Erik spent most of the day unpacking and helping Vickie rearrange furniture. He couldn’t quite understand the female preoccupation with designing rooms. It must be that nesting instinct.
Yet he was very pleased with the job she’d done on his office-the Thoreau Suite. Naming the room had started as a private joke between them. While on their honeymoon in Miami they had visited a mansion built by one of those turn of the century capitalists. The place had a gold name plate on the door of each room. They’d laughed at the pretentiousness of rich people.
“When we get a place of our own, we’ll name the rooms, too,” Vickie had said.
“What if we only have two rooms?”
“We’ll still name them. They’d be our rooms, right?”
The new house wasn’t a mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but it did have more than two rooms. And Vickie had promised him an office of his own, designed any way he wanted. She had delivered on her promise.
He sat back in his luxurious office chair-an elegant nut-brown leather-and looked at the result. With a simple natural look, including small plants, nature prints, and the Thoreau collage, the room had Walden Pond written all over it. Erik had done most of his work in tiny apartments on a kitchen table. Now, for the first time, he really felt at home.
As happy as he was with the new place, though, he couldn’t stop thinking about the woods behind the house, and Johnny Dovecrest’s visit. Pastor Mark hadn’t done much to reassure him, either. He hadn’t realized the woods were so deep. The first investment he’d make would be a good, sturdy fence to enclose the backyard.