my brush and my elastic band. I bent over at the waist, brushed my hair while I was inverted, and gathered it into a ponytail on top of my head. I was sure it was centered, because the movements were just automatic after all these years. My ponytail came down past my shoulder blades now. I looped the band, ran the ponytail through, and I straightened, ponytail flying back over my shoulders to bounce in the middle. Quinn and Everett had stopped their task to stare. When I looked back at them, the two men hastily bent back to their tasks.
Okay, I didn’t get that I’d done anything interesting, but apparently I had. I shrugged and vanished into the master bathroom to slap on some makeup. After another glance in the mirror, it occurred to me that maybe anything I did in that outfit was fairly interesting, if you were a fully functional guy.
When I came out, Everett had gone and Quinn gave me a slip of paper with Everett’s cell number on it. “He says to call him when you need some more boxes,” Quinn said. “He took all the bagged clothes. Looks like you don’t need me at all.”
“No comparison,” I said, smiling. “Everett didn’t bring me grease and caffeine this morning, and you did.”
“So what’s the plan, and how can I help?”
“Okay, the plan is . . .” I didn’t exactly have one more specific than “go through this stuff and sort it out,” and Quinn couldn’t do that for me.
“How’s this?” I asked. “You get everything out of the kitchen cabinets, and set it out where I can see it all, and I’ll make a ‘keep or toss’ decision. You can pack what I want to keep, and put what I want to toss out on the gallery. I hope the rain stays away.” The sunny morning was clouding over, fast. “While we work, I’ll fill you in on what happened here last night.”
Despite the threat of bad weather, we worked all morning, called in a pizza for lunch, and resumed work in the afternoon. The stuff I didn’t want went into garbage bags, and Quinn furthered his muscular development by carrying all the garbage bags down to the courtyard and putting them in the little shed that had held the lawn chairs, still set up on the grass. I tried to admire his muscles only when he wasn’t looking, and I think I was successful. Quinn was very interested to hear about the ectoplasmic reconstruction, and we talked about what it might all mean without reaching any conclusions. Jake didn’t have any enemies among the vampires that Quinn knew of, and Quinn thought that Jake must have been killed for the embarrassment it would cause Hadley, rather than for any sin of Jake’s own.
I saw neither hide nor hair of Amelia, and I wondered if she’d gone home with the Mormonish Bob. Or maybe he’d stayed with her, and they were having a fabulous time in Amelia’s apartment. Maybe he was a real ball of fire under that white shirt and those black pants. I looked around the courtyard. Yes, Bob’s bicycle was still propped against the brick wall. Since the sky was getting darker by the minute, I put the bike in the little shed, too.
Being with Quinn all day was stoking my fire a bit hotter every moment. He was down to a tank top and jeans, and I found myself wondering what he’d look like without those. And I didn’t think I was the only one conjecturing about what people would look like naked. I could catch a flash from Quinn’s mind every now and then as he was toting a bag down the stairs or packing pots and pans into a box, and those flashes weren’t about opening his mail or doing his laundry.
I had enough practical presence of mind left to switch on a lamp when I heard the first peal of thunder in the distance. The Big Easy was about to be drenched.
Then it was back to flirting with Quinn wordlessly—making sure he had a good view when I stretched up to get a glass down from the cabinets or bent down to wrap that glass in newspaper. Maybe a quarter of me was embarrassed, but the rest of me was having fun. Fun had not been a big factor in my life recently—well, ever—and I was enjoying my little toddle on the wild side.