Chapter 22
“Hey, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not happy to see you,” Berkley added as she finished cleaning out and organizing one of the bedrooms. She’d made incredible time with this particular bedroom and had tagged what she thought the Storm siblings might want to keep, donate or definitely sell.
Clover looked around the room, her eyes wide. “I can’t believe all you’ve done.”
“Bessie Carmine might have been a pack rat, but she had a weirdly good organization system.”
Clover strolled around the room, looking at the different Post-it notes. “I like that you’ve color coded everything.”
“It’ll make our lives a lot easier later.
And I’d planned to call you this evening anyway to let you know in case you wanted to start looking at some of this stuff.
I can work on getting the keep and donation items where they need to be.
It’ll really clear out this space for when we have the estate sale and get the auction website up.
” The estate sale stuff would be a different beast and she usually waited to set up their sale link once they were closer to the end of the cleanout.
“Oh, sure that sounds good.” Clover looked as if she wasn’t paying attention as she ran her hands over an antique French settee.
“Is everything okay? Did my brother do something stupid? Also, are you guys dating? I’ve been wanting to ask and now I guess I’m just doing it.
” Maybe she shouldn’t have, but whatever.
She was nosy. And Micah had been weirdly quiet about things too.
Normally she got more details than she wanted from him.
But every time she called or texted he said he was “busy running down leads.”
Clover looked at her in surprise, then groaned. “Am I that obvious?”
“No. I mean…I can tell something is up, but you told your brother about me getting hauled into the sheriff’s station. It wasn’t hard to figure out that you and my brother are like, hooking up.”
“Oh, we’re not dating. Or sleeping together.” Clover looked almost horrified that she would think that. “Not that Micah’s gross or anything,” she added.
Berkley laughed as Clover stumbled over her words. She held up her palms. “I wouldn’t care or judge if you were.”
“I know. But we’re not like…together or anything. He’s just…helping me with something and he’s being annoyingly obtuse about some of the things he’s doing behind the scenes.”
“Ahh. That’s a Knight family problem.” Also, she was pretty sure that Micah was into Clover, whether the woman was into him or not. But yeah, he wasn’t good at sharing things so she could see that being a problem if he really was helping Clover with something.
“What is?”
“The ‘I’m doing this for your own good’ and ‘don’t worry your pretty little head about it.’ My brothers are obnoxious like that.”
Clover grinned. “My brother is pretty obnoxious too.”
Yeah, but he had grown on Berkley. So much that she couldn’t stop thinking about him…or a better word would be obsessing. “But he loves you.”
“True. Though we have been sort of arguing.”
“Really? About…this job?” There had clearly been some miscommunication between the two of them and she was curious how it had worked out. Obviously okay since the contract had gone forward, but there had to be more to it.
“Sort of. But also just him being a dumbass,” she said dryly.
Which made Berkley smile. “I’m done for the day… Want to do something fun?”
“Ah yeah, should we let Arlo know?”
“Oh, we’re not going to leave the house.” No way. She was taking her safety seriously. And that meant staying put until Nick got here to take her back to his place. She might not love the restrictions, but she did love being alive. So there was that.
“What do you have in mind?”
Berkley grinned. “This way.”