"Your landlady?"
"Yeah. She's eighty-six," I said defensively. "I'd get rid of it, but she asks about it now and then."
Nadia processed this. "And the cats?"
"They're hers, too. I moved in and they were already?—"
Nadia laughed, and I pulled her closer while Sofia's radio murmured overhead, a constant since she rarely slept more than a couple of hours a night.
Nadia rolled onto her side and looked at me, a bright smile still in place. "You spent six months trying to get me here, and you never thought to mention the decor."
"I was hoping you wouldn't notice."
"There are twelve cats, Daemon."
"Fourteen, actually," I said, and kissed her shoulder. "Sofia added two more in the fall."
She laughed again. Really laughed, the kind that shook her whole body and pressed her closer against my side. We lay there in the pink lamplight with a clowder of ceramic cats, and I felt something settle that had been restless for a long time.
I was in a lot of trouble.
The very best kind.
TWO
DAEMON
I should've been savoring this time. Months of pursuit, months of polite rejections, six months of Lindsey Hunter apparently watching us and taking notes for reasons that were now uncomfortably clear.
Then last night, Nadia had finally let me in. In every sense of the word.
But now, watching her sleep, her dark blonde hair spread across my pillow and her curves barely covered by my sheets, all I could think was: she's still here.
Last night she'd laughed at the doilies and the ceramic cats and the hideous lampshade Sofia had painted herself. She'd teased me about spending six months trying to get her here and forgetting to mention the decor.
Then she'd curled up against my side, and I'd lain there in the pink lamplight, feeling something settle in my chest that had been restless for a long time.
But that was then. Now dawn had arrived, and she was still here. The panic squeezing my ribs had nothing to do with the decor, which looked as if Laura Ashley had suffered a stroke. No, it had everything to do with what came next. Commitment. Not something I had much experience with.
I knew that's what I was facing, and what Nadia would expect, because last night had been unlike any I remembered. Not even close.
It would be worse than explaining my criminal record to someone for the first time.
The one she didn't know about. Yet.
One disaster at a time, Booth.
I'd been living in Coogan's Break, in doily purgatory, for almost three years. Ever since Ethan gave me a job at Lucky Break Construction when I was fresh out of county lockup.
Sofia Ferrari, my eighty-something landlady, had taken one look at my prison buzz cut, defensive attitude, and lack of references, and quoted me a rent so low I'd thought it was for a week.
"No, that's for the month," she'd said, patting my arm with her papery hand. "But you check on me every day, yes? Fix things when they break? My grandson, he moved to San Diego. Thinks I should be in a home." She'd sniffed with magnificent Italian disdain. "I'll show him a home."
I hadn't minded. The rent let me save money, pay down the legal fees and restitution from my conviction, and send a little toward my mom's headstone maintenance.
Besides, I never brought women back here, and whenever I'd hooked up since my release, it had always been at their place. Condom in my wallet, no names traded that mattered, easier to get away.
Nadia was the exception to every rule I'd set since getting out. With her, that was becoming a pattern.
