go through it alone,” he said, then felt like an ass. “I should have stopped at ‘It’s none of my business.’”
She shook her head and dunked her teabag—something herbal by the scent of it—into the mug of water as she took a seat at the breakfast bar. “It’s okay. I’m sure I would say the same thing if I was watching from the outside. From the inside ... it’s not so simple.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
“I come from a perfect family,” she said. “I’m supposed to have a perfect family. I thought I did. What did I do wrong?”
Mendez felt a rush of anger. “You didn’t—”
“You don’t know that.” She smiled at him as if he were a sweet but dimwitted boy. “Nothing happens in a vacuum.”
He wanted to say at least ten derogatory things about her husband, but he bit his tongue.
“Maybe I’m too insecure,” she said. “Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe—”
“Maybe your husband is a son of a bitch.”
So much for his self-control.
“That too,” she said, and took a careful sip of her tea. “It’s hard on Wendy. I feel guilty for that. I’m the mom. I’m supposed to make her life ideal and shelter her from life’s unpleasant side. Instead, her father and I are wallowing there.”
“Then you need to change that.”
“I know,” she admitted. “It’s scary.”
“Do you think he’ll make it hard for you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
The bastard was a lawyer. He would know every way possible to screw her over in a divorce. He had probably been stashing assets for the past year. Keeping secrets seemed to be his specialty.
“Are you married, Detective?” she asked.
“No, ma’am—uh, no,” he said. He didn’t invite her to call him Tony. “No, I’m not.”
She seemed to think about that for a minute, as if she might have had a different idea about him.
“We used to be happy,” she said. “Not that long ago. And then something changed and neither one of us seemed to know what to do about it. It’s hard to explain. It was like one minute we were standing toe to toe, and then all of a sudden there was a chasm between us.”
She sipped her tea and shrugged to herself. “Maybe I wasn’t needy enough. And now that I am, it’s too late.”
“When did he become so involved with the Thomas Center?” Mendez asked, steering away from the too- personal details. He didn’t need more reasons to want to put his arms around her and protect her. That wasn’t his job. It was his White Knight Syndrome, as his sister Mercedes called it.
“Steve has always been involved in women’s rights causes. He had a single mother. It was a tough situation for him growing up. She passed away when he was in law school, and he dedicated himself to helping disadvantaged women in her honor.”
She smiled an ironic little smile. “That dedication was one of the first things that attracted me to him.”
Dedication was one thing, Mendez thought. Lobbying in Sacramento for women’s rights was terrific. Donating services to the Thomas Center was admirable. But that dedication also put Steve Morgan in a target-rich environment of women to take advantage of.
Sara sighed and slid down off her stool. “And now that you know more about my life than you ever wanted to know, I’m going to take your advice and go to bed. I have car pool in the morning.”
Mendez watched her dump her tea in the sink and rinse out the mug.
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “You don’t have to stay. Really. I’ll be fine.”
He didn’t believe her—or he didn’t want to believe her.
“You should take your own advice,” she said. “Go home and get some rest.”
The hell he would, he thought. Her husband had as good a reason to kill Marissa Fordham as anybody. And he had even more motive to kill the wife who was about to divorce him and take half of everything he had—plus alimony, plus child support.
But he said none of that to Sara.
“You’ll lock your door behind me,” he said as they went down the hall to the front of the house.
“Yes, sir.”
She gave him a little salute as he turned to say good night.
“And thank you,” she said sincerely. “For stopping to check on me, and for listening to me rattle on.”
“That’s okay,” he said with half a smile. “That’s a nice switch for me. In my line of work, most people don’t want to talk to me.”
“Too bad. You’re a good listener.”
An awkward little tension sprang up between them. It was like the end of a first date. Who should say what? Should he kiss her? No. Absolutely no.
“Thanks. Well, good night,” he said abruptly, and he turned and walked away.
