In Death 32 - Treachery in Death

dessert before he said his good-nights.
    The house monitor told him he’d find her in the bedroom.
    She’d changed into the cotton pants and tank she favored during her downtime. He could smell her shower on her as he bent down to kiss her head. She sat brooding over a slice of pizza.
    “You missed a lovely dinner,” he told her, and peeled off his suit jacket. “And truly delightful company.”
    “I had things.”
    “Mmm-hmm.” He loosened his tie, removed it. “So you said in your thirty-second appearance.”
    “Look, it was a long day, and I didn’t expect to come home to a dinner party. Nobody told me about it.”
    “It was spur of the moment. I’m sorry,” he continued, brutally pleasant, “am I supposed to check with you before I join Summerset and a couple of his old friends for dinner?”
    “I didn’t say that.” She took a sulky bite of pizza. “I said I didn’t know about it.”
    “Well then, perhaps if you’d contacted me, let me know you’d be very late coming home I’d have informed you.”
    “I got busy. We caught a case.”
    “Earth-shattering news.”
    “What are you so pissy about?” she demanded. “I’m the one who came home and found a party going on.”
    He sat to remove his shoes. “It must’ve been quite a shock—the brass band, the drunken revelers. But then, that kind of madness happens when adults leave the children on their own.”
    “You want to be pissed at me, fine. Be pissed.” She shoved the pizza away. “I wasn’t in the mood to socialize with a couple of strangers.”
    “You made that abundantly clear.”
    “I don’t know them.” She pushed to her feet, tossed up her hands. “I’d just spent the bulk of the day dealing with three assholes who killed some old guy for a bunch of goddamn candy bars. Damned if I want to come home and sit around having dinner with Summerset and his old pals and listening to them talk about the old days when they scammed marks and picked fat pockets. I spend all day with criminals, and I don’t want to spend the evening asking them to pass the fucking salt.”
    He said nothing for a moment. “I’m waiting for the corollary, where you remind me you married a criminal. But we can consider that unsaid.”
    She started to speak, but the icy resentment in his voice, in those brilliant blue eyes, slammed between them.
    “Judith is a neurosurgeon—chief of surgery, in fact, at a top London hospital. Oliver is a historian and author. If you’d bothered to spend five of your precious minutes with them, you’d have learned that they met and worked with Summerset as medics during the end of the Urbans, when they were only teenagers.”
    She jammed her hands in her pockets. “You want me to feel like shit, well, I’m not going to.” But of course she did, which only throttled her resentment to fire against his ice.
    “I didn’t know what was going on because nobody told me. You could’ve tagged me, then I’d have known I’d be walking in on you guys halfway through a fancy meal when I’m grubby from work.”
    “When you don’t bother to let anyone know when you’ll come home I have to assume you’re tied up with something. And I’m damned, Eve, if I’m going to start tagging you asking what you’re doing, when you’re coming home like some nagging spouse.”
    “I meant to contact you. I started to—twice—but both times I got interrupted. By the end of the interruption, I forgot. I just forgot, okay? Get a rope. You’re the one who married a cop, so you’re the one who has to deal with it.”
    He rose, walked toward her as she continued to rant.
    “Locking up the bad guys is just a little bit more important than being home on time to have dinner with a couple of people I don’t know anyway.”
    Eyes on hers, he flicked her shoulder. Her mouth fell open.
    She started stomping the floor.
    “What in God’s name are you doing?” he demanded.
    “Trying to kill the giant tarantula, because the only reason I can figure you just fucking flicked me is because there was a big, fat spider on my shoulder.”
    “Actually, I was knocking the chip away that was balanced there. It looked awfully heavy.”
    She strode away from him before she did something violent. She eyed the AutoChef. “How do you program this thing for a steaming cup of fuck you ?”
    “Children,” Summerset said from the doorway.
    They both whirled on him, both snarled, “What?”
    “I’m sorry to interrupt your playtime—and