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“Please.” Without thinking, he covered her hand with his. “I didn’t want to take all this home. I thought you and Jacob could enjoy it. Please,” he repeated, looking from her face to his hand, still resting on hers. He felt quivering tension and the fineness of the bones beneath his fingertips and palm.
Damn.
He pulled his hand back. What kind of idiot was he? That she, too, slipped occasionally into thinking of him as a man rather than a detective didn’t help, only heightening his awareness of her.
This moment, he absolutely could not tell what she was thinking. She did pull the plate back toward her and, after a tiny hesitation, resume eating.
Breaking the tension, Jacob demanded, and got, another cookie. Seth asked what he’d done today, then tried to piece the answer together from an indignant insistence that Neil had hit him, but Jenna told a story with puppets and they ate mac cheese and he didn’t want to go to Jenna’s today, he wanted to stay with Mommy. At least, that’s what Seth thought he’d said. Some of his words were clear, some incomprehensible, although Seth could tell the boy’s mother understood every one.
At last Helen lifted him to the floor. While she was still bent over, he whispered something.
She ran her hand gently over his head and smiled, her face softening. “Yes, you may play with your animals for a few minutes, but then it will be bedtime.”
He scampered away, her gaze following him. The tenderness changed to worry.
“Usually, he loves his day care, but today he cried and refused to let me go. It was...really hard.”
Before Seth could offer sympathy, she set down her fork and lifted her chin. “Can we get this over with? I have to get Jacob ready for bed, and fold laundry, and—”
“I get it,” he said gruffly. We are not friends. “You said you lived in Hollywood.”
“North Hollywood,” she corrected.
“Okay.” He leaned back. “Were you still married then?”
She became very still, only her eyes vividly alive. Before he could prod her, though, she exclaimed, “What difference does it make?”
“I need to know you if I’m to find out what connects you and Andrea.”
“But...I didn’t meet her until I arrived here in Lookout.” Helen’s bewilderment appeared genuine. “If she ever lived in California, she didn’t say so to me.”
They went back and forth. She didn’t want to tell him any specifics. Not her former employer, sure as hell not her ex-husband’s name, although she did imply the move here came on the heels of the split from her spouse.
“I don’t want any contact with him,” she repeated stubbornly.
“Because he might try to take Jacob from you?”
“No!” She tried to sear him with her eyes, but mostly Seth thought she was afraid. “I’ve already told you all this! He never wanted children. It’s me—”
“He didn’t want to let you go,” he said slowly, his protective instincts firing up at the very idea of her being terrorized by any man.
“No,” she whispered. “At the end, he said he’d kill me if I tried to leave him. I had to get away and hide before I could get legal help to divorce him.”
Seth forced himself to take a mental step back. He still couldn’t be sure there was a brutal, possessive ex-husband at all. The possibility existed that she was really afraid of him, the detective who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“How did you escape him?” he asked.
“I went to a battered women’s shelter,” she said with such dignity, he felt chastened.
Or was manipulated a better word?
Damn, it was hard to hold on to his usual detachment.
“I can check out this man’s whereabouts without drawing attention to you. I promise,” he said. “All I need is a name.”
Helen pressed her lips together and glared at him.
“It doesn’t make you even a little nervous that a woman who looks a lot like you was murdered a few days ago here in your kitchen?” He turned in his chair, zeroing in on a stretch of the vinyl floor. “Right about there, if I remember right.”
Her gaze followed his, her expression suddenly stricken.
