your niece as beautiful as you are?” Nash asked smoothly.
Zane laughed and shook his head. “Next he’ll ask you what your sign is, or look puzzled and ask if you’ve met before.”
Brylee liked Nash, even though he was half-again too smart-alecky for his own good or anybody else’s, so she ignored Zane’s remark. “And you’re how old?” she countered lightly.
Nash reddened a little under her kindly scrutiny, and he seemed stuck for an answer. Brylee would have bet that didn’t happen very often.
“He’s twelve,” Zane supplied graciously.
Nash glared at his brother.
Twelve? Impossible, Brylee thought. “Going on forty-five,” she said.
A short silence followed, the air between the two brothers so charged that Brylee wouldn’t have been surprised to see thunderclouds forming beneath the ceiling.
“I could show you around,” Nash finally volunteered, effectively rendering his older brother invisible, at least as far as he was concerned. “I mean, since you haven’t been here in a while and everything...”
Zane sighed at that, but raised no objection. Was he ashamed of the place? It was pretty dilapidated, an unlikely abode for an established movie star, certainly.
“That’s a great idea,” Brylee said, pushing back her chair to stand. “I’d love to have a look at the place.” She glanced at Zane, who was standing now, too. “You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind,” he confirmed. The twinkle in his eyes and the twitch at one corner of his mouth said he knew full well she didn’t really care whether he minded or not.
“We’re getting more furniture after the renovations are done,” Nash hastened to explain. “Right now, we’ve got a couple of beds and an air mattress, and that’s about it.”
Following Nash, with Snidely right behind her, Brylee suppressed a smile. “Things take time,” she said.
The house, though empty, was just as she remembered it—large and rambling, with spacious, raftered rooms and tall windows and a total of three natural rock fireplaces. There were four bedrooms and as many baths, along with a sizable dining area and a living room that not only ran the full width of the house, but offered a magnificent view of trees and mountains and that endless pageant of sky.
“Cleo gets here tomorrow,” Nash announced, when they’d come full circle, after about fifteen minutes, and returned to the kitchen. Zane and Slim were both gone, and Brylee caught the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of a hammer somewhere nearby. “She was my brother’s housekeeper, when he lived in L.A.”
Brylee offered no comment. She was just glad she hadn’t followed her first inclination and jumped in to ask who Cleo was before Nash got around to clarifying the matter for her.
So, Cleo wasn’t a girlfriend or, worse yet, a wife. Brylee felt like a damn fool for caring either way, but care she did.
“I guess she can really cook,” Nash went on conversationally, “but Zane says she’s a stickler for neatness and order, and she’ll raise hell when she gets a look at this place.” He paused, sucked in a breath and went right on talking. “We ordered a washer and dryer and another bed, but we’re holding off on all the other stuff because Cleo’s the type to want a say-so in just about everything.”
Brylee smiled, amused by this assessment of the unknown Cleo. She sounded like a SoCal version of Opal Dennison Beaumont, local force of nature. “That’s probably wise,” she said.
Suddenly, Nash looked wistful, and his gaze was fixed on something—or someone—very far away.
“You don’t have to tell Zane or anything,” he said, very quietly, “but I kind of like it here.”
Brylee rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder, touched to the core of her heart. “Why would you want to keep that from your brother?” she asked, searching his face. If she’d known Nash Sutton better, she’d have put her arms around him just then, the way Donna Jackson had so often done with her, and given him a squeeze, promised him everything would be all right. Since they’d just met, though, she knew that would be overstepping, and she’d done enough of that for one day, accusing Zane of neglecting, if not abusing, his dog.
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