been recently vacuumed and dusted, but in less than twenty-four hours the clutter had already started to accumulate. Luke’s shoes from the day before had been kicked off near the couch and empty cans of Mountain Dew were scattered across the coffee table. Apparently he’d ordered pizza in at some point as well, because the box lay open and half eaten among the cans and an empty bag of Twizzlers.
Kris had called that one.
Down here, the decoration was all about video games, but mostly the walls were bare in the large family-type room. Around the corner she found a small kitchenette that seemed to be dedicated to housing junk food and soda. Any real food was obviously kept upstairs.
She followed the sound of the shower down the hall, finding a well-equipped home gym, a storage room, and two bedrooms where the dividing wall had been ripped out to create one massive bedroom. Luke’s room.
It was a lot to process, from the massive water bed to the bookcase devoted entirely to Marvel figurines. In their new home, Luke would definitely need his own man cave. And the bed was going. Luke was insane if he thought there was any way she was going to sleep with him on that.
Not. A. Chance. She’d rather rip the crime scene tape of his parents’ bed and use that, dust and all.
Luke seemed obsessed with things called Halo and Call of Duty. Rori assumed these were video games, based on the art. Computer generated with 3-D animation. It was a skill set she really should invest some time in. Yes, the mediums she chose to work with were more traditional, but Rori didn’t believe in inhibiting the expression of art just because it wasn’t time-tested. It would be fun to learn the software and see how classical methods and technology could be married together.
Still, she had to draw the line at decorating her walls with drawings of men in alien-looking body suits. That wouldn’t be happening. It was also a good thing they would have a maid, or she might take bigger issue with Luke being such a slob. Mike obviously didn’t clean this room as often, and it showed.
Just then the shower turned off and Rori heard Luke step out and slide a towel from the rack. She moved to the bathroom door and this time she didn’t knock before entering. She just stepped into the steamy room right as Luke wrapped a towel around his waist.
“So why do you live downstairs when it’s your house?” she asked, appreciating the graceful slope of his chest into his flat abs. To his credit, he didn’t seem as skittish as he’d been before the shower.
“Hey, there,” he said, wiping the mirror off with a hand towel. “You noticed that, huh?”
“It’s kind of hard not to,” she teased, letting him see that she was looking him over. He was attractive. And since he was a little shy, it seemed only fair that she let him know that she liked looking at him. It might help… expedite things between them.
“Upstairs is for guests,” he said with a shrug. “Mike keeps it clean and presentable and I get my privacy down here. I get to be a slob and no one gets to give me a hairy eyeball, because if they do, I’ll just send them back upstairs to Mike’s turf and they can bug him about how the place needs a woman’s touch.”
That made Rori smile. “Would these be women in his family, or women offering to be the woman’s touch?”
“Both,” Luke said, raking his hair away from his face with his fingers. “He gets the free rent in exchange for doing all the chores, paying the utilities, and dealing with the headaches.”
“Sounds fair,” she said, wondering if he dared to lose the towel in front of her yet. Something had him skittish. She only wished she knew what so she knew whether to back off or push forward.
“So what do you want to do today?” he asked, switching subjects. “The day is ours and the options are endless. Inside? Outside? What sounds good?”
Finally, something Kris wasn’t right about. Rori had definitely not heard the words Zelda or alphabet in that sentence.
“Outside, definitely,” she said, thinking of the kids she’d watched on her way over. “A hike, maybe? Or a visit to some place you like? I don’t know anything about your hometown, so I’ll put myself at your mercy.”
Luke actually wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Well, that