Northern Lights

thick—and a little crazed from her hands.
    "I wanted a change. So I changed." She walked over, got a bottle from the pantry. Getting down glasses, she glanced back and saw him grinning at her. "What?"
    "I like it. It makes you look, I don't know, young and cute."
    She angled her head. "Young and cute like you want me to dress in a pinafore and Mary Janes and call you Daddy?"
    "I don't know what a pinafore is, but you can wear one if you want. I'd as soon skip the Daddy part."
    "Whatever blows up your skirt." She shrugged, poured deep-red wine into two glasses. "It's good to see you, Burke."
    He walked over, took the glasses out of her hands and set them down on the counter. And using his hands to skim back that thick hair, leaned down, slow, eyes open, and kissed her. Soft and quiet until the warmth sparked with licks of heat. And he watched her watch him through the kiss, saw those perfect blue eyes of hers flicker once.
    When he eased her back, he lifted the wineglasses again, gave one to her.
    "It's good to kiss you, too."
    She rubbed her lips together and was surprised the heat that had pumped into them didn't spark from the friction. "Hard to argue with that."
    "I worried about you. You don't want to hear that, puts your back up. But that's the way it is. We don't have to talk about any of it if you're not ready."
    She took a drink, then another. A lot of patience inside there, she decided. And the kissing cousin to patience was tenacity.
    "Might as well deal with it. Do you know how to make a salad?"
    "Ah . . . You open one of those bags of salad stuff you buy at the store and dump it into a bowl?"
    "Not a guy for the kitchen, huh?"
    "No."
    "Still, at this point in our relationship, when you're hot for me, you'll
    learn to chop vegetables without complaining about it. Ever peel a carrot?" she asked as she walked to the refrigerator.
    "Yes, yes, I have."
    "There, that's a start." She piled produce on the counter, handed him a carrot and a peeler. "Do that."
    While he did, she began to wash lettuce. "In some cultures, women hack off their hair as a sign of mourning. That's not why I did it, altogether. He's been gone a long time, and I adjusted to that—in my own way. But it's different now."
    "Murder changes everything."
    "More than death does," she agreed. "Death's natural. It's a pisser because, hey, who wants to, but there's a cycle and nobody gets to jump off the wheel."
    She dried the lettuce, those long fingers with their short, blunt nails working briskly. "I could've accepted his death. I'm not going to accept his murder. So I'll push at the State cops, and I'll push at you until I'm satisfied. This may cool off your hotness for me, but that's the breaks."
    "I don't think it will. I haven't felt hot for a woman in a while, so I'm due."
    "Why not?"
    He handed her the carrot for inspection. "Why not what?"
    "Why haven't you been hot for a woman?"
    "I . . . hmm."
    "Performance issues?"
    He blinked, managed a strangled laugh. "Well, Jesus. That's a question. But this is just too weird a conversation to have over lettuce."
    "Back to murder, then," she replied.
    "Who took them up?" he questioned.
    "What?"
    "They'd have needed a pilot, right? Who flew them to the base camp or whatever you call it."
    "Oh." She paused, tapped her knife on the cutting board. "You are a cop, aren't you? I don't know, and it may be tricky to find out after all this time. But between me and Jacob, we should be able to do it."
    "Whoever it is took down at least one less man than he dropped off. But he didn't report it. Why?"
    "And those are the things we need to find out. Good. A direction."
    "The investigators in charge will be asking those questions, heading in that direction. You might want to give yourself some time to deal with the more personal business."
    "You mean the custody battle and funeral Charlene's planning." She began to slice interesting ribbons from a hunk of red cabbage. "I've already had an earful, which is why I stopped answering the phone yesterday. Fighting over a dead body's just a little too stupid for me. Especially when she has no idea if his family will object to her burying him here in the first place."
    "Have you met them?"
    She got out a pot and began to fill it with water for the pasta. "Yeah. His mother contacted me a few times, and when she offered to fly me out there to meet his family, I was curious enough to go. I was eighteen. Charlene was supremely pissed, which only made me want to go