The Night that Changed Everything (10 page)

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.