No Place Like Home (8 page)

“
That dreadful pink has to go, of course,” Kaye said. Her voice wasn’t quite steady, but she had command of herself again. She let go of his arm and turned around to look across the room with half-closed eyes. “I think something in off-white or light gray would be much more versatile.”

“
Hmm,” Graham said. He vanished through the door that led to the kitchen.

For an instant, Kaye was almost afraid. Now that they were alone again, what would Brendan say? Would he demand an explanation of the harsh accusation she had flung at him? He certainly had every right to.

But he didn’t. Instead, he murmured, “I see the jeweler had your kind of glitter in stock, after all. I thought perhaps your ring would have to be specially ordered.”

“
It was,” Kaye said. “Graham designed it.”

He studied her face for a long moment. Then he took hold of her hand and his eyes dropped to the ring. “How very... interesting.” There was no expression in his voice.

Kaye flushed in embarrassment, and then was heartily ashamed of herself. What difference did it make what Brendan McKenna thought of her engagement ring, anyway? Graham had spent his precious time designing a ring, when most men would have settled for the first ordinary diamond that they saw. How dared Brendan sneer at it! She glanced down at her hand and sighed wistfully.

“
I think that sigh must mean that he designed it without even asking what you wanted,” Brendan hazarded.

“
And I think that it’s a beautiful ring and—and none of your business.”

He let her fingers slip out of his, and the weight of the ring dragged her hand down. “That’s true,” he said. “It certainly is none of my affair. Shall we catch up with your multi-talented fiancé?”

Graham was upstairs by then, inspecting the master bedroom.

Brendan waved a hand at the bedroom across the hall and said, “I think you’ll find this to be quite a comfortable house for a family, Mr. Forrest. The nursery is just across the hall and the entertainment center downstairs, right in the center of the house, would make a wonderful playroom. It would be very easy to keep track of the children.”

Graham looked at him with disbelief and said, “That’s only another way of saying that they’d always be underfoot!”

It didn’t disturb Brendan. “Nothing of the sort,” he said. “As soon as they’re old enough, they can be moved down to the bedrooms on the lower level. The entertainment center could be soundproofed so if you wanted to have a party, it wouldn’t disturb the children.” He was smiling calmly.

Graham didn’t bother to answer that one. “Kaye,” he said, “now that you’ve had your little joke, shall we get down to some serious house-hunting?”

“
I don’t understand,” she said. “I am serious, Graham.”

Graham waved a hand. “This is absolutely impossible, Kaye. There isn’t even space for a maid’s room.”

“
The maid’s going to live with us?” she asked weakly.

“
The dining room will only seat six, at best. The entire house is far too small to entertain properly.”

“
But you haven’t even looked at the lower level. There is an enormous room down there.”

“
Are you really suggesting that I entertain my clients and my friends in a basement, Kaye? How do you plan to give dinner parties? By setting up a buffet on a ping pong table? I think you must have gone completely mad.” He glanced at Brendan. “Or else you have fallen into the clutches of an unscrupulous salesman.”

“
That’s ridiculous, Graham! Brendan is not unscrupulous.” She was almost in tears.

“
Certainly not unscrupulous,” Brendan said calmly. “But perhaps I’m confused. If we could sit down and talk about what you’d like to have, Mr. Forrest—?” He indicated a window seat.

“
I thought I had made things clear to Kaye,” Graham said, but he settled himself on the seat.

“
Yes, I believe Kaye thought you had, too. It happens sometimes; a client falls in love with a house and is completely blind to its faults. Now, if we can just talk it over—”

Kaye was furious.
Isn’t that just like two men?
she thought.
When something goes wrong, they blame the woman!—and then they go off and discuss it without even including her. Dammit, this is going to be my house! Shouldn’t I at least have a say in it?

But they had their heads together, and they obviously weren’t going to listen to anything she said.

She retreated to the entrance hall, her resentment building into a storm. If there had been a china vase handy, she would have smashed it.

So she had fallen in love with the house, had she? And she had become completely blind to its faults! At least now she knew where she stood with Brendan McKenna, she thought resentfully—precisely nowhere!

He hadn’t even backed her up; as soon as he saw which way the wind was blowing, he had promptly deserted her cause and agreed with Graham. Well, that shouldn’t have surprised her, she decided. She certainly didn’t have the money to buy a house; it was Graham’s funds that would, in the long run, pay Brendan’s commission.

And that, she thought spitefully, was what he was counting on to pay for that spanking new car. She should have expected that he’d abandon her as soon as his commission was threatened!
Well, I hope he has to eat the damned car,
she thought vindictively.

When Graham and Brendan came downstairs twenty minutes later, apparently the best of buddies, she looked at them both with silently smoldering anger.

“
Well,” Brendan said cheerfully, “I’ll get to work, and next week we’ll have some new things to look at, Kaye.”

“
Don’t bet on it,” she muttered, and swept out to Graham’s car with an icily regal air that the best royal families would have envied.

CHAPTER FIVE

KAYE maintained an obstinate silence halfway across town, and then realized that giving Graham the silent treatment was going to accomplish less than nothing. So she finally cleared her throat, gathered her poise, and said, “I like that house, Graham.”

Amazingly enough, he didn’t argue. “It is a very nice house, darling. But it is simply not suited for us. I can’t imagine how you allowed yourself to be so short-sighted about it. Even your pet real estate agent was pointing out flaws that I’ll bet you had never seen.”

“
I didn’t hear him pointing out any flaws,” she muttered. There must have been quite a heart-to-heart discussion going on between the two of them, she thought, while she had been downstairs steaming with anger.

“
You must not have been really listening. That probably accounts for the whole misunderstanding. Come, Kaye, you don’t expect that he’s going to walk from room to room telling you in plain English what’s wrong. You have to learn to listen to what he means— not just the words he’s saying.”

“
I thought he was saying it was a wonderful house!”

“
You obviously aren’t sensitive to the implications, Kaye. Though, as a matter of fact, I can’t blame you too much. I hardly believed myself that he was saying those things—I can’t imagine how he ever sells a house if he keeps telling the buyers everything that’s wrong with the place.”

“
Unlike Andy Winchester,” Kaye murmured sweetly.

Graham nodded. “That’s right,” he said, very seriously.

Kaye longed to throw something at him. So much for being sensitive to implications, she thought viciously. Sometimes Graham himself was downright dense!

“
Or perhaps he actually didn’t realize that those things were flaws,” Graham went on, as if he was talking to himself. “I can’t think how McKenna got the reputation he has, if he can’t read a client any better than that.”

He walked her to the door of her apartment and left her with a reminder that he’d be back at six to pick her up for the evening. “I hope you’ll find a smile by then,” Graham said. He turned her face up to his and put a quick kiss on her cheek. “It will do no good to pout, Kaye. You’re simply going to have to accept the fact that you can’t always have everything you want.”

Then he was gone, leaving her standing on the step with her mouth open. It took a moment for his meaning to sink in, and then fury rose like a geyser from deep inside her. The idea, she stormed, of him implying that she was nothing more than a spoiled baby, throwing a temper tantrum because she couldn’t have the house she wanted!

She slammed the apartment door behind her and smiled grimly as the whole building seemed to shake under the impact.

“
Oh, I always get what I want,” she said sarcastically. “That’s why I’m living in a one-room apartment on Williams Street—because I really couldn’t
stand
one of those elegant new condos downtown!”

Omar looked at her warily from the opposite end of the couch, seemed to decide she was not approachable, and put one paw over his eyes as if he couldn’t bear the sight.

The doorbell rang. It made her feel a little happier, since Graham had apparently thought better of that last careless remark and had come back to apologize.

Then she saw who was standing on her doorstep. “The word on the doormat does not apply to you,” she said icily. “You are not welcome. You are a traitor, and I want nothing further to do with you.”

She would have closed the door, but there was a large foot in a very nice black wingtip shoe blocking the way.
Damn,
she thought.
I don’t know exactly what he wants, but if I let him in, I’ll probably never get rid of him.

Brendan said, mildly, “A traitor? I merely recognized the realities of the situation, and dealt with them appropriately.”

“
Just what is that supposed to mean?”

“
Graham is never going to buy that house, Kaye. You know it, even if you won’t admit it, and I know it. If we had both stayed adamant about it, we wouldn’t have changed his mind, but we would have convinced him that we’d both gone completely berserk. He would have told you to have nothing more to do with me.”

“
At the moment,” Kaye said bitterly, “I can’t think that it would be any great loss.”

Brendan ignored the interruption. “—and you would have had to go back to looking at houses with Andy Winchester.”

“
You really know how to hurt a girl’s feelings, McKenna.”

“
It’s true, whether you like it or not. May I come in?”

“
No. You’re just coming back because you need the commission to pay for that new car!”

“
What difference does it make to you how I spend my money?” he asked quietly.

“
Because it isn’t your money yet!”

“
I’m not embezzling it, Kaye.” He shook his head sadly. “You shouldn’t be so angry at me. In fact, you should be grateful that I kept my head.”

“
I thought you were trying to sell houses, not talk people out of buying them!”

“
I had no reason to suspect Graham might veto it. After all, you did tell me he said you could choose your own house.”

“
He did.”

“
Well, obviously, he didn’t mean it. It didn’t take long to see the way things really work with Graham Forrest.”

She resented the fact that he’d dared to say that, but she had to admit he was partly right. Graham had told her she could choose her house freely, and she could— as long as it met every one of his requirements.

“
Instead of adding to the calamity,” Brendan said reasonably, “I pulled your chestnuts out of the fire, convinced Graham that I do know what I’m talking about and that I can restrain you from falling blindly in love with any more inappropriate houses.”

“
I did not fall blindly in—” she began resentfully.

“
Yes, you did. You didn’t even notice that the microwave oven they’d built into that brick wall in the kitchen was too high for you to reach.”

She thought about it, and concluded with regret that he was right. “You could have told me that yesterday,” she said, “before I made a fool of myself.”

“
Would you have cared yesterday?” It was quiet.

Yesterday, the magical spell of that wild valley had been still tugging at her. She shook her head.

“
Kaye,” he said, very seriously, “I don’t gain if the buyers aren’t pleased. If they don’t like what I’ve done for them after they move in, they don’t send their friends to me. I don’t think you would have been happy in that house. You would have cursed me every time you tried to walk around that kitchen.”

“
If you’re so sure it’s the wrong house for me,” she said sadly, “then why did you even show it to me?” She was leaning against the door jamb, her face turned up to his.

There was a long pause. His eyes had turned an even darker blue, she noticed idly, and his hair was ruffled from the winter’s wind. “Because I didn’t know it wasn’t right till I saw you there,” he said, very quietly. “And I had no idea you’d fall so deeply in love with it.”

“
That’s the house I want,” she said stubbornly. Then she added, more quietly, “You think I’m being unreasonable, don’t you?”

“
Not unreasonable, exactly, but short-sighted. Graham will never consider that house, and you’ll get nowhere if you insist. The situation calls for some psychology... Kaye, if you’re not going to let me come in, would you at least stop leaning on the door? You’re cutting off the circulation to my toes.”