“But it’s barely light,” Edie protested. “What on earth time did she go?”
“She go last night.”
“Last night? But she didn’t mention anything yesterday.”
“Change of plan,” the woman said. She didn’t sound as if it was any big deal. Probably for her it wasn’t.
“When’s she coming back?”
“Don’t know. Three, four, five days maybe. They go to mountains.”
“Mountains?” That didn’t sound good. And they were going to be gone days? “But I need to talk to her.”
She was only calling the phone at the house Mona had rented because she had already tried Mona’s mobile phone half a dozen times. Each time it had gone directly to voice mail.
At first she’d thought her mother was simply avoiding her. But after two hours with no reply, she knew something else was going on. Mona was a stickler for returning messages. The only time she didn’t call back was when she was in the middle of a scene or completely out of range.
Obviously now she was out of range. But for days?
“Where are the kids?” Edie asked. Ordinarily her mother would have sent for her to take care of them while she was gone. Surely she hadn’t just left them with the woman who cared for the house.
“They go, too.”
“Ah. Well, um, good.” At least Edie hoped that was good. There was no doubt that Mona loved her children. But she also had a career that demanded she put it first most of the time. Taking the twins and Grace with her this summer—without having Edie along to keep an eye on things—was something of a first.
“Did she even take her phone?”
“She take it,” the woman said. “But hard to get calls. You try,” she suggested cheerfully. “Maybe you be lucky.”
Luck, Edie could have told her mother’s housekeeper, was not on her side at the moment.
She thanked the woman, tried Mona’s number twice more, then gave up. There was no point in filling her mother’s in-box with messages she wouldn’t see until she got back to civilization. Besides, when she confronted Mona about her matchmaking, she intended to do it live and, if not face-to-face, then at least ear to ear.
She’d given Mona a piece of her mind after the Kyle Robbins incident at the wedding. She thought Mona had learned her lesson. Apparently not.
Still grumbling, Edie stared at the computer screen and tried to focus on the rest of the afternoon’s work. She had phone calls to return, some correspondence from Mona’s contracts lawyer to deal with and Rhiannon’s plane reservations to cancel and rebook. Surely she had plenty to keep her busy—enough so that she wouldn’t spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about Nick Savas.
Easier said than done. She got the reservations rebooked. She looked up the answers to the questions Mona’s contracts lawyer wanted. She returned that call and several others. But all the while she did so, she had one ear cocked toward the door, expecting to hear it open, expecting the sound of footfalls heading toward the office.
Time passed. An hour. Two. By five-thirty he still hadn’t come. Perhaps he’d taken a look around, then simply left. When she closed up the office she actually walked out to the front room to look out the window to see if his car was still there.
Of course it was. He couldn’t have left without her knowing because he’d have had to come back for his bag. He’d already taken his duffel upstairs.
So did he expect her to simply sit in her office and wait for him?
Probably not, Edie admitted to herself. Probably he hadn’t given her a thought at all.
“And you should stop thinking about him,” she counseled herself.
So she did what she always did after work. She changed into her bathing suit, went out to the pool and dived in.
It was just past six when Nick got back to Mona’s house.
He had gone over every inch of the adobe, had walked around kicking the foundation, prying up floorboards, clambering onto the roof. He was grimy, filthy, sweaty and hot and he needed a shower. Bad.
Now he went around the house to go through the doors closest to the stairs so he wouldn’t track in dirt and dust. And so he could stop by Edie’s office. But before he got there, out of the corner of his eye he saw movement that caught his attention.
Beyond the bank of oleanders growing partway down the lawn, someone was in the pool.
Before his brain made a conscious decision, his feet were already heading across the lawn toward where Edie’s lithe form cut through the water as she did laps. Her stroke was smooth and even, but it wasn’t her stroke Nick was focused on. It was her body, her mile-long legs, her tanned back—all that lovely golden skin he remembered so well.
If he’d needed a shower before, he needed one worse now. A long icy cold one.
Or, he thought, he could dive into the pool, take Edie into his arms and solve all his problems at once.
Not a difficult choice.
He had unbuttoned his shirt by the time he reached the terrazzo-tiled patio where the pool was. He opened the gate, tossed the shirt onto a chaise longue and was toeing off his shoes and tugging his undershirt over his head at the same time.
“You’re back.” Edie’s voice startled him.
Nick jerked the T-shirt the rest of the way off to see her, out of the pool now, coming toward him. She had a towel wrapped around her waist and she was rubbing her hair dry with another. He couldn’t see her legs anymore, but her bare midriff was enticement enough. As Nick watched, half a dozen droplets of water slid down her abdomen from beneath the top of her bathing suit.
He swallowed, staring as the drops disappeared into the towel knotted at her waist.
“So what do you think?”
“Think?” He wasn’t thinking. Not with his brain anyway.
“About what?” he asked dazedly. She had to have seen him coming. Why the hell hadn’t she stayed in the pool? Was she trying to avoid him? he wondered, nettled.
“About the house.” She lowered the towel from her hair and peered at him over the top of it “Time to raze it? Cut our losses?” She sounded almost hopeful.
Was she hoping? Surely not. He’d seen the wistful look on her face this afternoon. He’d watched her move from room to room, running her hands over the woodwork and the cabinets, touching those little pencil marks by the back door.
“No,” he said sharply, with more force than he intended. He moderated his tone. “No. It’s quite salvageable.”
“Really? And it should be?” Now she sounded surprised.
“It’s an interesting piece of vernacular architecture,” he said firmly. “Not all of a piece, of course. And not of huge historical significance,” he added honestly. “But the fact that it’s not a mansion, but a surviving example of small ranch architecture makes it worth restoring.”
Also true. To a point. From a purely historical significance standpoint, the old adobe ranch house was such a pastiche of different styles, periods, restorations, disastrous additions and bad workmanship that, as a bonafide professional historical restoration expert called on to choose which buildings were worth preserving and restoring, he ought to have been running in the other direction.
But he wasn’t.
He was standing here saying, “It can be salvaged,” with an absolutely straight face.
And he was rewarded by seeing her face light up. “I thought you’d say it wasn’t worth the trouble.”
It