That got his attention. He tore his gaze from her and started propping the pictures up, nearly tipping over three more in his haste to clean up after himself. “Sorry,” he said. She could have sworn he blushed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I shouldn’t have so many on that table anyway. They’re bound to fall over.” Part of her was thinking at how pleased her grandmother Fergusson would have been to hear her taking the blame on herself, like a good southern belle. Another part of her was acutely aware that under her all-enveloping robe, she was naked.
That thought must have occurred to Russ as well, because when he turned back to her, he looked not at her face but at the tie belted around her waist. Her heart was trip-hammering, blood like heated honey flowing through her veins, raising her body temperature until it seemed the cloud of steam was still with her, enveloping her in dampness and warmth.
He looked at her, his blue eyes that crackled like the glaze on a Japanese pot, and the fierceness and the ache she saw there dropped the bottom out of her stomach and made her go loose-limbed.
She stepped toward him. Something flared in his eyes. She took another step. She wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t stop. She was alone with him, in her own house, on her own time, and they were both adults, and why should she stop? She
She took another step. It was easy. She wanted to laugh. She took another-
– and he looked away. Turned his whole body, so that he was edge on toward her, and she thought stupidly,
“Don’t,” he said, his voice tight.
In an instant, every cell in her body was icebound. She had never been so mortified in her life. “I’m sorry,” she managed to get out through her constricted throat. “I’m so sorry. I was-”
“For chrissakes, Clare, it’s not that.” He wouldn’t face her. “What, do you think I don’t want you?” He clenched his hands. “I can’t be responsible for both of us. You sashay across the room with your eyes saying,
She stared at him. He stared at her. She felt her lips twitch. Then grin. Then she started laughing, hard, clutching her stomach through the robe.
“Okay, okay.” He sounded abashed, but he was grinning, too. “The monk remark was not well thought out.”
Sighing from laughter, she wiped her eyes. “I love you,” she said.
She had never told him that straight out, without an apology. He looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I love you, too,” he said.
They stood there, three feet apart, not knowing what to say. Clare glanced down to where her feet were peeking out from underneath the robe. “Well,” she said finally. “Now that we’ve covered that, would you like some soup?”
She walked to the kitchen without waiting for his reply, knowing that doing something, keeping busy, was the safest course. And even though she wasn’t the least bit hungry at the moment, she also knew she’d be starving once he left.
She had her head in the fridge when Russ pushed through the swinging doors separating the kitchen from the living room. “What kind of soup?” he asked. She could hear it in his voice, too, a deliberate attempt to be casual, as if the two of them hanging out in her house while she was practically undressed was a normal thing.
“Butternut squash. I made it yesterday. It has squash, onions, chicken broth, peanut butter.” She pulled the Tupper-ware bowl from the bottom shelf and placed it on the counter.
“Uh…” He looked dubious. “I’ll pass.”
She shrugged. “More for me.” She retrieved a pot from the dish drainer and poured the soup in.
“So,” she said, opening the fridge again and bending down for the good bakery bread. “If you didn’t come here to have your way with me, why did you come?”
Silence. She straightened, turning, in time to catch him staring at her rump. His eyes looked glazed. “Uh,” he said.
Flustered, she nearly dropped the bread. She grabbed at the first topic to come to mind. “You said you were on your way back from the ME’s office. What’s happening in the van der Hoeven case?”
His eyes snapped into focus. “Ed Castle’s off the hook. Dr. Dvorak confirmed that Eugene died from a fall. As in, off the tower where we found his body.”
“The tower?”
“I told you about it, remember? A nineteenth-century folly.” He flattened his hands on the kitchen table. “Even if I could spin a theory whereby Ed chased Eugene up to the top of the tower and threw him off, the weird setup we found would argue for something entirely different. What different thing it was, I don’t know yet.”
“What did you find?”
“It looks like someone was being held there. There was food, articles of clothing, blankets…”
“Good Lord. Millie van der Hoeven?”
“That’s my thought. The crime tech guys didn’t find any prints, but there were a number of long blond hairs around.”
“Becky Castle has long blond hair,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but she wasn’t unaccounted for for any length of time. Besides, we know who assaulted her. Lyle interviewed her when she got out of surgery.”
Clare stopped, her serrated knife halfway through the loaf. “Who?”
“A guy named Randy Schoof.”
“Is he related to Lisa Schoof? The woman who works at Haudenosaunee?”
“They’re married.
She shook her head. That poor young woman. “How do you handle something like that?”
“Obviously, we keep Mark away from that investigation. Believe me, there’s more than enough to keep him busy elsewhere. He’s following up on a black Mercedes some of the search and rescue guys saw driving up to Haudenosaunee before Eugene died.”
“You think the driver might be Eugene’s killer?”
“At this point, I’m more concerned with finding Millie van der Hoeven. There’s nothing I can do to help Eugene now. But Millie… hell, I have no idea if she’s alive, if she’s dead, what she was doing in that tower room, who was keeping her there.”
“Sounds frustrating.”
“It is.” He sniffed at the soup. “Can I have a taste of that?”
She slid the bowl along the counter. He downed a spoonful. Then another. He looked at her, surprised. “Is it too late to change my mind?”
She grinned. “According to my theology, never.” She fetched another bowl from the cupboard and filled it from the pot. “Let’s eat in the living room,” she said. “My feet are cold.”
He took both bowls from her while she slapped the bread on a plate and followed him through the swinging doors. He laid the bowls carefully on the square coffee table before sinking into one of the cushy chairs facing each other across it. She settled the bread plate between the bowls, then turned on two lamps and the CD player. She glanced out the window before sitting down. “It sure gets dark early these days.”
“It’s November.”
She tucked her feet under her and smiled. “I didn’t get a chance to say this before, but happy birthday.”
He looked embarrassed.
“So you’re fifty now.”
He leaned forward, put his face in his hands, and groaned.
“That’s really, really old.”
He gave her a stony look. “Brat.”
She laughed. “Then don’t be in such a funk about it. As my grandmother used to say, getting old isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” She picked up her soup bowl. “What do you want for your birthday?”
“To find Millie van der Hoeven alive and well and to nail Eugene van der Hoeven’s killer.”
