She’d inherited the place from her great-aunt Katherine, the only other female Finch to rebel against the confining familial bonds of being a Finch. Her great-aunt had started the process of taking the neutral color palette beloved by their taupe-is-color-enough family and injecting the hand-finished plaster walls with bright, glorious color—and Chelle had continued the tradition.

She’d spent the fall sanding down the built-in bookcases in the living room and then staining them a peacock blue that looked gorgeous with the sun coming in from the oversized leaded-glass window that overlooked the park. Next on her list was to strip all of the white paint from the fireplace surround and bring it back to its original red brick. There were a pair of matching leopard-print dog beds on either side of the hearth, a custom-built catwalk for Sir Hiss that went across the top third of the window, and parquet-patterned hardwood floors that had enough coats of industrial-strength polyurethane to protect it when Groucho Barks and Mary Puppins got the zoomies.

“Is that a sword?” Nash asked, looking at the Claymores hanging above her fireplace that had been the inspiration for the hero’s weapon of choice in her second book.

“Yes.” She unhooked the dogs’ leashes from their collars, and they took off running to the water bowl in the kitchen. “Here, you sit down, and I’ll get a bandage for your head. Then we can take a look at your ankle.”

After he settled into the chair and put his foot up on the deep merlot–colored storage ottoman also filled with books, she hurried into the kitchen. She grabbed the bandages and hydrogen peroxide from the cupboard by the fridge, filled a plastic baggie with ice, and then snagged a clean washcloth from under the bathroom sink and got it wet enough to clean up the one-inch slice Sir Hiss had made to the guy’s forehead.

Arms full of Florence Nightingale supplies, Chelle walked through the arched opening from the hall back into the living room and came to a dead stop.

Nash sat there in the chair, with Sir Hiss making biscuits on his thigh.

Seeing her cat do that was weird enough to make her pause, considering his fuck-you attitude toward almost everyone.