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.
“When did you finish at Mont Chamion?” she asked.
“I left a week or so after the wedding. There were some talented local craftsmen who continued the work while I was in Norway. I went back a couple of times to make sure everything was going well, but I’ve been in Norway and Scotland most of the past two months.”
“Scotland?”
“Mmm. Tell me about the ranch house.”
So much for getting him talking. But the ranch house was business, too, so Edie did as he asked.
“I think it’s from the mid-nineteenth century. Pretty primitive to begin with, I think. My dad used to tell us stories about the ranchers who lived here. I don’t know how true it was. Dad liked to tell stories.” She smiled now as she remembered the delight Joe Tremayne had taken in gathering her and Ronan onto his lap and regaling them with tales of early California.
“Was it in his family?” Nick asked.
“No. My mom and dad bought it right after they married. It was pretty run-down already by then, but the land was what my dad wanted. He was raised on a ranch north of San Luis Obispo. His dad was a foreman there. Dad wanted to raise cutting horses. That was his dream. He dabbled in winemaking, too. He wasn’t a Hollywood sort of guy.” In her mind’s eye she could still see her tall, handsome father with his shock of dark hair and wide mischievous grin. “He was a good balance to my mother. Solid. Dependable. Steady.” She caught herself before she went any further. “But you don’t care about that. You want to know about the house.”
“I want to know it all,” Nick said, his eyes on hers. “About the house, of course. But it’s important to understand the people who live—or lived—in it. What mattered to them. What they valued.”
Edie thought about that. She remembered him telling her about the history of the castle at Mont Chamion and about the royal family there. She guessed it was the same here.
“Family,” she said firmly. “That’s what they both wanted. Even Mona,” she said before he could raise his brows in doubt “My dad’s death changed her. He was her anchor. When he died, it was like she’d been cut adrift. She was lost. She wanted what they’d had—what we’d all had—and she kept trying to get it back.”
Telling him about it now, she could see it all again—the happy days they’d spend as a family in the old adobe followed by the painful dark days after the car accident that had taken her father’s life. Her voice trailed off as they crested the hill and headed down the other side. The old house came into sight beyond a stand of eucalyptus.
“Hence the marriages?” Nick ventured.
“Pretty 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