Page 43 of Born to Sin

“Probably best,” he said, and thought,Definitely best.He found he couldn’t be nearly as cavalier about the whole idea as she was.

“So,” she said. “Want to come over with the kids on Sunday and take a look? Maybe ten-thirty, because I run at seven-thirty with my group, and Sunday’s our long one.”

Of course you do.“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll do that.”

“You can give me the straight man’s opinion on my first-date outfit, too,” she said, breezy still, “which you’ve never seen, since I went for the sweats instead with you. Especially if it fails to go over with a bang again. Martin picked it out. I’m not denying his taste in clothes, but he’s not exactly my target demographic.”

Giving her dating advice? Meeting the bloke like some friendly neighbor? Having breakfast with her in her dressing gown? This was mad. It was never going to work, because he’d explode. Sexual frustration, jealousy … pick your poison.

What he said, though, was, “Sure.”

He’d be mad to do it.

He was probably going to do it anyway.

19

MISMATCH

Beckett rang the doorbell and appraised the freshly painted blue-and-white frame house. Close to a hundred years old, he’d bet, and not really his style. Craftsman, you’d call that. Quinn opened the door within ten seconds, wearing not a speck of makeup and with her hair slicked back and still damp from the shower. She was in faded, tight jeans and a quarter-zip pale-green jumper of the soft, performance type that hugged her body. Not any kind of devastating presentation, except that it was, and when she said, “Come in,” and turned around to let them do it?

Yeah, a pretty devastating presentation. Her arse was round, high, tight, and right there to see in those jeans.In the way somebody who’d swum butterfly for a decade would tend to look,he did his best to remind himself,not so you can fantasize about telling her to turn over.It didn’t work, but then, his mind was an unruly bugger.

Oh. The house. The door opened into a large enclosed sun porch with a wooden table and mismatched chairs on one side and a couple of wicker armchairs on the other. She said, “My favorite part of the house, especially in the autumn, like now, when the trees are turning, though it’s pretty great in the spring and summer, too. Really a second living room, except that it’s too leaky to sit out here in winter.”

He said, “Windows aren’t double-glazed, that’s why.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I keep meaning to get around to having that done, but it hasn’t happened yet. Always something else to do first. Maybe next spring.”

The real lounge, then, with a wood stove set into the masonry fireplace, built-in bookshelves, and mismatched, comfortably shabby furniture that looked like it had come from an op shop. There were big windows with deep wooden sills you could perch on, hundred-year-old narrow-plank oak floors covered by pleasantly faded carpets, and an enormous beam that marked the start of the kitchen. Load-bearing wall, that would be. She said, “I know it’s not modern, and my dad says the wood stove isn’t anywhere near as practical as gas, but that’s why I like it.”

“It feels like a magic house,” Troy said. “Like a house in a story.” His taste didn’t run to the modern, then. Interesting to know.

“Ah,” Quinn said. “Wait until you see the rest, then.”

“Who chops the wood?” Beckett asked.

“I do, although I buy it already split. It’s a good workout, and it feels good, too. Got an issue with that?” Combative again, or defensive, like somebody’d commented before, and not in a good way.

“I told you,” he said, “I like strong. Show us the rest, then.”

Her shoulders relaxed, and so did her face, at least a bit. “Warning, the kitchen’s old-fashioned, too.”

It was. New appliances, but the deep farmhouse sink was white porcelain, the gas cooker was a soft orange, the benchtops were multicolored slate tiles that had probably cost half what anything else would, and on one entire gold-wallpapered wall, instead of cabinets, she’d placed a huge piece of old, scarred wooden furniture. The hutch on top had two glass-doored cabinets at the ends with open shelves and hooks between them, all of which appeared to be storage for her cups, plates and glasses, and drawers below with antique metal cup pulls and knobs. She said, “This is another one of my favorite things. Go on, kids, open one of the big drawers.”

Janey looked at her dubiously and said, “It’s a drawer.”

“I know,” Quinn said. “But what’s inside?”

Janey opened it and blinked. Quinn said, “They’re tin, and the bottom slopes, see?” She pulled it out farther and showed them. “For flour and sugar, and smaller tin drawers for other things like baking powder and cocoa and brown sugar. Flour and sugar didn’t always come in neat little paper bags. You bought it in a big cloth sack instead, and then you dumped it in here and scooped it out. If you didn’t have much money, you made skirts and dresses out of the sacks, back in the old days when Montana really was the Wild West, and real clothes had to come all the way out on the train. They printed the sacks with flowers just so you could do that.”

“I wouldn’t much want to wear a dress made of a sack,” Janey said.

“If the other girls were wearing it, too,” Quinn said, “I imagine you’d have got over it.”

“Interesting choice,” Beckett said.

She didn’t take offense. She laughed. “My mom asked, ‘Why?’ My grandma said, ‘All I ever wanted was a modern kitchen. The day I got my first frost-free refrigerator, I would’ve kissed that thing if I hadn’t been in such a hurry to plug it in and watch it not need defrosting. Why on earth would anybody want this old monstrosity?’ And I couldn’t really explain, except that I like it. The drawers stick a little, but oh, well, nothing’s perfect. Also, my mom couldn’t understand why I didn’t want a kitchen island like everybody else, even though I’d opened the kitchen up to the living room, and just wanted the table instead.” Another piece that was old, scarred, and lovingly polished. Her chairs didn’t match here, either.

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