Read The Night that Changed Everything for Free Online

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 asvulnerable 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