"Tanya Huff - Keeper's Chronicles 1 - Summon the Keeper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

where she was needed. "I feel as though I've been cast aside like an old shoe, drifting
aimlessly…"
"Mixing metaphors," the cat interrupted, jumping up on the bed. "That's
better; while there's nothing wrong with your knees, they're not exactly expressive
conversational participants. Maybe," he continued, "you're not needed because good
has dominated and evil is no longer considered a possibility."
They locked eyes for a moment, then simultaneously snickered.
"But seriously, Austin, what am I supposed to do?"
"We're only a few hours from home. Why don't you visit your parents?"
"My parents?"
"You remember; male, female, conception, birth…"
Actually, she did remember, she just tried not to think about it much. "Are you
suggesting we need to take a vacation?"
"Right at the moment, I'm suggesting we need to eat breakfast."
The carpet on the stairs had seen better days; the edges still had a faint
memory of the pattern but the center had been worn to a uniform, threadbare gray.
Claire hadn't been exactly impressed the night before, and in daylight the guest house
had a distinctly shabby look.
Not a place to make an extended stay, she thought as she twisted the pommel
back onto the end of the banister.
"I think we should spend the day looking around," she said, following the cat
downstairs. "Even if the site's closed up, it wouldn't hurt to check out the area."
"Whatever. After we eat."
Searching for a cup of coffee, if not the promised breakfast, Claire followed
her nose down the hall to the back of the first floor. With any luck, that obnoxious
little gnome doesn't also do the cooking.
The dining room stretched across the end of the building and held a number of
small tables surrounded by stainless steel and Naugahyde chairs-it had obviously been
renovated at about the same time as her room. Outside curtainless windows, devoid of
even a memory of moldings, a steady rain slanted down from a slate-gray sky,
puddling beneath an ancient and immaculate white truck parked against the back
fence.
Fortunately, before she could get really depressed about either the weather or
the decor, the unmistakable scent of Colombian double roast drew her around a corner
to a small open kitchen. The stainless steel, restaurant-style appliances were separated
from the actual eating area by a Formica counter, its surface scrubbed and rescrubbed
to a pale gray.
Standing at the refrigerator was a dark-haired young man in his late teens or
early twenties, wearing a chefs apron over faded jeans and a T-shirt. Although he
wore a pair of wire frame glasses, a certain breadth of shoulder and narrowness of hip
suggested to Claire that he wasn't the bookish type. The muscles of his back made
interesting ripples in the brilliant white cotton of the T-shirt and when she lowered
her gaze, she discovered, after a moment, that he ironed his jeans.
Austin leaped silently up onto the counter, glanced from the cook to Claire,
and snorted, "You might want to breathe."
Claire grabbed the cat and dropped him onto the floor as the object of the
observation closed the refrigerator door and turned.
"Good morning," he said. It sounded as though he actually meant it.
Distracted by teeth as white as his shin and a pair of blue eyes surrounded by a
thick fringe of dark lashes, not to mention the musical, near Irish lilt of a