No Place Like Home (4 page)

He made a couple of phone calls and then glanced at his watch. “What I’d like to do this afternoon,” he said, “is take you to several different kinds of houses, and get an idea which things you like best. I doubt any of them are quite what you’re looking for, but...”

“
Is that really necessary? It sounds like a waste of time.”

“
If we stumble across your dream castle this afternoon, no one could be more pleased than I will be. But if we don’t, at least I’ll know where to start looking, and what not to show you. We may waste one afternoon, but we’ll save lots of time in the long run.”

“
All right,” she said doubtfully.

“
And I’m certain enough of my eventual success that I’ll even buy you lunch before we start,” he added. “I’ll take it out of my commission.”

“
Is this another symptom of your humility?” she said.

“
That’s right. Sales people don’t get anywhere without self-confidence.”

“
Why don’t you bottle some of yours and sell it? You seem to have plenty.” Kaye bit her tongue. Brendan McKenna seemed to be having an unfortunate effect on her manners. “I am sorry, Mr. McKenna,” she said stiffly. “That was uncalled for.”

He shrugged it off. “I think you’d better start calling me Brendan,” he suggested. “We’ll either be the best of buddies by the time this is over, or we’ll never want to see each other again, but we won’t be neutral.”

“
I thought we’d already gone far past neutral.”

“
After what happened Saturday night, perhaps you’re right. It might have been the luckiest car accident of my life. Do you realize that with the commission the seller will pay me when you buy a house, I can buy a whole new car?”

“
I’m touched,” Kaye said crisply.

“
I thought you would be. Maybe instead of fixing this one, I’ll just trade it in on a BMW.” He helped her into her coat.

“
I really don’t think lunch is such a wonderful idea.”

“
Believe me, if you don’t eat, by the end of the afternoon you’ll wish you had. Cindy,” he said to the gorgeous brunette as they crossed the big office. “Miss Reardon and I are going to the Wolfpack for lunch and then out to look at houses.”

“
The Wolfpack?” Kaye asked. “That’s the name of a restaurant?”

“
One of the best in town. I don’t know why they call it that—except that you’ll see big groups of people there gobbling away as if they’re protecting their kill. Let’s take my car.”

“
I know, you’ll feel safer if I’m not driving.”

“
I didn’t say that.”

“
Don’t start being diplomatic now.” She stopped to inspect the dent. It looked even worse in daylight. “I really did put a crease into it, didn’t I?”

He nodded. “The garage said it was lucky you weren’t in a real hurry, or I wouldn’t be driving it at all.” He unlocked the door. A battered teddy bear was occupying the passenger’s seat; he tossed it into the back.

“
Oh, please! Now you’re really making me feel like a worm.”

“
You should. You’ll probably have a new car every year from now on, while the rest of us drive old, battered ones.”

She could, she decided. She hadn’t thought of things like that before. It was a pleasant thought.

*****

The Wolfpack turned out to be a little bar tucked into a corner of the downtown area. Outside the door, Brendan turned to her and said, “Perhaps I should have asked if you’re the quiche and salad type. If so, we’d better go somewhere else. The Wolfpack leans to a heartier sort of fare.”

“
How hearty?” Kaye asked doubtfully.

“
Reubens, submarines, hot roast beef with horseradish.”

“
Oh, the kind of thing you can’t eat if you don’t want anyone to know where you’ve been.”

“
That’s the place. They also have the best French fries in Illinois.”

“
And I’ve never heard of it?”
I can see why,
she thought as they stepped inside. From the pavement, it looked like a seedy dive. Inside, it made no pretensions to style or atmosphere; the table coverings were paper, the chairs looked less than reliable, and the smell was heavenly.

Her Reuben was the best she had ever eaten, dripping with sauerkraut and salad dressing. “You’re certainly right about the food,” she said.

He said, modestly, “I nearly always am. Where do you live now, Kaye?”

“
In a studio apartment on Williams Street. Is that important?”

“
It might be. We’re trying to establish what you really want, so that I show you that and not what I think you should have. What made you choose that apartment? And what do you hate about it?”

She thought it over as she nibbled at the corned beef that peeped out of the edge of her sandwich. “It was mostly the fact that I could afford the rent,” she said.

“
Williams Street is not a luxurious neighborhood, but neither is it a slum. Let’s be serious, please.”

“
Sorry. I like it because it has huge windows and it’s one big room—all open space for my plants and my cat. I hate it because it’s new, so the walls are thin and if the upstairs neighbors make noise it sounds as if I’m living inside a bass drum.” She thought about it. “I suppose what I’m really saying is that I want an old house, one that has a history to it. One with a classic style.”

“
I’m a bit prejudiced towards Victorians myself,” he agreed. “I suppose it’s because I grew up in one. Nevertheless, you’d be amazed at all the people who say they want an old house, and end up buying a new one.”

“
I wonder why.”

“
Partly because it doesn’t sound like a bass drum if there are no upstairs neighbors,” he said gravely. “And a new house has all kinds of advantages—things like plumbing that isn’t half-plugged.”

Kaye shrugged. “You can’t decorate a water pipe at Christmastime, but you can certainly hang holly on an open staircase.”

He pulled out his notebook and jotted a few words. “Are you finished with your sandwich?”

Kaye looked regretfully at her plate. “I give up.”

“
Take it home to the cat.”

“
Omar is a spoiled baby and a picky eater, so—” She stared at the sandwich and changed her mind. “That corned beef is too good to waste. I’ll eat it myself, for supper.”

Brendan grinned. “Just don’t think that I’m going to start providing all your meals,” he teased.

“
Oh? I thought it was part of the service.”

They looked at eight houses that afternoon. Kaye rejected all of them, and each time she shook her head, Brendan, with unruffled good humor, merely locked the front door behind them and drove on to the next. By the time they got back to the shopping plaza, Kaye felt as if she had just finished a marathon run.

“
If house-hunting is always this tough,” she said, tossing herself down in the chair beside his desk, “you should insist on a medical check-up for clients before you start.”

“
We won’t keep up this pace, now that I have an idea of what you’re really looking for.”

“
Eight houses, and not a single one of them what I want.”

“
The Georgian brick came close—at least from the outside.”

“
How do you know?” she challenged. “I said hardly a word about any of those houses.”

“
You have very expressive eyes, my dear,” he said, in the same tone as if he were the wolf talking to Little Red Riding Hood. “It was in the way you looked at it, before you went inside and the chopped-up interior made you feel ill.”

“
I was very tactful,” she said defensively.

Brendan laughed. “Outrage is hard to hide, Kaye. Be sides, I felt the same way myself. I can also tell a great deal by how fast a woman walks through a house. The slower she walks, the more she likes it. That one, you raced through as if there was a pack of hounds at your heels.”

“
Is that why you dawdled along behind me all the time?”

He nodded. “It doesn’t work that way for men. They’re much harder to predict. It’s the funniest thing—that’s why I prefer to work with women.”

“
I’ll just bet you do,” Kaye murmured.

“
For example, I’m not planning to show you any more ranch-style houses, either. Am I right?”

She nodded, and shivered at the thought. “They’re so spread out,” she said. “I’d walk myself to death keeping the place clean.”

“
Surely you’ll have a housekeeper.”

“
I hadn’t thought of that.” She considered it, and shook her head. “I don’t think I really want one,” she said. “I like the idea of playing house under my own roof, with no one to get irate if I want to scrub the kitchen floor in the middle of dinner preparation.”

He was looking at her in astonishment. “You actually like the idea of scrubbing floors?”

“
I don’t mind,” Kaye said, feeling a little ridiculous, but determined to stand up for herself. “And if it was my very own floor, I should think there would be a lot more satisfaction in it.”

“
Haven’t you ever had a home of your own?”

“
Not really, just apartments.” She bit her lip and said stiffly, “My father and I moved around a lot.”

Brendan looked intrigued, but he didn’t comment. He leaned back in his chair. “Would tomorrow be all right for another session?”

“
I don’t think I should plan on taking too many afternoons off.”

“
Then we’ll go after you leave work.”

“
You don’t mind tying up your own evening?” She was thinking about the battered teddy bear that had been in the front seat of his car, and the child it must belong to.

“
It’s part of the job.” He saw her out, and as she walked across the parking lot to her car, she turned and saw him, in the pool of light that was the real estate agent’s office, sitting on the corner of the desk again and talking to the gorgeous brunette.

Of course he wanted her to find her house soon, she thought. The quicker she found it, the sooner he’d get his money, and the less time he’d have invested in the process.

It’s been a long time,
she thought,
since I’ve gone shopping for anything, especially without having to worry too much about the price tag. Something tells me this could be a lot of fun—more fun than I’ve had in years...

CHAPTER THREE

KAYE glanced through the mail while she waited for water to boil so she could make herself a cup of instant coffee. There wasn’t much of interest, just a magazine, a letter from a college friend, and a sweepstakes entry form which she dropped into the wastebasket. She had a vague feeling that she’d already been lucky enough for one week, and there was no sense in wasting a stamp to mail a certain loser.

She stirred the coffee crystals into the hot water and carried her cup and her letter to the far corner of the big single room, where Omar the Persian cat watched sleepily from his comfortable nest on a blue cushion at one end of the couch. As soon as she sat down, the cat rose, stretched, yawned, and gracefully swarmed across the couch and into her lap. She stroked the soft white fur and said, “How would you like to move to a big house, Omar? A house where there’s room for all the cushions you want, and you don’t have to give up your couch every night so I can unfold it and make it into a bed?”

Omar wrapped his front paws around her neck, then put his nose into her right ear and began to purr throatily. She jerked away from the rumbling, tickling noise and said, “That’s two in favor. I think you can call it a unanimous vote in this household.”

But what house? she thought. Was it going to be so difficult to find just the right house for herself and Graham? Had Brendan McKenna been right? Was she asking too much?

After a half-day with him, she had no doubt that the man knew his business. And yet, she just couldn’t believe that the perfect house wasn’t out there somewhere. Some day, and surely not too far in the future, she would walk into a house and say,
This is it. This is where Graham and I will live, talk, laugh, and play, raise our children, grow old together
.

She was buying not just a house, she reflected, but a home for a lifetime, and that required a completely different sort of search.

“
I won’t settle for less,” she told herself. “In a city this size, there has to be a house that is just right for us.”

The telephone on the kitchen counter rang, and she dumped Omar unceremoniously off her lap to answer it. It was Graham.

“
Where have you been, Kaye? They told me at the travel agency that you’d gone to look at houses.”

“
I did, Graham.” She was eager to share the results with him; her words were almost tumbling over each other. “I haven’t found anything wonderful yet, but today was just exploratory, to find out what sorts of things I like best, and—” She realized suddenly that she was babbling, and that there was no sound from the other end of the line.

“
Which firm did you go to, Kaye?”

“
First City.”

“
But surely you know that Andy Winchester always does my buying and selling, Kaye. He’s done it for years.”

Kaye had never met Andy Winchester, but she knew who he was. If there was a million-dollar building project in the wind, the Winchester firm was always involved. “Yes,” she said. “I knew that. But I thought he only dealt with commercial properties, banks and industries and shopping complexes.”