Chapter 3 #4
He started to tell her it was his house, then decided he wasn’t up for an argument.
Poppy narrowed her eyes. “I’m going to talk to the lawyer on Monday, and we’ll get to the bottom of this,” she told him. Beneath her sharp words, he caught her exhaustion. She was running on fresh air and emotion, and he’d bet this house she hadn’t eaten anything yesterday.
“This is Thom’s house, Poppy. He bought it off your grandfather before he died,” Luna told her.
Poppy looked at Luna and stubbornly shook her head. “Have you seen the deed of sale, Luna?”
Luna lifted her hands in frustration. “Why would Thom lie? Why would he pour an insane amount of money into a property he doesn’t own?”
Excellent points, Luna. But Poppy had entered Stubborn Mode, and he knew, from experience, that once Poppy dug in her heels, it would take a meteor to dislodge her.
And sometimes not even that would work. She wasn’t going to believe anyone but the lawyer, and only after she saw his copy of the deed of sale.
Then Poppy caught sight of the jar filled with her pearls and let out a strangled yelp, not unlike the sound Felony had made earlier.
She rushed over to the table, grabbed the jar and unscrewed the lid.
Looking around, she reached for a kitchen towel and, pushing aside his laptop, spread it on the table.
Carefully, so carefully, she tipped the pearls onto the towel.
Using the tip of her finger, she rolled the pearls into a necklace-shaped half circle, with the smaller pearls at the top of the circle, and the bigger pearls in the middle.
When they were laid out to her satisfaction, she counted them.
Then she frowned and counted them again. She lifted her head and glared at him. “There are two missing.”
Like he was the one who dropped them. “Okay,” he replied.
“What do you mean, ‘okay’?” she demanded. She placed her hand on the pearls, as if he was about to snatch them out of her grasp. “These are my grandmother’s pearls. Grandpa M. gave them to her as a wedding present over sixty years ago.”
“Okay,” he repeated, purely to wind her up.
“They are Hanadama pearls, which are as good as you can get. They are rare, expensive, and two of them are missing.”
Right, she was working herself up into another paddy. God, what had he done to deserve a Sunday morning full of drama?
“You were the one who broke the string,” he reminded her. The fire in her eyes intensified. “I picked up your pearls last night and put them in the jar. A thank you wouldn’t go amiss.”
“Two are missing.”
Annoyed, Thom stepped forward to scan the floor and quickly found one rogue pearl.
After another ten minutes of increasingly half-hearted searching, Luna declared herself late for church and scuttled off, reminding Poppy—pointedly—that Wren would meet her here later.
The second Luna disappeared, Poppy dropped back down onto her hands and knees and resumed the search for the pearl with focused determination.
And Thom couldn’t help noticing that his shorts, baggy on her, rode up just enough to reveal the unmistakable curve of her round, soft—and completely inappropriate—butt in the air. Thoroughly distracting.
His attention snagged hard and stayed there, even as his brain yelled at him to look away and called him several inventive, and colorful, shades of stupid.
It wasn’t just the view, though—hell, it was the way she moved, unselfconscious and stubborn, focused on her search, as if her world hadn’t already been turned inside out and sideways. He was acutely aware of her in his space, in his house, and it was hot, low, and dangerous.
And that was why he couldn’t have her here.
Those boundaries he’d erected mattered. Attraction was a liability he needed to ignore.
But Poppy was here, currently on her knees on his kitchen floor.
Her wedding dress skimmed the floor next to her tiny, elegant foot, and her curves were seriously testing his self-control.
Was he screwed?
If not yet, he was in very real danger of becoming so.
Sighing, knowing he had no choice but to help her, she’d be down there forever if he didn’t, he started at the other end of the kitchen and scanned the floor.
Twenty minutes later, after covering the same space twice, they looked at each other in defeat. He sat down on the floor, bent his legs, and rested his forearms on his knees.
“It’s not here, Poppy,” he stated.
“It has to be,” she insisted, stubbornness personified. “Did you sweep or mop between the time the string broke and this morning?”
“Yes, I had my crew of house elves come in to give the place a once over,” he sarcastically replied. “No.”
“Then, unless Felony ate it, it has to be somewhere. It can’t just disappear.”
But it had. And it was bloody weird.
“What now?” he asked, exhausted. It wasn’t ten o’clock yet, and he felt like he’d put in a full day.
She sent him a stubborn look. “Simple. No matter what the lawyer says, or what you say, no matter whether you try and have me arrested for trespassing, I’m not leaving until I find that pearl.”
Well, shit.