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“I’ll just bet it did.”
“At least he didn’t live with his mother.”
“And Shane does?”
“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Will you please stop looking for trouble?” With a concerted effort, Catherine kept their conversation light for the remainder of the meal. Then as she left Joyce’s, she saw Luke’s car parked in front of her house and hoped she could take her own advice. But it was a challenge to remain calmly optimistic rather than desperately eager for love.
Luke had been sitting on the porch steps and leapt to his feet as Catherine came up the walk. He brushed off the seat of his pants and raked a hand through his hair before greeting her. “I swear I’m not stalking you.”
“That’s a relief. How long did you plan to wait?”
He shrugged. “As long as it took.”
She slipped by him to unlock her door. “Come on in. What’s happened, has another lowlife been murdered?”
“I don’t know, maybe. We can always hope.”
Catherine left her keys on the table beside the door and held up a plastic storage bag filled with cookies. “I had dinner with my Neighborhood Watch buddy, and she makes great cookies. Would you like some?”
“Do you have any milk? I haven’t had milk and cookies in years.”
She wished all his requests were so easy to fill. “Sure, I have milk.”
Luke sat at the breakfast table while she turned on the fire under the teakettle and poured his milk into a glass. She got out a plate for the cookies and brought them to the table with the milk and napkins.
“Thanks,” Luke said. “I just came by to say that I was wrong, yet again. I do have a heart, but it’s shriveled to the size of a raisin.”
She sank into a chair, slid her hand over his and gave his fingers an affectionate squeeze. “From what I’ve heard, milk and cookies are the recommended treatment for shriveled heart syndrome.”
He laughed in spite of himself. “I’m trying to be serious, Catherine.”
“So am I, but not too serious, and it’s far easier to relax here than at Lost Angel.”
“Yes, it sure is.” He grabbed a cookie with his free hand and took a bite. “Say, these are good.”
“Joyce swears she just uses the recipe on the bag of Nestle Toll House Morsels, but somehow her cookies are always especially good.”
“That’s a gift, isn’t it?”
“I suppose. She’s frantic a certain man’s mother won’t like her, and it just occurred to me that you haven’t mentioned your parents other than to say they insisted upon a wedding. Are they still living?”
He swallowed a gulp of milk before replying. “I’ll say. They’re in their mid-sixties and still have more energy than most people half their age. My father’s a geologist, and he and my mother travel a good part of the year. Their home is in Tucson now, where he does some work for the University. Arizona is a great place to study rock formations.”
“If you’re into that kind of thing,” Catherine amended.
“Right, and I wasn’t. Not that I didn’t love dinosaurs as much as any other boy, but people were always more interesting to me than fossils. So I became a psychologist and swiftly learned the more I studied, the less I knew. I’ll try to find time to look up some statistics on serial killers, though, so we’ll be ready for Garcia and Salzman the next time they show up at our door.”
At the teakettle’s whistle, she got up to make her tea and brought it to the table. “If it weren’t for Lost Angel, we wouldn’t have met, but I’m afraid the tensions there will make everything doubly difficult for us.”
He reached for another cookie. “That’s just modern life. It’s complicated everywhere.”
“Please don’t be flippant.”
“I wasn’t,” he denied. “It’s the truth.”
“I’ve heard truth described as a matter of opinion.”
