LITMIR.BIZ

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      While David stood beside her at the lab table, Amanda stored her drawing boards, wondering what kind of coward buried a woman and walked away, leaving her body to be ravaged by animals and the elements.

      She didn’t know. Didn’t care to. All she knew was sitting in that lab, staring at the skull, sketching based on estimations of tissue depth, she’d experienced a buzz, the high of having the ability to change the course of an investigation—something her mother used to talk about. Amanda had never experienced it. Never quite understood the lure of forensic work. As a kid, she’d thought it all seemed...morbid...and she hadn’t grasped what her mother found so intriguing.

      Until today.

      She thought about her workbench back in the studio where a forensic workshop registration—the one she kept putting off—was weighted down by a giant conch shell she’d found on a trip to Florida when she was nine. A shell her mother had uncovered while wading in the surf.

      I know, Mom. I know. Every day she’d been without her mother, she’d never doubted her presence.

      Beside her, David stepped closer and she glanced up, their gazes locking because when he pinned those haunting dark blue eyes on her, she couldn’t resist the pull of them reaching right in and paralyzing her.

      Something she didn’t want to feel. With anyone.

      “Everything okay?”

      “Fine.”

      Breaking eye contact, she studied the intricate stitching on the shoulder of his jacket and the way the seam fell at exactly the right spot, the cut so perfect for his big body that she realized it might be nice, sometime soon, to have sex.

      And wow. What a mess her mind was today. She couldn’t deny there was a certain heat between them. From the time she’d opened her front door, she’d felt it. That simmer.

      “This project,” she said, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t be overheard by Paul, who patiently waited for them to get packed up. “It’s complicated.”

      Receiving her message that she didn’t want Paul eavesdropping, David dipped his head lower. “The sketching?”

      No. You. “It’s more than that.”

      Because with him she felt things, tingly things that made her system hum, gave her a little high. If only she liked that high. Highs and lows, in her experience, shattered lives. But it had been so long since she was beyond her personal safe zone. Since she allowed herself to immediately feel a certain way about a man. About this man. Feelings like that messed with her emotions, brought her to places that terrified her. For ten years she’d worked to not turn into a person tortured by her own emotions.

      But David kept surprising her. In a good way. In a way that made something warm and gooey chase away the cold, empty heartbreak she’d felt in the lab. That alone was worth...she didn’t know. She’d simply never met anyone who affected her this way. And so quickly.

      Needing to get her mind right, she shook her head and stored her iPod in her bag while the quiet in the lab made her arms itch. Too quiet.

      “When I was nine,” she said, “my mom found a conch shell on the beach in Florida. I have it on my workbench where I can see it every day. It’s a paperweight for important things. Right now one of those things is a registration form for a forensic workshop I’ve been thinking about taking. Pretty high-level stuff. I keep putting off registering.”

      “Why?”

      She gave up on packing her things and faced him. “My mother was a forensic artist.”

      His eyebrows lifted. “She doesn’t do it anymore?”

      “She died. Ten years ago. Killed herself.”

      Wow, Amanda. Totally on a roll here. That miserable fact had only been spoken a handful of times and each time to people who’d proved their loyalty. People she could trust. Apparently, David was now one of those people.

      “I can’t imagine that. I’m sorry.” He stood, unmoving, his face completely neutral, no judgment or horror, just a mild curiosity over whether she’d continue.

      “Thank you. But I’m only telling you so you understand. She did a drawing once that helped convict a man of murder. He went to prison for a few years and was later exonerated. She never forgave herself.”

      His head snapped back and Amanda held up her hand. “She didn’t kill herself over it, but it didn’t help. My mother always battled depression. She may have been bipolar. I’m not sure. All I know is that there were tremendous highs followed by days she couldn’t get out of bed. Work was her savior. She loved making a difference. After that man was exonerated she never did another sketch. Never. I think the loss of her work sent her into a spiral she couldn’t come out of.”

      “And now we’re asking you to do a reconstruction.”

      “Yes.”

      David cracked his neck, finally showing some indication of his thoughts. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have pressured you.”

      “I’ll do the sculpture,” she said.

      For a moment he stood in his spot, his face deadpan, not even a flinch as dead air clogged the space between them. “I’m... Wow. What made you change your mind?”

      So many things. My mother. An unidentified dead woman. She pointed at the image she’d created still sitting on the lab table. “Look at her. She was a beautiful girl. At least from my interpretation.”

      He reached for the sketch, then stopped, his hand in midair. “May I?”

      “Sure.”

      “Your work is amazing.”

      He set the image back on the table and angled back to her. “Are you okay?”

      “I am. I thought doing the work my mother loved would be this big dramatic scene where I’d be doomed by my own emotional sludge. Turns out, it wasn’t so bad. If anything, I got a taste of what my mom went through each time. It’s odd, but it was like I had a piece of her right there with me, and that made me come alive a little bit.” Oh, what a thing to say to a man she barely knew. “I’m just babbling.”

      “You’re not. I get it.” He winced. “Ew. Sorry. No, I don’t get it. Not really. What I should have said was I can see where, in a weird way, you’d connect with the work.”

      All she could do was nod. Talking about this, letting him dissect her and examine her motivations, wouldn’t help her stay detached.

      From the work or him.

      “If they’ll give me the cast of the skull, I’ll try it. The reconstruction will be 3-D and have much more detail than my sketch.”

      Appropriate or not, and definitely not caring that Paul sat just across the room, she stepped closer, slid her hand under David’s jacket around his waist and went up on tiptoes to hug him. “Thank you for being a pushy Hennings. After spending the afternoon in the lab, I believe my mother is letting me know it’s time I use my talent for more than what I’ve been doing.”

      He backed away from the hug and hit her with one of his amazing smiles, not lightning quick but a slow-moving and devastating one that creeped across his face and kicked off a tingle low in her belly.

      “Well, we Hennings people like to do our civic duty. How about as a thank you for saving me from my mother’s wrath, I buy you dinner one night this week? I can’t do it tonight because I’m expected at my mother’s.”

      “You don’t have to feed me.”

      “Yeah, I do. You’re doing this for us despite what you’ve been through. Besides, what I really want is a date with you, so a dinner kills two birds with one stone. As they say.”

      So slick, this one. Total charmer. And such trouble. But trouble, right now, might be nice.

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