have married him if she hadn’t been sure she could lean on him. She could honestly say the first two years of their marriage had been everything she wanted.
But gradually things began to shift. The minute that plus sign showed up on the pregnancy test, it seemed as if everything had changed.
Financial success became the only thing that mattered to him, to the point of obsession—and not just financial success, but instant financial success. He had pursued one get-rich-quick scheme after another. Day trading, direct sales, real estate flips.
If someone else had made a dollar at something, Trent had been determined to make a thousand.
After Maddie was born with a heart defect, achieving success had become almost a compulsion.
She would have been thrilled with a steady paycheck, decent health insurance, but he wouldn’t listen.
“This is it, babe. The big payoff. I swear it.”
How many times had he said those words to her? At first, she had been stupidly proud of him for working so hard to support their family. Gradually, that had become the only thing that mattered to him. Not her, not Maddie. Just adding more zeros to their bank balance.
His last grand idea had actually been a good one, surprisingly enough. He had come up with the concept for a revolutionary new productivity app and had begun working with a developer friend of his from college.
He had been determined to sell the idea to one of the big Silicon Valley companies—and of course, Caine Tech had been his first choice for their forward-thinking products and phenomenal success rate.
Somehow through a friend of a friend, he had finagled a meeting. Not with Aidan, she knew that. Trent had called her after leaving the company, ranting about how he had been fobbed off on a couple of lower management flunkies who didn’t have the imagination or brains to see the genius of his idea.
After a few moments, the rant had turned despondent and she had spent a few moments trying to play the supportive wife while inside she had been completely exhausted and wondering how much longer she could do this.
He had told her he was going to stop off for a drink. Just one, he’d said, because he deserved it after that complete waste of time.
Two hours later, he was dead in a single-car accident—or at least she hoped it was an accident. She would never know if he had hit that barrier intentionally or just been too impaired after six drinks.
For a man obsessed with providing for his family, Trent had been remarkably shortsighted. He had racked up thousands in debt—and had missed their life insurance payment three months before his death.
She released a long breath now, trying not to think about that terrible chapter in her life. She had grieved for her husband and the life she had once imagined for them together and his death had reinforced that Eliza could only truly depend on herself.
* * *
LONG AFTER ELIZA returned to her room, Aidan sat in the dark kitchen trying to analyze what the hell had just happened.
He wanted to blame a hundred different things. The warm, seductive intimacy of the quiet kitchen, the pain medicine he hated that seemed to make him act in strange ways.
The hard truth of the matter was that he had ached to kiss her, quite fiercely. As he looked back on the past few days, he realized this attraction had been simmering inside him almost since the beginning.
The attraction part he fully comprehended. Eliza was a beautiful woman, with that silky spill of honey-streaked hair, the green eyes flecked with gold, the little smattering of freckles across her nose. Hers was a soft, understated beauty, fragile and sweet and deeply appealing.
This aching hunger inside him might be a normal, perfectly understandable physiological reaction to a beautiful woman—especially considering he had been living like a monk for the last three months.
Acting upon it was a completely different story.
She worked for him! He had a firmly held personal policy not to become entangled emotionally with the people who worked for him. He tried not to be cold or harsh about it, only resolute.
While he cared deeply for long-term employees like Sue and Jim, Louise, a few others in his trusted circle, he had learned not to combine romantic relationships and business. They created a toxic mix for everybody involved, as he had learned from bitter experience early on when a few overambitious women had tried to take advantage of him—including one miserable lawsuit he would prefer to forget.
Eliza worked for him, which automatically made her completely off-limits to anything like heated kisses in the early morning hours. Yes, her employment was temporary and maybe a bit unorthodox but that didn’t change the underlying philosophy.
Beyond that, Eliza was not his usual sort of woman. He typically was drawn to sophisticated, urbane women after the same sort of relationship he wanted—casual, easy, uncomplicated.
A young widow with a medically fragile child—however adorable Maddie might be—didn’t strike him as someone who would be amenable to a quick fling.
The reminder served as the same bracing shock he would have gotten from sticking his face in the snow.
So. Lesson learned. He had to avoid intimate conversations with her in seductively quiet rooms. He could do that. Now that he was aware of his attraction to her, he would just have to be careful to keep out of situations where it might become an issue.
He had always been able to compartmentalize easily and had learned to shove aside the unimportant in order to focus on higher priorities.
He knew people thought him cold and emotionless. Even his siblings accused him of it. He wasn’t. He felt things just as deeply as everyone else—maybe even more deeply—but his long and difficult grieving process after his mother’s death had one good side effect in that he had learned through it how to put aside fears and hurts and loss and distill his concentration toward meeting his goals.
He considered his single-minded focus one of his greatest strengths—and he would simply apply the same principle to the quandary of Eliza Hayward.
Forgetting that intense kiss wouldn’t be an easy task but he would just have to force himself to try in order to return things between them to a professional level.
She would only be here for a few weeks. How difficult would it be to shove down his inconvenient attraction for that time, especially since he would no doubt be distracted once his family arrived?
“ARE YOU SURE you don’t mind running to the grocery store for me, too?” Sue asked Friday.
Eliza shrugged into her coat. “Not at all. It’s right on my way after I pick up the new lamps.”
“I told you, Jim can do all of that for you. I’m not sure you should be carrying those big boxes to the car. I know you say you feel fine now but I still worry about you.”
The other woman’s concern warmed her heart. After several days of working
