Kathie DeNosky - It Happened One Night

“That’s right, Emmie,” Kiley said, stroking her daughter’s dark blond hair as she smiled down at the only good to come out of her brief marriage. “Can you go over and sit with Elaina and Bobby so we can get started, please?”

Emmie nodded, then hurried over to join her two friends where they sat with the rest of the toddlers.

“Miss Kiley, Jimmy Joe Harper pulled my hair,” Sarah Bartlett accused, glaring at the little boy seated beside her.

“Jimmy Joe, did you pull Sarah’s hair again?” Even before he nodded, one look at the impish grin on the child’s face told Kiley that he had. “I’m sorry, but I told you that if you pulled Sarah’s pigtails again you’d have to sit in the ‘time out’ corner for five minutes.”

Without further instruction, the child obediently got to his feet and walked over to sit in a chair by himself in the far corner of the room. When she noticed Josh glancing from her to Jimmy Joe in the “time out” corner, Kiley raised an eyebrow. “Is there something wrong?”

“You didn’t even have to tell him to go over there,” he said, sounding as if he couldn’t quite believe a child would willingly accept his punishment. “And he didn’t protest at all.”

“Jimmy Joe is no stranger to the ‘time out’ corner,” Kiley answered, smiling fondly at the adorable red-haired little boy. “He loves aggravating Sarah.”

Josh looked confused. “Why?”

“Because he likes her.” Kiley turned to her assistant. “Could you please pass out the bells and candy canes, Carrie?”

“I see,” Josh said as a slow grin curved the corners of his mouth. “In other words, he’s teasing her to keep her attention focused on him.”

“Something...like that,” Kiley said, her breath catching at how handsome Josh looked when he smiled.

As her assistant finished handing each child an oversize bell or a giant plastic candy cane, Kiley queued up the music on her CD player and purposely avoided looking at Josh. He made her nervous and she wished he would leave. But it appeared as if he intended to stay for a while.

Deciding that as long as he was there, he might as well participate, she picked up one of the bells and shoved it into his hand. “I assume you know the words to ‘Jingle Bells’?”

He looked surprised, then determined as he shook his head. “Yes, I’m familiar with the song, but I’m afraid I can’t stay. I promised a friend I would stop by his place this afternoon and I’m already running late.”

“That’s a shame,” she lied. She had accomplished what she set out to do. He was going to leave. She couldn’t help but smile. “Maybe another time.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, sounding doubtful. He reached out and, taking her hand in his, placed the bell in the center of her palm, then gently folded her fingers around it with his other hand. “Will you be free tomorrow evening?”

Startled by his unexpected question and the warmth of his hands holding hers, she stared at him a moment before she managed to find her voice. “Wh-why?”

“I’d like to discuss a couple of things with you,” he said evasively. He gave her a smile that made her insides flutter. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time to talk to you about it now. I’ll come by here around five-thirty on Friday evening and we’ll have dinner in the club’s restaurant. They have an excellent menu and we’ll be able to talk without interruption.”

Kiley opened her mouth to refuse, but when he tenderly caressed her hand with his, she forgot anything she was about to say. As she watched him walk across the room to the door, she shook her head in an effort to regain her equilibrium.

What was Josh up to? And what did he think they needed to discuss? She had been quite clear when she spoke to the funding committee about the use of the extra money for the day care center. Surely he couldn’t want to talk about what happened that night....

“Miss Kiley, can I go back to the carpet now?” Jimmy Joe asked from the “time out” corner.

“‘May I go back to the carpet,’” Kiley automatically corrected.

“May I?” the little boy asked, flashing his charming grin.

“Yes, you may,” she said, deciding that she could give more thought to Josh and his dinner invitation after the children had gone home for the day.

Kiley went through the motions of rehearsing the Christmas show the children would put on for their parents in a few weeks. But her mind kept straying back to Josh and his ridiculous invitation. Even if she were willing to go to dinner with him—which she wasn’t—she didn’t think he would be all that enthusiastic about dining with a two-year-old.

It wasn’t that Emmie wasn’t well-behaved. She was. But by the end of the day, she was tired and wanted nothing more than dinner, a bath and to go to bed. Besides, there was absolutely nothing Kiley felt the need to discuss with Josh. Now or in the foreseeable future.

* * *

As Josh drove his Mercedes through the gates of Pine Valley, the exclusive golf course community where several of the TCC members had built mansions, he couldn’t help but wonder what he’d been thinking when he asked Kiley to dinner. Why couldn’t he just drop what had happened that night three years ago?

He knew that would be the smartest thing to do and what Kiley wanted. But for reasons he didn’t want to delve into, some perverse part of him wanted her to admit that, although the circumstances that brought them together that night might have been an unfortunate accident, their lovemaking had been nothing short of amazing.

“You’ve lost your mind, Gordon,” he muttered as he steered his car onto Alex Santiago’s private drive.

Doing his best to forget the matter, he parked in front of the palatial home, got out of the car and climbed the steps to the front door. Before he could ring the doorbell, the door opened.

“Hello, Señor Gordon,” a round-faced older woman with kind brown eyes said, stepping back for Josh to enter. “Señor Alex is in the sunroom.”

“How’s he feeling today, Maria?” Josh asked as the housekeeper whom Alex’s fiancée, Cara Windsor, had recently hired led the way toward the back of the elegant home.

Maria stopped, then, turning to face him, gave Josh a worried look. “Señor Alex still has headaches and can’t remember anything before he was found.”

“I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before he recovers his memory.” Josh wasn’t entirely sure who he was trying to reassure—the housekeeper or himself.

Alex had been missing for several months before being found, suffering a head injury, in the back of a truck with a group of migrant farm workers smuggled across the border from Mexico. No one seemed to know how he wound up across the border or how he got into the back of the truck with the workers, and he couldn’t tell the authorities anything. There was strong evidence that he had been beaten several times and one theory was that he had been kidnapped. But no matter what had happened, Alex still had amnesia. It had only been recently that he’d been released from Royal Memorial Hospital. With Cara’s encouragement, Alex’s friends from the TCC had been taking turns dropping by to check on his progress. No one had said as much, but Josh knew they all hoped to help him recover his memory so they could find whoever had done this to him.

“How are you feeling today, Alex?” he asked, walking into the sunroom where his friend sat reading a book.

Alex smiled and slowly rose to his feet to extend his hand. “Josh, isn’t it?”

Nodding, Josh shook Alex’s hand. The man’s grip was firm and Josh took that as a good sign that his friend was regaining some of his strength. But he was still cautious about making sure he called his friends by the correct name, which indicated his memory wasn’t much better.