True Colors Read Free Page A

away
from them, it settled on her eyes, which were wide-set and fringed
in dense lashes a shade darker than her red hair. Her irises
contained a multitude of color—green and gray and amber. The way
she peered at him gave him the uneasy sense that she could see more
than he’d like.
    Not that he had anything to hide. He just
felt…unnerved.
    “What was number two again?” she asked when
his silence extended beyond a minute.
    Number two? Right. “Number two, this property
isn’t licensed for commercial enterprises. It’s not insured for you
to be hosting classes with children. You need a permit from the
zoning board to do that, and I know you don’t have one, because as
the landlord, I’d be the one to have to request it.”
    “It’s not a commercial enterprise,” the woman
said. “It’s two little third-graders who come here and make
collages.”
    “They called it a class.”
    “I teach them things. Parents teach their
children things, too, but that doesn’t make their houses commercial
enterprises.”
    He glanced toward the stairs and scowled.
“Are they your children?”
    “No.”
    “Are they paying you to teach them whatever
the hell it is you’re teaching them?”
    She hesitated long enough for him to know the
answer.
    “That makes it a commercial enterprise,” he
said. “Most parents don’t charge their kids to teach them how to
tie their shoes.” He scraped a hand through his hair in
exasperation. He wasn’t sure what he was most upset about: the fact
that Monica Reinhart was in breach of her lease, the fact that if
something awful had happened—say, a pint-size art student got
injured in his house—his insurance wouldn’t cover it and he might
just find himself afoul of the law…or the fact that Emma Glendon,
with her wild, fiery hair and her paint-spattered clothing, oozed
sex appeal.
    He couldn’t figure out why. She was no
Vanessa. She was short, unfashionably curvy, and messy. A smear of
paint tattooed her left hand. Not his type. Not at all.
    “All right,” he said, as much to himself as
to her. “You’re going to have to vacate the premises.”
    “At the end of the lease. I understand.”
    “Now,” he said. As soon as the word emerged,
he felt terrible. Since when had he become such a tyrant? It wasn’t
as if he was a landlord by profession. If he was in breach of
zoning laws, he could hire an army of lawyers to rectify the
situation.
    But he wanted this house vacated. He wanted
it sold. He wanted to put this part of his life to an end. He
couldn’t move on as long as he still owned the place.
    And it was probably going to be more
difficult to evict two tenants than it would have been to evict
one. Two tenants and a couple of pint-size Picassos in
pigtails.
    He was angry. He thought he’d overcome all
his anger, his bitterness, his resentment. That was what this year
had been about: rebalancing his life. Reclaiming it. Healing. And
then moving on.
    The red-haired art teacher standing in his
entry hall only complicated matters, making it harder to rebalance,
reclaim, heal, move on. Of course he was angry.
    Before he could say anything more, anything
that would make him feel even angrier, he yanked open the door and
stormed down the bluestone front walk. The fat pink flowers on
those shrubs couldn’t possibly be mocking him, but it felt as if
they were.
     
     

Chapter Three
     
    “Who was that?” Abbie asked.
    The little girl’s voice distracted Emma from
her inspection of the white carpeting on the steps leading up to
the loft. She’d noticed a few faint smudges of dirt, but nothing
that looked like paint or glue or ground-in clay, nothing a vacuum
cleaner or a little rug shampoo couldn’t remove. At least she hoped
so.
    She wondered if the condition of the floors
mattered anymore. The guy was kicking her to the curb, literally—or
as literally as possible, given that the road leading to the house
didn’t have a curb. Whether or not the carpet was in