Читать книгу The Tycoon's Proposal - Leigh Michaels, Leigh Michaels - Страница 9

KURT STAMPED HIS feet on the doormat and cast a long look around the dim hallway of the boarding house. The wallpaper was peeling, the glass in the door rattled as he closed it, the floorboards creaked under his feet, and the air smelled of burned popcorn.

Lissa looked over her shoulder. “Fancy meeting you here. I suppose Hannah gave you the address?”

“She sent me over to help so you’d be finished moving in time for dinner.”

The landlady stopped yelling and bustled over. “Did you say you’re moving?”

“I’m not giving up the room,” Lissa said. “I’m just picking up the stuff I’ll need for a couple of weeks.”

The landlady folded her arms across her ample chest. “If you want me to hold the room, you’ll have to pay ahead of time for January. Otherwise, how do I know you’ll come back?”

Kurt stepped between them. ”You trust her—the same way she trusts you not to put the rest of her stuff out on the curb the minute her back is turned.”

The landlady gave him the same stare she would a bedbug and went on, “And don’t expect me to return your deposit if you do give up the room, because there’s a hole in the wall.” She returned to the front parlor and went back to haranguing the other tenant.

“Home sweet home,” Lissa said. “The hole in the wall was there when I moved in.”

Honestly curious, Kurt asked, “Why do you put up with this?”

“Because it isn’t for much longer, and because living cheaply now means I won’t have so much debt to pay after I get my degree.”

“But you can’t want to come back here, after you were robbed.”

“Well, that’s rather beside the point, isn’t it?” Lissa pushed a door open. The sliding panel squeaked and stuck, and she gave it an extra shove.

In some situations there aren’t any good choices, she had said. You deal with it and go on.

It was starting to look to him like she was an expert at dealing with things and going on. Nursing a sick father, getting pneumonia herself….

She’d had a streak of hard luck, there was no doubt about that, but he couldn’t help but wonder if there was even more to the story than she’d told him.

Kurt followed her in. She flipped on every light in the place—such as they were. How she managed to get dressed in this gloom, much less read or study, was beyond him.

His gaze came to rest on the mantel, where a little Christmas tree stood bravely in the center, drooping under the weight of five too-big ornaments.

Damn. He didn’t want to feel sorry for her…but he did.

“You pack,” he said. “I’ll carry.”

The trouble was, Lissa had no idea what to pack. Clothes weren’t a problem—her wardrobe was limited, so she figured she’d just pile everything into a crate and take it along. It was all the other things she wasn’t sure about.

All the other things. What an all-encompassing, grandiose statement that was, Lissa told herself, considering how few material goods she actually possessed. Everything she owned would fit in the back of a minivan with room to spare.

Kurt came back from his third trip out to the car and raised an eyebrow at the half-empty crate Lissa was contemplating. “What’s the holdup?”

“I’m trying to decide what else to take.”

He looked around, as if he had no idea what she could be talking about.

She had to give him a little credit, though—Kurt hadn’t said a single disparaging word about her surroundings, her belongings, or the fact that her luggage consisted of plastic crates and not the monogrammed leather bags his crowd probably carried.

“Besides clothes, what could you possibly need?”

“Books, maybe. I wonder if I’ll have time to start studying for my spring classes.”

“Those would be the classes that won’t start until January? You already have the books?”

“Some of them. Picking up one or two at a time is easier on the wallet than buying them all at once.”

He looked startled, as if he’d never thought of that before.

His expression made it perfectly obvious, Lissa thought, that budgeting for textbooks had never been a problem for Kurt Callahan. “It’s sort of like putting money in the bank,” she said. “Buying what you need ahead of time, I mean.”

“So if you had invested all your cash in math books rather than just leaving it lying around, you wouldn’t be in this spot.”

“It wasn’t lying around, it was hidden.” Just not well enough. “And if I’d bought all my books with it I’d still have had a problem—namely, what I was going to eat for the next two weeks.”

“Speaking of eating,” Kurt suggested, “Janet promised prime rib for dinner, and I like mine rare. So can we hurry this project along?”

Lissa’s stomach growled at the mere suggestion of rare prime rib. Or, for that matter, medium or well-done prime rib; it didn’t matter, because it all sounded the same to her. Delicious, in a word.

“Just grab everything you might need, and let’s go.”

“Everything?” she said doubtfully.

“Sure. That’s really what’s bothering you, isn’t it? You’re wondering if the vandals around here will pop in to inspect whatever you’ve left behind and destroy it if it isn’t of any value to them.”

She couldn’t argue with that, since it was exactly what she’d been thinking. It was the reason she’d hesitated to tell the landlady that she’d be gone at all. If word got around that she wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks she might as well leave the door standing wide open.

Still, her pride was nicked at the idea of dragging out the detritus of her life in front of him.

In front of anyone, she corrected herself. It wasn’t specifically Kurt she was sensitive about. She didn’t like letting anyone see the pathetically few sentimental things that remained to her.

Kurt strolled over to the mantel and picked up a textbook from the political science class she’d just finished. “What are you taking next semester?”

He was actually trying to make things easier for her—making conversation to cover her discomfort. If she had half a brain, Lissa thought, she’d be grateful. Instead, she was unreasonably annoyed—as if he’d come right out and said that he realized she had reason to be embarrassed, so he would do the proper etiquette thing and pretend not to notice. As if etiquette and good behavior were a big consideration with him!

She gathered up a couple of bags of books and kept her voice level. “Accounting theory, auditing, organizing information systems, advanced database programming—”

“What do you do for a hobby? Write the computer code for the federal government to calculate income tax?”

“I could,” Lissa said calmly. “In fact, I have. Not the government’s software, but a sample package for a small corporation. That was last year, in my tax practicum.” She pulled a ragged box from under the bed.

Kurt ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m curious—do the words pizza and a movie mean anything to you? You notice I’m not even talking about anything as elaborate as going to a basketball game or a dance.”

She shrugged. “I don’t have the time or money for entertainment.”

“Everybody needs to relax. And you can’t tell me those guys hanging around the cloakroom last night wouldn’t buy you a pizza. That looks like a very old quilt.”