“Can I see inside?” he said mildly.
She couldn’t speak. She could hear her own breath, swiftly now over the beating of her heart.
She just turned and climbed up the steps, and he followed.
She fumbled with the key yet again. She could feel the heat of his body against her skin.
Behind me. Over me. On me. In me.
Her dirty little prepositional phrases started up like a chant again.
She turned the key and pushed open the door.
He stalked through this room, taking it in thoughtfully. The entire house wasmaybea thousand square feet. The living room looked out onto the porch and the woods; the little bedrooms flanked it. It wasn’t as moldy as it might have been, mainly because the hole in the roof was recent and the intense Gold Country summer heat tended to dry things out. The prevailing smell was good, aging wood.
He stepped into the tiny bathroom, his hand lingering with bemused pleasure over the original porcelain knob. All the fixtures in the house—knobs, latches, hinges, lights—were pretty much original. There was a shower over an old claw-foot tub, and a vintage porcelain sink, a little rusty now, with a separate knob for hot and cold. He tried both, casually. Water spurted from each.
And still he didn’t say a word.
She felt like he was mulling over a decision, and it had more to do with her than with this house.
She found her voice, but it emerged pitched a little high. “Want to see the kitchen?”
She led him in there.
He followed in almost dreamlike silence.
The floors were wood, and a huge old farm sink sat below a little window letting in leaf-filtered sunlight. A bird flew up to it and split when it saw them.
A huge, sturdy slab oak table sat in the middle of the kitchen. It was the only piece of furniture in the house.
Britt touched it. “Jonah Greenleaf owned this house. He made this table. Apparently he was good at stuff like that before they hauled him off.”
“‘Hauled him off’?” J. T. was amused rather than alarmed. He was ready for another Hellcat Canyon story.
“Drugs. Sheriff Barlow arrested him for running drugs out of the Plugged Nickel. Scary bar up near the Coyote Creek settlement. He’s doing time. Bank repossessed the house and Gary bought it a short time ago. Remember the woman from the open mic? Glory Greenleaf? Her brother.”
“Mmm,” was all he said.
The stove was an ancient gas model, gorgeously made. She touched it, too.
“It works,” she told him. “But you’ll need to get a fridge in there. A wood stove heats the place, and I don’t know if the heat reaches the bedrooms very well. There are fans in the bedrooms, though. Want to check out the back deck? It’s a little on the rickety side.”
Her voice was still rushed and breathy, as if he’d been chasing her through the house. It was pure anticipation.
She opened the kitchen door, which creaked on its hinges. She took two steps out onto the deck. J. T. wrapped his hand around Britt’s arm and drew her swiftly backward.
And then he pointed upward silently.
Her eyes followed the direction of his finger.
A huge black widow spider was hovering up high in the web in the eaves of the house over the kitchen door. Clearly hoping not to be noticed.
“Holy....” she breathed.
The spider backed swiftly up like a square dancer getting ready to do-si-do with a partner, scrambling to get away from them.
“You know what they say. It’s more afraid of us than we are of it,” he said dryly.