Kate Hardy - One Night of Passion - The Night that Changed Everything / Champagne with a Celebrity / At the French Baron's Bidding

Edie hadn’t gone near it when she’d shown him the house, but he knew she must have played there as a child.

It took no imagination to envision her swinging high, short legs pumping furiously, long dark hair streaming out behind. He smiled as he saw it in his mind’s eye because he knew exactly what she’d looked like. The dark-haired little girl who had been Edie graced half a dozen pictures in the upstairs hall at Mona’s place.

Later when he ate his lunch in the kitchen at the rickety table, he thought about her eating meals here with her family. It was intriguing to think of Mona Tremayne cooking in this kitchen, of her not as a megastar but as a young wife and mother.

But it was more intriguing to think about Edie as a child.

As the sun spilled through the dirty windows, making patterns on the dusty floor, Nick tried to imagine her playing there with her brother. He was sure she had. He’d seen the flickering expressions on her face when she’d brought him here. He wondered about those memories.

Ordinarily when he thought about the earlier occupants of a building he was restoring, they were distant historical figures. They weren’t the woman he’d had pizza with on Tuesday and meat loaf with last night, the woman he’d made love with in Mont Chamion, the proper, tart-tongued woman who had melted in his arms, the woman he couldn’t stop wanting to take back to his bed.

But when he studied the vertical row of little ink marks climbing the wall by the back door—dark blue Rs for her brother Ronan, and bright red Es for Edie—once again she became the little dark-haired girl she had been when she’d lived here. He bet she had stood tall while her father measured her.

If he shut his eyes he could see them now in his mind. There was a photo in the hall of Edie and her dad. She had been sitting on the adobe’s front porch steps, snuggled close under her father’s arm. She’d had her head turned so that, instead of staring into the camera, she was looking up at her father as if he regularly hung the moon just for her.

The memory made Nick smile until he realized that within a year of that photo, Joe Tremayne had been killed in an accident and Edie’s life had irrevocably changed.

It was a wonder she wanted to come back here at all.

The noise of clicking on floorboards jolted him back to the present, and he turned to see Roy pattering in from the living room across the dusty floor. His mood lightened and he looked up, expecting—hoping—to see Edie at last.

But no one was there.

“Where is she?” Nick asked the dog.

Not surprisingly, Roy didn’t answer. He was more interested in what remained of Nick’s sandwich, and he whined hopefully. Nick gave the crusts to the dog, stood up and went outside to look for her. “Edie?”

But no one answered. He called her name again. Nothing. Except that Roy, having swallowed the crusts in one gulp, had come outside, too, and stood on the porch, wagging his tail.

“You didn’t come without her, did you?”

But apparently he had. Hope faded. Nick sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, kneading taut cords of muscle. “Well,” he said to the dog, “make yourself at home. I’ve got work to do.”

If Mona ever got back to civilization, Edie thought irritably, she’d be amazed at all the work her business manager had accomplished while she had been out of touch.

Edie always worked hard. But working all day and a good part of the night, determinedly refusing to let herself think about Nick Savas, was having an extraordinary effect on her work output.

Even in the instances where, previously, there would be half a dozen phone calls waiting to be returned when she got to work in the morning because people all over the world were involved with Mona, now Edie almost always picked up the phone regardless of the time of night.

Why not?

She wasn’t sleeping.

And talking about whatever they wanted to talk about was safer by far than lying in bed, tossing and turning and thinking about the man asleep in Mona’s house—the man who could be in her bed if only she’d let him.

But she wouldn’t let him. Couldn’t.

But she thought about him. Couldn’t help herself.

She looked forward to their dinners every evening. Couldn’t seem to help that, either. She was eager to learn what he’d done on the house every day.

“You should come and see,” he said each evening.

But she always declined. “I’ve got too much to do,” she said. But she was curious.

So was he. While she asked about his work, every evening he asked questions about the years she’d lived there.

Which had been her bedroom? When had the swing set been set up? Whose birthday present had it been? How had they celebrated Christmas when they’d lived there?

At first Edie was reluctant to answer. For years she had bottled up the memories because it had seemed safer that way. But under Nick’s gentle questioning, she found herself talking more, remembering more—and finding joy in the flood of memories she’d kept close to her heart.

Why hadn’t she done it sooner?

Because talking about her father had always caused her mother pain. Ronan, too, shied away from discussing their father. But then Ronan shied away from talking about everything. And no one else shared those memories. No one ever asked about them. Not even Ben, she realized. He hadn’t probed, didn’t want to make her sad. And Ben had always been busy looking forward.

But Nick asked.

And Edie talked. When she protested that she was talking too much about herself, that it was his turn, he obliged with stories about his own childhood—about summers on Long Island—he and his brother Ari with their Savas cousins, especially Demetrios who was his age and George who was the same age as his brother Ari.

“We were wild and crazy kids,” he told her. “If there was trouble to get into, we found it.”

He told her stories that made her laugh and he showed her scars that made her wince. And she realized that not going to bed with Nick wasn’t stopping her falling in love a little bit more every night they shared a meal.

Each evening the dinners lasted longer, and it was harder to pull herself away and say she needed to get back to work.

But she did. She had to. It was all she could do for self-preservation.

But by Friday she knew it was a very good thing she had agreed to go out with Derek that evening.

Midafternoon, after she’d taken four high-pressure phone calls in a row and spent another hour fruitlessly trying to contact Mona about a script, she decided to take a break, go back to her apartment and figure out what she was going to wear.

“Come on,” she said, turning to look for the dog as she hung up the phone, frustrated at still not reaching Mona. “Let’s get out of here.”

And that was when she realized Roy wasn’t there.

“Roy?”

She got up from her desk and went out to the kitchen. Sometimes on hot days he would go lie on the cool tiles there. But not today.

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