Page 26

“No, I’m…” Melinda looked around her apartment, trying to figure out what she’d been doing or what plans she’d had. She shook her head at herself. “I’m free.”

“You don’t have to work?”

“No, I have the day off.”

“Shit. I’m bugging you on your day off. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she replied. “Kyle, it’s fine. Can you maybe just explain what you were talking about before?”

“So, according to something I found in her house, my grandma owned another property, and I have the key.” Kyle paused. “Jolie is a paralegal, and she says it looks legit, but I called the attorney my grandma’s neighbor said she had and left a message. He hasn’t gotten back to confirm yet. I was going to go over there to check it out today with my sister, but–”

“She decided to go on a tour with her new friends?”

“Yes. It’s fine, though. She’s here for the vacation more than anything. But I’m here to figure this all out,” Kyle said.

“So, you want company?” Melinda asked.

“You can obviously say no, and I don’t want to guilt youinto anything just because you were nice enough to give us a free tour yesterday.”

“No, I’d like to,” she said. “Where’s the other house?”

“That’s the thing… It’s in the Garden District.”

“Itis?” she asked, standing up.

“Yes. I already looked it up online. It’s huge, and I… There’s just so much I don’t know.”

Melinda sighed and asked, “When do you want to go?”

“Whenever,” Kyle replied. “I’m at my hotel now. I wasn’t planning on calling you. I know we said we’d do another tour together, but this wasn’t what I had in mind. I just… I don’t really have anyone else.”

Melinda smiled at the thought that even though they’d just met, Kyle had called her.

“Do you want to meet there?” she asked, glancing down at her perfect cup of coffee and hoping she could recreate it later.

“I can come get you. I don’t know. You know the city. What makes more sense?”

Kyle in her apartment? Yeah, that made sense. But it also didn’t because while it was relatively clean, there were still dishes in the sink, and her bed was unmade. She was also pretty sure she had at least one vibrator lying around on a table somewhere from her time alone last night. She’d left it in the kitchen, maybe. Or, her bathroom. No, it was on the dining room table. Why had she left it there?

“I can meet you at your hotel,” she blurted out, turning around and finding a pink vibrator sitting in the middle of her small, round table.

She knew she had a black one still in her bedroom, lying on the bedside table, charging. It had died on her, so she’d pulled out the other one, and after giving herself three orgasms with it, she’d gotten up for a snack, and she’d ended up carrying it with her in a post-orgasmic haze and forgetting all about it until now.

“Okay,” Kyle said. “Have you had breakfast? We could grab something. I’m buying, obviously.”

“I haven’t,” she replied.

“There’s a good place down the street from my hotel.”

“Can you give me about thirty minutes?”

“Of course,” Kyle replied.

They said their goodbyes, and Melinda took another sip of her coffee as she walked into her bedroom. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet, and her sweats and T-shirt wouldn’t be appropriate for breakfast and the Garden District later, so she found a pair of her nicer jeans and a Tulane T-shirt. It wasn’t supposed to be cold today, according to the weather app, but she made sure to grab a sweatshirt, too, just in case, and after making sure her hair wasn’t a mess in the ponytail she’d pulled it up into that morning, she left her apartment and walked the short distance to Kyle’s hotel. Minutes later, she was in the lobby and texting Kyle that she was there.

“Hey,” Kyle greeted as she exited the old-style elevator that gave the building that authentic feel even more so than the rest of the original architecture.

“Hi,” Melinda replied, looking at Kyle’s all-white tennis shoes and thinking that it was cute if she expected to make it out of this town with them still looking that way.