Sleeping Beauty Suspect

She didn’t smile. In fact she looked horrified.

“Hey, that’s my ego you’re trampling.”

“Prince Phillip.”

Flynn stared at her. “What?”

“In Sleeping Beauty his name was Prince Phillip, not Prince Charming.”

He grinned wryly. “I’ll be sure and point that out to them. Do you like eggs?”

“What?” She shook her head as if to clear it. “Eggs?”

“Yeah, you know, those white oval things with the thin shells and yellow centers? Hens lay them, people eat them. You aren’t allergic, are you?”

“Of course not. What are you talking about?”

She followed him to the kitchen.

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. Lots of people are allergic to eggs. I’m talking about feeding us. I’m starving. I know there’s a nice big steak in the fridge with my name on it, but I’m not sure what else is in there. I’m thinking steak and eggs and toast. Or maybe baked potatoes. I might still have a couple of them left. I was going to go shopping after I came off shift. I know there’s an apple. There might even be enough lettuce left for a salad. If you don’t want to eat you can watch me.”

He began pulling ingredients from his refrigerator. Eggs, cheese, green pepper, there were even grapes and a couple of apples and ice cream for dessert. Plenty of stuff to cobble something decent together.

“You cook?”

“Don’t sound so horrified. We take turns cooking at the station all the time. I’m no gourmet, but I’m not so bad. Burning things is frowned on at a fire station.”

He turned the gas on under the cooktop’s grill. “Of course that doesn’t stop Smokey, so nicknamed because he was foolish enough to start a grease fire one night. He’ll never live that one down.”

“You don’t have to cook for me,” she managed to say.

“No, but it seems rude to cook for myself and then eat it in front of you.”

“I can’t stay here.”

He began pulling more ingredients from the refrigerator. “I don’t remember inviting you to stay. I’m just offering to cook us some dinner while we talk. Or did you eat when you changed clothing?”

“No, but…” She started coughing again and took several more sips from the water glass.

“Pull up a stool at the counter and stop trying to talk. I’ll impress you with my mastery. My stomach is making demands. And I believe that’s yours rumbling in agreement?”

She blushed again. After a moment’s hesitation she took a seat at the breakfast bar, still striving to control the urge to cough.

“Don’t fight it too much. You need to purge those lungs. Let’s see what else we have in here.”

There was only one potato so he went with the eggs, conscious of her eyes watching him with a bemused expression. “Don’t you cook?”

“Not very often,” she admitted.

“I like to cook. Mom wanted me to become a chef instead of a fireman but this way I get the best of both worlds.”

Her expression was understandably confused. He was deliberately trying to keep her off balance so she wouldn’t leave. That pleat between her eyes wasn’t new. She was a worrier and she wasn’t sure what to make of him. It only made sense. He was a big, muscular guy and she was alone in a strange house with him. She was understandably nervous. Any sane young woman would be, so he did his best to appear nonthreatening as he chopped onions and the green pepper that had passed its prime but was still usable.

“You can call me Kathleen,” she announced abruptly.

He looked up. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Why not give me your real name? Or is it something unique like Cher or Sting or—”

“That is my name.”

“Your first name?”

Her gaze dropped. “Middle,” she admitted. “My first name is Whitney.”

“See? That wasn’t so hard. Whitney Kathleen…what?” He turned to the cooktop and flipped the steak.

“Charles,” she added after a long hesitation.

“Well, Whitney Kathleen Charles is unusual, but not all that unique. Certainly better than Beulah. That was my mother’s cousin’s first name. She hated it. Everyone called her Bee and she wasn’t too fond of that, either, but she claimed her middle name was even worse. I never did learn what that was, come to think of it. I’ll have to remember to ask Mom one of these days.”

“Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

Slender shoulders rose and fell quickly. “You don’t even know me.”

“Hey, cut me some slack. I’m working on it. I’m trying to put you at ease.” He smiled at her. “Is it working?”

She didn’t smile back, but he thought some of the tension eased from her shoulders.

“How come you disappeared from the hospital this morning?”

The tension returned. A barely perceptible shudder ran through her. “I don’t like hospitals.”

“Something else we have in common. Noisy, smelly places.”

“People die there.”

He filed that away for later sensing this wasn’t a good place to probe at the moment.

“Well, you came pretty close to asphyxiating in the fire. Oxygen would have helped. And it would have been better to have told someone you were leaving.”

He had a strong urge to rub that pleat between her eyes away so he kept his fingers busy rinsing lettuce for the salad.

“The press is going to find out who you are sooner or later, you know,” he warned. “A beautiful woman in an expensive evening dress inside an abandoned house that someone set on fire? That’s a story they’re bound to keep in the headlines for a while.”

Her fingers trembled. “You’re saying the fire wasn’t an accident?”