Marrying Mr. Wrong (Dirty Martini Running Club #3) - Claire Kingsley Page 0,48

estate agent, had parked in front of us. She got out and we followed her up the short walk to the front door.

“It’s only a two bedroom, but the bathroom is very roomy,” Cynthia said as she unlocked the door and led us inside. “No stairs, of course. Fenced backyard, fresh paint inside and out. Overall, it’s quite charming.”

I took slow steps into the front room, taking in the feel of the place as much as the look. It was a nice day outside, but it seemed dim in here. Still, I wanted to give it a chance.

Cynthia left us to wander through the small house. Cox and I peeked into the bedrooms and the bathroom. The kitchen was small—cramped, even—but the breakfast nook was nice.

“What do you think?” Cox asked.

I hesitated, glancing around. I wasn’t getting a good vibe here. I didn’t want to sound overly picky but I also didn’t want my dad to end up somewhere he wouldn’t like.

“The bathroom is nice. And the bedrooms are big enough.”

“But?”

“I didn’t say but.”

“I can tell. There’s a but.”

“There’s not much natural light. And the kitchen is tiny.”

He gave me a decisive nod. “We can do better.”

“I don’t want to be a pain, but—”

“Say no more, sugar. We’ll keep looking until we find the right place. Cynthia, let’s move on to the next one.”

She smiled. “Of course.”

The next house didn’t have a driveway and all the street parking for two blocks in either direction was taken. Cox nixed it on that alone before we even went inside, saying there had to be a reasonable place for me to park when I came to visit him. House number three was a contender, although I didn’t get solid Dad’s future house vibes. Still, it was nice.

We pulled up to the fourth, and final, house on Cynthia’s list for the day. From the outside, it looked charming. It was tan with white trim and had a manageable small yard, plus a driveway that would easily fit two cars.

The inside was nice, with three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a kitchen that was roomy for a house on the small side. Plenty of light. All in all, not a bad choice.

Cox raised his eyebrows at me.

“I like it.”

“But do you love it?”

Putting my hands on my hips, I looked around again. “I don’t know if I love it, but it definitely has potential.”

Cynthia excused herself and went outside to take a phone call. I decided to wander through the house again. See if I could imagine Dad living here.

There was more space than he had now, considering he couldn’t use his second story. And it was a lot bigger than my apartment.

I wondered what it would be like to walk into a house and know you could just buy it. And not even for yourself.

“What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?” Cox asked.

“Nothing. I don’t want to make it weird.”

“Well, now I really need to know,” he said with a grin.

“It’s just amazing to me that you can buy someone a house and it doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal. I’ve worked for Mr. Calloway long enough, I should be used to being around someone wealthy. But it’s still so foreign.”

He put his hands in his pockets and took a few steps deeper into the room. “Sometimes it’s still foreign to me, too.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t grow up with money. Most of my life, we were scraping along the bottom end of poor, just shy of destitute.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t have been living on Ashford Street back then if your family had been swimming in money.”

“No, indeed. And that was one of the nicer places we lived.”

I gazed at him. Ashford Street hadn’t been a very nice place. Small, tired houses with saggy porches and weeds in the yards. It had been a low point in my childhood. A time when Dad had been out of work for a while and things had been rough. He’d shielded me from the worst of that, never letting on how hard it was to make ends meet. But it hadn’t been the sort of neighborhood where people lived when they were thriving.

“You’ve come a long way since then.”

“That I have. On the day I turned eighteen, I vowed to my mama that I’d make something of myself so I could take care of her. And that’s exactly what I did.”

There was something in his voice when he talked about his mom. A hint of