“Leith.” She stood in the center of the pink braided rug and turned in a circle, amusement plastered all over her face as she took in the elderly horror. He deserved her laughter. “I never pegged you as a pink kitchen sort of guy.”
He had to run with it, though he was loathing where her next line of questioning was heading. “Isn’t it more of a mauve?”
She guffawed. “Did you just move in or something?”
“Or something.” He shut the back door and joined her in the small kitchen.
“Is this your grandma’s house?”
“No.” Strangely, he felt a little defensive, and reached out to straighten a faded and burned pot holder hanging from a hook above the stovetop. “It was Mildred’s.”
“Who’s Mildred?”
“Mildred Lindsay.”
Jen nodded slowly. “Ah, okay. I get it. I think.”
“Her husband died, oh, I don’t know, thirty years ago? She lived alone here, but Horace Lindsay’s name was still on three houses—this one, yours, and the empty one on the other side.”
She laughed low and graced him with a smile that said she’d forgiven him.
“May I?” She gestured down the darkened hall toward the front room. He shrugged. None of the stuff inside was his, and she wasn’t laughing at the house anymore.
Leith followed Jen deeper into Mildred’s home. She turned into the formal living room that looked out over the street. Leith leaned in the doorway, watching as she turned on a lamp with a fringed shade. The room was filled with knickknacks—porcelain figurines and blown glass vases in pale colors and framed Victorian prints—that meant absolutely nothing to him, and which he’d been viewing as a hindrance these past few months. But Jen spent time looking at each one, giving them a fragile, sad, forgotten meaning he’d been purposely avoiding.
She turned from a glass-enclosed bookcase near the window. “So why are you here?”
The lamplight hit her in a way that turned her dress into a translucent suggestion. She was still wearing that pale gray one from this morning, the one that seemed to wrap around the best parts of her body. Thanks to the fuzzy light from behind, he could see her shape: the subtle dent of her waist, the round curve of her hips, the slope of her inner thighs.
Though he’d seen her last night wearing a lot less, there was something terribly intimate about her appearance now—especially in the way she regarded him, head tilted, eyes gone soft.
He cleared his throat and angled his body to stare at a crack in the well-worn hardwood floor. “Mildred left all her stuff to me. The three houses. Everything inside. A bit of money.”
Jen trailed her fingers over a secretary desk. “Why to you?”
He shrugged.
“Did you know her well?”
“No. Not really.”
“But you must have made an impression.”
“I said I don’t really know why.”
“No, you didn’t. You just shrugged.” Her expression turned sly, teasing. “Did you buy her groceries or something?”
“No.”
“Date her granddaughter?”
“No grandkids.”
Jen came forward, moving out of the tormenting lamplight, thank God. He was momentarily blindsided by the memory of how she’d looked the night of their first kiss. Her face turned up to him, him towering over her, she’d looked delicate and beautiful and trusting. And also scared.
Much as she seemed just now.
Jen, true to character, somehow covered all that up with a hand on her hip and a playful squint. “So you must have cut her lawn.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling like he was ten. “Yeah, I did.”
She swallowed a smile and went to the window, leaning over to pull aside the curtain. That smooth, clingy, gray fabric settled into the crack of her ass, and he had to look away again.
“Wow,” she said, examining the plainest, smallest front yard on the block, “you must have done a spectacular job.”
“I also talked to her. I think I might have been the only person who did.”
She swiveled to him, green eyes giant, dark hair swishing around her shoulders. “Oh my God, she had a crush on you!”
There was the Jen he remembered, the Jen he’d once loved. The one who knew how to be fun and giggly and teasing when she stopped moving or working for a minute or two. That, more than anything, made him turn around and head back into the kitchen. There was beer in the fridge somewhere.
“You’re nuts,” he said, opening the door and hearing the satisfying clink of brown bottles along the side shelf.
Jen followed him. Of course she followed. She was laughing now and her voice hit all sorts of wonderful high notes. “I bet she watched you out that big picture window and just . . . pined.”
Thinking about Mildred spying on him while sitting in that rocking chair was plain weird, but he knew that’s exactly what she’d done. He’d caught her once. Maybe twice.
“She watched youuuuu,” Jen sang, “and she thought”—here’s where she adopted a really bad old lady’s voice—“‘That man is so fine. Maybe if I leave him everything I own he’ll sleep with me in the afterlife.’”
He snatched two beers from the fridge door and swiveled around, finger pointing around the neck of the bottle. “That’s disgusting.”
Jen showed no signs of stopping laughing. A wave of emotion hit him as they fell back into their old camaraderie as though time had never happened, and he hid it by taking a half-bottle swig of beer.
She kept going. “And when you took your shirt off—”
“Hey, I don’t ever take off my shirt when I work.”
She stopped, scrunched up her face. “Really? I bet you’d get double the work in half the time. Seriously.”
“I’m not in high school. I’m a business person.”
God, he loved her smile. All diamonds and joy. But it faded a bit as she said, “I know you are.”
Another gulp of lager. He held out the unopened bottle. “You want this one?”
She eyed the brown bottle, her eyes shifting back up to him. He had no idea what she was thinking, taking such a long time to answer. It was a beer, not a shot of Jäger.
“No, thanks. I’m presenting to the city council tomorrow afternoon.”
If he didn’t know better, he’d say she looked nervous. “Good. More for me. I need it.”
She fingered the edge of the tiny breakfast table, and for a moment he was scared it was an indication she was getting ready to head out, to walk away again. Even though she was just next door, it felt painfully far. Too soon to separate after what had broken and been reformed during this strange little conversation.
She didn’t leave. Instead she scanned the kitchen again, but this time in no joking manner. “You didn’t really answer me before. Why are you here in Mildred’s house?” There was a soft, filtered tone to her voice. “And don’t say because you inherited it.”
He scratched at the back of his neck then cracked it. “Okay.”
“I mean, you had to have lived somewhere before here. Did you have a house?”
He finished the beer, setting a new personal record. “Nah. Never owned a place of my own in Gleann, believe it or not. Been holding out for when I find the perfect house so I can do it up right. I want to work on it, create it, from the inside out.” He glanced out the dark kitchen window to the town he couldn’t see. “I guess I know all the houses in the valley and none of them are mine.”
“Huh.” A little smile tugged at one edge of her mouth. “So where did you live before here? And why’d you move out?”
He leaned his ass against the counter and cracked open the second beer. “Because I knew I had to get out of here months ago and things happened real fast. Right around the time Mildred died, Chris Weir, the last guy I have on my payroll, needed to get out of his place because things had gone south with his roommates. He’s trying to get out from a bad crowd. Anyway, I sublet my duplex to him, and moved in here because it was the smallest of the three houses and I knew I wouldn’t be here long. I packed all my shit and divided it between the three garages until I can settle elsewhere.” The second beer tasted even better than the first. “It’s a good transition, I think, to getting out of here. Living here now will make it easier when I won’t have a Gleann address.”