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I shrugged. “It’s snacks and champagne on someone else’s dime. If the art’s good, you can enjoy it. If it’s not, you can mock it.”
“A cruelly practical approach.”
“That’s me,” I said. I sat up again, looked at her. “I’m sorry if we don’t spend enough time doing Lulu stuff. There has been a lot of my nonsense since I came back. Not caused by me, but I end up in the middle of it.”
“You put yourself in the middle of it.”
My first instinct was to respond with a sharp, defensive denial. But she was right. “I do. I have to,” I admitted. “I can’t just stand around and let other people do the dirty work.”
“I know. You’re good people, Lis.” She sat up, scrubbed hands over her face, looked at me. “It’s just damned inconvenient sometimes.”
I smiled. “I can’t argue with that. We good?”
She nodded. “We’re good. You think Benji would let us have a party here?”
“No, not if you call him Benji.”
“Lassie?”
“Quit while you’re ahead, Lulu.” I gave her a hug. “Does goingto those paint-your-own-pottery places count as artistic? I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“Sure. If your pottery turns out good enough.”
I was getting judged oneverythingthis week.
***
I walked through the conservatory, a narrow room of framed glass with pretty rattan seating, to the stone patio outside, where several chairs fanned around a stone firepit. Connor wasn’t at either, so I took the path along the ivied wall that bounded the yard and found him on a blanket in the middle of the long rectangle of grass.
I’d already pulled off my boots, and the grass was deliciously chill beneath my feet.
Connor lay on his back, hand beneath his head, gaze on the sky—and the few stars he’d be able to see through the haze of Chicago’s lights.
He turned his head to look at me. “She’s okay?”
I nodded. “She will be. She’s getting used to my working for the OMB and dating and then there’s this house. I think she’s feeling... left out. She needs to find her people, and thought she had with Mateo.”
“Alexei would be happy to entertain her.”
“I know. And she does, too, believe me. I think she needs more time with me right now. More time on Lulu activities.”
“Which would be?”
“I think I’ll be painting mugs.”
He blinked. “If that’s a euphemism, I don’t know what for.”
I sat cross-legged on the blanket beside him. “Not a euphemism. Artsy stuff.”
“Ah.”
“I saw the books,” I said, when we were nearly eye to eye again.
His brows lifted. “Books?”
I poked him in the shoulder. “The ones in the front room. About vampires.”
“Ah.”
