Did she like him?
She’d done this before.Trusted a man who gave her private smiles.Who looked at her as if she was a puzzle he personally needed to solve, who showed up steadily, who remembered little things about her.
Brent had been like that at first.Steady and certain and present.She’d trusted that steadiness, built a life on it, gave him children and her future and the softening of every defense she'd constructed before he came along.
And then he looked at someone else the same way he looked at her.
She set the untouched water glass in the sink and went to check on the kids.
She knew from bitter experience that the kind ones were the dangerous ones.They got all the way inside your walls before you thought to close the gate.The ones who knew exactly how to make you trust them because that was as natural to them as breathing.
Brent had been kind.He’d been thoughtful.He’d held her hand at her mother's funeral, answered her texts within minutes, remembered how she took her coffee, and never, in seven years, gave her any reason to doubt him.
Until he did.
She knew it wasn't fair to compare Gray to Brent.She also knew that one man's failures were not a verdict on every man who came after him.
She knew these things the same way she knew she should eat breakfast and get more sleep and call her father more often: intellectually, clearly ...and without the slightest practical effect on her behavior.
She lay awake until well after midnight and still no answers came to her about what she was supposed to do now.
5
The Cobbler Cove municipal records storage unit was located on the far edge of town past the grain elevator, a long, squat, cinder-block building designed by someone who believed utility was a virtue and beauty was a moral failing.
Gray got there at 8:25.His father, a military man, had taught his boys early that if they weren’t five minutes early, they were late.The storage facility was surrounded by a tall fence, so he parked beside the gate to wait for Bonnie.
It was a nice morning, so he got out and opened the notebook on the hood of his truck that he had brought with him.He reviewed the list of questions he hoped to answer by seeing the Shoemacher barn blueprints.
Bonnie pulled up beside him in her Subaru at eight thirty-three, looking harried.
“Rough morning?”he asked sympathetically.
She rolled her eyes by way of response.He would take that as a yes.
“You were early,” she teased, getting out of her car.
“I was on time,” he retorted, grinning.“You're late.”
“Barely.I had to drive the kids to school.We all overslept this morning and the kids missed the bus.”
“Well then, I’m impressed you’re only slightly late.”He held out the thermos he’d brought along.“Coffee?I’m guessing you didn’t have time to get any.”
She accepted it, took a sip, and groaned gratefully.It was a dark roast, no sugar, the way she drank it.She handed it back without comment.But he was fairly sure she noticed that he remembered how she liked her coffee.
If she could be a mature adult about this and concentrate on doing her job like the professional she was, so could he.
She entered the numeric code in the gate’s keypad and drove inside.He jumped into his truck and followed her through.The gate slid shut ponderously behind him.
She stopped in front of a unit about halfway down the long building, and he parked behind her.
She unlocked the heavy padlock and bent down, reaching for the steel door handle.Gray’s hand got there at the same time as hers, and their fingers brushed as they simultaneously reached for it.A shock raced up his arm and through his whole body, tingling all the way to the vicinity of his toes.Her fingertips were warm and soft.Feminine.
“Let me get that,” he murmured into her ear from a range of about twelve inches.
She looked at him, and their faces were no more than a foot apart.Her eyelashes were long and dark, framing her eyes.From this range he could see the ring of light brown around the outer edges of her irises, and green with flecks of gold in the center.
But as they stared at each other, her pupils dilated until only the brown ring was visible.He felt his own eyes widen in response.
