BAM, just like that, her breath was gone.
“So you work for the property management company and at the Misty Cat?” he wondered.
“Yeah.” That word emerged as a squeak. She cleared her throat. “Yeah. You’re looking for a place in Hellcat Canyon?”
“Yep. I’ll be here off and on to film on location, and I have a little downtime before my schedule really picks up again. I stayed at the Angel’s Nest last night. A little surprised I wasn’t spontaneously ejected from the place, like Lucifer from heaven.”
Every surface of Angel’s Nest that could be was scented, frilled, fringed, or embroidered. If it wasn’t purple, it was floral. Cherubs and angels gazed sympathetically from frames and pillows.
And she realized she was smiling, imagining him irritably ensconced amid all of that.
“A little hard to picture you there.”
He did, on closer inspection, have faint shadows under his eyes. As though he hadn’t slept well, or much.
“Yeah? Where do you picture me, Britt?”
Underneath me. Over me. Behind me. In me.
Those dirty little prepositional thoughts surprised her. Maybe it was just his drawl that turned everything into innuendo.
With some difficulty she reassembled her thoughts. She actually had a job to do. “I can picture you right here in the Michaelson place!” she said brightly.
Truthfully, she couldn’t picture anyone in the Michaelson place.
“Is that so?” His expression told her that he knew she was lying through her teeth, but he was prepared to be entertained. “When does the tour start?”
“How about now?” She literally threw her shoulders back, the way heroines in novels did, an attempt to bolster her nerve, and strode past him to open the door.
But she betrayed her lack of aplomb by fumbling an inordinate amount of time with the key, as if her hands were newly installed and she was just learning how to use them.
She finally got it in there and cranked it.
Stale air whooshed out when she pushed open the door. They both stepped back as if dodging an escaping entity.
“The owner hasn’t used this place in some time,” she apologized.
He peered in. He didn’t say a word for a moment.
“Since... 1972?” he hazarded. Sounding bemused, and as hushed as Indiana Jones entering a tomb.
The carpet was forest green shag, about four inches deep, or so it seemed, and it was everywhere. Like a living thing. It met them at the front door. She wouldn’t be surprised if the carpet one day made it all the way into the bathroom and escaped out into the woods to join the wild foliage outside.
She led him inside.
The house comprised two main rooms and two bedrooms. The main room was vast and open with soaring beamed ceilings, bisected only by the long oval Formica counter of the open kitchen. But the whole place was dark, because brown wood paneling covered every inch of the walls, and the single wall of windows was covered in blinds, and the blinds were covered in dust.
“I feel like I ought to be stalking an antelope.” He said it on a wondering hush, as he tread over the carpet. “I can’t hear my feet.”
“This kind of carpet keeps the place warm in winter,” she asserted, mindful that her goal was to get the property rented. “It does get cold up here in winter, and we even get snow on occasion, so if you intend to stay that long, it’ll cut down on your heating bills.”
“Ah, so that’s the purpose of shag carpet,” he said somberly, like an attentive pupil. “I always wondered.”
“And it might seem dark now, but wait until you see the view,” she gushed, though her voice was still a little shaky. “Those blinds... um... apparently we need to use a remote to open them. Let’s see... it must be around here somewhere...”
“It’s probably in the rug.” He was nudging at the carpet in an exploratory fashion with the toe of his boot, as if hoping to find treasures in it. Or worried something might be lurking.
In any other circumstance she might have found this hilarious.
