“Let’s go find our men.” She tucked Homer on her shoulder like a baby, patting his back as she headed toward the noisy game room.

They were, as she’d suspected, sprawled everywhere in an intensely male Sunday afternoon tableau. The football game must have ended, but there was a new contest under way as Flynn took on her son in what appeared to be a vicious round of Mortal Kombat.

Jordan was slumped in a chair, a beer bottle dangling from his fingers, his long legs stretched out on a rug that was littered with potato chip shards, portions of the Sunday paper, and dog hair.

Brad had copped the couch, and with a bowl of nachos balanced on his belly looked to be catching a nap, despite the ringing sounds of battle from the screen and the floor.

Flushed with love for all of them, Zoe headed toward Jordan. He gave her a lazy smile, then cocked a brow as she caught his dark hair in her hands and bent down to give him a long, hard kiss.

“Hello, handsome.”

“Hello, gorgeous.”

With a laugh for his perplexed expression, she swung around. She crouched by Flynn and as Simon goggled, hooked her arm around Flynn’s neck, tipped him back like a dance move and pressed her lips enthusiastically to his.

“Jeez, Mom.”

“Wait your turn. Hi, cutie,” she said to Flynn.

“Hi, back. Did Mal have whatever you did?”

She grabbed Simon, wrestling him into her arms as he pretended to struggle. She peppered kisses over his cheeks, then did an exaggerated mmmmm on his lips. “Hello, son of mine.”

“Did you drink stuff, Mom?”

“No.” She gave him a quick tickle in the ribs, then got to her feet.

Brad stayed as he was, but his eyes were open now and on hers. With a slow smile, she pushed up her sleeves one at a time as she crossed the room.

“I wondered if you’d get around to me.”

“Saved you for last.”

She picked up the nachos, set them on the table. She sat at his hip, and grabbed a handful of his sweatshirt. Yanked. “Come here, and bring that sexy mouth with you.”

Behind her, Simon rolled around on the floor making gagging noises until Moe sat on him.

She ended the kiss with a teasing nip on his bottom lip and a whispered “We’ll finish this later.” Then gave him a light shove to send him flat again.

“Well.” She rose, brushed her palms together as if completing a task. “Y’all be sure to pick up in here when you’re done. I’ve got some work to do upstairs.”

She sauntered out, feeling like the queen of the world.

Chapter Seventeen

BRAD wasn’t sure what had gotten into her, but he was pretty sure he liked it. Whatever had put that brilliantly sexy look on her face and had turned her voice into a laughing purr couldn’t be bad.

He wondered what sort of strange and exotic female rituals she and the others had performed while he’d been watching football.

He wondered if they would perform them once a week.

The first chance he got, he was going to corner her and see that she made good on that promise to finish what she’d started with that long, smoldering kiss.

But from the looks of things, it wasn’t going to be soon.

By the time Flynn and Jordan left, Simon claimed to be starving to death. The fact that the boy had been eating steadily all day didn’t seem to matter. He was starving, the dogs were starving. They would all keel over and die if they didn’t eat soon. To hold them off, Brad thrust what was left of a bag of corn chips in Simon’s hands and chased the three of them outside.

But from Zoe there hadn’t been a peep in over an hour. The woman had swept in, stirred him up, then swept out again, leaving the taste of her lingering on his lips.

Simon wasn’t the only one who was starving.

Unwilling to wait for her to wander his way again, Brad went upstairs and knocked on her closed bedroom door.

“Come on in.”

He opened it and saw her sitting on the bed, surrounded by stacks of paper and notebooks, library books and her borrowed laptop. She still looked sexy—he doubted she could look anything but—and very focused.

“What’s up?” he asked her.

“The desk couldn’t hold all this. It’s a big bed.” She had a pencil behind her ear and was idly chewing on another one. “I’m going through everything one more time, start to finish. I’ve got all this energy all of a sudden and all these ideas.” She shook herself as if she couldn’t hold them all comfortably. “I’m trying to organize them, but one thing just keeps slapping into another.”

Watching her, he walked over to sit on the side of the bed. “You look excited.”

“I am. It just sort of struck me as I was driving back, and I thought if I went back through each clue, each quest, each . . . Where’s Simon?”

“He’s outside with the dogs.”

“It’s getting late. I wasn’t paying attention. I’d better throw something together for dinner, and get him in and settled down.”

“Take a minute. Tell me where you’re heading with this.”

“That’s one of the things I need to figure out. Where am I heading? I’ll tell you while I see about dinner.”

“You don’t have to see about dinner,” he said as she wound through her stacks and off the bed. Reaching out, he snagged the pencil from her ear, tossed it on her papers. “There’s enough left over down there to forage through.”

“I think better when I’m busy, and foraging isn’t part of the deal. And I like fussing around in that kitchen of yours,” she added as she started out. “That’s one of the things I need to talk to you about.”

“You want to talk to me about the kitchen?”

“That’s part of it. Part of the whole.” Catching his expression of pure male distress, she chuckled. “Don’t panic, I’m not pulling a Malory on you. Your kitchen’s wonderful just as it is. The fact is, this is the most wonderful house I’ve ever seen.”

She trailed her fingers along the rail on the way downstairs. “Everything about it is just as it should be. I love my place. It means so much to me. There are still some mornings I wake up and just hug myself because it’s mine.”

She stepped into the kitchen. And let out a very long, very audible breath.

“We, ah, foraged considerably earlier.”