he would need or that he really didn’t want them to break—like his grandfather’s old violin—and patted their heads.
“I’ll be back and take you to dinner on Sunday,” he promised.
As he left, Jenna borrowed money to pay the pizza delivery man.
“Sure you won’t change your mind, Seb?” she’d said, forgetting to give him the change.
Seb had shaken his head. “No.”
But now, as his stomach rumbled on his way down the dock, he wished he’d at least thought to snatch one of the pizzas.
No matter. He’d grab something after he settled in—and dealt with Frank’s tenant. A guy who rented a room on a houseboat ought to be delighted to be offered a studio apartment rent free. And maybe by the time Seb was ready to sell, he’d have his finances in order and could get a loan.
Seb found himself whistling just like Max as he stepped aboard his houseboat and turned the key in the front door lock.
“Home sweet home,” he murmured, and pushed open the door and stepped into a small foyer with a staircase leading up to the second floor on one side and bookshelves and a door on the other. Straight ahead, down a hallway he glimpsed the setting sun through the window. It drew him on. So did the music he heard.
Unlike the cacophonous racket he’d left behind with his sisters, this was a Bach minuet, light and lilting, rhythmic, orderly.
The lingering tension in Seb’s shoulders eased. He’d wondered how he would convince Frank’s tenant that he needed to move. The Bach reassured him. A tenant who played Bach would see the logic and good sense in Seb’s offer to put him up rent free.
He made his way down the hallway and into an open living area and stopped stock-still at the sight of a rabbit hutch—complete with two rabbits—on a window seat. There was an aquarium on the bar that separated the kitchen area from the rest of the room. There were three half-grown kittens wrestling on the floor and one attempting to clamber up a cardboard box that had been strategically placed to keep it inside while the door to the deck beyond could be left open.
But none of it was quite as astonishing as the sight of a pair of long bare very female legs halfway up a ladder out on the deck.
“You’re back?” the female said, apparently having heard Seb shutting the door. “This is way too soon. Go away and come back in half an hour.”
Seb didn’t move. Just stared at the legs. Felt wholly masculine interest at the same time he felt stirrings of unease.
His tenant was female?
And Frank hadn’t bothered to mention it?
Well, maybe to Frank it hadn’t made any difference. He had been spending his time at his fiancée’s afterall.
“Cody?” The woman’s voice said when Seb didn’t reply. “Did you hear me? I said, Go away.”
Seb cleared his throat. “I’m not Cody,” he said, grateful his voice didn’t croak as his eyes were still glued to those amazing legs.
“Not…?” Bare feet moved down the ladder one rung at a time until the woman could hook her arm around one side of the ladder and swung her head down so that she could see him.
Seb stared, transfixed.
Neely Robson?
No. Impossible.
Seb shut his eyes. It was just that his irritating meeting with Max had had the effect of imprinting her on his brain.
When he opened them again he would, of course, see some other stunningly gorgeous woman with dark honey-colored hair and legs a mile long.
He opened them again.
It was Neely Robson.
They stared at each other.
And then, almost in slow motion, she straightened up again so he could no longer see her face—only her legs—and for an instant he could tell himself that he’d imagined it.
Then slowly those amazing legs descended the ladder and she came to stare in the open doorway at him, the paintbrush in one hand as she swiped her hair away from her face with the other.
“Mr. Savas,” she said politely in that slightly husky oh-so-provocative voice.
Did she call Max “Mr. Grosvenor”? Seb wondered acidly.
“Ms. Robson,” he replied curtly, keeping his gaze resolutely away from her long bare legs, though seeing her blowsy and barely buttoned above the waist wasn’t entirely settling.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting—I thought you were Cody with Harm.” There was a flush across her cheeks and she suddenly looked confused.
Seb shook his head, not sure what she was talking about and feeling confused himself.
“My dog. Harmony. That’s his name. Well, not really. But it sounds better. His name is Harm. As in, ‘he does more harm than good.’” Her words tumbled out quickly. “The boy down the dock took him for a walk. I thought you were them coming back and I’m not done painting yet.”
Seb had never heard Neely Robson babble before and he would have found it entertaining under other circumstances. Now he raised a brow and she stopped abruptly.
“Never mind,” she said. “You’re looking for Frank.”
“No.”
She blinked. “No?” A pause. “Then…why are you—?” She looked him in the eyes, then her gaze traveled down and he saw when it lit on his bags. Her frown deepened.
Damn, he wished he could enjoy this more. Wished he had been prepared. Wished he were a lot less shocked than she was by the turn of events.
No matter. What was done was done. And Neely Robson was on her way out.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Ms. Robson,” he drawled. “I’ve already seen Frank. Now I’m moving in.”
“What?” The color drained from her face. Her tone was outraged.
Seb did enjoy that. He smiled thinly. “If you’re the ‘tenant,’ Ms. Robson, you have a new landlord. Me.”
She was hearing things.
Neely used to tell her mother that would happen.
“I’ll go deaf if you keep playing that music so loud,” she used to say all the time she was growing up with hard rock at a hundred decibels blaring in her ears while her mother made jewelry out of old seeds and twigs.
She was probably the only child in the history of the world who had a parent more likely to shatter her eardrums than to wait for Neely to do it herself.
Lara—her mother had never wanted to be called Mom or Mother. “Do I look like somebody’s mother?” she would challenge anyone
