The Night that Changed Everything

by Anne McAllister

  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 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.

  “Roy?”

  She went back to the office, and pushed open the door to the patio and called his name again. Since she’d adopted him from a rescue organization shortly after she’d come back to the States following Ben’s death, Roy had been her shadow.

  If she was in the office, he was by her chair. If she was stretched out on a chaise beneath the ramada making notes on scripts, he was always there. If she was swimming laps, Roy was lying on the tiles, one eye open, watching her. If she was eating a salad for lunch, he was sprawled on the kitchen floor looking hopeful—though admittedly salads weren’t his favorite meal.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d seen him. It had been at lunch, she thought.

  He hadn’t been enthralled when she’d begun to tear up salad greens. Had he wandered back toward her office? He could push the door open to go outside, but he rarely did—only if Clara was there cleaning or if her grandkids had come and were swimming in the pool would he leave Edie’s side.

  Roy was a social animal. He liked to be with people, and Edie was the only one around.

  Except …

  “No,” she said aloud. “Roy, you didn’t.”

  And, truthfully, she didn’t believe he had gone all the way to the adobe to see Nick. Why would he?

  But if he wasn’t there, where was he?

  Had something happened to him?

  Please God, no.

  But even as she thought it, the words formed a knot in her gut, bringing back the memory of Ben’s disappearance all over again.

  Rationally she knew it wasn’t the same, Roy was a dog in his own territory. Not a man in a small boat on a stormy sea. Roy was capable and competent. But bad things happened even to the capable and competent.

  Ben had been both. And he’d been a skilled sailor besides. He’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In high school, Edie’s friend, Kelly, had lost a dog to rattlesnake bites. It wasn’t common, but it certainly happened. And without warning.

  Edie knew there was nothing she could have done to save Ben. But if something had happened to Roy …

  He wasn’t by the pool. He hadn’t gone to the cutting horse arena. He was nowhere in the house or the carriage house. There was no place else to go but the adobe. It was close to half a mile away. She couldn’t believe he’d gone that far.

  But she had to check. Maybe at least Nick had seen him.

  “Roy!” she called his name over and over as she went.

  The first response came when she was not quite at the top of the hill. She couldn’t see the adobe yet. The voice that responded was loud enough for her to hear, but strained.

  Just two words. “He’s here.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she said aloud as she hurried over the rise.

  She was elated to see Roy standing in the yard in front of the house, tail wagging happily, and horrified to see Nick, shirtless, halfway up a ladder, a huge heavy beam on one shoulder as he tried to climb.

  One end was already in place, which must have been a chore in itself. But the other needed to be lifted up and slotted into the opposite end of the porch.

  Even as she watched, the ladder seemed to teeter.

  “Wait!”

  The second she shouted she thought she’d made a mistake, that she could startle him and he could drop it, could fall and have it come down on top of him.

  Fortunately he didn’t. He stopped, then turned his head to look up the hill toward her.

  Edie was already scrambling and skidding down. Roy, enthused at the sight of her, began barking and frolicking in joy.

  “No! Roy, stop!” She could just imagine him hurtling against the ladder and sending Nick flying.

  For once in his life, Roy listened. He stopped at the bottom of the broken steps and squirmed, wagging his tail furiously as she reached the yard and glared up at the man on the ladder.

  “What on earth are you doing? You could kill yourself!”

  “I’ve done it before.” His voice was still strained, undoubtedly from the load he was bearing.

  Edie could see the sweat trickling down the side of his face and making paths through the dust on his shirtless back. “And lived to tell about it, apparently. But that doesn’t make it sensible. You need help.”

  “You volunteering?”

  “Yes, I am.” And she brushed past Roy and took hold of the ladder, standing behind Nick, bracing her hands on the sides to keep it steady as he climbed.

  Startled, Nick looked down at her. “Get out of there. You’re right in the line of fire if I drop this thing.”

  “Then you’d better not drop it.” She stayed right where she was, nose to the back of his denim-clad knees.

  “Edie!”

  “Nick!” she countered, still not moving.

  “Damn it,” he muttered under his breath. But when she still didn’t move or relinquish her hold, she saw the legs of his jeans shift as he tensed his muscles and climbed another step. The ladder trembled. She gripped it for all she was worth. Now she could study the smears and scuff marks on his steel-toed work boots. Above her Nick breathed raggedly.

  “You’re an idiot,” she told him conversationally, more to keep her brain engaged, thinking about the bigger picture than about what could happen if the beam slipped or he did.

  “So—” he went up another step “—are you.”

  The boots went out of her line of sight. She had to look up if she wanted to see him at all. She did. The view was pretty spectacular—apart from the beam, which was downright scary.

  She wanted to look away and was mesmerized at the same time. Nick was beginning to shift his weight, easing the beam forward off his shoulder and into place. As he did so, the ladder tilted. Edie clutched it with white-knuckled fingers, her breath caught in her throat.

  And then he said, “Got it,” and in the time-honored behavior of proficient ladder climbers everywhere, he skimmed back down before she could unlock her fingers from the uprights.

  And there she stood, her hands locked to the ladder, her knees weak with relief, her nose pressed to the back of his neck, her arms bracketing him.

  Exactly where she wanted to be.

  She was so stunned she didn’t move away. Just hung on. Clutched the ladder for dear life and breathed in the scent of sweat and dirt and something so elementally Nick.

  For a moment Nick didn’t move, either. He stayed absolutely motionless within her arms, as tense as she was boneless. She could see the tension in the quiver of the muscles of his back. Then his head dipped as he rested his forehead on one of the rungs and took a deep shuddering breath. The movement closed the millimeters of distance between her lips and the hard damp skin of his back.

  She kissed it.

  Tasted salt. Tasted Nick. Couldn’t help herself.

  It was a split second. That was all.

  Yet at her touch he spun around
. “God, Edie!”

  Then he was kissing her back. Not a taste. He was determined to devour her. He wrapped her hard in his embrace and his mouth met hers with a fierce hunger. “Yes,” he said, exultant. “Yes! I knew it. I told you.” He pulled back to look at her, eyes glittering, triumphant.

  And Edie grabbed for the shards of her sanity and shook her head. “No.”

  Hard fingers gripped her upper arms. “What do you mean, no? You kissed me!”

  She wouldn’t deny it. “Your neck,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “It’s enough,” he said. Then, “No, it’s not. Not nearly. But you can’t claim you don’t want me.”

  “I never said that,” Edie told him. “I did … want you,” she admitted. She owed him that.

  “Do,” Nick corrected firmly, as if daring her to dispute it. “You do want me.”

  Edie pressed her lips together. “Yes,” Edie admitted. “I do. But I told you—I want more than that.” Her voice quieted. “And you don’t.” Their eyes met again and now she gave him a look that dared him to argue with her.

  His teeth came together. A muscle in his jaw ticked. She dropped her gaze to watch the steady rise and fall of his hard, tanned chest. Then slowly she lifted her eyes once more. He met them squarely. He didn’t say a word.

  His silence said it all.

  Somewhere in the treetops Edie could hear birds calling. A long way off the faint sound of a motorcycle broke the silence. By her knees Roy was panting.

  She stepped back, drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “I have to go.”

  Nick’s shoulders settled slightly. His fingers, which had been curled into fists, eased open and hung loosely at his sides. His dark eyes accused her.

  She’d made the move. She’d changed her mind, they seemed to say.

  She hadn’t. She only wished she could.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE was gone—and then there was gone.

  When Edie had said, “I have to go,” Nick assumed she meant back to the house, back to the safety of her work schedule where she could pretend that the desire that had just flared up between them could be dialed back to a simmer she felt comfortable ignoring.