Page 20

She even put on earrings, which was a huge concession on her part, because she always became a little too aware of the fact that she was wearing metal shoved through her flesh, and sometimes it was impossible to think about anything else.

But they dangled a bit and caught the light, and she thought that was pretty, too.

She slid her feet into her favorite sandals, then kicked them off again, because they were hiking sandals. Functional, but not exactly date worthy.

Kitty looked through her closet again, but could find nothing at all that she would consider date worthy in the least. Because she didn’t date. It shouldn’t have surprised her that she had nothing suitable. She went down the stairs to Indy’s room, and helped herself to her sister’s shoes. Indy and Flannery liked to say that it was so much fun that they all were the same shoe size and were roughly the same dress size as well, because that meant they had two wardrobes.

The joke, Kitty was well aware, was that nobody was breaking down doors to get to her wardrobe. Something she hadn’t really cared about until today.

She took a pair of Indy’s fancier sandals, and while she was there, helped herself to one of those filmy little scarves that Indy liked to wear, tossing them carelessly over her shoulders or around her neck so that she always looked somehow Bohemian and sophisticated at once.

Kitty didn’t look like either of those things, but when she wound the scarf around her neck, she liked it.

She made it down to the main floor of the rickety old house right at six. And she didn’t have to look at a clock to know what time it was. She heard the sound of boots on the front porch.

Sure enough, a decidedly male knock followed shortly after. It was… imperative. Authoritative and unapologetic. When she realized that she was attributing character judgments to the sound of someone knocking, she ordered herself to stop.

Kitty blew out a breath and was forced to accept the uncomfortable fact that she was, it turned out, a little nervous. She couldn’t think of any other way to describe that fizzy sort of feeling inside of her that made even the breath she took feel a little raggedy.

She disliked this feeling intensely, she told herself, so she marched herself toward the front door and threw it open. And there he was.

Finn Patrick, blocking out the evening light.

He had dressed up too, she could see. He wore jeans, the way men here always did, but she could see that they were nicer jeans. Not working jeans. And his cowboy boots didn’t look the least bit scuffed up. Like they were his good pair, or something.

Most telling of all, he had a blue denim shirt tucked in to his jeans, which made her aware of too many things at once. That belt of his, with the gleaming silver buckle that drew attention to a place it was not polite to look. To say nothing of those wide, wide shoulders. And the blue shirt itself, which made his eyes nothing short of spectacular.

“I think we should kiss,” she said.

Blurted out, really.

For a moment, Finn only stared at her, looking something like shocked. Then those blue eyes of his lit up with all that laughter again. “I thought I had to take you out to dinner first.”

“I just think that we should get used to kissing,” she said, because she hadn’t meant to say that but she had, so now she needed to defend it. “That way you can kiss me in public, and there won’t be any surprises. Like at dinner tonight.”

He considered her in that way that made her skin feel too tight. “Do you often find that kissing comes with a whole lot of surprises?”

Kitty didn’t know how to answer that. She scowled at him. “I’m not any happier about this than you are. But I think we have to accept the kissing as part of the package.”

It seemed to take him a moment to collect himself, but when he did, he nodded. Soberly. Too soberly, she thought. “I see your point.”

“So I figure we might as well practice here a little bit, and then go to dinner, so we’ll know what we’re getting into.”

“Yes,” he said in that same tone. “It’s always better to rehearse. To get the kinks out, you could say.”

Kitty would never have said that. But he seemed to find that particularly entertaining. She could see that unholy amusement in his eyes all over his face.

She scowled harder at him, but he didn’t move.

It took him a moment, then he seemed to understand that he needed to do something, because she watched his mouth curve.

He moved closer and Kitty thought he was going to simply lean down and put his mouth on hers, making it simple and easy and getting it over with quickly. That was what she would have done in his position. What she would have done in another second if he hadn’t gotten the ball rolling.

But Finn didn’t do that.

Instead, he… crowded her. He put one hand on the doorjamb and the other on her face, making everything in her body seem to riot. His hand gripped her chin, and then, suddenly, she couldn’t think about anything at all but the way he levered himself towards her and guided her mouth to his.

And then licked his way into her mouth.