The Night that Changed Everything

by Anne McAllister

  Edie barely heard them beyond registering that all these bridges he was going to have to cross would take time. And time meant—

  “Where are you staying?” she asked abruptly.

  Nick blinked, then the lopsided smile reappeared. “Well, Mona invited me to stay here.”

  Edie felt as if she’d been punched in the gut.

  “Is that a problem?” Nick asked. He was looking at her speculatively.

  “I—” Edie managed one word, then her speech dried up.

  Problem wasn’t precisely the word. Try awkward, she thought. Try disconcerting. Or mortifying. But how could she explain? She’d told him that Mona was matchmaking back in Mont Chamion. She didn’t want to have to admit it again. She didn’t want him to think her mother was trying to serve him up on a plate!

  Deliberately she pasted on her best mi casa es su casa smile. “Of course not,” Edie lied and stepped back to open the door wider. “Not a problem. I was just surprised. Come in. This is Roy, by the way.”

  Nick hunkered down and ruffled Roy’s ears. The dog, a sucker for ear rubs, moaned his pleasure. The sound made Edie remember all too well how Nick’s hands had made her moan, too.

  She was sure her cheeks were flaming when he gave Roy’s ears one last rub, then stood up. “I’ll just get my bag from the car.”

  Edie waited by the door and tried to gather her wits, to find a proper emotional leg to stand on from which to handle the sudden appearance of Nick Savas into her life.

  He wasn’t here for her, she reminded herself. At least not in his estimation. He’d come because her mother had given him some song-and-dance about renovating the adobe. And he didn’t care enough about her one way or the other to let it sway him.

  “It’s business,” she told herself firmly. “Remember that,” she muttered under her breath as he strode back up the driveway with a leather and canvas duffel in one hand and a battered laptop case in the other.

  “What’s that?” he asked, obviously having heard her saying something.

  Edie shook her head. “Just talking to myself. I need to remember something.”

  “You should write it down.”

  Yes, Edie thought. I should. I should emblazon it on the insides of my eyelids.

  “I’ll do that,” she told him briskly, then took a deep breath and turned to lead him back into the house. “Right this way.”

  “Amazing place,” Nick said appreciatively as he followed her.

  The living room, with its high ceilings, thick cream colored rough plastered walls and terrazzo floors, opened through a series of French doors onto a broad patio with a trellised canopy sheltering it from the sun. The doors at this time of year were open, and the light afternoon breeze drifted in, stirring a set of shell wind chimes as they passed.

  “It’s hardly authentic,” Edie said over her shoulder, glad that he was looking around rather than at her. “It’s what my brother calls ‘Movie star Spanish.’”

  Nick laughed. “I recognize it.” Then he shrugged. “But it pays homage to the real thing in an impressive way. The purists hate it, but it celebrated the heritage and the history in its own way. It’s made it popular and accessible.”

  “You’re more forgiving than my brother.” Edie was surprised at his attitude. She would have thought an architect, especially one who dealt with authentic historic preservation and restoration, would be more judgmental, not less.

  “It is what it is,” Nick said, running his hand up the smooth dark bannister as she led him up the broad staircase, then looked back at the room below them. “A romantic idealization. It’s not pretending to be authentic. Maybe your brother is responding not to the house but to what it means to him.”

  Which was probably truer than he could know, Edie thought. And Ronan wouldn’t like being called on it, either.

  “You could be right,” she said as they reached the open hallway on the upper floor.

  “You can pretty much have any of these that you want.” She gestured at the several open doors. She showed him all the ones that were available, at the same time pointing out her mother’s suite at the far end of the hall, then her youngest sister, Grace’s, room and the twins’ room overlooking the pool. “They’re in Thailand with Mona right now,” she said. “For the summer holidays.”

  She used to do that herself when she was young, trail after her mother and watch the filming from the sidelines. Those experiences had made her certain she never wanted to do what her mother did, at the same time it had made Rhiannon long to get in front of the cameras.

  “How about this one?” Nick said, looking into a spare masculine looking room. It was almost Spartan in its lack of decor.

  “Ronan, my older brother, uses this one when he’s here. But he won’t be here for months, so you’re welcome to it. Or,” she added with a grin, “you can have the tower room.”

  “Tower?”

  “Surely you noticed our pseudo-Moorish tower when you drove up.” It was the most romantic of all the romantic elements in the house.

  He grinned. “I’d forgotten that. There’s a bedroom up there?”

  “A small suite. Rhiannon loves it.” She pointed at the narrow staircase that curved upward.

  “Why am I not surprised? Does she use it when she’s here?”

  “Yes. But she’s gone right now. You’re welcome to it.”

  “I’d have thought you’d have first dibs on it.”

  “Never wanted it.”

  He raised a brow. “Not a romantic?”

  “No.” Not about rooms, anyway. And she tried to be realistic. At least most of the time. “That was my room.” She tilted her head toward one that looked up toward the woods.

  “Was? Which one is yours now?”

  “I have an apartment over the carriage house.”

  It was a small, cozy one-bedroom flat that had been the caretaker’s place when Edie was growing up. But then the caretaker left, and Ronan had taken over the carriage house during college. He’d kept it even after he got his first job as a journalist. But eventually he was out of the country so much he decided he didn’t need it.

  Edie had moved in there when she came back after Ben had died. She would work for her mother willingly, but she wasn’t going to live with her, too. She’d been a married woman, Now she was a widow. She wanted her independence.

  For all the good it was obviously doing her!

  “So who’s sleeping in your bed?” Nick asked.

  Edie opened her mouth and promptly shut it again, face burning. Then she realized he meant the bed in the room that had been hers. “No one,” she said hastily, which was in fact the answer to who was sleeping with her in the carriage house, too. Not that he would care.

  “Then I will,” he said and walked in and dumped his duffel bag and laptop on the bed.

  She wouldn’t let herself read anything into his choice. It was a fine room, and there was nothing of hers left in it. At least she hoped there wasn’t. Not that Nick Savas would care if there was. To him it was a place to sleep.

  “Great,” she said with all the brisk indifference she could muster. “Well, I’ll just leave you to get settled in.”

  “Who else is here?” he asked.

  “Just you. But don’t worry. Clara—she works for Mona, cleaning and sometimes cooking—will come in and cook for you. She lives in Santa Barbara, but she comes up every day and cooks for the family when Mona and the kids are home. She regularly does it for guests, too.”

  Nick shook his head. “Not necessary. I can cook for myself. Besides,” he reminded her, “I might not be staying. Gotta see if it’s worth it.”

  “Of course.”

  He might be gone before nightfall. Life would go back to normal. Edie crossed her fingers.

  “Do you want to take a look at the old house today, then? Or are you tired from traveling?”

  “I’m fine. Just flew up from L.A. I was visiting my cousin.”

  “Demetrios?” She knew he and Anny kept
a place there for when his work took him to Hollywood.

  But Nick shook his head. “Yiannis.”

  If Edie remembered right from the wedding, he was Demetrios’s youngest brother. Another lean, dark, handsome Savas male. “Is he an actor, too?”

  Nick laughed. “You wouldn’t catch him dead acting. He works with wood. Makes furniture. Imports and exports everything from raw lumber to finished pieces. He’s done some pieces for restorations I’ve worked on. Talented guy.”

  “Apparently.” Edie smiled and began to back toward the door. “Come down when you’re ready and I’ll take you to see the adobe. I’ll be in my office. It’s in the back of the house, beyond the kitchen. If you get lost, follow the sound of the phone.”

  It was ringing now. And so she had the excuse to dart off to answer it. She gave him a quick smile and a little waggle of her fingers, then hurried back down the stairs.

  It was the first time in weeks she was glad to hear Rhiannon’s voice when she picked up the phone. Even when her sister said, “I’ve changed my mind,” Edie didn’t snap.

  She just grabbed a pencil and said, “Okay. Tell me what the new plan is.”

  If Rhiannon noticed that Edie wasn’t peevish, she didn’t remark on it. But then she rarely seemed to pick up on other peoples’ reactions. Now she just began explaining her most recently changed decision, which was to go meet Andrew in Miami next weekend instead of following up on meeting with a director about a film set in Turkey.

  “So you can change it, right?” Ree demanded.

  “I can change it,” Edie assured her. It just meant starting over from scratch, canceling the reservation she’d made an hour ago. But at least she’d have something to occupy her mind that she could handle—unlike the man upstairs.

  No, she told herself firmly. She could handle him, too. She just needed a little space and a little time to regroup.

  She was just surprised, that’s all. She hadn’t expected to see him again. She might have hoped, yes—just a little—but she hadn’t really considered it. And then when he did turn up, she’d dared to believe he had come to find her, to explore the connection she had sensed between them.

  And then she’d discovered he’d come because her mother had asked him to—on the flimsiest of pretexts!

  “Edie! Are you there?” Rhiannon’s voice broke into her mental conundrum.

  “Of course I’m here. Did you think I’d hung up on you?”

  “You’re not talking.” It sounded like an accusation.

  “I’m writing down the information you just gave me,” Edie said. It wasn’t totally a lie. She’d made a couple of notes. “I’ll make the reservations now. I’ll send you an email and forward them.”

  “Great. Thanks. You’re the best. Don’t tell Andrew,” Rhiannon added quickly. “I want to surprise him.”

  “Are you sure?” Surprises were sometimes not the best idea.

  “I need to make a gesture. To show up when he’s not expecting me, when he’s given up all hope!”

  Ah, the drama of it.

  “Whatever,” Edie said vaguely.

  “Thanks, Ede. Love you!” Rhiannon trilled and rang off, leaving Edie to muster her wits and check her watch. It was the middle of the night in Thailand or Mona would be getting an earful.

  The phone rang again, distracting her. And two more calls after that forced her mind back to her work so that she actually jumped when a voice behind her said, “So this is where you work.”

  She spun around to see Nick standing in the doorway, hands braced on the uprights as he looked around and then let his gaze come to rest on her. There was a smile on his face.

  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.