Killing Me Softly. Maggie Shayne

But I did what I had to do, and it was five years ago. I’m just not up to rehashing it all. Not now.”

      His eyes narrowed. She thought she saw a flash of anger, but he banked it fast. “It’s not all that important, anyway,” he said.

      Her brain immediately registered it as a lie.

      “Look, Bry, can we just skip all that for the moment? Just focus on what’s going on here and now instead? ’Cause this is a big thing, you being implicated in a murder. All this ancient history between us, it can wait. Can’t it?”

      He met her eyes. “It’s waited for five years already,” he said. “I’ve waited for five years.”

      “You weren’t exactly waiting,” she said. “I mean, this poor woman—she died in your bed, after all.”

      He lifted his brows and took two steps closer to her. “Does that bother you, Dawn?”

      “Of course not.” But she averted her eyes when she said it, cursing herself afterward for being so obvious.

      “Did you think I was going to be celibate for five years? Did you really think one night losing our virginity to each other was going to sustain either of us for the next half decade? ’Cause that’s crazier than talking to dead people.”

      “Let it go, Bry. I’m not up to this, not yet.”

      He watched her face for a moment, as if waiting for her to give something more away, and when she didn’t, he finally nodded. “Fine. It’s waited five years—it can wait a little longer.”

      She lifted her head and, gingerly, put a hand on his forearm, where it hung by his side. His biceps were big and hard. They hadn’t been before. His shoulders were broader, and his hair, as brown as milk chocolate, was longer than she’d ever seen it. She liked it long. It would be a shame when he had to cut it again to return to his job as a cop. If he was able to return to his job as a cop.

      She thought about saying so, then realized she’d been standing there with her hand on his biceps for a good minute and a half, in silence.

      “I want to help you get through this,” she said. “I want to help however I can.”

      “There’s nothing you can do.”

      “You know better.” She lowered her hand, reluctantly, but her eyes replaced it. Damn, he’d beefed up. “God, don’t you remember what a kick-ass pair of amateur detectives we were?” she asked, forcing her eyes to move upward and lock with his.

      “I thought we weren’t going to talk about the past.”

      She sighed deeply. “I don’t care how difficult you try to make this, Bryan. I’m staying, and I’m going to try to help.”

      “That’s kind of a switch from ‘Beth wouldn’t take no for an answer,’ isn’t it?”

      “Oh, come on. I would have come whether she asked me to or not, once I knew what was going on with you. Don’t pretend you don’t know me well enough to know that.”

      “I’m not sure I know you at all anymore.”

      She probed his eyes, looking for the emotion behind the words. Was it just anger, or was there also hurt, frustration, even worry? Or maybe a combination of all of the above? He must be going out of his mind with everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. And yet she resented him snapping at the friend who had come all the way across the country to help him. “You going to be an asshole the whole time I’m here, then?”

      “Probably.”

      “Well, just so I know up front. Look, I want to take a shower before dinner, so—”

      “Right. Go for it. I’m out of here.”

      He turned to go, but she went after him, grabbed his shoulder to turn him around, and then jerked her hand away as if the contact burned. Because it had. His shoulder was even more changed than his biceps. Big and hard, and so very different from her memories of him.

      “What do you mean, you’re out of here? You’re staying for dinner, aren’t you?”

      He met her eyes, and his face, harsh before, softened just a little. She had to wonder if that touch, no matter how brief, had hit him the way it had hit her. Like a fingertip to bathwater that was way too hot, making you pull it back fast and hiss through your teeth. Making your nerves jump from lazy complacence to screaming awareness.

      He sighed and said, “Yeah, I’m staying. And I’ll try not to be an asshole the entire time.”

      He almost smiled.

      She almost returned it.

      “That’s good,” she said. “Because I want to know everything, Bryan. Everything that happened, everything you can remember, including the stuff you haven’t told Josh or the police or your best friend.” She tightened her lips, thinking that she used to be his best friend. Wondering who filled that role today. And why the very thought was like a knife in her chest.

      He studied her for a long moment, and slowly something changed in his face. It was as if he were thinking of something troubling, something he hadn’t thought of before. He reached out, and to her utter surprise, he ran his fingertips from the crown of her head down over her hair, to where it hit her shoulder. “Dawn, I don’t know how safe it is for you to get too close to this. Or to me. Hell, I don’t know if it’s even safe for you to be here right now.”

      She frowned. “Why?”

      Beth called his name from downstairs, and he hesitated, then nodded as if making a decision. “There’s a lot to this you don’t know. But I’ll fill you in after dinner, okay?”

      “Okay.” She could have sagged in relief just then. Because for that moment he had seemed like the old Bryan. It had felt as if nothing had changed between them. But only for a moment. As soon as she smiled up at him, she saw the door behind his eyes slam closed. The moment was gone, and he was tense and defensive again.

      Beth called again, saying, “Nick’s on the phone, Bryan.”

      “Coming,” he called. Then he lifted a hand, a half wave that might have started out as something else—a touch, maybe—before morphing into the kind of halfhearted wave strangers offered one another. “See you at dinner, Dawn.”

      She nodded and watched him go, then closed her bedroom door, leaned her head briefly against it and wondered why her heart was contracting into a tiny stonelike lump in her chest and her throat had tightened to the point where it was hard even to breathe.

      She was feeling too much. Way too much. And way too soon. But at least she’d forgotten to worry about the dead.

      Odd that they hadn’t bothered her yet. She wondered why, then decided it was best to just count her blessings, as she headed for the shower.

      Bryan really hadn’t intended to be a jerk. But damn, there was something infuriating about being in the same room with Dawn, and he didn’t think it was due to stress over being a murder suspect.

      Now she sat across the dining room table from him, nibbling halfheartedly on her pot roast. She seemed to be ignoring the mouthwatering scent wafting from her plate to her nose. She barely touched the gravy-soaked vegetables and potatoes. She looked as if her mind were entirely elsewhere.

      For the first time Bryan wondered if she was seeing someone back on the West Coast. God, what if she was so touchy simply because she missed her lover?

      Suddenly he couldn’t stand the smell of the food, much less eat it. He started to push himself away from the table.

      “It’s just us here now, Bryan,” Josh said, finally breaking the tense silence that filled the dining room as surely as the aroma of Beth’s continuously simmering potpourri. “You can tell us everything. It’s not going any further.”

      Bryan felt the bottom fall out of his stomach at his father’s