The Weekenders by Mary Kay Andrews

Author:Mary Kay Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466872929
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

34

As she sank further into Nate’s embrace a tiny part of her brain—the only part of her body not preoccupied with the pleasure of being in a man’s arms again—kept insisting that one of them would have to come to their senses soon and break away.

After all, they were standing in an abandoned house, in broad daylight, making out like a couple of horny teenagers.

But then, Nate’s hands slid slowly, slowly around her waist, slipped under her T-shirt, and were definitely headed north, while his lips were unmistakably headed south, hovering now around her collarbone.

“Whoa,” she whispered.

He looked up, genuinely puzzled. “Whoa? Does that mean slow down?”

“It means,” she said, catching his right hand just as it reached her right nipple, “what’s going on here?”

Nate nuzzled her neck. His breath was warm on her skin. “Well, I was hitting on you, and I thought it was going pretty well.”

“Yeah, it was going great until you suddenly went from hitting on me to swinging for the fences,” Riley said.

Nate sighed and stepped away. “Too fast. My bad.”

“Again,” Riley said.

They both laughed, temporarily breaking the tension of the moment.

“It’s getting late, and I really want to see the rest of the house,” Riley said abruptly, heading for the stairway.

“Are you running away from me?” Nate asked.

“Absolutely,” she called over her shoulder.

He caught up with her on the wide second-floor stair landing. She was standing in front of the open door to a bedroom, with her hand clapped over her nose and mouth, pointing inside the room.

“Gross,” Nate said, peeking inside. He kicked at a mound of rotting trash, walked inside, and quickly retreated, pulling the door closed.

“It looks like a family of raccoons moved in here after the Holtzclaws moved out.” He pointed toward the ceiling, where a hole had been chewed in a section of rotting boards.

“This stench!” Riley made a gagging sound in the back of her throat.

Nate moved over toward a window and tugged at the sash, but it didn’t budge, so he took a step backward and kicked out the glass.

Riley raised an eyebrow, but he pointed at the rotted window frame and she nodded in agreement.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I kinda want to keep going and see the rest of the space up here.”

“You go first,” she said, pointing down the hallway.

In all, they discovered that the second floor held six bedrooms but only two bathrooms, both of which featured cracked and stained porcelain tile floors, wainscoting, and enormous cast-iron claw-foot bathtubs.

“No showers, just like Shutters,” Riley noted. “And I guess the concept of creating a master bath never occurred to the Holtzclaws. My dad used to say Dr. Holtzclaw was so cheap he squeaked when he walked.”

“I can tell now that it was built as a boardinghouse,” Nate said. “And it would probably take a couple hundred thousand dollars to at least make it livable. Probably another reason Wendell decided it was a teardown, aside from the fact that the location and the deep-water access makes it a perfect spot for the marina he was planning.

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