Fast & Loose by Elizabeth Bevarly (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📕

the floor to rub his injured toe against his calf. When he did, his carry-on tipped over and hit a small table beside the door just hard enough to knock something off of it that shattered upon impact with the floor.

Cole closed his eyes at hearing the crash. One foot in the door, and already he’d broken something that didn’t belong to him. When he opened his eyes and looked down, he saw that whatever it was had been made out of brightly colored glass. Probably a vase, he thought. Hopefully nothing expensive that any person with half a mind would know not to put near a front door, since anyone and his carry-on might break something expensive were it situated in such a place. Then Cole peered around the front door and saw an ugly notch in the plaster where the door had slammed into it. So much for the damage deposit. For some reason, though, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling, however bizarre, that the house had kind of enjoyed seeing him get battered.

Jet lag, he told himself. He ignored the fact that, having flown east, he was still on Pacific Time and should be three hours fresher than anyone in Louisville. Flying always made him irritable, no matter where he was going or when he arrived. And sometimes it made his brain a little weird. Nevertheless, when Cole closed the door behind himself, he did it with infinitely more care, making a mental note to clean up the glass once he got settled. Then he turned to survey his surroundings.

The house was much nicer inside than out. Whoever lived here was obviously more concerned with interiors than she was with exteriors. He felt confident using the feminine pronoun because there was no question that at least one person who lived here was a woman. Although the furnishings weren’t overly girly or anything, there was just too much…stuff…for this to be an exclusively masculine domain. Too much color. Too much comfort. Too much care.

The living room spanned the entire front of the house, but had been fairly well separated into two distinct areas by the careful placement of furniture. To his right was a love seat and chair angled toward an intricately tiled fireplace, giving the feel of a living room, and to his left was a makeshift library of two chairs and a table near floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books. The walls were painted a rich dark yellow, a color that complemented both the warm berry and blue of the floral pattern on the fireplace grouping and the cool sage of the library chairs. Two different but complementary jewel-toned Oriental rugs spanned the hardwood floors on each side of the room, and the floors fed nicely into the natural woodwork of the doors and windows. What looked to be original oils of pastoral landscapes and sketches of European cafés hung on the walls, and gauzy curtains the color of the chairs framed the windows.

The overall feeling was…happy, Cole decided. And…pleasant. Even though pleasant wasn’t a word that turned up in his vocabulary often. Calm, too, he thought further. Which was a word he used even less frequently. It was the kind of room that just made a person feel better for having entered it.

Immediately across from the front door was a hallway that led into the rest of the house, and to the right of that, near the fireplace, were French doors opening into another room. Shunning the traditional entry of the hall for the wider one offered by the doors—there was no need to risk breaking anything else—Cole made his way into a dining room with a broad bay window. A massive buffet littered with whimsical, brightly painted wood-carved animals and flamboyant pottery took up virtually the entire wall across from it, dwarfing the small table and two chairs by the window. The colors on the walls in here were a tranquil turquoise blue, offset by countless paintings of lush gardens that hung on the walls.

Clearly, his hostess was a collector of art who had very eclectic tastes. Cole wasn’t much of a connoisseur himself, but from what he could tell, the house’s owner had good taste. Certainly, she liked things that were colorful.

Through a door on the other side of this room, Cole found the kitchen, its red walls, retro coffee advertisements, and old-fashioned appliances pulling more reluctant smiles from him. A breakfast nook in the corner was encased on two sides with wide windows that looked out onto a backyard that was surprisingly private, thanks to a veritable jungle of foliage along the outer rim. Through a second kitchen entry, he found himself in a hallway painted yet another bright color—this time something reminiscent of a tropical sunset—looking down into the living room again. There were two more doors on his right, and another on his left, between him and the front door. The room on the left was a bathroom, he discovered as he passed it, while the first room on the right was a home office. The third room was filled with boxes and odd bits of furniture and miscellany that made him think whoever lived here had moved in fairly recently and hadn’t yet decided what the purpose of this room was to be.

So where was the bedroom? he wondered.

Turning around, he noticed a door at the other end of the hall that he’d overlooked before. Opening it, he saw stairs and understood there was more to the house than he’d initially realized. Although he’d noted a window above the wide front porch when he was outside, he’d thought it was for decoration or to offer some sparse illumination to the attic. As he climbed the stairs, twisted around a cramped landing, then climbed some more, he discovered that what was once an attic had been turned into a master bedroom. Well, okay, maybe it wasn’t so masterful, since, like the house, it was small and a little crowded, its ceiling