One Night of Passion: The Night that Changed Everything / Champagne with a Celebrity / At the French Baron's Bidding. Kate HardyЧитать онлайн книгу.
pizza sorts of smells as he moved toward the door. Edie’s stomach growled.
“Oh, fine. Sit down,” she snapped.
He beamed. “Will do. Gotta clean up a bit first. You take care of this while I grab a quick shower.” He thrust the pizza box into her hands. “Don’t eat it all before I get back.” And he ran lightly back down her stairs and headed for Mona’s house.
She put the pizza in the oven and turned the heat on low to keep it warm. Then she finished making the salad, adding enough for him now, and set the table for two. Roy looked hopeful. Gerald came over to see if there was something for him. Edie fed them both.
Then she told them sternly, “That’s all you get. No sitting around watching us, looking hopeful.”
“No, that would be me.”
She whipped around to see Nick standing in the doorway. He gave her what was undeniably a hopeful look, tempered with a grin, as his gaze slid over her, making her all too aware of what he was hoping for. Edie steeled her heart—and her hormones.
“Don’t,” she said firmly.
He shrugged. “Okay,” he said easily, dropping the hopeful look and heading straight for the table with the same single-mindedness Roy and Gerald had shown. “Starving,” he said as he put a piece of pizza on her plate and one on his. Then he dished her up some salad and took some for himself. “This looks great.”
It did. And she was hungry. So she ate.
For the first few minutes there was silence as they were both focused on the meal. But eventually Edie had had enough to be far more aware of the man than of the meal he’d brought.
When he finished his fourth piece of pizza, he leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Ripping off a roof gives a guy an appetite.”
She’d noticed that he’d already begun when he’d called her to bring the key. Now she reached over to the counter and plucked it up and held it out to him. “You’d better have this. Then you won’t have to keep calling me.”
His lips twisted, but he took the key and stuffed it into the pocket of the canvas shorts he was wearing. “Thanks.”
Their gazes met again. His dark eyes regarded her warmly. A slight smile played across his lips. She abruptly got up and carried her plate to the sink. “Thank you for the pizza,” she said, running water to wash the dishes.
“Thank you for the salad,” he said equally politely. He came up behind her, set his plate on the counter. He was so near she could feel the heat of his body. She added dish soap to the water, then began putting the dishes in, all the while aware of him right behind her. And equally aware when he moved away.
She breathed again.
“I’ve got some planning to do,” he said. “So I’ll say good night.”
She looked over her shoulder, surprised.
Nick shrugged. “Unless you have a better idea?” There was that hint of hope again.
Edie shook her head. “No. No. I—good night.”
It was the right thing to do, she assured herself when the door closed behind him and she heard his feet going down the steps. It was safer—far far safer—this way.
Nick finished ripping the roof off the next morning. The following day he cleaned and sorted tiles. It had been a while since he’d worked on a roof like this one. Putting new and old tiles together was a tricky business. He wanted to take his time.
And he wanted Edie to come back.
She hadn’t been here since the first day. He barely saw her except at dinner. Somehow they managed to eat that together every night. Either she cooked and apparently felt obligated to feed him—”Mona’s hospitality is legendary,” she said, making it clear the meals were an extension of it—or he went into town and picked up take-away.
But other than at dinner, he didn’t see her. She didn’t come around the adobe at all. Well, no, that wasn’t true. She was certainly there in spirit—in his head—even if she didn’t set foot in the place.
On Friday as he removed the last of the rotten front porch beams before he put the new one up this afternoon, he could look across the roof line and see the rusty swing set near the trees.
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