Page 17 of First Date: Divorce
“Make yourself at home,” he invited with a wry smile.“My house is your house.”
“Not totally, since you moved here after the separation.I can get away with some lack of knowledge because I’ve never lived in the house.But you’ll have done some things the same here as you did where we lived together.Where did we live together — apartment or house?”
“Condo.Modern.Your choice, not mine.”
She glanced at the now-open bedroom door, zeroing in on the broad bed.Made, but not obsessively.
A closer look could wait.Preferably when he wasn’t around.
She started down the stairs with him behind her.“So you rebounded to a place that would be all your taste.That could indicate you’d given up on repairing the marriage.You’d have to sell to move back to Chicago.”
“You’d have to move here.Not only because I’ve poured a good amount of my life’s blood into this place — literally.I’ve also opened a practice here.Not starting all over — again — by going back to Chicago.Besides, I like the pace here.Pauline’s office is what used to be the front parlor.”Open pocket doors opposite the stairway allowed a view of a rigorously neat desk with two guest chairs in front of it, and a settee in the window behind it.Across from the door, a large armoire sat near a fireplace.“Pauline said she got the front room because clients see it first, and I’m too messy.I think she wanted the fireplace and bay window.”
“Who can blame her?”
“For my humble office,” he gestured for her to continue to the left through Pauline’s office to another open doorway with pocket doors, “we have to repair to the rear parlor.”
It was smaller.And messier.But it had great built-in bookcases flanking a side window.
“You don’t look too abused,” she said.
“Looks can be deceiving.”
He ushered her out of the room by a side door and down a short hallway that opened into the large living room that … glowed.Not gaudy like neon, but like a lit fireplace in an otherwise dark room.Curtains were drawn back from a series of windows occupying both angles of a corner.
She walked to the windows as if she had no power to do otherwise.
A deck wrapped around the outside, with cushioned lounge chairs and potted plants.Red.Petunias?No, something else familiar.Geraniums.
Light streaming in from those windows created part of the glow, but not all of it.
It was what the room did with the light.
Light angled through the windows, like dusty gold.The unadorned woods absorbed it and threw it back, the soft cream of the pair of couches reflected it, the deep green pillows mellowed it.
“This used to be the dining room.”
He didn’t need to identify it as his living room.That was obvious from the easy comfort of couches, chairs, tables, and bookcases.
She turned from the windows with real reluctance.Then she saw what anyone sitting on the opposite couch would see.
A painting as large as the new TV her sergeant had exulted over.Greens and golds and gray, with impact slashes of rusts and black.
She imagined him on that couch.His back to the night-darkened windows, reading a book by the swing arm lamp beside it, looking up to that painting…
“You kept that in your divorce settlement?”She didn’t know why she asked that.
“No.”
His tone said there was more to that answer than two letters.It also said badgering him wouldn’t get the answer.Sometimes law enforcement required patience.Hammering made suspects harder, like tempered steel.
Although Eric Larkin didn’t qualify as a suspect … precisely.
“Want breakfast?”he said.“I make great scrambled eggs.”
“I’d comment on your lack of modesty, but since my breakfast skills consist of opening a carton of yogurt, I don’t want to annoy the cook.”
“Good decision.Right this way.”The living area opened into an expanded and renovated kitchen.“Have a seat.”Eric gestured to a row of stools at an island.
