To Say I Love You Read Online Free Page B

with you. And if we’re going to be here for any length of time, we need to have somewhere we can be ourselves….”
    “Okay….”
    “So I bought us a house.”
    I blinked a few times, then shook my head, laughing. “Is that really the solution?”
    “Mm,” he hummed, leaning down to kiss my neck. “It’s about twenty minutes’ walk from your dad’s house, according to the Realtor, so you’re still close to him. But the neighbors on either side are really far away.”
    His meaning was pretty clear. We needed to be alone together in a place where people wouldn’t overhear us.
    “Do you want to look inside?”
    I really did. He held my hand as we walked through the yard. He unlocked the front door with a key from his pocket. Inside, the house was slightly neater than the outside, but not by much. There were a few sparse pieces of furniture the last owner had left behind; a welsh dresser, a well-padded leather armchair that needed reupholstering, a broken side table in the hall.
    It turned out not to be a single-story house; there was an attic area, although the ceilings weren’t high enough for it to be converted into a playroom, like we’d done back home. Standing in there, I had to crouch slightly, too tall to straighten up.
    “The Realtor said it hasn’t been lived in for some time,” Will said as we made our way down to the main living area in the house. “You wanna know the best bit, though?”
    “Go on.”
    “One of the last things the previous owner did was install air-con throughout.”
    I looked up and found the telltale panels in the ceiling and smirked at him. There wasn’t air-con in my room back at Dad’s house. I’d always just made do with a standing fan. “I knew the heat was killing you.”
    “That wasn’t the reason I picked this house,” he said, protesting a little. “I thought it was beautiful and you’d love it.”
    “And you were right. As always.”
    “The air-con is just a perk.”
    I leaned in and lightly kissed his cheek. “It needs some fixing up,” I said as he wrapped his arm around my waist.
    “A little, yeah. Inside and out.”
    “I bet my dad would help me out. I know he helped my uncle out quite a bit when he was younger. Uncle Hank is in property—he used to flip houses all the time.”
    Will hummed in agreement. “That sounds good. You could spend more time with him that way. Or—I mean—you spend a lot of time together now, but it’s not really productive. You’re just together. This way you’ve got something to work on.”
    “Yeah.”
    The project was starting to come together in my mind; I knew the yellow paint on the outside of the house needed to be redone, as well as redecorating most of the interior. If we had the budget, the kitchen could be replaced too, or the counters and cupboard doors, anyway. I’d done that before and knew it wasn’t too hard a job.
    The more I thought on it, the bigger the project became.
    There wasn’t exactly anything wrong with the bathroom, it just needed cleaning up some. If we replaced some of the tiles, though, it would make the room a lot nicer. Since it was only a one-story house with one master and one guest bedroom, there wasn’t a master bath, just one family bathroom. I didn’t mind. One bedroom meant we didn’t have to invite guests to stay. I wanted to turn the second bedroom into an office space for Will. That way he’d have a place to work from that was separate from the living area.
    There was no way I was going to IKEA for the furniture for the house, even if it was the easiest and cheapest way of getting started. That’s the way the IKEA invasion always begins—a few essentials, that’s all, then you end up with multicolored kitchenware and an eight-foot picture of the Empire State Building on your wall.
    We have standards.
    If I had my way (and I would, eventually), all the pieces in our house would come from local dealers. Will had introduced me to auctions, either for antiques or