LITMIR.BIZ

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on thick, told me how much she’d consider it a personal favor to her….”

      “She guilted you into coming over here?”

      “She’s good at convincing people to do what she wants,” he said, so solemnly that Faith blinked. “She thought if I helped you with your water heater problem, it’d make up for you being ticked off at me and we could all hold hands, sing songs of friendship and skip off over some fairy-tale rainbow.”

      Faith cleared her throat. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”

      “Yeah, well, Brit wants everyone to get along. She’s always been that way, even as a kid.” He tapped the toolbox with the toe of his work boot. “She loves me and considers you a friend, so she wants us to tolerate each other.”

      Panic knifed through Faith. Friends? Her and Britney? Why did all the Colettis want to be her friend? Britney was her boss. Period. Besides, when you were friends with people they did things like send their brother to your house. She hadn’t missed all those hints Britney had given her these past few months about how wonderful Nick was, how perfect he’d be for some lucky woman.

      That lucky woman obviously being Faith.

      “If you want me gone,” Nick said, “just say the word.”

      Oh, she wanted. But she’d long since learned that it didn’t matter what she wanted.

      She’d play nice with Nick, show him she was just a single mother trying to get by, and then he’d stop looking at her as if she was a suspect in one of his cases.

      Damn it, she and Austin were done running. And Nick Coletti wasn’t going to change that.

      “I APPRECIATE YOU checking the water heater.” Faith sounded sincere. So why did Nick have the feeling she’d rather eat her apple core then let him in?

      “No problem.” He picked up his toolbox and stepped over the threshold, his bare arm brushing against hers, causing his skin to prickle with awareness.

      Faith shrank back as if she wished she could disappear into the wall. She shut the door. “Uh…it’s in the basement.”

      Nick nodded and took the room in with a quick glance. She sure liked bright colors. If the porch hadn’t proved that, her living room did. The walls were painted a sunny yellow, the plump sofa was green with pink-and-white pillows that matched the high-backed, pink-checked chair in the corner. He squinted and hoped all the cheeriness didn’t burn his retinas.

      Talk about a surprise. Going by how she dressed, he would’ve guessed Faith’s home to be more subdued. And much more beige.

      He followed her as she put the phone back in its receiver on a small green-painted table next to the sofa before going into the long kitchen. The cupboards had been painted white and in the middle of the room stood a narrow island with a cooktop on one side and an eating bar on the other, flanked by two high-backed wooden stools.

      Austin sat on one of the stools, reading. “I’ll get dinner going as soon as I show Mr. Coletti where the water heater is,” Faith told her son.

      Nick shifted his toolbox to his other hand. “Why don’t you let Austin show me where it is? That way you can go ahead and work on dinner.”

      She looked at him as if he’d asked her the impossible. See? It was things like that, along with her reaction to his giving Austin that five bucks, that had him so damn curious about her.

      “That’s not necessary,” she assured him, tossing the apple core into the garbage can in the corner. “It’ll only take a min—”

      “I don’t want him to lead me into battle,” Nick interrupted. There he was, trying to do her a favor, and she acted as if she didn’t trust him around her kid. “If it makes you feel better, why don’t you point me in the general direction of the basement? I’m sure with a map, a compass and maybe a decent GPS unit, I’ll find my way before nightfall.”

      “That won’t be necessary.” But her tone indicated it wasn’t altogether out of the realm of possibility, either.

      “It’s okay, Mom,” Austin said. “I’ll show him.”

      He jumped off the stool and Nick followed him to a door at the end of the room. Austin flipped on a light and led the way down the wooden stairs, trailing his hand along the stone walls as he descended. The farther down they went, the cooler it got. And the mustier it smelled.

      Nick followed Austin past the washer and dryer, a furnace that had to be at least as old as his mother, and a few large plastic totes that had “Winter Clothes” printed neatly on the sides. That was it for storage.

      He set his toolbox down, opened the lid and took out his trouble light. “I take it your mom’s not the sentimental type?”

      Austin wiped the back of his hand under his nose. “Huh?”

      Spotting an outlet, Nick plugged the hanging light in and flipped it on. Laid it on the floor, where light shot up onto Austin’s pale face. The kid sure didn’t spend much time outside. When Nick was Austin’s age, he’d already turned two shades darker. Of course, his olive complexion tanned easily, whereas Austin seemed to take after his fair-skinned mother. That and his eyes were about the only similarities between mother and son.

      “Sentimental. You know, mushy about baby clothes and old toys. Most moms keep everything from drawings you made when you were three, to your first lost tooth, to all your report cards.”

      His mother’s basement wasn’t half this size, but she’d managed to stuff it with a whole lot more than Faith had. Hell, when Nick had gone down last winter to change her furnace filter, he’d spied his old hockey skates. Why did women hold on to stuff like that?

      Austin shrugged. “My mom’s not like that. She says the most important thing is that we’re together, not holding on to material things.”

      And if that wasn’t a direct quote from Faith, Nick would eat his badge.

      “Your mom’s right. People are more important than things.” Although he couldn’t imagine any mother who didn’t have at least a small box of keepsakes. But if Faith had one, she didn’t keep it in this eerily empty basement. “And now you have more room to store all your winter stuff.” When Austin stared at him blankly, Nick added, “Things like your sleds, shovels, boots and hats and gloves. Not to mention all your holiday decorations.”

      “We don’t have any of that,” Austin said.

      Nick searched for somewhere to hang his light, trying not to reveal what he was thinking. It was weird they didn’t have any winter gear. Weird, but hardly illegal, or any reason for his instincts to be kicking in. There could be a reasonable explanation. “I take it you’ve never lived up north during winter before? Never been around snow?”

      Austin shook his head—either as a negative response or to flip his hair out of his eyes. “Nah, I’ve seen snow. We had a shovel and I even had a sled when we lived in Serenity Springs and—”

      Guilt and panic, two emotions Nick saw often when he interrogated suspects, flashed across Austin’s face. Apprehension, suspicion, tickled the back of Nick’s neck. He rubbed at it but the tickle wouldn’t go away.

      He wasn’t going to interrogate the kid—just ask him a few questions. Maybe get a feel for the real story behind Faith’s secretiveness. What was the worst that could happen? If he was wrong, getting the kid to talk about himself wouldn’t hurt anything.

      Hey, he was a cop. He justified using sneaky tactics all the time.

      “What kind of sled did you have?” Nick asked.

      “A round, plastic one,” Austin muttered, staring at the floor.

      “My nephew has one of those,” he said, giving up on hanging his light. Hopefully, it’d cast enough of a glow from the floor for him to see what he was doing. “That thing really flies.”

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