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Mick blinked.
Okay, that was worse.
“I mean – not attractive attractive. A-art-artistically attractive. I don’t – um – I mean…”
Good grief. She was stammering and babbling. She never babbled. Usually the worse her nerves, the quieter her voice became, until she ended up speaking at a level that could only be heard by people with elephantine ears and NASA-quality hearing aids. Melissa’s ex-boyfriend Dale had once joked that for the first month he and Sophy had hung out, he’d thought he was gradually going deaf.
“I’m no good at this.”
The miserable exclamation startled them both.
Mick slowly hooked a booted foot around the leg of the vacant chair and pulled it toward him. It creaked alarmingly as he sat down, obviously designed for the more softly-knitting-grandmother variety of visitor. He was back to that façade of singular blankness that made him look like a baddie in a Bond film, the ones who stood silent and square-jawed behind the master criminal and kept one hand on their gun. If he had a weapon, he at least kept it holstered. His hands draped casually between his knees, the fingers loosely interlocked, while he watched her with faintly curious grey eyes.
“No good at what?” he asked finally.
She pulled her gaze from his and flushed.
“Talking to people,” she said, her voice stilted. “People I don’t know well. I’ve never been able to talk to strangers. I get nervous and I can’t think of what to say, and if I do speak, it’s never the right words.”
Sophy. He doesn’t care. Be quiet immediately.
She jumped when he reached toward her, but he tactfully ignored her jumpy reaction and touched a fingertip to the sketchbook.
“But you get people,” he said, and she looked up, confused.
Mick’s voice was level and his expression serious, but a slight smile quirked the corner of his lips. There was a hint of what might, with a full-fledged grin, be a boy band cute dimple in the world’s least boyish face.
Worse and worse.
She had a weakness for men with dimples. If he produced a pair of glasses next, she was going to start finding him sexually attractive as well as a-art-artistically attractive and things already seemed sufficiently awkward.
“What?” she asked brilliantly.
“I had a look at your other drawings. Sorry,” he added, not sounding remotely apologetic. “It’s obvious in every line that you understand what makes people tick. That might not be particularly comfortable from your subject’s perspective,” he went on dryly, “but on the whole it seems to me that empathy is more important than verbosity.”
Sophy’s fingers went absently to her neck and she twiddled a loose strand of hair as she stared at him, not knowing what to say. The conversation had gone from reluctant small talk to soul-searching depth in about thirty seconds. She’d had less intimate moments with her cognitive therapist.
Mick suddenly looked equally uncomfortable. He shifted as if to rise, and despite having wished him gone from the opening “ahem”, Sophy found herself rushing into speech.
“Um, did you come all the way here just to return my sketchbook? Because it was very kind of you, but…”
They were both staring at the hand she’d instinctively flung out as if to catch hold of his own and halt his departure. Hastily, Sophy withdrew the offending limb, and tucked it under the bedcovers for good measure. She was obviously going into belated psychiatric shock.
“Hell.” Mick sounded disgusted, but his derision was evidently self-directed so she didn’t bother to take offense. “No. I was going to leave that for you at the hotel reception, but I wanted to have a word with you about your witness statement.”
Oh. Well, that – ought to be reassuring. She supposed.
The impersonal security guard was back, having sent the more approachable man away in disgrace, probably to receive a stern lecture on correct conduct with bedridden witnesses.
“Was it really a bomb?” Sophy asked, just as another voice shrieked in atonal horror, “Oh my God, you would not believe the size of his – ”
She almost had another asthma attack on the spot. Hastily, she snatched up the remote and turned off the forgotten TV. And proceeded to will away the heat in her cheeks through sheer Jedi mind power.
Mick cleared his throat and earned her eternal gratitude by merely continuing, “It was a minimal-impact explosive device, yes.”
So in normal-people terms, a bomb.
“Thanks to your information, we were able to locate the device and bring in an expert team to diffuse the situation. The subject of your sketch was identified as Maria Harper, the wife of the man we apprehended at the scene, William Darvie. She was arrested late this afternoon.”
