When I Dream Of You

“That was good. Thanks.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Please.” He put his dishes in the dishwasher while she poured two cups of coffee.

She joined him at the table and removed the folder from the manila envelope. Laying it on the table in front of him, she said, “This is all the information Jess and I have collected from the official files and the newspapers.”

“Nice to have relatives in the sheriff’s office, huh?”

He didn’t cast any particular inflection on the words, so she wasn’t quite sure how to take the statement. Ignoring it, she was silent while he perused the reports. When he came to the photos, he studied each of them in detail.

It was a few minutes after ten when he finished.

“What do you think?” she asked, getting up to refill their cups.

“You were right. The sailboat isn’t as far down as I thought. Maybe it won’t be an impossible task.”

“To float it to the surface?”

He gave her an appraising glance as if reassessing her intelligence. His expression was stony.

“Jess thought maybe that was why you wanted the compressor, to float the Mary Dee to the top. He said with the two motorboats, we could probably pull her in.”

“Oh, he did, did he? Did you discuss this with anyone else that I should know about?”

“Well, Kate was here.”

His lips thinned to a straight line. She returned his scowl with no expression whatsoever. Slowly his frown changed from anger to…she wasn’t sure what.

“You drive me crazy when you do that,” he at last said.

“What?”

“Look at me like that. Your eyes are fathoms deep and mysterious, like a mossy pool hidden in the woods. You’re good at disguising your thoughts.”

She blinked in mild shock at his words. “So are you.”

His gaze continued to move over her, from her eyes downward to her mouth, where he lingered for a long moment, then a quick flick along her shirt, then back to her eyes.

Heat slid gently up her neck and into her face. Her breath went jerky until she forced herself to breathe deeply several times. She stared at him, into eyes that seemed to be charcoal rather than silvery-gray tonight.