“I’ll get you another shirt,” she offered on a whisper, not looking at him and moving toward the mudroom.
“I’d be obliged,” he murmured as she rounded him and felt his eyes on her.
There were, luckily, no more incidents but Sally demanded Isabella stand on the front steps and wave them away “until we’re out of sight”.
Which she did.
“How are things with Mr. Broody-Hot?” Mikey asked, taking Isabella out of her thoughts.
Mr. Broody-Hot. Where did Mikey come up with this stuff?
“If you mean Prentice,” Isabella answered, “they’re nearly one day closer to me being out of here.”
“That bad?” Mikey asked quietly.
Isabella looked at her friend’s profile. “Next time you love a man for twenty years, return to him and he thinks you jilted and made a fool of him and you have to sleep under his roof for a week, slowly falling in love with his two children then you can tell me how bad it is.”
“I’d say that’s bad,” Mikey returned.
Isabella didn’t reply because she didn’t need to.
“You’re falling in love with his children?” Mikey asked, voice still quiet.
Mikey knew all about her quest to get pregnant. He’d lived through it with her, though he’d been in Chicago and she’d been, well, globe-trotting with Laurent.
“There’s a good deal to love.”
Mikey sighed. “I noticed they’re good kids.”
Isabella was again silent.
“They like you,” Mikey said.
Isabella looked out the window. “More fool them.”
She felt Mikey squeeze her thigh. “There’s a good deal to like, girlie-girl.”
Hardly, she thought but she kept her silence.
Mikey slid to a halt outside Prentice’s house and ogled it through her window as he had that morning when he came to pick her up.
“I’ve got to say, Bella darling, this house is something else.”
She couldn’t agree more.
She stared at the house, sprawling and imposing on its cliff, somehow looking like it erupted from the cleft where it was situated and belonged there.
She hadn’t seen any of his other work but if this was anything to go by, Prentice was very talented.
Not for the first time she thought her father was an idiot. Even Carver Austin, who could find fault in anything, wouldn’t have been able to find fault with this house.
She pulled her eyes from the house and turned back to Mikey while saying, “Thanks for the ride.”
But she said it to no one. Mikey was out of the door and closing it.
She didn’t have a good feeling about this.
Isabella got out her side and slammed the door, calling, “Mikey, what’re you doing?”