Читать книгу One Night of Passion: The Night that Changed Everything / Champagne with a Celebrity / At the French Baron's Bidding - Kate Hardy, Anne McAllister - Страница 10

The unexpected sound of the front doorbell of her mother’s Santa Barbara mansion startled her.

“Blast!” Edie shot a helpless glance in the direction of the living room, then turned a malevolent one on the computer screen she’d been staring at forever.

She was in the middle of making the latest of Rhiannon’s many plane reservations. She was almost to the last screen. If she stopped now, it would “time-out” and she would have to start over.

God knew, she probably would anyway. Rhiannon had been changing things almost daily for the past two months. Ever since she and Andrew had had their meltdown in Mont Chamion, even though they’d made up, Rhiannon had been edgy and wired, worried about whether Andrew would dump her one minute, and whether her career was over the next. She was constantly changing her priorities and her mind, and today’s rearranged schedule was just the latest indication of her turmoil.

It did not give Edie restful days, either. Fortunately Rhiannon was in the Bahamas shooting a music video today. If she hadn’t been, chances were good she’d have been perching on the edge of Edie’s desk talking a mile a minute, fretting about Andrew, and changing her mind even as Edie was rebooking her reservations. Now Edie glared at the hourglass, which still hung on the screen.

The doorbell rang again.

At its insistence, the dog, Roy, a gigantic Newfoundland—all black glossy fur and lolling red tongue—looked up with vague interest. As a pup he’d have been at the door already, barking like mad. Now at nine, he had a more casual approach to visitors. They had to be persistent or he wasn’t interested. He lay his head between his paws and closed his eyes again.

The doorbell chimed again. Emphatically. Twice.

Well, whoever they were, Roy would give them points for persistence. Ah, at last. The new screen finally appeared asking her to confirm the ticket purchase. Edie clicked. The hourglass reappeared. She waited.

And the doorbell rang. Once, twice. Three times now.

Not many people got as far as Mona Tremayne’s front door. Tucked away high in the mountains behind Santa Barbara, the acreage Mona had bought with Edie’s father, Joe, was far off the beaten path.

Everyone else had urged Mona to move after Joe died. The acreage was too big, they said. It had been Joe’s dream to have the cutting horse operation on rural Santa Barbara ranch land. But Mona had stayed true to that dream.

She and Joe had bought it not just for the horses, but because they’d wanted a place to get away to, a place where they could be themselves without coming face-to-face with the fanfare of Mona’s growing celebrity on an hourly basis. Of course it hadn’t had the present house on it then, only the now sadly decaying old adobe ranch house even farther from the road.

This house had come later, after Joe’s death. In her grief Mona wouldn’t leave the place they’d had together. But the crumbling old adobe was no place to be with two small children. Without Joe to keep things together, the roof would have fallen in on them at the very least. So Mona had had a new house built and a year later she and five-year-old Edie and nine-year-old Ronan had moved down the hill several hundred yards to what Ronan still called “Ma’s movie star house.”

It was big and lavishly decorated, parts of it definitely elegant enough for spur-of-the-moment entertaining of Hollywood moguls and the world’s rich and famous. At the same time it had eleven bedrooms, even more bathrooms, a butler’s pantry big enough for Edie’s twelve-year-old twin half brothers Dirk and Ruud to roller skate in, a swimming pool, tennis court and, oh yes, a doorbell.

This time whoever it was didn’t just ring it, they leaned on it. Long and hard and far too shrilly.

Annoyed, Edie was tempted not to answer it at all. But Mona’s “open house” policy extended to whomever among her hundreds of “close” friends turned up in the vicinity. Even when Mona was on the other side of the world, she—or, basically, Edie—welcomed all and sundry. The Tremayne hospitality was legendary, and Edie was quite happy to do it, though usually her mother warned her before guests were expected.

Now the hourglass gave way to a “confirmed” screen. Gratefully Edie punched a button to print Rhiannon’s itinerary, then, with Roy at her heels, she went to answer the bell—which was still ringing “All right! I hear you!” she shouted as she hurried down the hallway from her office at the back of the house, across the living room and grabbed the handle of the oversize dark oak door. “You can stop now!”

It stopped.

She jerked open the door. Her jaw dropped. Her fingers clenched on the door handle. She stared in disbelief. “Nick?”

Because it was—Nick Savas in the flesh. As tall and gorgeous as she remembered. And as unexpected as—well, Edie couldn’t think of anything she had been anticipating less.

She clutched the door handle with one hand and Roy’s collar with the other, as if they would anchor her in a storm. And there was a storm—of emotions, of memories, of questions and answers that she’d put behind her because she’d never managed to sort them out.

Not that she hadn’t tried. For weeks after she’d got back home after the wedding in Mont Chamion she’d thought about that night—about the man she’d spent it with. She thought about what she’d done and tried to understand why.

As near as she could come to an explanation was that somehow that night he had awakened her.

After two and a half years of going through the motions of getting on with her life—and yet never really finding the spark that would make her recognize that she was alive and fully functional again on all levels—that night she had.

Something—and she never did put her finger on what—about Nick Savas had touched something elemental in her. In her most fanciful moments she thought it was what the prince’s kiss on Sleeping Beauty’s lips had done—brought her back to life.

It wasn’t Nick’s kiss that had done it for Edie. It wasn’t his lovemaking, either. It was simply him—his energy, his charm, his wit, his dazzling smile. And his eyes. His eyes were eloquent. They spoke to her without words. They laughed with her, they teased her. They bore witness to his suffering. They anguished with her about her own. They drew her in.

They woke her up.

The kisses, the lovemaking grew out of that. She thought maybe she’d gone to bed with him out of gratitude for her awakening. She was grateful. But it was more than that.

She’d felt a connection she couldn’t explain—as if he’d given her something that night and, in their lovemaking, she had given him something in return.

She’d tried over the past couple of months to articulate what. She hadn’t been able to. Not really. If he’d come after her, she might have been able to. But of course he hadn’t.

It had been a one-off, just as he’d said it would be.

So what was he doing here now?

His mobile mouth tilted into a conspiratorial smile and his eyes—those dark, sometimes laughing, sometimes brooding eyes—were just as intent as ever as they focused on her.

Once more Edie felt the connection she’d felt that night in Mont Chamion.

So whatever it was, it had lasted—for her at least—longer than one night. Edie felt her breath catch.

“What—What are you doing here?”

The Cinderella inside her wanted him to say he was here for her. The other sane sensible 99.9 percent of her brain told herself to get a grip. Things like that didn’t happen in real life. She wouldn’t want them to happen!

“Nice to see you, too,” Nick said amiably. Then he cocked his head and looked quizzically at her. “I don’t remember us parting on bad terms. Actually I don’t remember us parting at all. I woke up and you were gone.” Now his eyes accused her.

Edie felt her face warm, her fingers tightened on Roy’s collar. “You were asleep. I had a plane to catch.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact. In fact she knew she just sounded defensive. “Sorry,” she said after a moment. “It was …” She hesitated, trying to find the right word. “It was a lovely night.”

That was inadequate. But what else could she say? And the situation wasn’t one she’d ever been in before—or since.

He was still smiling at her, every bit as gorgeous as he had been that night, only this time in an easy California casual way. This Nick wore a pair of jeans, faded nearly white at the knees and thighs, a long sleeve sage-green oxford cloth shirt with the cuffs rolled half up his forearms and a pair of aviator sunglasses parked atop his midnight-black, wind-ruffled hair.

“It was,” Nick agreed. His gaze moved over her slowly, as if he were undressing her again now. Edie felt her whole body warm.

And then he said, “I’ve been talking with your mother.”

“My mother?” He was undressing her with his eyes and he’d been talking to her mother? Dear God, what had Mona done now?

“We were talking about an old adobe ranch house she’s got.”

Edie stared at him, feeling a total disconnect. “What?”

“She mentioned it when I met her in Mont Chamion,” Nick went on. “She said it was in need of work. So I told her I’d give her an evaluation.” He gave Edie an encouraging smile.

“Evaluation?” Edie echoed. He was here because he’d talked to her mother? It was business. It had nothing to do with her. She felt oddly deflated and off-kilter. She didn’t know quite what to say, but Nick was watching her, clearly waiting for her to say something.

Finally she said the only thing she could think of. “Mona’s not here. She’s in Thailand.”

“I know. I talked to her yesterday.”

“Really?” Edie had talked to her mother yesterday as well, and Mona hadn’t said a single word! The name Nick Savas hadn’t crossed her lips. Nor had any mention of the adobe.

“We discussed renovations a couple of weeks ago,” Nick said. “But I didn’t know when I was going to be finished then. She said it didn’t matter, just to come on ahead whenever I got my last job done.” Nick spread his hands.

Pennies were slowly beginning to drop.

“Come ahead?” Edie echoed again, wondering if he thought it was strange that she couldn’t seem to form a thought he hadn’t already said. “For what?”

“The evaluation. Working on the house, if it warrants it.” He reached out a hand to the dog, letting Roy sniff to make sure he was a friend.

Edie wished that was all the assurance it took. She felt pole-axed. And betrayed. Obviously when dangling Kyle in front of her didn’t tempt Edie, she’d moved on to the man Edie had gone off with the night of the wedding.

Had she tracked Nick down and called him? Twisted his arm?

Edie was mortified beyond belief.

“You won’t want to bother with the adobe,” she said shortly now. “It’s not worth saving.”

That wasn’t true, of course. Or at least she hoped it wasn’t. She loved the old house where she’d lived as a small child. But that didn’t mean she wanted her mother to hire Nick Savas to restore it!

Unfortunately Roy seemed to have accepted him as a friend. He began to slowly wag his tail. Edie anchored him firmly with a hand on his collar. She ground her teeth, trying to keep a polite smile in place.

“She made it sound as if it had possibilities,” Nick said. “We won’t know until I look at it, though,” he added, as if to mollify her. “When I have, I told her I’d have a look and give her a call and talk to her about it. If it looks like a go, I’ll do up a plan and explanations, then submit it for approval. There may be historical commissions to talk to, people to get on board. We’ll cross those bridges as we come to them.” This was Nick the professional talking, detailing all the steps with easy confidence.

Edie barely heard them beyond registering that all these bridges he was going to have to cross would take time. And time meant—

“Where are you staying?” she asked abruptly.

Nick blinked, then the lopsided smile reappeared. “Well, Mona invited me to stay here.”

Edie felt as if she’d been punched in the gut.

“Is that a problem?” Nick asked. He was looking at her speculatively.

“I—” Edie managed one word, then her speech dried up.

Problem wasn’t precisely the word. Try awkward, she thought. Try disconcerting. Or mortifying. But how could she explain? She’d told him that Mona was matchmaking back in Mont Chamion. She didn’t want to have to admit it again. She didn’t want him to think her mother was trying to serve him up on a plate!

Deliberately she pasted on her best mi casa es su casa smile. “Of course not,” Edie lied and stepped back to open the door wider. “Not a problem. I was just surprised. Come in. This is Roy, by the way.”

Nick hunkered down and ruffled Roy’s ears. The dog, a sucker for ear rubs, moaned his pleasure. The sound made Edie remember all too well how Nick’s hands had made her moan, too.

She was sure her cheeks were flaming when he gave Roy’s ears one last rub, then stood up. “I’ll just get my bag from the car.”

Edie waited by the door and tried to gather her wits, to find a proper emotional leg to stand on from which to handle the sudden appearance of Nick Savas into her life.

He wasn’t here for her, she reminded herself. At least not in his estimation. He’d come because her mother had given him some song-and-dance about renovating the adobe. And he didn’t care enough about her one way or the other to let it sway him.

“It’s business,” she told herself firmly. “Remember that,” she muttered under her breath as he strode back up the driveway with a leather and canvas duffel in one hand and a battered laptop case in the other.

“What’s that?” he asked, obviously having heard her saying something.

Edie shook her head. “Just talking to myself. I need to remember something.”

“You should write it down.”

Yes, Edie thought. I should. I should emblazon it on the insides of my eyelids.

“I’ll do that,” she told him briskly, then took a deep breath and turned to lead him back into the house. “Right this way.”

“Amazing place,” Nick said appreciatively as he followed her.

The living room, with its high ceilings, thick cream colored rough plastered walls and terrazzo floors, opened through a series of French doors onto a broad patio with a trellised canopy sheltering it from the sun. The doors at this time of year were open, and the light afternoon breeze drifted in, stirring a set of shell wind chimes as they passed.

“It’s hardly authentic,” Edie said over her shoulder, glad that he was looking around rather than at her. “It’s what my brother calls ‘Movie star Spanish.’”

Nick laughed. “I recognize it.” Then he shrugged. “But it pays homage to the real thing in an impressive way. The purists hate it, but it celebrated the heritage and the history in its own way. It’s made it popular and accessible.”

“You’re more forgiving than my brother.” Edie was surprised at his attitude. She would have thought an architect, especially one who dealt with authentic historic preservation and restoration, would be more judgmental, not less.

“It is what it is,” Nick said, running his hand up the smooth dark bannister as she led him up the broad staircase, then looked back at the room below them. “A romantic idealization. It’s not pretending to be authentic. Maybe your brother is responding not to the house but to what it means to him.”

Which was probably truer than he could know, Edie thought. And Ronan wouldn’t like being called on it, either.

“You could be right,” she said as they reached the open hallway on the upper floor.

“You can pretty much have any of these that you want.” She gestured at the several open doors. She showed him all the ones that were available, at the same time pointing out her mother’s suite at the far end of the hall, then her youngest sister, Grace’s, room and the twins’ room overlooking the pool. “They’re in Thailand with Mona right now,” she said. “For the summer holidays.”

She used to do that herself when she was young, trail after her mother and watch the filming from the sidelines. Those experiences had made her certain she never wanted to do what her mother did, at the same time it had made Rhiannon long to get in front of the cameras.

“How about this one?” Nick said, looking into a spare masculine looking room. It was almost Spartan in its lack of decor.

“Ronan, my older brother, uses this one when he’s here. But he won’t be here for months, so you’re welcome to it. Or,” she added with a grin, “you can have the tower room.”

“Tower?”

“Surely you noticed our pseudo-Moorish tower when you drove up.” It was the most romantic of all the romantic elements in the house.

He grinned. “I’d forgotten that. There’s a bedroom up there?”

“A small suite. Rhiannon loves it.” She pointed at the narrow staircase that curved upward.

“Why am I not surprised? Does she use it when she’s here?”

“Yes. But she’s gone right now. You’re welcome to it.”

“I’d have thought you’d have first dibs on it.”

“Never wanted it.”

He raised a brow. “Not a romantic?”

“No.” Not about rooms, anyway. And she tried to be realistic. At least most of the time. “That was my room.” She tilted her head toward one that looked up toward the woods.

“Was? Which one is yours now?”

“I have an apartment over the carriage house.”

It was a small, cozy one-bedroom flat that had been the caretaker’s place when Edie was growing up. But then the caretaker left, and Ronan had taken over the carriage house during college. He’d kept it even after he got his first job as a journalist. But eventually he was out of the country so much he decided he didn’t need it.

Edie had moved in there when she came back after Ben had died. She would work for her mother willingly, but she wasn’t going to live with her, too. She’d been a married woman, Now she was a widow. She wanted her independence.

For all the good it was obviously doing her!

“So who’s sleeping in your bed?” Nick asked.

Edie opened her mouth and promptly shut it again, face burning. Then she realized he meant the bed in the room that had been hers. “No one,” she said hastily, which was in fact the answer to who was sleeping with her in the carriage house, too. Not that he would care.

“Then I will,” he said and walked in and dumped his duffel bag and laptop on the bed.

She wouldn’t let herself read anything into his choice. It was a fine room, and there was nothing of hers left in it. At least she hoped there wasn’t. Not that Nick Savas would care if there was. To him it was a place to sleep.

“Great,” she said with all the brisk indifference she could muster. “Well, I’ll just leave you to get settled in.”

“Who else is here?” he asked.

“Just you. But don’t worry. Clara—she works for Mona, cleaning and sometimes cooking—will come in and cook for you. She lives in Santa Barbara, but she comes up every day and cooks for the family when Mona and the kids are home. She regularly does it for guests, too.”

Nick shook his head. “Not necessary. I can cook for myself. Besides,” he reminded her, “I might not be staying. Gotta see if it’s worth it.”

“Of course.”

He might be gone before nightfall. Life would go back to normal. Edie crossed her fingers.

“Do you want to take a look at the old house today, then? Or are you tired from traveling?”

“I’m fine. Just flew up from L.A. I was visiting my cousin.”

“Demetrios?” She knew he and Anny kept a place there for when his work took him to Hollywood.

But Nick shook his head. “Yiannis.”

If Edie remembered right from the wedding, he was Demetrios’s youngest brother. Another lean, dark, handsome Savas male. “Is he an actor, too?”

Nick laughed. “You wouldn’t catch him dead acting. He works with wood. Makes furniture. Imports and exports everything from raw lumber to finished pieces. He’s done some pieces for restorations I’ve worked on. Talented guy.”

“Apparently.” Edie smiled and began to back toward the door. “Come down when you’re ready and I’ll take you to see the adobe. I’ll be in my office. It’s in the back of the house, beyond the kitchen. If you get lost, follow the sound of the phone.”

It was ringing now. And so she had the excuse to dart off to answer it. She gave him a quick smile and a little waggle of her fingers, then hurried back down the stairs.

It was the first time in weeks she was glad to hear Rhiannon’s voice when she picked up the phone. Even when her sister said, “I’ve changed my mind,” Edie didn’t snap.

She just grabbed a pencil and said, “Okay. Tell me what the new plan is.”

If Rhiannon noticed that Edie wasn’t peevish, she didn’t remark on it. But then she rarely seemed to pick up on other peoples’ reactions. Now she just began explaining her most recently changed decision, which was to go meet Andrew in Miami next weekend instead of following up on meeting with a director about a film set in Turkey.

“So you can change it, right?” Ree demanded.

“I can change it,” Edie assured her. It just meant starting over from scratch, canceling the reservation she’d made an hour ago. But at least she’d have something to occupy her mind that she could handle—unlike the man upstairs.

No, she told herself firmly. She could handle him, too. She just needed a little space and a little time to regroup.

She was just surprised, that’s all. She hadn’t expected to see him again. She might have hoped, yes—just a little—but she hadn’t really considered it. And then when he did turn up, she’d dared to believe he had come to find her, to explore the connection she had sensed between them.

And then she’d discovered he’d come because her mother had asked him to—on the flimsiest of pretexts!

“Edie! Are you there?” Rhiannon’s voice broke into her mental conundrum.

“Of course I’m here. Did you think I’d hung up on you?”

“You’re not talking.” It sounded like an accusation.

“I’m writing down the information you just gave me,” Edie said. It wasn’t totally a lie. She’d made a couple of notes. “I’ll make the reservations now. I’ll send you an email and forward them.”

“Great. Thanks. You’re the best. Don’t tell Andrew,” Rhiannon added quickly. “I want to surprise him.”

“Are you sure?” Surprises were sometimes not the best idea.

“I need to make a gesture. To show up when he’s not expecting me, when he’s given up all hope!”

Ah, the drama of it.

“Whatever,” Edie said vaguely.

“Thanks, Ede. Love you!” Rhiannon trilled and rang off, leaving Edie to muster her wits and check her watch. It was the middle of the night in Thailand or Mona would be getting an earful.

The phone rang again, distracting her. And two more calls after that forced her mind back to her work so that she actually jumped when a voice behind her said, “So this is where you work.”

She spun around to see Nick standing in the doorway, hands braced on the uprights as he looked around and then let his gaze come to rest on her. There was a smile on his face.

Business, Edie reminded herself sharply. Just business.

“This is my office,” she agreed with a sweep of her hand taking in the room. Mona called it “command central” but it really looked more like a comfortable den than anything else. There was a wall of bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, wide planked floors with a deep burgundy and navy blue Turkish rug, a pair of upholstered armchairs, a comfortably saggy sofa, a double-length heavy Spanish style oak desk with Edie’s computer, printer, scanner and a stack of in-and-out boxes without which she would not be able to survive.

But most impressive of all was the view.

One wall was mostly glass, comprised of floor-to-ceiling windows around the Spanish-style equivalent of French doors, which opened onto a terrazzo-tiled ramada overhung with bougainvillea. It looked out onto a broad rolling expanse of lawn with an inset naturally landscaped nearly Olympic-size swimming pool. Below the sweep of lawn and the pool, the land fell away steeply so that a grove of eucalyptus treetops were at eye level. Beyond them you could see the rooftops of Santa Barbara and, in the distance, the bulky shape of the Channel Islands in the sea.

“Not bad,” Nick murmured, taking it all in. He slanted her an amused glance. “I’m surprised you get any work done.”

“You get used to it,” Edie confessed as she stood up. “It seems a sacrilege to say so, but unless I consciously stop and look—and sometimes I do—most days I don’t see it. I see work.”

Nick nodded. “Understandable. It’s the same when I’m working on a building. It’s usually some massively impressive place in all the guide books, and all I see is rising damp and rotting timbers.”

“Were there rotting timbers in the stave church?” she asked him. When he’d given her his “tour” in Mont Chamion he had mentioned that his next project was to be a Norwegian stave church restoration. Edie hadn’t been familiar with stave churches then, but as soon as she got home, she’d looked them up online. Now she knew they were medieval wooden churches, and she could well imagine they’d have a few rotten timbers after all these years.

“There were.” Nick nodded. And then he did what she hoped he would do—he began talking about the project.

As long as he kept talking about the church, she could focus on that. She could remind herself that he was here on business, and that it had nothing to do with her.

But then, on the way out of the house, she grabbed a baseball cap and yanked it on. In the summer Santa Barbara, particularly away from the ocean’s edge, could be hot in midafternoon. Once the sun broke through the fog that usually blanketed the coastline until late morning, it beat down relentlessly. And while inside fans were enough to keep things cool, outside Edie regularly wore dark glasses and an old baseball cap of Ronan’s to shade her eyes.

“Very fetching,” Nick drawled, a corner of his mouth tipping in a grin as he studied her. Then he reached out and tugged the bill of the cap.

And suddenly remembering this was just business wasn’t so easy.

“I sunburn,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Then she headed out the door. “This way.”

She headed across the driveway and up the path past the carriage house. The groomed lawns didn’t extend to this side of the property. It was brush and chaparral and eucalyptus, with a sort of vague path through it that led up the hill. Roy ambled on ahead, nosing in the under brush.

“No road?” Nick said, striding alongside her, easily keeping pace.

“There’s a rough one,” Edie told him. “But it doesn’t come past the house. It goes around the side of the hill and winds a bit. So it’s generally faster to walk—unless you’d rather not.”

His hair was ruffled and damp on his tanned forehead and she thought he did look a bit tired. But he just laughed. “Is that a challenge, Miz Daley?”

Something in his drawl made Edie’s skin prickle with awareness. It was perverse, really. For two and a half years after Ben died, she felt no interest, no awareness of the opposite sex at all. Then, that night in Mont Chamion, the very sight of Nick Savas across the ballroom with her sister, had jolted her awake. His appeal as the night went on hadn’t lessened, and it had certainly taken her mind off thoughts of Kyle Robbins. Still, she’d expected that, not seeing him again, her reawakened hormones would have noticed another man in the meantime.

But they’d gone right back to sleep—until now.

Now she tried to ignore them as best she could. “Just asking. We can drive if you want.”

He shook his head. “I’m good,” he told her and started walking again. “I was just wondering how I’d get materials to the house.”

Right. Business.

So Edie pointed out where the road went as they climbed the hill. Once there had been a path through the woods that led from the new big house back to the old adobe. But in the past fifteen years or so, it had overgrown as the family had gone back there less and less.

It meant something to Ronan and Edie. But the rest of Mona’s children had been raised in the new one, so they had no memories and little interest in a derelict run-down ranch. Even the twins, who thrived on the prospect of adventure, especially where mud and dirt were involved, had really never shown much interest in it. It wasn’t exactly exciting, though Edie loved it.

Occasionally she had thought she would love to restore it and make it into the family house it had once been for them when she was a child. She hadn’t said anything to Ben about it, though. There had been no point when they were in Fiji. And she’d always thought there would be time.

Now she was glad she hadn’t. She had only come back a few times since his death—mostly to bring the twins and Grace to the house, to try to interest them in it, to tell them stories there and give them a sense of connection to a past they were only peripherally part of.

“I thought you didn’t do houses,” she said now as she and Nick made their way up the path.

“Maybe I won’t,” he said. “I have to see it first.”

“Of course. It was nice of you to come all this way to look at it and give Mona an opinion,” Edie said, striving to sound properly businesslike. “I don’t know why she is so keen on doing it now.”

Well, she did, actually. And it had nothing to do with the house itself. But just how blatant had Mona been in her attempt at matchmaking? Edie slanted a glance at Nick as they walked, but he didn’t reply, and the look on his face didn’t give anything away.

“When did you finish at Mont Chamion?” she asked.

“I left a week or so after the wedding. There were some talented local craftsmen who continued the work while I was in Norway. I went back a couple of times to make sure everything was going well, but I’ve been in Norway and Scotland most of the past two months.”

“Scotland?”

“Mmm. Tell me about the ranch house.”

So much for getting him talking. But the ranch house was business, too, so Edie did as he asked.

“I think it’s from the mid-nineteenth century. Pretty primitive to begin with, I think. My dad used to tell us stories about the ranchers who lived here. I don’t know how true it was. Dad liked to tell stories.” She smiled now as she remembered the delight Joe Tremayne had taken in gathering her and Ronan onto his lap and regaling them with tales of early California.

“Was it in his family?” Nick asked.

“No. My mom and dad bought it right after they married. It was pretty run-down already by then, but the land was what my dad wanted. He was raised on a ranch north of San Luis Obispo. His dad was a foreman there. Dad wanted to raise cutting horses. That was his dream. He dabbled in winemaking, too. He wasn’t a Hollywood sort of guy.” In her mind’s eye she could still see her tall, handsome father with his shock of dark hair and wide mischievous grin. “He was a good balance to my mother. Solid. Dependable. Steady.” She caught herself before she went any further. “But you don’t care about that. You want to know about the house.”

“I want to know it all,” Nick said, his eyes on hers. “About the house, of course. But it’s important to understand the people who live—or lived—in it. What mattered to them. What they valued.”

Edie thought about that. She remembered him telling her about the history of the castle at Mont Chamion and about the royal family there. She guessed it was the same here.

“Family,” she said firmly. “That’s what they both wanted. Even Mona,” she said before he could raise his brows in doubt “My dad’s death changed her. He was her anchor. When he died, it was like she’d been cut adrift. She was lost. She wanted what they’d had—what we’d all had—and she kept trying to get it back.”

Telling him about it now, she could see it all again—the happy days they’d spend as a family in the old adobe followed by the painful dark days after the car accident that had taken her father’s life. Her voice trailed off as they crested the hill and headed down the other side. The old house came into sight beyond a stand of eucalyptus.

“Hence the marriages?” Nick ventured.

“Pretty much,” Edie agreed. “She wanted to be married. She wanted a man. And men want Mona. They always have. So they kept proposing, and she kept saying yes. And she kept having babies,” she added a little wryly.

“That must have been difficult for you.”

“No. It was great, especially after she got to be so famous. It was easier that there were six of us. It diluted the paparazzi’s attention.”

They were approaching the house now, and Edie was appalled at how run-down it looked. Tried to see it from Nick’s perspective. She imagined he was mentally packing his bags, ready to declare it worthless. It certainly didn’t look salvageable to her. And it had an empty forlorn air very much at odds with how she remembered it.

“It’s a lot worse than I remembered,” she said. “It wasn’t like this when I was growing up here.”

Nick didn’t say anything. He just stopped on the slope and studied the sprawling one-story adobe structure with its broad front porch and deep-set windows.

“It wasn’t in the best shape when they bought it,” Edie said quickly. “I remember Mona saying they got it cheap as a ‘fixer-upper.’ But my dad did a lot of work on it,” she added defensively. “But he was busy making a go of the ranch and the horses. He didn’t have a lot of time.”

“Understood.” Nick made his way down the rest of the dusty slope and began a closer inspection.

Edie, following him, recognized how very neglected the house had become. The broad front porch covering sagged. Pieces of the zaguán were broken or altogether missing. Places that her father had tried to patch with stucco had crumbled away and the adobe beneath them was crumbling as well.

Nick took his time, walking around the building slowly, looking at it from all angles while Edie followed, looking at the house, but also at him. He moved with the easy grace of some sort of jungle cat. Last year when she’d taken Ruud and Dirk to the San Diego Zoo, she’d been fascinated with the grace of a tiger moving through the brush. She thought of that tiger now as she watched Nick prowl around the house. He took hold of one of the timbers that poked out from the roof and jerked it. The crack of the wood made Edie wince.

“Probably not worth restoring,” she ventured.

He didn’t reply, just kept moving. He paused to pick at some of the stucco her father had used to repair part of the crumbling back wall, then watched it flake and fall to the ground. Another reason to wince.

It was good, she tried to tell herself. With all these things wrong with the house, the less likely he was to stay and Mona’s heavy-handed efforts at matchmaking would come to naught. But at the same time she didn’t want the house to fall down. And the Cinderella gene she was trying to ignore still wanted Nick Savas to stay.

“Is it unlocked?”

So the outside hadn’t totally discouraged him?

“I have a key.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out a set of keys, then chose the one to open the front door. Nick took it wordlessly from her. Their fingers brushed. Yes, heaven help her, even with a simple touch the awareness was still there.

In one long leap Nick vaulted onto the porch and opened the door.

Edie followed him more carefully, picking her way past the broken wooden steps up to the porch. “The electricity’s off,” she said. “I’m afraid you can’t see much.”

With a forest of towering eucalyptus all around, the house never received the brunt of the direct sun. It was far cooler that way, but the interior, shrouded in shadow and with only very deep-set windows, was barely visible when Edie followed him in the front door.

Apparently Nick was used to doing things by feel. As she watched, he moved around the room, running his hands over the walls, peering up at the ceiling, crouching down and studying the floor.

Edie didn’t know what he was seeing, but the longer she stood there, the more she saw memories of the house she’d been happy in as a child. This living room was the place where her dad had crawled around on the floor giving her horsey rides. Over by the window was where they’d put up the Christmas tree. In the big kitchen they had eaten meals her mother had actually cooked instead of those a cook made for them.

The memories made her throat ache as she looked around.

She walked around, touching things, recalling things. She ran her hand over the kitchen countertop and remembered standing on a chair helping her mother cut out cookies there. By the back door there were still the marks on the wall where her dad had marked her height and Ronan’s every few months. How small she’d been.

She rubbed her thumb over the last, highest pencil mark and remembered how she used to stretch as tall as she could, and her dad would press his hand on the top of her head, laughing. “Stop that! You’re growing too fast already!”

“You okay?” Nick appeared in the doorway, looking concerned.

Edie mustered a smile. “Just remembering.” She gave the wall a little pat. “It’s been a long time. This was a good place. I was just remembering how good it was.”

Nick nodded as if he understood.

Maybe he did. She didn’t know that much about him. The trouble was, what she knew she liked. And seeing him here made things somehow even more difficult.

When she’d had one night with him in a completely foreign setting, it was easier to tell herself she wasn’t really interested, that her awareness of him was a momentary aberration, that back in her own life, she wouldn’t really notice.

But she did.

He was opening the cupboards now, peering inside. And she allowed herself to study him because he wasn’t paying attention to her. She had run her fingers through that tousled hair. She’d nibbled her way along his stubbled jaw, then pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. Now, as he shut the cupboards and crouched down to look at the floor, she watched the muscles in his thighs bunch and flex beneath the worn denim covering his thighs and remembered that she had touched him there. And he had touched her, too.

Not just her body—but something fundamental deep inside her. Something that she hadn’t managed to forget.

“I have to go,” she said abruptly, her announcement rather louder than she intended. “I have work to do.”

From where he was crouched on the floor studying the boards, Nick glanced up at her and nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Fine. Go ahead.” He sounded as if he’d already dismissed her from his mind.

No doubt he had, Edie thought. She turned and hurried out of the house. “Come on, Roy,” she called to the dog who was nosing curiously around the edge of the porch.

Roy looked at her, then back at the house, as if he expected Nick to join them.

“He’s not coming,” Edie said, more for her own good than for the dog’s. “He’s here on business. And then he’s leaving.”

She hoped.

At least she thought that was what she hoped. He wasn’t here for her. He had awakened her, but he didn’t want her. He thought he was here for work, but it was really because Mona had been playing matchmaker again.

Edie glanced at her watch. It was early yet in Thailand, but so what?

If Mona thought she was going to get away with meddling in Edie’s life, she deserved an early wake-up call!

He’d hadn’t made any promises.

“I’ll take a look at the adobe,” Nick had told Mona on the phone last week. “You don’t want to throw money down the drain. If it isn’t a good candidate for restoration, I’ll tell you.”

“Fine. Good. Whatever you think,” Mona had said. “You can stay at my place. There’s plenty of room.”

“I’ll do that,” he’d said. “But it might not be worth it.”

“Understood.” Mona had sounded impatient. “Got to go. We’re shooting now. Discuss it with Edie. She can show you around. You remember Edie.”

He remembered Edie.

She hadn’t changed a bit.

Her utilitarian ponytail hardly recalled the sophisticated upswept hairstyle she’d worn to the wedding. And her casual canvas pants and open-neck pink shirt might mask the curves the purple dress had highlighted.

But Nick was willing to bet that, unloosed, her hair would cascade down her back in those wondrously silken waves. Just as he knew damned well that underneath whatever Edie Daley wore, he would still find her petal-soft skin and the womanly secrets he’d only once had a chance to explore.

“Hell,” he muttered, scowling toward the door she’d walked out of moments before.

Hell—because she was just as appealing as she had been back in Mont Chamion. He’d hoped she wouldn’t be. That was why he’d been at pains to make sure Mona understood he might not stick around.

Maybe the house wouldn’t be worth working on—or maybe he’d take one look at Edie Daley and decide that their one night in Mont Chamion was the extent of her appeal.

No such luck.

Now he stood in the shadows of the window and watched her until she was out of sight.

She was still wearing the baseball cap, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and poking out through the space above the adjustable strap at the back of the hat. And she really didn’t have any noticeable curves. In fact, from the back he was disconcerted to discover that she could probably pass for a tall, slender twelve-year-old girl.

So why, for two and a half months, had he not been able to get her out of his mind?

Nick had never dwelt on the women he bedded. Had no interest in them beyond the night they spent together. They were fun and attractive and he had a good time with them. But as soon as they were gone, he moved on and never looked back.

End of story.

He couldn’t even have told you half their names. But he couldn’t forget hers: Edie Daley.

Edie of the long dark curls and flashing green eyes, of the wide mobile mouth and the very kissable lips. Lithe and limber Edie. Eager and passionate Edie. Her spark, her charm, her curiosity, her vulnerability, all had haunted him every night, and plenty of days. Since he’d shared his bed with her.

Two and a half months and he hadn’t been able to forget her. It was absurd.

At first Nick thought the memories kept coming back because they’d spent the night in his bed. He had always made a point of never sharing his own bed with a woman.

He didn’t bring them onto his turf.

Hell, he didn’t even have turf. He didn’t own a house, didn’t rent a flat. He had no place to call his own. He’d sold the house he’d built for Amy as soon as he could after her death. He wanted nothing more to do with it.

He left what little personal gear he didn’t carry with him at his uncle Socrates’s house on Long Island. And he stayed on the move, living in someone else’s house while he renovated it. It suited him perfectly. He had no reason to have a house.

He had no wife. No kids. No dog nor cat. No encumbrances at all.

He didn’t need them. Didn’t want them.

And he didn’t want Edie Daley, either!

Well, he did. Carnally, at least, Nick admitted, he wanted her a hell of a lot. But that was all.

The desire was an itch he needed to scratch. So, he’d scratch it and it would be gone, and that would be that.