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

Chapter Two

NICK’S brows shot up. So did his heartbeat. And the spark of interest that had vanished when she had was back in spades.

But even as his libido was in favor of her suggestion, his brain was saying, Hang on a minute.

“Change your mind?” he asked her, careful not to sound too eager even though he damned well was.

Edie’s smile, if possible, grew brighter. “Yes.” Her voice was firm and clear. No hesitation at all. But he spotted a glitter in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before. And was that a bit of her sister’s desperation in her tone? He narrowed his gaze on her.

Her lashes flickered rapidly. Her smile amped up a bit more. Yes, this was desperation. And defiance, too. He could see that now. But exactly who or what had inspired it, he had no idea.

Carefully he let out a breath, drew another as he studied her from her flyaway hair to the tips of her stocking-clad toes. He wanted to take the stockings off those toes.

Would she let him?

Whatever was going on, taking her to his bedroom couldn’t be a bad thing. Could it?

Nick guessed he’d find out.

Putting his hand over hers, he smiled down at her. “By all means.” Then he turned to the blonde he’d danced with, the one who was still standing there and whom he’d completely forgotten about. “Thank you for the dance,” he said to her politely. “Good night.”

Then he laced Edie’s fingers through his and started to lead her back to where they’d first met.

“The door is that way.” Edie was practically dragging her feet.

“Shoes,” he said and dived beneath the table. The miserable things were still there. He grabbed them and rose again, then slanted Edie a glance.

“You don’t want to wear them, do you?”

She laughed, but it was a more brittle laugh than she’d shared with him before. Something had indeed happened. “I certainly don’t,” she said.

Nick tucked the shoes in his coat pockets so only the spiky mauve heels protruded. Then he offered her his arm. With no hesitation at all, Edie linked her arm through his and walked, head held high, along beside him, her bearing more regal than the queen of Mont Chamion.

Her posture was stiff and far more tense than when they’d danced, and she didn’t speak again. But Nick knew better than to ask about it now. Edie kept her gaze straight ahead until they had nearly reached the door.

Then, near the door they came upon Mona and the small but inevitable knot of men clustered around her. Edie barely glanced their way, but she turned her gaze on him, focused a melting smile right at him and fluttered her lashes.

Nick almost laughed. He did smile at raised brows on Mona’s face. There was a look of surprise and something else—consternation?—on Edie’s mother’s face. Whatever had sparked Edie’s return, it had something to do with her mother.

Or, Nick realized as Mona said something to the man standing next to her who was staring at Edie and frowning, did it have something to do with him?

He was about Nick’s age, fair-haired and handsome in a young Robert Redford sort of way. Familiar looking, but Nick couldn’t put a name on him.

An actor, no doubt. Actor friends of Demetrios’s were thick on the ground tonight.

This one transformed his frown into an engaging grin and stepped forward to intercept them as they approached. “Edie! Long time no see. I was so glad when Mona said you were here.”

Edie’s fingers tensed against his arm, but she smiled, too. “Not here for long,” she said, still moving. “We’re just leaving.”

“But we haven’t danced.”

She kept smiling, but Nick could see it was tight. “Nice to see you again, Kyle. Good night.”

“I’ll see you in the morning, then,” the man called Kyle said.

But they were already past him and headed toward the door when Edie said brightly to Nick in tones that were certainly loud enough to be overheard, “Which wing is your room in?”

Nick didn’t think he imagined the sound of several people sucking air behind them. His own brows arched, but he said cheerfully, “I’ll show you,” gave her a melting smile for good measure and held the door so she could sail through it ahead of him.

Only when the door closed behind them did Edie seem to sag. But almost at once she pulled herself up straight and tall again, and kept right on walking until they’d left the reception area totally and were in one of the long walnut-paneled corridors. There at last she stopped and took a deep breath, then looked up at him.

“Thank you,” she said, all her previous brightness gone. But the brittle tone had vanished, too.

Nick liked that. “My pleasure.” She looked pale suddenly and he said, “Do you need to sit down?”

She gave him a wan smile, but shook her head. “I’m all right.”

Still she looked rattled. Not at all like the Edie Daley who had come running to defend her baby sister. “What am I missing?” he asked her.

She looked down at her feet, then rubbed the bottom of one stocking-clad foot against the top of the other. They looked as vulnerable as she did. He wondered if she was going to deny that he was missing anything.

But at last she looked up at him and made a wry face. “My mother’s heavy-handed attempt at matchmaking, I fear.”

“The blond guy with the hundred-dollar haircut?”

Edie looked startled, then sighed and nodded. “Yes.”

“You’re not interested in him?” Nick was surprised how glad he was to hear it.

“No!” she said with a force that indicated more than indifference. She seemed to realize it because she muttered, “I’m not. I was just—I was afraid she’d try something like this.”

“She being your mother?”

Edie nodded.

“She often sets you up?”

“She hints.”

“And you don’t like that?” He supposed she had a right to dislike matchmaking relatives as much as he did. But most women he knew welcomed the meddling. “Matchmaking is a bad thing?”

“Yes, it is,” Edie said flatly. She didn’t elaborate at first, and he thought she was going to change the subject. But then she sighed, “She thinks I need to start dating again.”

“Again?” Nick prompted when she didn’t explain.

There was another pause, as if she were deciding how much to say. Finally she looked around, then back at him and said impatiently, “Where are these architectural renovations?”

His brows lifted. “You really want to see them?”

“Do they really exist? Or were you flirting with my sister?”

“They really exist. And I wasn’t flirting with your sister. Coming to see them was her idea.”

“But you invited me—”

“I was flirting with you.” And not giving her a chance to respond, not waiting to see what her reaction to that actually was, Nick grasped her hand in his and led her toward the tower.

She didn’t speak as they walked, and Nick didn’t say anything, either. He was too busy trying to assess the situation, trying to decide if she had been merely using him to avoid an unpleasant confrontation, no more no less? Or had she been angling for something else considerably more intimate.

He knew which he would prefer.

What she wanted he guessed he’d find out, he thought as he stopped and unlocked the east tower wing door. There was no one else staying in it but him so he’d only left a few lights burning, and the hall was cast in gloom when he pushed open the heavy door.

Edie paused at the entrance to peer into the shadows.

“Having second thoughts?” Nick asked. He wouldn’t have blamed her.

But she took a quick breath. “No.” There was a moment’s pause and then she turned her head and met his gaze. “Are you?”

The question caught Nick off guard.

He’d slept with other women since Amy’s death. It had been eight years, after all, and he had never claimed he would be a monk.

But it hadn’t meant anything. Not the way it had with Amy. It was an itch he scratched. But only with women who considered it the same way he did.

He looked intently at the woman beside him now and wondered how Edie Daley considered it—she who wasn’t even dating. That was when he realized that she was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

Quickly Nick cleared his throat. “No,” he said just as firmly as she had.

Edie smiled. It wasn’t the smile she’d given her mother or the man named Kyle. It wasn’t the brittle smile she’d given him when she’d reappeared and taken his arm. It was the smile he’d coaxed out of her before they’d danced—a genuine smile, he thought, and one that wasn’t reluctant. It sent a shaft of desire right through him.

He wanted more of those smiles. More of her.

“Let me show you my renovations,” he said, and he began to talk about the structure of the building. Several sentences later he realized that she was staring at him, wide-eyed, and he stopped. “What?”

“You really know all this stuff?” She sounded amazed.

Nick laughed. “It’s what I do. My job. Why I’m here.”

“I thought … the wedding …”

“I didn’t come for the wedding. I came to restore the east tower.”

And suddenly the smile he’d been hoping for lit her face. “How wonderful,” she exclaimed. “Show me. Tell me everything.”

He thought she might just be being polite, but as he turned on more lights and walked her through the main rooms, which were already finished, all the time telling her about the history of the place, explaining when it had originally been built and which parts were added on later, she asked eager, interested questions.

She didn’t endure his lecture as her sister had done, but demanded to know more. Of course, to be fair, he’d deliberately droned on when he’d described his work to Rhiannon. He took pains to interest her sister.

But it wasn’t long before he realized he needn’t have bothered. Edie was clearly interested in the castle and in the work he’d done on it. She had studied history in college, she told him. She’d thought she might be a teacher.

“A teacher? Far cry from being your mother’s business manager, isn’t it?”

Her lips twisted. “One of those times when life happened while I was making other plans.”

What plans? Nick wondered, but he didn’t ask as there was something in the expression on her face that told him to leave it alone. So instead he asked, “Did you ever want to go into acting?”

She shook her head. “Never. That’s not my world.”

“But you work in it every day.”

“In the business part of things. Not the glitz and glamour part. Not the movie star bit,” she said adamantly.

“You don’t like the ‘movie star bit’?”

“It’s not for me,” she said simply, then added, “it’s too difficult.”

“Acting?”

“I suppose that’s part of it. But I think really that it’s harder being real. Being honest. If you act all the time, who are you? Really? Do you even know?”

Her voice rose when she asked the questions and they didn’t sound rhetorical. Nick supposed, having a mother who was an icon of American film and screen, she’d probably given it considerable thought. Then, as if she decided she’d betrayed a bit too much emotion, Edie shrugged and said lightly, “I’m a behind the scenes person, that’s all.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” When she blinked, clearly surprised, Nick explained. “When I’m working on a building, the building is what matters.” He waved a hand to encompass the whole of the one he’d been working on. “Not who does the work.”

Edie looked thoughtful, then she nodded. “Yes. I see what you mean.” Then she ran an appreciative hand down one of the window casings. “You’ve done an amazing job. At least I guess you have. Honestly, it’s hard to tell where the old stuff ends and the new begins.”

“Exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”

“How do you start?”

“I case the joint,” he told her with a grin. “I go over it all with a fine-tooth comb, so to speak. I learn who built it and when and why. Then I live in it.”

“Hence the architectural renovations in your bedroom,” she said with a grin. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” He pointed toward a door at the far end of the hall. “My digs.”

Her gaze followed his gesture. Rhiannon would doubtless have rubbed up against him and suggested, “Show me.”

Edie looked at the door, then turned back to him and asked, “When was the tower built?”

So Nick told her.

“It was a thirteenth century addition to the castle. It was designed to be a lookout and barracks for the soldiers who defended against the onrushing hordes.”

“Hordes?” Her eyes got wide. “There were hordes? It’s so small! Why would they bother?”

“The whole country was bigger back then. The royal family had more wealth and they had some good mountain valleys for cultivation. There are several natural springs as well as rivers. It would have made a nice prize for whoever could take it.” He grinned and shrugged. “But no one could.”

“I had no idea.”

“The Chamion family are survivors. They knew how to pit one enemy against another. They also knew how to make alliances and how to make friends. There’s lots of history here,” he went on as he led her through the finished rooms to a heavy oak door at the far end. He pushed it open to reveal a hall where there was substantial scaffolding. “We’re still working in here.”

There were tarps and sawhorses—his concession to modern working conditions—all over, along with piles of lumber. But the tools were all primitive, ones that thirteenth century carpenters, joiners and masons would have used. Edie headed straight for them. She asked about every one, made him explain how he used them, where he’d found them. She looked at him with admiration when he said he often made his own.

“A matter of necessity,” he said. “No old ones left.”

“And you do it all yourself?”

Nick laid a proprietary hand on one of the scaffolds. “I started it. I did the first rooms on my own so I had a good feel for things. Recently I’ve been working up in the tower and there are a couple of local craftsmen doing this.”

She walked around the room, noting where he’d replaced a joist. The new wood was evident. But she ran her finger over the chisel marks and shook her head. “It must take forever.”

“Which is why it took generations to build places like this.”

She smiled, then lifted her gaze from the wood to look at him again. He felt her gaze assessing him. “You look like such a ‘modern’ man,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine you spending your days doing this.”

His mouth quirked. “Well, I don’t usually wear a suit to work.”

“How did you get into it? Kids usually say they want to be a fireman or a cowboy.”

“I wanted to be an architect.”

“Of old buildings?”

He shrugged. “I like them.”

“Have you ever designed a new building?”

“Once,” he said curtly, turning away.

There was a moment’s silence. Then, “I’m sorry,” Edie said.

Nick shot her a quick glance from beneath drawn down brows. She was leaning against one of the worktables, her gentle eyes on him, looking incongruous and desirable, both at the same time. “Sorry about what?” he said gruffly.

“Getting too close.”

His frown deepened. “Close to what?”

“You.” She smiled faintly. “Asking about how you came to do this. What you had designed,” she added.

He felt an edginess between his shoulder blades. “It’s not important.” He picked up a chisel and balanced it on his palm, stared at it, then abruptly set it down again to look at her.

She looked back, her brows lifted a little. “I would have said it was very important,” she countered quietly.

She would have been right.

Now Nick rubbed the back of his neck, kneaded the muscles, but they remained tense. “It was,” he said tonelessly. It had changed his life.

This time she didn’t ask. She didn’t pry. She simply waited.

Nick shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, rocked back on his heels, stared into the middle distance, not at Edie.

“I designed a house,” he said at last, unsure why the words were coming out of his mouth. He didn’t talk about the house. Had never talked about it with anyone. But now he found himself saying, “I was getting married. I built it for my fiancée.” He said the words almost defiantly.

Edie made a small sound. Otherwise she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“It was supposed to be the perfect house,” he went on, his tone as harsh as his feelings. He’d intended it to be his gift to her. He’d wanted it to be perfect. As perfect as she was.

Amy had laughed at that. “Don’t be silly,” she’d said. “I’m far from perfect.”

But he’d thought she was. Absolutely perfect in every way. She was certainly perfect for him.

So he’d made her tell him everything she’d ever dreamed of having in a house—the expansive picture windows looking out across Long Island Sound, the winding staircase, the second-story balcony overlooking the naturally landscaped pool. The massive stone fireplace, the island-centered kitchen, the three upstairs bedrooms—a suite for them and one each for the children they would have—he was determined they would all be exactly as she wanted them.

“Her heart’s desire,” he said bitterly now.

“But it wasn’t?” Edie ventured softly.

He shrugged. “She didn’t care. Oh, she was delighted about the house, thought it was a great idea. But mostly she just wanted to get married. And I kept putting it off. I wanted the house finished. I wanted it all just right.”

Not because he didn’t want to marry her. He had. But he’d wanted to give her the very best he had to offer. He’d thought it was worth waiting for.

He’d been wrong.

The inadequacy of that house compared to the time he could have had with her still gutted him. He ground his teeth, cracked his knuckles. Swallowed hard.

“What happened?” Edie asked quietly.

“She died.”

He said the words baldly. Forced himself to confront the mistake he’d made. He didn’t look at Edie. This wasn’t about her. It was about him. And Amy.

For a long moment Edie didn’t say anything, either. Nick wasn’t surprised. What, after all, was there to say?

He should have kept his own mouth shut. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, dragging out his private pain for a woman he’d known less than a couple of hours.

“Forget it,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“I asked.” She reached out, touched his arm. “I am so very sorry,” she told him.

A lot of people had said they were sorry. But Edie’s words didn’t sound like a platitude. He could hear the earnestness in her voice, and there was something so close to pain in her tone that it surprised him. He turned to look at her.

“You lost her,” Edie said, “and you lost your own future as well.”

“Yes.” It was something that no one else seemed to get. He wasn’t the one who had died, after all. He should just get on with his life. If they didn’t say it—and some did before many months had passed—he could see it in the way they looked at him, in the suggestions for dates, in the offers to set him up with eligible women.

“I understand,” she said.

He doubted it. “Thank you,” he said politely and looked away out the window.

“My husband died two years ago.”

Nick’s gaze snapped back, shocked, to meet hers. His “I’m sorry” felt as feeble and inadequate as a platitude now. “I didn’t know.”

“I don’t generally announce it,” Edie said lightly. Then she gave him a faint smile. “I don’t suppose you do, either.”

“No.” It had been, literally, years since he’d talked about Amy to anyone. Now he paused, considering. “That was why you were upset about Mona’s matchmaking?”

She thinks I need to start dating again. Nick remembered Edie’s earlier words. Remembered wondering about the again. Now he knew.

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

He understood. It made perfect sense. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t think she was looking at him. She was probably thinking about the husband she’d lost much more recently than he’d lost Amy.

And he was thinking about—her. About Edie.

He tried to think about her as someone’s wife. He wondered what had happened, didn’t feel as if he could ask.

She wasn’t that close to him. Three feet, maybe even four. But even without looking he could feel her presence. There seemed to be a hum of awareness between them. Or maybe it only went one way. However it went, Nick felt a connection. He wanted to soothe away her pain, make her forget.

But he knew better than anyone that you didn’t forget.

Now he heard her move, step away from the side of the table and he turned to face her again. She was smiling, but it was a faint smile. Sad, he thought. And why not? She had reason to be sad.

“I should go,” she said now. “I’ve intruded on you enough.”

But as she moved past him toward the door, he caught her arm. “Don’t,” he said. And when she looked up into his eyes, he said, “Stay.”

Just one word. Low, rough, but laced with an urgency that surprised him. The very word surprised him. The request. The command.

He didn’t know what to call it. Only knew he didn’t want her to leave.

Edie looked surprised, too. Her lips parted, but for a moment no words passed through them. She seemed to be weighing her answer, deciding how to respond. Finally she said lightly, “You’re not done with the tour yet?”

The question allowed them both to back off. Nick nodded. “You haven’t seen the tower.”

“The tower?” she echoed.

“I’ve been redoing the stairway up to the parapet, rebuilding the tower and the battlements. There’s a fantastic view. You should see it.” But he said wryly, “You’re not exactly dressed for it.” She was, of course, still in her stocking feet.