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
