Kate Hardy - One Night of Passion

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.”