property again.”
“I am.” I say it easily, still studying the stone patio and path. “Is that local rock?”
“Yeah, they were dug up when the foundation was built, so I decided to repurpose.”
He’s so damn intentional, right down to the smallest detail. “It’s beautiful. How much property do you have?”
“A little over an acre. It seems bigger because of the trees, but without them, you’d be able to see the back fence from here.” His voice moves as he walks into the kitchen. “Don’t go wandering. It’s shitty outside and you’re not dressed for it.”
Since I was just considering stepping outside, I laugh. “Can you blame me? It’s not often I get to see a Jonas Barnett house up close and personal.” I turn in time to see him hesitate as he opens the fridge. I sigh. “I’m not bringing up business. But we’re both interested in stuff like this, so it’s silly to not even be able to talk about it.”
He shakes his head and ducks into the fridge, returning a moment later with a carton of eggs, a handful of vegetables, and some bacon. He sets them aside and then walks to the narrow door beside the fridge that reveals itself to be a pantry and disappears inside.
Curiosity takes hold again, and I wander over as he walks out. The pantry is larger inside than I expect, running a good fifteen feet down the side of the house. “Cozy,” I murmur.
“Blake.” He sounds exasperated, but in a fond sort of way. “It’s going to take me a few minutes to get this going.”
I step back into the kitchen and grin. “Does that mean you’re giving me the green light to explore?”
“Do it now, because you’re not going to have the energy for it later.”
His meaning sends a pulse of heat through me, but the thought of getting free rein of his house is too tempting to let sex distract me. I bounce to him, press a quick kiss to his lips, and head for the living room.
Exploring Jonas’s house is like hunting for treasure. The rewards are in the details. In the tile work I find in the downstairs bathroom. In the mud room with custom shelves that has a door directly into a laundry room with its own custom shelves. Each window offers another slice of the outside world, except it doesn’t look like our world at all.
Or at least it doesn’t look like my world of steel and concrete and cement. It’s peaceful here, and Jonas has expertly brought elements of that peace into this house. It’s cozy and comfortably isolated.
Then I find the study.
Three of the walls are bookshelves, and a quick perusal finds paperbacks of every genre, from thriller to romance to nonfiction. They are, of course, sorted by genre and then alphabetical within their genre. Their spines are creased from being read, and the apparent imperfection of their varied heights and colors only seems to make the office cozier. Plenty of businesspeople stock their offices with pretty books that they’ve never opened in order to create an aesthetic, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Jonas.
And the desk. The desk is its own work of art, a huge sturdy thing that reminds me a little of the one in my father’s study. I circle it and, sure enough, see the distinctive design on the drawers that marks the craftsman. It makes sense, in a way. There are plenty of things that my father and Jonas have in common. They wouldn’t be friends otherwise.
It’s still a reminder of the strange situation I find myself in.
15
I hear footsteps and turn to find Jonas in the doorway. He should look less forbidding while shirtless, with his blond and silver hair messy from my hands, his lounge pants slung low on his hips. He should…but he doesn’t. He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms over his chest. “Snooping?”
“Only a little.” I start working my way toward him, drifting my fingertips across the spines of the books. “You’ve read all these?”
“There’s no point of having them here if I haven’t.”
The edge in his voice sends a delicious thrill through me. I veer away from the shelves and back to stand in front of the desk. “Do you even work in here? It’s so clean, it practically shines.”
“I like things in order.” He starts moving toward me slowly. Jonas bypasses me and peers down at the surface of his desk. He sighs heavily. “Now you’ve gone