I was also an introvert. My home was where I spent most of my time and it looked like it. Every interest I had was blatantly obvious here, but Kate still scoffed. “It’s supposed to look like a person actually lives here. Where are the clothes hanging over the chairs and the piles of mail?”
“I have a laundry hamper and a closet. That’s where clothes go, and who still gets paper mail anymore?”
“Uh, everyone?”
I shook my head. “Not if you know how to set it up so that everything gets sent electronically like a responsible earth dweller should.”
Kate had already turned her back on me, scanning my shelves with her fingers hovering close to signed baseballs and framed ticket stubs. My pulse ticked upward.
“I like sports,” I said flatly, mostly so she wouldn’t touch anything. Maybe if she knew it was important to me, she’d refrain from smearing her fingerprints all over everything. “All of them.”
“I noticed. Chicago Bears. Cubs.” She nodded toward a glass case. “You have season tickets framed. That’s pretty extreme.”
“Some might say it’s loyal,” I reasoned. “I’m a fan.”
“You also seem to be a fan of Jane Austin,” she said, sounding genuinely surprised as she studied one of my bookshelves.
I shrugged, my heart rate skyrocketing for reasons this insensitive woman would never understand. “My mom was a fan.”
“Oh. I guess that explains it, then.”
She picked up a framed photo from the side table before I could stop her, and instantly, my stomach dropped to my ass. It was an older picture, sunlight catching bright, golden-blonde hair and green eyes crinkled in laughter. My mother stood on the dock at our old lake house, wind whipping her sundress around her legs.
Kate studied it, her expression softening. “Is this your girlfriend?”
“My mother.”
She cleared her throat, color rising in her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I just assumed. She’s lovely.”
Her grip tightened slightly around the frame before she placed it back down with surprising care.
“She was,” I agreed.
Silence fell between us, stretching for moment before I turned and marched to the kitchen, grabbed the bottle, and uncorked it in one clean motion. I set the corkscrew beside it and held the bottle out toward her.
“Anything else you’d like to critique? My throw cushions? My personality? Or are we done here? Your wine is open, so you can leave.”
She leaned against the counter, relaxed and looking around like she planned on staying indefinitely. The soft cotton of her pajama shirt sleeve brushed my arm as she reached for the bottle. The contact was brief but it sent a bolt of something through me anyhow.
Fucking annoying.
“You’re very controlled,” she said slowly.
“It beats being invasive.”
She shrugged like she’d taken it as a compliment, but she still hadn’t moved back toward the front door, so I sighed and gestured at the staircase. “Do I have your permission to put some pants on?”
Her gaze dropped blatantly and unrepentantly to the towel riding low on my hips, then lifted again, her expression perfectly composed but the faintest flush tinging her cheeks. “That’s fine.”
“How kind of you.”
She ignored me, already drifting back toward my bookshelves, scanning titles and tilting her head at framed photos of my brothers, sister, and me at various games, charity events, and family gatherings. I shook my head, dragging a hand through my damp hair as I headed for the stairs.
Apparently, she was immune to quiet hints that she was intruding and not welcome here. The next few weeks might actually kill me if she was going to keep insisting on barging into my personal space like this.
I came back downstairs a few minutes later in sweats and a T-shirt, fully prepared to reclaim my apartment and my sanity, but Kate was sitting on a stool at my kitchen island, drinking wine from one of my crystal glasses. I stopped halfway down the stairs, so surprised that for a second, I could only stare at her. She must’ve found the glass while going through my kitchen cabinets.
Shameless woman.
