CHAPTER FOUR

 

MEG

 

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR her phone to ding.

“Hi, M, I’m Chris.”

She nearly rolled her eyes. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Your profile says that.

She didn’t say that, though.

She typed: Hi!!!

Exclamation points were important. Especially for a woman who “liked to please her man.”

“I see you’re interested ;) Maybe we should get a drink and see if we’re a match? Would you like that?”

Meg glanced around the shambles of a house. Nothing was ready yet, but why not check it out? What could it hurt?

“Sure!! When did you want to meet?”

She hit send on the app and waited. A little swirling icon let her know Chris was, in fact, messaging her back.

“He’s going to say tonight,” she muttered.

“How about tonight?”

She smiled. Now she’d see just how big of a prick pretty boy Chris was.

“Oh, I can’t tonight. I could tomorrow. How about that?”

She put the phone in her pocket and began to unpack. She put all the stuff from the utilities box in the cabinets under the kitchen sink. The place had come fully furnished, which she liked.

The kitchen table was old, heavy, solid wood, and long. The chairs were equally substantial and made of weathered but good wood. She scrubbed the floor on hands and knees, all the while working in silence.

No ding from her phone, just the sound of her breathing and working.

She found herself humming as she cleaned the table and the chairs with sanitizing wipes. No reason she couldn’t be clean in her work space. She wiped down the sink and the countertops. She looked in the fridge, which was running, and found it clean and bare.

She wiped it down anyway. Best to know it was clean and not just assume.

She vacuumed out the dresser drawers, also made of nice sturdy wood. A darker wood. Chestnut maybe?

Once she knew they were clean, she put her clothes away. She stripped the bed of linens, vacuumed the mattress, and put her own sheets on.

All told, she worked for an hour and a half in silence, getting her home ready for future company.

She found herself hot and sweaty but pleased.

Her phone finally dinged.

“I guess that’s okay. You’re near Baltimore it says? How about Miss Vick’s? Seven?”

She was not near Baltimore anymore. She was out in the sticks, just as she wanted. But he didn’t need to know that.

“Sure. That’s great. See you then.”

She rolled her eyes and tossed her phone on the bed as she stripped off her dirty, sweaty clothes. When he hadn’t gotten his way, he’d pouted and punished her, making her wait a long time for a response. Then he made it feel like he was doing her a favor by answering.

She grinned at herself in the bathroom mirror as she turned the water as close to scalding as she could without hurting herself.

Oh, she liked him. He was going to be fun.