Beauty and the Brit by Lizbeth Selvig

back a grunt of disdain. He’d just described the bathroom she’d used for the last twenty-six years. He turned to the right and led the way to a corner room facing the front of the house, decorated in spring green and white. A beautiful quilt in greens and yellows with touches of blue adorned the double bed. Bonnie gaped.
    “This has to be the most gorgeous room I’ve ever seen! Oh Rio, look. Look at the flower pictures.”
    The décor was luxury beyond anything Rio could ever have afforded. The delicately striped green-and-white curtains were pretty but not frilly. David Pitts-Matherson clearly had deeper talents than raising horses and filling out tight pants.
    “It’s yours for now if you wish,” he said.
    “Really? Oh, really?” Bonnie spun around the space once and flipped her suitcase onto the bed. “Thank you!” She stopped short of throwing her arms around David’s neck.
    “Yours is right next door.” He caught Rio’s eyes, his smile underscored with friendliness.
    “Yeah!” Bonnie stopped her room-ogling and grabbed Rio’s upper arm. “I can’t wait to see what yours looks like.”
    “Hers” looked like a page out of a decorating magazine. What Bonnie’s spring-fresh room was to airy neutrality, Rio’s was to masculine serenity. A soothing dove gray covered the walls, and classy blue, gray, and maroon striped drapes hung floor-length at the window. Like the green room, this one faced the driveway, barns, arenas, and off into the fields.
    The quilt on the bed was even more intricately designed than the first, in stars and log cabin blocks of blues and whites and reds. Rio stared at the richness of the space, both entranced and terrified. The colors touched her, yet David might as well have placed her in a room hung with gold tapestries.
    “I’m afraid this one is a bit less pretty,” he said. “Fit a little better for a fellow, I reckon.”
    “Stop apologizing,” she heard herself say. “This will be fine. It’s . . . beautiful.”
    Reluctantly, she set her case on the floor next to the bed, not daring to place anything on the amazing craftsmanship of the quilt.
    “Not much cohesiveness between rooms—each is its own little theme park, isn’t it?”
    “Just shows you have an amazing talent for decorating,” Rio said.
    “Me?” David’s eyes filled with amusement. “Good Lord, no. I can frame a room and hammer up drywall, but the rest is one hundred percent my mother. She comes from England once or twice a year and drives the people at the decorating shops into padded cells. She’ll be here the middle of November, in fact.”
    “So when you picked the color chip in my kitchen . . .”
    “It matched the floor.” He shrugged. “My mother tells me it’s important, the matching part.” He hesitated, then spoke hesitantly. “I truly am sorry about your kitchen. I know I said it, but I do understand being here isn’t the same.”
    One point for him. She nodded without replying.
    “C’mon, then,” he continued. “Let me show you the rest of what’s up here so you’ll know.”
    The bathroom was only a little ugly. Aged, shrimp-colored tile lined the tub surround and rose halfway up the rest of the walls. The glazing on a classic, pedestal sink had cracked over the years, and the linoleum had bubbled slightly in a few places. But, just as David had said, it was spotless, and it smelled like fresh citrus. Fluffy white and blue towels hung on a long towel bar, and a white wicker shelf unit held more linens. A pot of bright silk flowers up on one shelf added a cheery spot of color. David’s mother, Rio assumed, had made the best of the old room.
    “I use the bathroom downstairs,” he said. “So this is private for you ladies.”
    “I thought you said it was ugly!” Bonnie laughed. “It’s pretty.”
    Thank goodness for bubbly Bonnie saying all the right things. Rio couldn’t rid herself of the slight sourness in the pit of her stomach every time she opened another