My feet were freezing, and when I looked down, I was grimly unsurprised to see that I was standing in a scatter of unmelted snow. A gust of wind confirmed that there was a sizable gap between the door and the floor, and I took a long stride over to a part of theinsidethat looked less like theoutside.
Sunny was just stirring, stretching her arms and toes and then her arms again, like she could happily stretch forever. She finally opened her eyes and rolled all the way over—Mr.Tumnus jumping off her backside with an annoyed look—and then her gaze found me.
A small smile, happy and unguarded, pulled at her mouth, and it took me a minute to find my voice after seeing it.
But once I found my voice, her smile vanished in an instant.
“Sunny,” I said. “You can’t stay here.”
She sat up, pulling the sheet over her breasts. “Do you know how hard it is to find a place in Christmas Notch, Vermont, anytime after Thanksgiving?”
“I mean, yeah, but—”
“And a place that’s pet friendly?” She pointed to Mr.Tumnus, who was currently circling a dish full of dry food with his tail flicking in the air. “And don’t say I could have found a catsitter. Finding a catsitter in LA is like... well, it’s actually not that hard, but Mr.Tumnus is very particular, and all the catsitters who met him declined.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” I told her. “I was going to say that you should come stay with me at the mansion.”
Her mouth dropped open, revealing the white edge of her teeth. I remembered how they had dragged along my erection last night and a shiver passed through me that had nothing to do with the freezing room.
“You want me to stay with you,” she said, like she couldn’t believe it. “Like. Move in with you.”
“Sunny, I’ve got a million rooms, and those rooms have rooms, andthoserooms have little roomlets of their own. There are three kitchens and a bathroom behind every other door.” She was chewing on her lip now. “We’ll never even see each other,” I added, even as the idea depressed me. “I’ll stay out of your way. And you can even bring—that—with you.”
I pointed at Mr.Tumnus, who was currently cracking dry food between his teeth and glaring up at me as he did.
“And I have a library,” I mentioned, not knowing why, but it seemed like a selling point. It was my favorite spot in the house to sit in and think about death and loneliness. It had a really good chair for that.
At the mention of a library, her eyebrows lifted the tiniest bit, like she couldn’t hide her interest. But then she shook her head hard enough to make her black hair fly around her shoulders.
“Nope,” she pronounced with tones of finality. “Thank you very much, but I don’t need to be rescued from ugly carpet by pop music’s best smolderer.”
She slid off the bed, the sheet wrapped around her, and then strode into the bathroom like a queen. The door was too crooked for her to slam, so it clunked against the frame and then scraped shut with a shove from her side.
I stood, grumpy and cold, before moving to get my tuxedo pants from where I’d thrown them over a chair. I hated the idea of Sunny staying in this threadbare hellhole, with its sparking heating unit and expired smoke detector. She was going to be cold and what if there was a fire and I knew there had to be moldall over this place, the kind of mold that got fuzzy and hairy and made zombies out of itself, and I. Hated. That. It made me want to march into that bathroom, throw her over my shoulder, and carry her to the mansion like a villain in a black-and-white movie.
I clenched a fist, breathed out through my nose. I couldn’t do a kidnap. That was bad, even if it was to rescue a damsel from mold and faux wood paneling.
I just had to hope that she would see sense.
I scrawled my phone number on a yellowed pad of paper next to the desk, and wrote,It’s a real offer, Sunny. Please take it.And signed it:Todd.
And then I finished dressing and left to start my cold walk back to the Dirty Snowball, where I’d left my truck.
At least she thought I was the best at smoldering.
Chapter Three
Sunny
Mr.Tumnus nudged the bathroom door open and headbutted my calf. “What?” I said, my mouth full of toothpaste. “I don’t do favors.” His head pushed against me again, a little harder this time. “Especially after sex.”
And that was really, really good sex.
I spat my toothpaste into the sink and then reached over the toilet to turn on the shower.
The pipes groaned and clanked for a long moment as Mr.Tumnus’s back curled into a hunch before he darted under the bed.
And then, like a fucking geyser, water began to spew from the faucet. The grout between the tiles began to crack and freezing cold water shot out. I fumbled for the faucet while attempting to shield my face from the icy water, but the old plastic handle just spun uselessly as I became soaked.
