“I’m a little freaked out,” she said. “You tell me. Should I be? Should I move? What’s this guy like?”

Leg still hiked up on the step, one arm braced on the railing, he asked, “So why’s your underwear hanging around the house?”

“Because I don’t trust that old dryer not to fry it! And that shouldn’t matter. Is he peeking in my windows?”

“Well, they’re actually his windows.”

She pressed fingers to her mouth. The law of fluorescent lightbulbs said her skin and eyes shouldn’t look so beautiful under their glare, but she’d never been one to follow those kinds of rules.

“Do you think he’s actually gone inside the house? Do you think he’s actually, you know, touched my stuff?” Her whole body did this exaggerated shiver as her hands dropped. “Why are you laughing? This isn’t funny at all.”

But he couldn’t stop. He just laughed and laughed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Relax, Jen.”

“Don’t tell me to relax—”

“I wrote those notes.”

“Don’t tell me—wait. You?”

His foot dropped off the step and he leaned a hip against the basement railing. “Yep.”

Body frozen in a midrant pose, only her eyes shifted back and forth. “You. You’re Mr. Lindsay?”

He recognized the start of Jen’s anger. The gathering of her lips, the careful swipe of her tongue between them as she ordered her words.

“Before you start”—he held up a hand—“I freaked out when you called me out of the blue the other day. I had no idea you’d come back here. I heard your voice on the phone, you thought I was Mr. Lindsay, I ran with it.” Her shoulders dropped, her giant purse sliding with a jerk to the crook of her elbow. His other hand came up, warding off the verbal blow he could feel coming. He was shoring up his house, nailing boards to the windows in preparation for the hurricane. “I’m sorry. I thought it would buy me some time to deal with you suddenly reappearing. Thought it’d be funny for a bit; you know, since we used to play all those tricks on people together back in the day. Didn’t know you’d get so bothered.”

“A strange man leaving notes on my door. You didn’t think it would bother me.”

He ran a hand around the back of his neck and looked at the linoleum floor with the decades-old line of wear leading from the door to the stairs. “I didn’t think. I’m sorry.” Chin down, he looked up at her.

She broke. Her smile was the sun lasering through the swirling clouds, dissipating the storm.

“Jesus Christ, Leith!” She breathed like she’d just sprinted across the fairgrounds. The takeout bag dropped to the floor. But she was smiling. And laughing. “There’s no one out here! The thought of some creepy old guy looking through my window?”

Hand to his chest, he said, “I’m sorry. I really am.” He let himself have another chuckle, but this one not at her expense. “Want me to walk you back to your place? You know, in case any old men are lurking about?”

“Well, no. There’s underwear strung all around.”

“Like I said, want me to walk you back to your place?”

He hadn’t meant to flirt. Really. It caught both of them by surprise, their smiles fading, the laughter petering out. In the crappy foyer light, their gazes caught and held. The house felt too small, her proximity too close and yet not nearly close enough.

“I, uh . . .” she began, then cleared her throat as her eyes drifted away, over his shoulder. The moment her expression changed, from awkward—but also eager?—attraction, to one of bewilderment, he knew she’d spotted Mildred’s kitchen. He shifted his body to try to block her view, but it was useless.

“Okay, I may have underwear hanging from a clothesline across the living room,” Jen said, “but at least I don’t have shelves of Precious Moments and painted wooden hearts on my kitchen wall.”

Dropping her purse to the linoleum, she pushed past him and jumped up the one step into the kitchen. He sighed, waiting for it.

“Leith.” She stood in the center of the pink braided rug and turned in a circle, amusement plastered all over her face as she took in the elderly horror. He deserved her laughter. “I never pegged you as a pink kitchen sort of guy.”

He had to run with it, though he was loathing where her next line of questioning was heading. “Isn’t it more of a mauve?”

She guffawed. “Did you just move in or something?”

“Or something.” He shut the back door and joined her in the small kitchen.

“Is this your grandma’s house?”

“No.” Strangely, he felt a little defensive, and reached out to straighten a faded and burned pot holder hanging from a hook above the stovetop. “It was Mildred’s.”

“Who’s Mildred?”

“Mildred Lindsay.”

Jen nodded slowly. “Ah, okay. I get it. I think.”

“Her husband died, oh, I don’t know, thirty years ago? She lived alone here, but Horace Lindsay’s name was still on three houses—this one, yours, and the empty one on the other side.”

She laughed low and graced him with a smile that said she’d forgiven him.

“May I?” She gestured down the darkened hall toward the front room. He shrugged. None of the stuff inside was his, and she wasn’t laughing at the house anymore.

Leith followed Jen deeper into Mildred’s home. She turned into the formal living room that looked out over the street. Leith leaned in the doorway, watching as she turned on a lamp with a fringed shade. The room was filled with knickknacks—porcelain figurines and blown glass vases in pale colors and framed Victorian prints—that meant absolutely nothing to him, and which he’d been viewing as a hindrance these past few months. But Jen spent time looking at each one, giving them a fragile, sad, forgotten meaning he’d been purposely avoiding.

She turned from a glass-enclosed bookcase near the window. “So why are you here?”

The lamplight hit her in a way that turned her dress into a translucent suggestion. She was still wearing that pale gray one from this morning, the one that seemed to wrap around the best parts of her body. Thanks to the fuzzy light from behind, he could see her shape: the subtle dent of her waist, the round curve of her hips, the slope of her inner thighs.

Though he’d seen her last night wearing a lot less, there was something terribly intimate about her appearance now—especially in the way she regarded him, head tilted, eyes gone soft.

He cleared his throat and angled his body to stare at a crack in the well-worn hardwood floor. “Mildred left all her stuff to me. The three houses. Everything inside. A bit of money.”

Jen trailed her fingers over a secretary desk. “Why to you?”

He shrugged.

“Did you know her well?”

“No. Not really.”

“But you must have made an impression.”

“I said I don’t really know why.”

“No, you didn’t. You just shrugged.” Her expression turned sly, teasing. “Did you buy her groceries or something?”

“No.”

“Date her granddaughter?”

“No grandkids.”

Jen came forward, moving out of the tormenting lamplight, thank God. He was momentarily blindsided by the memory of how she’d looked the night of their first kiss. Her face turned up to him, him towering over her, she’d looked delicate and beautiful and trusting. And also scared.

Much as she seemed just now.

Jen, true to character, somehow covered all that up with a hand on her hip and a playful squint. “So you must have cut her lawn.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling like he was ten. “Yeah, I did.”

She swallowed a smile and went to the window, leaning over to pull aside the curtain. That smooth, clingy, gray fabric settled into the crack of her ass, and he had to look away again.

“Wow,” she said, examining the plainest, smallest front yard on the block, “you must have done a spectacular job.”

“I also talked to her. I think I might have been the only person who did.”