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“Damn straight,” he muttered, heading toward the fridge for a Coke.
It turned out she had not only cold Coke, but also an unopened pack of Hebrew National hot dogs just waiting to be eaten. “Amazing woman.” Quinn sighed when he tracked down the buns. He scarfed down two hot dogs and a Coke, then threw together one more dog and wandered into the living room, wondering if he should leave even if he really wanted to stay the night.
The sight of her living room chased away his idle thoughts.
What the hell was a vibrant woman like Lori doing in this house? Did she keep the trophies and the old furniture and the bad paintings as a way to honor her father? Or did she simply not care enough to change it?
Regardless of whether she was wearing a dress or jeans, Lori was bright and funny and young. She needed light around her, and color.
Sighing, Quinn shook his head and turned back toward the kitchen, but a quiver of blue light from the second floor caught his eye. He froze and watched the wall at the top of the stairwell. Another flicker of aqua blue. It looked like the light of a television. He jogged up the steps.
There were three doors here, but only one was open. It looked like a teenager’s bedroom, and Quinn immediately guessed that it must have been Lori’s. The room she was in now had belonged to her father at some point, and this room with the dark pink bedspread and poster-covered walls had been hers. He flipped on the light.
Though his mind was insisting on images of boy bands and Madonna, his eyes were sending him different signals about the posters. Strange. They seemed to betravelposters.
“Huh.” Some of them were retro thirties ads, but most were just the typical pictures you saw in travel agencies. Rome. Paris. Turkey. Greece. Ireland. Amsterdam. Bavaria. London. The Alps. There were a few more exotic locales like St. Petersburg and Cairo and Madagascar.
Stunned, he spun in a slow circle, as if the motion would somehow create sense from it. A packed bookcase was wedged into the far corner, so Quinn edged between the TV and the bed and scanned the titles. Travel guides and travelogues, every one. Hundreds of them, and more stacked on the floor.
Did Lori travel? She must. And yet a vague conversation floated up from the foggy pool of Quinn’s memory banks. Molly had mentioned something once about Lori giving up her dreams to care for her father. Something about Europe and international business.
“Shit,” he breathed, heart sinking to press itself against his stomach. He stroked a finger along the spine of one book and then another.The Single Girl’s Guide to France. England on Fifty Dollars a Day.Hundreds of them.
This room. This was Lori Love’s place in this house. And maybe it wasn’t as heartbreaking as it seemed. Maybe it was just a simple hobby.
But when he turned to leave, the view of the far wall stopped him in his tracks. On this wall she’d hung a giant map of the world, at least five feet wide. Bright colors were concentrated within the boundaries of Europe before spreading out like tendrils into Asia and Africa and the rest of the map. When he stepped closer, he could see that the jumbles of color were made up of thumbtacks. Hundreds of them. Different shapes and sizes so that it looked as if someone had thrown sticky confetti against the paper in celebration.
But this wasn’t a celebration. There were no thumbtacks pushed into Colorado. There wasn’t a single thumbtack in the whole of the United States. This wasn’t a map of places she’d been. This was a map of where Lori dreamed of going.
He stopped three feet away and refused to look closer. This was private. Not meant for him or anyone else to see.
Turning back toward the television, Quinn made himself stop thinking about the map. He glanced only briefly at the muted pictures of Venice on the screen before he switched off the DVD player and the screen. Then he descended the stairs and turned off the rest of the lights in the house. As he lay back down on Lori’s bed, he tried very hard not to indulge in that fantasy of saving the damsel in distress.
This was a short-term fling, and he wasn’t a prince sent to save a beautiful princess.
Still, the idea burned like phosphorous in his tight chest.
CHAPTER NINE
ASHOUTED, “Oh, shit!” woke Lori from a deep sleep. She bolted upright in her bed, assaulted by too many strange images flying at her, like a scene from that movieThe Birds. Daylight. The blankets sailing past her face, a naked man jumping from the bed. A nakedQuinnyanking on underwear to cover his tight ass.
Lori shoved wild curls from her eyes and glanced down at her own naked body. “Oh, my.” She pulled up the blanket.
“I’m sorry.” Quinn zipped his pants and reached for his cell phone to stuff it into a pocket. “I overslept and I’ve got a meeting at eight-thirty.”
Still trying to process that they’d really slept together, Lori turned toward the clock—7:00 a.m.
“I’ve got to get home and shower and change.”
She nodded.
“I’ll call you.” Quinn stopped buttoning his wrinkled shirt for a moment to look up at her. “I mean I’ll really call you later today. Not ‘Thanks for the good time, maybe I’ll call you sometime.’”
“I get that. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
He hurriedly tucked in his shirt and flashed her a smile, rocking her sleepy little world. “Oh, you’ll see me.” Then, like a sexy whirlwind, he grabbed his coat, crossed the room to give her a quick peck on the mouth and stole the book from her bedside table before heading for the door. “Homework!” he called, waving the book. “Have a good day, Lori Love.”
And just like that, the Quinn tornado was gone, leaving Lori alone with her shock and awe.
