Free No Place Like Home by Leigh Michaels

should have expected that he’d abandon her as soon as his commission was threatened! Well, I hope he has to eat the damned car, she thought vindictively.

    When Graham and Brendan came downstairs twenty minutes later, apparently the best of buddies, she looked at them both with silently smoldering anger.

    “ Well,” Brendan said cheerfully, “I’ll get to work, and next week we’ll have some new things to look at, Kaye.”

    “ Don’t bet on it,” she muttered, and swept out to Graham’s car with an icily regal air that the best royal families would have envied.

     

CHAPTER FIVE

    KAYE maintained an obstinate silence halfway across town, and then realized that giving Graham the silent treatment was going to accomplish less than nothing. So she finally cleared her throat, gathered her poise, and said, “I like that house, Graham.”

    Amazingly enough, he didn’t argue. “It is a very nice house, darling. But it is simply not suited for us. I can’t imagine how you allowed yourself to be so short-sighted about it. Even your pet real estate agent was pointing out flaws that I’ll bet you had never seen.”

    “ I didn’t hear him pointing out any flaws,” she muttered. There must have been quite a heart-to-heart discussion going on between the two of them, she thought, while she had been downstairs steaming with anger.

    “ You must not have been really listening. That probably accounts for the whole misunderstanding. Come, Kaye, you don’t expect that he’s going to walk from room to room telling you in plain English what’s wrong. You have to learn to listen to what he means— not just the words he’s saying.”

    “ I thought he was saying it was a wonderful house!”

    “ You obviously aren’t sensitive to the implications, Kaye. Though, as a matter of fact, I can’t blame you too much. I hardly believed myself that he was saying those things—I can’t imagine how he ever sells a house if he keeps telling the buyers everything that’s wrong with the place.”

    “ Unlike Andy Winchester,” Kaye murmured sweetly.

    Graham nodded. “That’s right,” he said, very seriously.

    Kaye longed to throw something at him. So much for being sensitive to implications, she thought viciously. Sometimes Graham himself was downright dense!

    “ Or perhaps he actually didn’t realize that those things were flaws,” Graham went on, as if he was talking to himself. “I can’t think how McKenna got the reputation he has, if he can’t read a client any better than that.”

    He walked her to the door of her apartment and left her with a reminder that he’d be back at six to pick her up for the evening. “I hope you’ll find a smile by then,” Graham said. He turned her face up to his and put a quick kiss on her cheek. “It will do no good to pout, Kaye. You’re simply going to have to accept the fact that you can’t always have everything you want.”

    Then he was gone, leaving her standing on the step with her mouth open. It took a moment for his meaning to sink in, and then fury rose like a geyser from deep inside her. The idea, she stormed, of him implying that she was nothing more than a spoiled baby, throwing a temper tantrum because she couldn’t have the house she wanted!

    She slammed the apartment door behind her and smiled grimly as the whole building seemed to shake under the impact.

    “ Oh, I always get what I want,” she said sarcastically. “That’s why I’m living in a one-room apartment on Williams Street—because I really couldn’t stand one of those elegant new condos downtown!”

    Omar looked at her warily from the opposite end of the couch, seemed to decide she was not approachable, and put one paw over his eyes as if he couldn’t bear the sight.

    The doorbell rang. It made her feel a little happier, since Graham had apparently thought better of that last careless remark and had come back to apologize.

    Then she saw who was standing on her doorstep. “The