Two Family Home by Sarah Title Read Free Book Online Page B

velvet. But that shouldn’t matter. Dad always told her not to judge a book by its cover. “Wait until someone gives you a reason to dislike ’em,” he always said.
    All she had to do was pay her rent and stay out of his way. What was she trying to do, sleep with him?
    That had her pausing over a squash blossom.
    No, of course not. That would be a terrible idea. He was her landlord. That was like sleeping with your boss, she told herself. Bad bad bad idea.
    But he wasn’t really her boss. What was the worst that could happen? He could evict her if it didn’t work out. That would suck.
    But that back. Those hands.
    There were other apartments in the world.
    No, no. No sleeping with Grumpy Walker. She was here to be independent, to work hard, and to make her own mistakes without a parental safety net. She had a big, demanding job that would take up all of her energy. She would be way too tired for ill-advised sex.
    She also had a mess of a garden.
    Lindsey bent over the plot and pulled out a weed. There were a lot of weeds. That was okay. She wasn’t afraid of a few weeds. Or a few thousand weeds. She kneeled down at the edge of the plot and started pulling.
    Â 
    What was she doing out there? From his hiding spot under the porch, he could hear her making noises. It sounded like she was playing in his jungle. He started to wag his tail. He wanted to play with her! He started to wiggle his way under the boards, and the cold dirt floor felt so good on his belly he almost gave up his mission and sat there wiggling. But then he got a good look at what she was doing. She was pulling his jungle apart! She was tossing big green pieces over her shoulder into a pile!
    Actually, that pile looked like it would be fun. He’d just wait down here until she was gone, then he’d have the pile all to himself. In the meantime, this dirt wasn’t going to roll in itself...

Chapter 6
    L indsey woke up restless. She was a morning person, and she was used to being at her most productive when she got out of bed. But she wasn’t used to feeling like this. Antsy, her old boss would have called it. She lay there, admiring the clean paint job on the ceiling, making a mental list of things to be anxious about.
    Job: so far, so good. Still a lot to learn, but she was okay with that. Friends: could use some work. Mary Beth had invited her to join her book club, and this month’s selection sat on her nightstand. It wasn’t exactly the raucous honky-tonkin’ she secretly hoped for when she moved to Kentucky, but she was willing to give that some time. Family: all in Arizona, all healthy, all starting to worry about her a little less, which was progress. Home: . . .
    Maybe that was it. Despite her efforts over the past few weeks, Walker still remained a grumpy mystery. And the mystery was beginning to get really deep under her skin. She wanted to know what his deal was, and not just because she wanted to know what his deal was.
    Why was he so quiet? What was his art like? Did he think she wouldn’t be able to just Google him to find out? Because she had, and it was cool. Very masculine, but somehow delicate and beautiful at the same time. They were landscapes, of a sort, metal that seemed to be flat or stamped with images, but when the photographer zoomed in, it was actually shaped and . . . carved, maybe?
    Of course, there was practically no information included, except that it was steel and copper, and there were six of them hanging in a gallery in New York City.
    Seeing images of his work made her even more curious about him. What kind of guy has the patience and vision to create what he created?
    And why did he apparently hate her?
    Maybe she’d been coming on too strong. Maybe what she thought of as a normal, neighborly level of friendliness was a creepy, stalker-level invasion of privacy to him. Maybe he was sensitive. He was an artist, after all.
    Right. Okay. Things looked a little