The Player Next Door - Kathy Lyons Page 0,20
like a tribal eagle. But now he was on break, so his hair was growing in thick and dark. A tight skull cap of barely an inch long, but it drew her gaze in the way it framed his face. Cut square across his forehead, it made the angles of his cheeks and jaw seem crisp and hard. When he’d stomped in here, his brows had been lowered in anger and his jaw clenched tight.
Scary on a man his size. But when she’d looked into his eyes, she’d seen a patient intelligence. Not that she was the best judge of character, but that didn’t seem to matter. Even when his hands were clenched, all she had to do was look in his eyes and she’d relax. She had nothing to fear from him because he wasn’t a man to let his emotions run away with him.
Which meant he was darkly attractive when angry. But now that his grin softened the harsh cut of his face, his whole demeanor seemed to lift. Fortunately, the crow’s feet kept him from appearing too movie-star handsome. But that was nothing compared to what she saw in his eyes.
This time the intelligence shifted to something devilish. Part mischief, part seduction, and filled with challenge. He was daring her to join him. Not just in the laughter, but in something much more. She wasn’t a competitive person. Challenges usually left her bored. But this was a temptation. He was a temptation, and that was a wholly new experience.
“Do you know why I was given this house?” she asked. As usual, her words had only a vague relationship to what she was thinking.
He shook his head.
“Aunt Mabel married a dreamer. Uncle Bob never followed through on anything. He was smart and had really good ideas, but he never accomplished anything because he could never focus long enough to finish it.”
“Hard man to live with,” he said, and he sounded like he knew.
“They had two kids, Sam and Robbie. Both have good careers and live elsewhere. She could have sold the house and split the money between them. Uncle Bob died years ago of heart disease, so he wasn’t a factor.”
“But she gave the house to you. Why?”
Tori looked down at the empty glass in her hand. She could still see the words typed in clear black letters. “Her will said that the house goes to me because every dreamer needs a place to call home.”
“She called you a dreamer?” He sounded shocked. As if he couldn’t believe it. “Don’t you have a PhD? A year with the Dalai Lama and all that?”
She looked at him, startled that he could wonder at the word. “My whole family calls me a space cadet. Dreamer is the nicest—”
“Well, then I wish my cousins were ditzes. Jesus, no wonder you want to rip this house up from top to bottom.”
He understood. When everyone else in her life was treating her like a two-year-old out on a dangerous daydream, he understood exactly what was driving her. This was her house now. And she would fucking prove to everyone what she could do.
He stood up and crossed into her kitchen. He grabbed a glass and headed for the tap, but she gestured to the refrigerator. “There’s homemade lemonade in there, but it’s kind of tart.” She shrugged. “I forgot to buy sugar.”
He paused. “How tart?”
She held up her own glass. “I’m drinking water.”
“Water it is.”
“I was going to buy beer for you, but I don’t know what kind you like—”
“I’m not picky.”
“—so I bought a variety. Thought I’d start experimenting. Edward always called it a blue collar drink, but I was surprised at how much some of it costs.”
“Edward doesn’t know shit.” He opened her refrigerator and let out a low whistle. “When you experiment, you don’t go halfway, do you?”
She looked over. She’d bought one bottle of thirty-two different brands of beer. She hadn’t even started on the cans, but this was every brand the small liquor store had. “It was a whim.”
“I’m not complaining. So which one do you want to try first?”
She didn’t understand what he meant but then he gestured to the beer array.
“I’ve become a little stuck in my beer choices too,” he continued. “Why don’t we split the bottles? Expand our palates together?”
She thought about it for a second, her gaze slipping to the five hundred dollar bills on the floor. “The World Beer Cup competition has over ninety categories of beer. And beeradvocate has reviews of