Free Crazy For You by Jennifer Crusie Page B

dropped the last garbage bag of clothes on her mother’s kitchen floor where Katie could sniff it the way she’d sniffed the other eight, evidently suspicious something threatening lurked within. “I’m not sure they can see me without him. After two years with him, I don’t think anybody sees me anymore, not the way I really am. I mean. look at you.”
    Nick froze for a moment in the act of taking a beer out of the fridge. “Leave me out of it.” He twisted off the cap and nudged the door closed with his shoulder.
    Quinn leaned against the counter, folding her arms so her pink sweater pulled tighter against her breasts as she scowled her exasperation at him. “I bet your whole life you’ve thought of me as either Zee’s sister or somebody’s girlfriend.”
    Nick shook his head. “You know better than that.” He knew better than that, even if he didn’t want to think about it.
    “It was different when Zoe was around.” Quinn went past him to the fridge. “I could understand that when Zoe was around, nobody saw me.”
    A gentleman would have told her that wasn’t true, but it was. Zoe had been perfect, exotic, her little vixen face capped with wild naturally kinky hair that fell past her shoulders, the red of it so dark it was almost black out of the sunlight.
    “I got used to it.” Quinn got a beer from the fridge. “But you’d think somebody would notice me standing next to a guy”
    She screwed the cap off her own bottle and drank, and he watched the curve of her neck as she leaned back and the movement of the muscles in her throat, willing his eyes not to drop farther down that curve to that damn pink sweater. Her hair fell back in the same smooth bell cut she’d worn since she was fifteen. No kink to Quinn at all, he thought, keeping his mind off curves. Just all that smooth silky red-gold hair, the kind that looked like it would fall like water through his fingers.
    “I saw you.” Nick put his beer down. “Listen, I have to go.”
    “You haven’t finished your beer,” Quinn said. “But I can take a hint. I’ll stop whining.”
    She walked out of the kitchen through the wide archway into the dark little living room, Katie stepping nervously beside her, and detoured around the big red couch that had been in front of the arch for as long as he could remember. “Do you believe this?” Zoe had said when they were seniors. “My mother bought a Carnal-Red couch. Don’t you just want to fuck every time you look at it?” Since he’d been eighteen and wanted to fuck anybody any time he looked at anything, the question was moot, but it came back to haunt him now because Quinn had plopped herself down in the center of it. Pink sweater, copper hair, orange-red couch: he could feel the heat from where he stood.
    Get out of here, he told himself, but Quinn rolled her head to smile at him over the back of the couch. “Really, I’ll stop whining. I truly am grateful you helped me move, and I’m sorry I’ve been such a grouch.”
    The light from the kitchen gleamed on her hair.
    “Your mother should redecorate,” he said and walked around the couch to sit beside her.
    “There’s a lot of things my mother should do.” Quinn moved over to give him room while Katie sat anxiously at her feet. “Like get a life. I think that’s one of the reasons I decided I had to have Katie.” Quinn smiled down at the little dog. Then her smile faded. “And leave Bill. I don’t want to end up settling like my mother, hitting the garage sales with my best friend while my husband watches TV instead of me, and that’s the way I was heading with Bill. I want it all. Excitement. Passion.”
    Nick leaned against the cushions, his arm stretched along the back of the couch but not touching her—that would be bad, touching her, don’t go there—and watched her soft lips part and close while she spoke, and felt his breath come a fraction faster. This is dumb, get out, he told himself, and yanked his mind away from