She shut the bathroom door again and focused now on the pictures she had been hoping to see. They were in this room in abundance, scattered in randomly sized frames—not nearly as put-together and cohesive as the art in the living room. They weren’t in chronological order, either, and a photo of an impossibly tiny Kent standing near a merry-go-round with her three large brothers surrounding her sat next to an older Kent—taller now, and just coming into her present-day beauty—in graduation robes, clustered together with her brothers, their faces creased in obviously proud smiles.

  She went from photo to photo, fleshing out Kent’s childhood with the random jumps of a time traveler. In some of the photos, an older couple stood with the quartet of siblings, but they were always a little bit separate. Not quite part of the group.

  She was looking at a picture of Kent and one of her brothers on what appeared to be an aircraft carrier when she sensed someone near. She turned around and saw Kent in the doorway, leaning against the jamb and quietly observing her. She had changed into a thick flannel shirt in a black watch plaid and black sweatpants. Her short, dark brown hair was still wet and slightly curled from her shower.

  “That’s Jimmy,” she said, nodding at the picture. “My youngest brother. He’s with a carrier strike group in Everett.” She walked into the room and pointed at a different photo. “Justin is the middle one. He’s in the UAE right now but is supposed to be back here for Christmas. And that’s Mom and Dad,” she said, almost as an afterthought. She picked up another with a boy in a football uniform holding Kent—tiny again—like a ball he was about to pass.

  “My oldest brother Kyle, the football coach.”

  “And photographer,” Tig added, nodding toward the living room.

  Kent smiled, looking as proud as her brothers had at her high school graduation. “Yes. He’s very talented.” She shrugged and put the photo back on the dresser, and Tig stepped behind her as she did, wrapping her arms around Kent’s waist and resting her chin on Kent’s shoulder. “It was an unconventional childhood,” Kent said, leaning into her, “but a good one.”

  She turned in Tig’s arms and slid her hands around the back of Tig’s neck, one hand nestling into Tig’s hair and the other settling between her shoulder blades. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

  “Me, too,” Tig managed to say before the urge to kiss Kent became too insistent to ignore. The kiss was soft, but deep, as their tongues played against each other, and Kent’s hand on her neck pulled them ever closer. Tig moved her own hands lower until they were cupped around Kent’s ass, holding them tightly against each other until every shift of their hips elicited a soft moan from both of them.

  They slowly ended the kiss and just held each other close, breathing together as their foreheads rested against each other. Tig decided kissing Kent was her new favorite activity, but she also loved the moments they’d shared over the past days when they just melted into the stillness that settled so easily between them.

  She pulled them together at the hips once more before loosening her hold and moving back. “Do you mind if I shower, too?” she asked, wanting to wash away as much of the day’s troublesome moments as she could, leaving her with just Kent for the night, with just these few hours they had together.

  Kent nodded. “I’ll order pizza. Come look at the menu first.”

  They settled easily on an Italian meatball pizza with olives, then Tig reluctantly walked away from her and up the open staircase. The bedroom upstairs was as elegant as the living room, but in a warm, lived-in kind of way. The colors were muted sage and ivory, and Kent’s preference for geometric patterns was apparent here, as well. There were stripes on the bedspread and interlocking diamonds on the throw rug beside it. The curtains were ivory, with a glossy, tonal Greek key design across the bottom.

  Tig stared at the bed for a moment, hoping—and feeling it was highly likely—that she’d be sleeping there tonight, and not on the game room sleeper sofa. As long as Kent was with her, though, she didn’t mind where she slept. Sofa, floor, kitchen counter. Wherever.

  She took off her clothes and stepped into the large shower. She stood under the wide, rainfall showerhead and let achingly hot water blast the day away.

  Chapter Twenty

  Kent tucked some wadded-up newspaper between two logs in her fireplace, then added a pile of shaved wood as kindling. She carefully stacked two more split logs on top before striking a long match and holding the flame against the paper. The fire caught quickly, then slowly spread from the kindling to the larger logs. She sat back on her heels and pulled the screen closed, savoring the rush of heat as the flames grew.

  She turned at the sound of Tig coming down the stairs. The sight of her, in an oversized T-shirt and leggings, with her skin flushed from the shower, took Kent’s breath away. The intimacy of having Tig here, of them wearing comfortable clothes and shutting themselves inside together, away from the night, was overpowering. She felt right here. Kent had been expecting attraction, and she hadn’t been surprised by the sense of awkwardness they both seemed to experience in their first few minutes together in Kent’s home, but this feeling of belonging caught her off guard. Tig belonged here, with her. And she belonged to Tig.

  “Feel better?” she asked, relieved when her voice sounded fairly normal and didn’t reflect the shock she felt at how easy it would be to have Tig simply live here now. She was here. She should stay.

  But she wouldn’t, and they both knew it. Kent dreaded the time when she’d have to admit to Clare that she had been right to be worried about her—because Kent was going to come out of this with a wound that would likely never fully heal.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She couldn’t let her racing thoughts ruin the evening. She got up and sat on the couch facing the fire. Tig sat next to her with her legs tucked under her hip, her knees resting against Kent.

  “Much better,” she answered. “That’s an amazing shower. I could have stayed in there for hours.”

  Kent smiled. “It was top on my list of must-haves when I was looking for this place. Those people I work with drive me crazy, and I need something to help me unwind at the end of the day.”

  Tig grinned at her, and Kent knew they were both thinking about a much better way to unwind. She put her hand on Tig’s thigh, playing with the hem of her shirt. The pizza would be delivered soon, and so she decided to fill the time until then by telling Tig about the news she had gotten that day. If she didn’t, she was worried they might start something and that neither one of them would be in a suitable state to open the door when their dinner arrived.

  “So, it seems Matthiou might have found the route your vases took to get to the States. The authorities at the Port of Tyre in the Middle East confiscated some other artifacts being smuggled through the port on a fishing boat, and it seems the dates and descriptions of those might be a good match for the ones Davies had. Matthiou thinks they were originally found at an illegal dig in Izmir in Turkey, which she said would have been part of ancient Greece?”

  “Yes, it used to be called Smyrna.” Tig sighed. “I suppose they’ll be sending them back, then? I won’t even have a chance to say goodbye?”

  Kent gave Tig’s knee a nudge. “Sorry, but they’d probably ask me to vouch for you before you did, and I’d be lying if I said you wouldn’t try to snatch them. I doubt I’ll be kept up to date on the situation with them, but if I hear anything, I promise to tell you.”

  Kent came to the end of her story. “The frustrating thing is that the closest we’ve come to finding a guilty-looking person is Chase himself. The only one who can’t be a suspect. The killer is likely someone close to the department, Tig. I know it’s not in your nature, but please don’t trust anyone completely, even Ayari. She’s not a suspect, but still…if she comes to you some night and says she wants to show you an interesting shrub on an out-of-the-way campus path, please tell her no.”

  Tig laughed. “I promise. She has a fascinating approach to studying her culture, and I have a feeling she’s going to be at the top of her field in a few years. If we can save our department and retain enough donors to be able to offer her opportunities to travel and continue her research, she has the potential to bring a lot of prestige to the university.”

  “More prestige than you bring?”

  Tig scoffed at that. “Far more. Honestly—and this isn’t meant to be an insult to myself, it’s just a fact—I’m a workhorse sort of professor. I publish articles regularly, and they’ve been well-received, but I’m a better teacher than I am a writer. Managing the department and giving lectures are my strengths. Writing innovative papers is something I can do, but not as well as the other parts of my job.” She shrugged, curving closer to Kent. “I’m fine with that, too. I enjoy sitting in a classroom discussing a poem or play with a group of students much more than sitting at my desk picking apart an ancient text. That’s probably why the thought of going back and writing grad school level papers like Chase was doing is so unappealing to me. Even when I was working on my degree, I loved being a TA more than working on my thesis or on essays.”

  Kent had a feeling Tig was downplaying the accolades her writing likely received, but she admired anyone who had enough self-awareness to identify their true gifts. “So, Ayari is more of a writer than a teacher?”

  “That’s part of it,” Tig said. “The other part is that my focus is on pieces of literature that have been studied by thousands of scholars over the years. It gets progressively more difficult to come up with earth-shaking new interpretations when we have a limited number of extant works. Sami’s focus lies in directions that have often been overlooked, so she’s in the vanguard.”

  “That makes sense,” Kent said as the doorbell chimed. “Hold on, I’ll get this.”

  She paid for the pizza, then set the box on the coffee table along with plates and napkins.

  “So, what exactly is she studying?”

  “Well, a brief recap of Tunisian history is that of conquest by different cultures, so they have a unique and multi-ethnic blend of cultures that make the Tunisian people who they are today,” Tig said, putting a piece of pizza on her plate but leaving it untouched while she spoke. “The Romans were a major conquering force, when they destroyed Carthage and settled on its ruins. Sami’s field is two-pronged. She studies pre-Roman art and inscriptions, really any surviving artifacts, which sadly isn’t a lot since so much was destroyed. Many scholars are dismissive about these pre-Roman relics, claiming that Tunisia didn’t offer anything significant to the world before the Roman conquest. But she also studies more modern art and literature, examining how aspects from the various conquering cultures were incorporated to become something uniquely Tunisian, rather than just being derivative. The combination of the two is providing some remarkable insights into the cultural identity of her people, and interest in what she’s accomplishing is only going to grow.”

  Kent ate some pizza while she listened to Tig talk. Their legs were entwined together, and they had seemed to have quickly developed the habit of reaching out to casually touch each other every few seconds. As much as she enjoyed being physically close to Tig, she was loving the chance to learn more about her just by watching her talk. There was no sign of jealousy as she spoke about Ayari’s bright future. Instead, she simply sounded fascinated by the prospects of the other professor’s research, and happy to have a chance to help her fulfill that potential in their new department.

  “I’m lecturing, aren’t I?” Tig asked, with a sheepish grin. She picked up her piece of pizza and took a bite. “Thank you for being kind about it. My friends usually throw things at me to make me stop.” She shrugged. “Of course, the main reason they want to shut me up is because they want the chance to lecture about their own subjects, and if I’m talking, they can’t.”

  “I like it,” Kent said. “I want to know all about you, and the university and what you do there are huge parts of who you are.”

  Tig balanced her plate on her knees, holding it in place with her right hand and draping her left across the back of the couch so her fingers barely brushed against Kent’s neck. “I feel the same about you. So, you know my career goals, which are to study and teach classics and which haven’t changed since I was ten. What about you? Do you like where you’re at in your department? Or do you want to promote? Make it to chief?”

  Kent groaned. “Not chief. Way too much paperwork.” She sighed, leaning into Tig’s touch. She loved hearing Tig talk about her job and her life, but she was less comfortable sharing parts of her own. She had let the habit of keeping herself closed off become too deeply ingrained, and even now, when she was sitting next to someone she was starting to truly care about, she was tempted to shut down. Give a shallow answer, or offer an expected, trite response. Not because she was afraid about Tig’s response—that she’d mock her or think she was foolish—far from it, in fact. Clare was correct that Tig was single-minded in her personal and professional focus on classics, but at the same time she was one of the most generous people Kent knew when it came to supporting others and recognizing their talents in their own fields.

  Rather, she was afraid for herself. If she offered too much of who she was to Tig, she’d be left with a hollow shell of herself when their relationship ended.

  But that’s what she had signed on for. If Tig stayed, they’d have built the foundation of something that overwhelmed Kent with the thought of how permanent and real it could be. If she left, then they’d have passed the point at which they could have ended without heartbreak. Kent had already passed it. Why stop now?

  “I’ve stayed at this rank too long,” she said, starting by admitting something she had barely acknowledged in her own mind. “I’m bored with it.” She shrugged, and with the movement, she felt the gentle graze of Tig’s fingernails along the side of her neck. She fought to recapture her train of thought. “It’s been my choice, though. I’ve skipped opportunities for promotions because moving up would mean I’d move farther away from patrol and my officers. At least as sergeant, I’m still connected to the daily life of the campus police, and that’s important to me. I’ve also stayed where I am because I haven’t had any compelling reason to go higher in the department.”

  “But something’s changed, hasn’t it?” Tig asked. “That night at the station, after Chase’s death, you were saying you were sometimes tempted to go back to patrol, but that’s not what you’re talking about now, is it? Have you found a reason to move up?”

  “Exactly, yes,” Kent said. She laughed. “I always tease you about being easy to read, but I never thought I was. You seem to be figuring me out.”

  “I want to learn all about you,” Tig said. “And I always devote myself fully to my studies.” She slid her hand to the back of Kent’s neck, then leaned forward and kissed the place it had vacated, just under her ear. Kent gave a sharp intake of breath at the feel of Tig’s warm lips, and the almost undetectable touch of her tongue.

  Tig sat up again. “Keep talking,” she said. “I didn’t mean to distract you. Yet.”

  “If this is you not distracting me, I don’t stand a chance in hell of resisting when you are.”

  “No, you don’t,” Tig agreed. “Now, go on. Talk.”

  Kent nodded, willing to do whatever Tig asked. “It’s these two cases,” she said. “The murders. I don’t mean to sound callous, or like I’m enjoying this investigation, but there’s been something…important about working to solve them. Working with Clare…I mean, Sawyer. Shit,” Kent said, poking Tig in the arm. “Don’t you dare tell her I called her by her first name. She’ll think I like her.”

  Tig laughed. “I promise not to tell her, but she already knows. Hate to break it to you, but she likes you back. You need to get used to the idea that you have friends now.”

  “Anyway,” Kent said, trying to hide her smile. “At first I thought I was just tired of the constant paperwork that comes with being a sergeant, and that I never should have left patrol in the first place. But something’s been changing. Sawyer was part of it, because she came here with experience as a detective. Not as much experience as she wanted me to believe, but her instincts for the job more than make up for that, and she’s been instrumental in keeping these investigations within our department instead of having them farmed out to Seattle PD.

  “I have an idea for forming a squad, or task force, within our department,” Kent continued, turning the half-formed ideas she’d been hoarding inside her head into a coherent plan as she spoke them out loud to Tig. “It would be made up of officers who get sent for specialized training in solving different types of crimes. Then, when something happens on campus, we’ll have skilled people who can step into the role of detective as needed. We don’t have enough call for this sort of thing to have dedicated detectives on staff, but we can have specialists who would assume those roles for the duration of an investigation, while still helping with patrol, like Sawyer has been doing. Not just with murders, but with other crimes, as well.”

  “You’d be a more self-sufficient department,” Tig said. Her hand had been stroking Kent’s neck, but it stilled as she considered Kent’s suggestion. “I could see how hard it was for you and Clare when the Seattle officers came to Chase’s house and took charge.”

  “We hated it,” Kent said happily—not at the memory, but because if she could turn this dream into reality, she’d be doing something to change that type of experience rather than just having to accept it. “Plus it would help the officers who receive the training. They’d get experience in detective work, which would be helpful if they ever want to pursue that more fully in another department, and they’d probably be more likely to promote if they stayed with ours.”

  “So, if you promote, you’ll be able to create something like this?”