“Now?”
Flick jammed her hands into the front pocket of her jeans. “You got something better to do?”
“Okay then.”
“Holy shit.”
Flick stood in the passage outside the last of the third-floor bedrooms and looked past Kai into the disaster area beyond the door. Unlike the doors to the other bedrooms and the study, the door to this room still opened unimpeded and was, therefore, according to Gina’s rules of hoarding, still relatively empty. Kai placed his hands on his hips, turned sideways, and lifted his eyebrows. “So, this is unexpected.”
“Isn’t it?” She knew what he meant; the downstairs, the area of Gina’s beautifully decorated house visitors got to see, could grace the pages of any magazine. But you’d need a tetanus shot to enter any room on the third floor.
Flick flushed, feeling embarrassed. “What can you see? Is it a dead cat?”
“It’s full, not dirty,” Kai replied, his eyes on something in the back corner of the room.
Flick frowned as he walked up to an old table piled with books and squeezed between it and an old cupboard. Old puzzle boxes resembling the leaning tower of Pisa threatened to tumble to the floor as he pushed aside another table so that he could wedge his large frame into a small space between a bookcase and a display cabinet.
“Kai, you’re going to cause everything to fall, like dominoes. You’ll be buried and I’ll have to leave you there!”
“Chill, Flick,” Kai retorted. He stopped in front of the display cabinet and instead of opening the cracked glass doors, he stood up on his toes and stretched up, his hand brushing the top of a high, long windowsill. There was something in the shadows, something she couldn’t identify. Flick was distracted by the strip of flesh beneath the hem of his t-shirt and his well-fitting jeans, and remembered the heat of his skin, the way he tasted, the feel of that firm, well-shaped ass under her hands as he slid into her, hard and masculine...
“It’s a Beretta.”
Shaking off her memories and ignoring the lusty throb between her legs, Flick concentrated on what Kai was cradling like a newborn baby. It was a long and thin and incredibly elegant rifle.
She frowned. “Berettas are pistols.”
“Not this one,” Kai rubbed his thumb down the barrel of the rifle. “Beretta is just the brand name—the company makes other weapons as well. This is a Beretta Imperiale Montecarlo shotgun.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?”
The corners of Kai’s mouth kicked up in a smile. “Hell, yes. These shotguns are generally accepted to be amongst the best in the world and are frequently used in the Olympians for skeet and trap shooting.”
“Oh.”
Kai rubbed his thumb over what looked to be silver engraving. “Any idea where she got this?”
“I didn’t even know she had it, or the rest of this crap, until recently.”
“Not crap,” Kai corrected her. “There’s some high-end stuff in this room.”
“And how would you know that?” Flick asked.
“I was a poor kid who grew up on the streets, so I know crap. This isn’t it.”
“It’s just furniture, and old puzzles, and guns—”
Kai’s head snapped up. “There are more guns?”
“In the other room. I think I saw some the first time I was here.” Why was he looking so interested? His yellow-brown eyes narrowed in concentration. He couldn’t possibly think that Gina had something worthwhile in these piles of junk. “Don’t get excited, Manning, they’re probably fake.”
“This one isn’t,” Kai pointed out, stroking the stock of the rifle before reaching up and placing it back on the window ledge.
“Even so, if she manages to get a hundred bucks for it, I’ll eat my hat.”
Kai maneuvered his way through the furniture, and the smirk on his face made Flick feel desperately uneasy.
When he reached her, he bent down and brushed his mouth against hers. “Then get chewing, honey, ‘cos that gun—that Beretta Imperiale MonteCarlo—is worth around a hundred grand. And I want to buy it.”