much,” Edie agreed. “She wanted to be married. She wanted a man. And men want Mona. They always have. So they kept proposing, and she kept saying yes. And she kept having babies,” she added a little wryly.
“That must have been difficult for you.”
“No. It was great, especially after she got to be so famous. It was easier that there were six of us. It diluted the paparazzi’s attention.”
They were approaching the house now, and Edie was appalled at how run-down it looked. Tried to see it from Nick’s perspective. She imagined he was mentally packing his bags, ready to declare it worthless. It certainly didn’t look salvageable to her. And it had an empty forlorn air very much at odds with how she remembered it.
“It’s a lot worse than I remembered,” she said. “It wasn’t like this when I was growing up here.”
Nick didn’t say anything. He just stopped on the slope and studied the sprawling one-story adobe structure with its broad front porch and deep-set windows.
“It wasn’t in the best shape when they bought it,” Edie said quickly. “I remember Mona saying they got it cheap as a ‘fixer-upper.’ But my dad did a lot of work on it,” she added defensively. “But he was busy making a go of the ranch and the horses. He didn’t have a lot of time.”
“Understood.” Nick made his way down the rest of the dusty slope and began a closer inspection.
Edie, following him, recognized how very neglected the house had become. The broad front porch covering sagged. Pieces of the zaguán were broken or altogether missing. Places that her father had tried to patch with stucco had crumbled away and the adobe beneath them was crumbling as well.
Nick took his time, walking around the building slowly, looking at it from all angles while Edie followed, looking at the house, but also at him. He moved with the easy grace of some sort of jungle cat. Last year when she’d taken Ruud and Dirk to the San Diego Zoo, she’d been fascinated with the grace of a tiger moving through the brush. She thought of that tiger now as she watched Nick prowl around the house. He took hold of one of the timbers that poked out from the roof and jerked it. The crack of the wood made Edie wince.
“Probably not worth restoring,” she ventured.
He didn’t reply, just kept moving. He paused to pick at some of the stucco her father had used to repair part of the crumbling back wall, then watched it flake and fall to the ground. Another reason to wince.
It was good, she tried to tell herself. With all these things wrong with the house, the less likely he was to stay and Mona’s heavy-handed efforts at matchmaking would come to naught. But at the same time she didn’t want the house to fall down. And the Cinderella gene she was trying to ignore still wanted Nick Savas to stay.
“Is it unlocked?”
So the outside hadn’t totally discouraged him?
“I have a key.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out a set of keys, then chose the one to open the front door. Nick took it wordlessly from her. Their fingers brushed. Yes, heaven help her, even with a simple touch the awareness was still there.
In one long leap Nick vaulted onto the porch and opened the door.
Edie followed him more carefully, picking her way past the broken wooden steps up to the porch. “The electricity’s off,” she said. “I’m afraid you can’t see much.”
With a forest of towering eucalyptus all around, the house never received the brunt of the direct sun. It was far cooler that way, but the interior, shrouded in shadow and with only very deep-set windows, was barely visible when Edie followed him in the front door.
Apparently Nick was used to doing things by feel. As she watched, he moved around the room, running his hands over the walls, peering up at the ceiling, crouching down and studying the floor.
Edie didn’t know what he was seeing, but the longer she stood there, the more she saw memories of the house she’d been happy in as a child. This living room was the place where her dad had crawled around on the floor giving her horsey rides. Over by the window was where they’d put up the Christmas tree. In the big kitchen they had eaten meals her mother had actually cooked instead of those a cook made for them.
The memories made her throat ache as she looked around.
She walked around, touching things, recalling things. She ran her hand over the kitchen countertop and remembered standing on a chair helping her mother cut out cookies there. By the back door there were still the marks on the wall where her dad had marked her height and Ronan’s every few months. How small she’d been.
She rubbed her thumb over the last, highest pencil mark and remembered how she used to stretch as tall as she could, and her dad would press his hand on the top of her head, laughing. “Stop that! You’re growing too fast already!”
“You okay?” Nick appeared in the doorway, looking concerned.
Edie mustered a smile. “Just remembering.” She gave the wall a little pat. “It’s been a long time. This was a good place. I was just remembering how good it was.”
Nick nodded as if he understood.
Maybe he did. She didn’t know that much about him. The trouble was, what she knew she liked. And seeing him here made things somehow even more difficult.
When she’d had one night with him in a completely foreign setting, it was easier to tell herself she wasn’t really interested, that her awareness of him was a momentary aberration, that back in her own life, she wouldn’t really notice.
But she did.
He was opening the cupboards now, peering inside. And she allowed herself to study him because he wasn’t paying attention to her. She had run her fingers through that tousled hair. She’d nibbled her way along his stubbled jaw, then pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. Now, as he shut the cupboards and crouched down to look at the floor, she watched the muscles in his thighs bunch and flex beneath the worn denim covering his thighs and remembered that she had touched him there. And he had touched her, too.
Not just her body—but something fundamental deep inside her. Something that she hadn’t managed to forget.
“I have to go,” she said abruptly, her announcement rather louder than she intended. “I have work to do.”
From where he was crouched on the floor studying the boards, Nick glanced up at her and nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Fine. Go ahead.” He sounded as if he’d already dismissed her from his mind.
No doubt he had, Edie thought. She turned and hurried out of the house. “Come on, Roy,” she called to the dog who was nosing curiously around the edge of the porch.
Roy looked at her, then back at the house, as if he expected Nick to join them.
“He’s not coming,” Edie said, more for her own good than for the dog’s. “He’s here on business. And then he’s leaving.”
She hoped.
At least she thought that was what she hoped. He wasn’t here for her. He had awakened her, but he didn’t want her. He thought he was here for work, but it was really because Mona had been playing
