Even though he’d said no, Emilie was sure he’d change his mind. It was intuition. It was wishful thinking. She prayed hard on the wishing star. If she’d thought it would help to take off her clothes and dance naked with her aunt’s friends, she would have done that too.
This is going to work, she thought as she fell asleep that night. Her brain argued that it was illogical. Her heart said it was going to happen.
#
The rest of the week was chaotic at school. There were end of term tests for the upper grades, including Emilie's, as well as Christmas pageants and plays.
Emilie went to the Christmas band concert, at Adam's invitation. Though the boy had only been with the band a scant two weeks, he was able to participate in the concert. Mr. Foster was beaming at his 'prodigy', making a fuss over the boy's talent and ability to pick up quickly on what the band was already doing.
Thrilled to see Adam in the spotlight, Emilie sat in the back row of the auditorium, watching Nick and Amber in the front row. He sat with the baby, pointing out her brother in the flute section of the band on stage. He'd walked past Emilie without looking at her as he came into the auditorium.
She put her hand up to hail him and then changed her mind. It was better not to push it any further. Though Nick hadn’t decided to take her up on her invitation to stay at her house, she still felt confident that he would. It was only a matter of time.
Adam was handsome in his dark suit and white shirt. He wore a bright red Christmas tie around his thin neck and played his little heart out for his flute section. When Mr. Foster introduced him as his newest and brightest pupil, he took a small bow and the audience applauded.
“The next song is for my mom,” he said to the audience. “She taught me to play the flute when I was just a kid. She couldn’t be here tonight because she was killed. But I still love her.”
Emilie felt her eyes brim with tears on the boy's behalf—she knew there wasn’t a dry eye in the audience. Adam seemed to be on the road to recovery finally. She was so happy for him.
Would Nick adopt him out if he wasn't in trouble all the time? Or would he decide to keep Adam? Had his sister wanted Amber adopted out?
Emilie sighed, afraid she would never know the answers to those questions. She'd been glad to see Amber's smiling baby face as she sat in Nick's lap. Maybe it meant that she hadn't been adopted yet. There could still be time for her plan to work.
Nick sat in his seat with Amber when the concert was over after the band's stirring rendition of 'Frosty the Snowman'. People had lined up to the stage from the audience. He didn't feel like wading through them with the baby who'd fallen asleep in his lap during the concert.
He was watching the parents and relatives of the other band members laughing and talking with their children. Then he saw Emilie.
She was holding the red and white program that had been handed out at the door and she was talking to Adam. She was wearing a bright green dress that clung to her slender form, emphasizing her rounded breasts and curved hips. Her hair was different, pulled back on one side. There was a sprig of fake holly near her ear.
He'd seen her when he'd walked into the auditorium. He’d developed a sixth sense where she was concerned. It was as though he could
feel
her near him. He'd purposely walked by her at the back of the seating, telling himself that Amber needed to sit near the front to see Adam better.
Of course, Amber had fallen asleep within the first five minutes. Then he'd been tortured, wanting to look back at her and knowing that if he did, she'd see him looking and know that he was looking at her.
Nick enjoyed looking at Emilie. She was like a living jewel on the stage, laughing at something Adam had said to her. She bent down and hugged him tightly, touched his hair where it wouldn't ever lay flat. He wondered what Adam had said that had brought that light to her eyes and that curve to her pink lips.
He knew he was obsessing about the woman and bitterly regretted it. If he could have moved from Ferrier's Mountain to get away from her, he would have. All of his money was tied up in the house and business.
Emilie wasn’t interested in him. He was her mechanic. It sounded feudal, but he knew that kind of relationship wouldn’t work out. Besides, he had the kids to think about.
Still, he hadn't slept at all the night after he'd kissed her, wanting her. His mind might tell him that it wouldn’t work between them. His body didn’t seem to care.
The crowd was thinning and Adam was looking his way. Nick stood up and started toward the stage. When his gaze met Emilie’s, her bright smile faded. She said something else to Adam who nodded and smiled at her. Then she began to walk away.
She walked slowly, as if she was in pain, but she didn't look back. Nick knew the story about her now. She’d had polio as a young child and all the Ferrier’s money couldn’t make it better. She’d survived, but couldn’t have children to continue the family name.
The mountain was as much a mother lode of gossip as it had once been of gold. Emilie was one of their favorite tidbits.
Nick had heard about her brief marriage too. She’d married a bad 'un, as Sam Clark had told it—divorced quietly a few weeks after. Emilie had gone away for a time after that and no one had seen her. Broken hearted, they speculated. Her husband had left with a cocktail waitress from down the mountain.
What had that cost a woman like Emilie, with her soft heart and sad eyes? He’d speculated on it more than he should have. It was as though he couldn't think about anything else besides Emilie Ferrier since he'd met her.
"Uncle Nick!" Adam held his flute aloft, hailing him. "What did you think? Did Amber like it?"
"We both loved it!" Nick told him. "Amber liked it so much, she fell asleep."
Adam frowned. "That didn't mean she liked it."
"She did," Nick disagreed. "She was laughing and clapping her hands before she went to sleep."
"Really?" Adam looked at his sister's sleeping face. "It was easy! Mr. Foster is a great teacher."
Mr. Foster came up and shook Nick's hand. He laughed and patted Adam's head, telling them both what a pleasure it was to have Adam in his class and how much he looked forward to seeing him after the Christmas break.
Emilie paused when she'd reached the shadows at the back of the auditorium. She looked back at Nick in his dark suit and deep blue shirt, standing beside Adam who was triumphantly waving his flute. The baby was asleep on Nick's shoulder.
Nick was tall and straight standing beside Mr. Foster's rather stooped appearance. His thick, dark hair held the light from the stage. His deep voice was audible as he spoke with the teacher.
She recalled suddenly what he'd smelled like, and felt like, that night in the car. His hands had been strong and gentle. His touch had excited her.
His sweetness with the baby and his patience with Adam made her feel that tug of attraction even deeper within her, but she was terrified.
You're too smart to be taken in by another good looking man,
she reminded herself, still staring up at the stage.
Even if he seems to be a good hearted too. Stick with the plan. You’re after Amber, not Nick.
Nick felt that familiar prickling of sensation and turned to find her eyes burning on him. Her lips parted as their gazes locked and held. Suddenly, whatever the teacher and Adam were saying made no sense whatever to him. The tension between them seemed to fill the auditorium as the music from the band concert had earlier that evening.
Emilie shivered with the longing that filled her. It swamped her senses and kept her rooted to the spot in the aisle, not able to look away.
Nick drew a ragged breath while heat suffused his body, making a jumble of all his good thoughts and intentions. Was it possible to feel, to desire someone from across a crowded auditorium?
Emilie turned away and the link was broken abruptly. She felt weak and weightless, as though she'd been fighting to swim a strong riptide that was threatening to swallow her.
Nick focused back on what Mr. Foster was saying about Adam. His body began to calm down. A glance from her and his blood was racing. He was glad that he hadn't taken her up on her offer to stay at her house over Christmas. He wasn’t sure what would happen between them if he saw her every day.
He shifted the baby more comfortably in his arms and willed his body to ignore the excitement it felt whenever Emilie was around. He didn't want to be involved with her, he repeated to himself. He didn't feel anything unusual when she walked into a room—or when she looked at him. No one could be so attracted to another person that they could be aroused just seeing her.
Nick told himself those things in a rational, unemotional statement. His heart whispered that he lied.
Chapter Seven
Emilie was sitting at her desk writing checks and answering letters. It was well past midnight. The wind howled around the eaves of the big house.
She hadn't been able to sleep. She didn't know if it was the wind coming down from the mountain or that she was too busy thinking about Nick, Adam and Amber.
She knew she was obsessing over them. She couldn't stop herself. For better or worse, she felt linked to them. When the children were gone and Nick was a person she wrote a check to every month, maybe then she’d be able to sleep at night without seeing their faces.
Sighing, she picked up the invoice from the garage for his work on her car. In bold letters at the top was his name, Nick's Service and Towing. She looked at the amount of the invoice and wrote a check to cover it.
Aunt Joda had consumed a little too much elderberry wine and fallen asleep in front of the fireplace in the sitting room that evening. When Emilie had returned home from the concert, she'd covered her with a blanket and turned off the light.
The frail old lady hadn't moved. Emilie studied her face in the firelight, wondering if she would look like her when she grew older. She wondered if there would be anyone to share her life, even as haphazardly as the two of them, when she was Joda’s age.
It was a daunting prospect, growing old alone and unloved. She pulled her robe closer around her and went up the stairs to her room.
Trying to decide what, if anything, she wanted to do about Christmas that year, Emilie heard a banging sound from the front of the house. It was probably a few shingles that had blown loose in the gusty wind. It would wait until morning when she could contact someone from town to take care of it. The house was old and in constant need of attention.
The banging came again. This time she realized that it was too steady, too rhythmic, to be shingles or shutters blowing in the breeze.
She got up from her desk and went downstairs. Joda met her at the bottom of the stairs.
"Someone's at the door," her aunt remarked casually, walking past Emilie towards the second floor.
"Where are you going?" Emilie wondered.
"To bed," Joda replied. "Where else?"
"I thought you might like to stay downstairs until I answer the door," Emilie answered. "You know, to find out if I'm raped and murdered when I open the door for some stranger in the middle of the night?!"
Joda yawned and kept going up the stairs. "It's not some stranger,
mon petite
. Are you answering your prayers or not?"
Emilie shook her head. Sometimes, she wondered if Aunt Joda really was really crazy or simply eccentric, as her parents had claimed with great dignity. It was difficult to tell the difference.
She walked to the door and opened it wide, wishing they had some type of intercom or even a small peek hole in the heavy wood door. She could at least see who was on the step.
"Miss Ferrier?"
She looked down into Adam's upturned face and heard Amber catch her breath to start crying again. Her little eyes were red in the dim porch light.
"Is that offer still open?" Nick asked hesitantly. His dark eyes were intent on her face.
Amber had her breath by that time and she let out with a lusty wail that rivaled the strong wind moaning through the night around them.
"Come in!" Emilie ushered them quickly out of the frigid night, closing the door behind them. She looked up the stairs into Joda's beaming face.
"I'll get something for the baby," her aunt said as Nick tried to quiet the screaming child.
"Wow! This place is huge!" Adam enthused, looking around the front entrance hall with wide eyes and hands that touched the six-foot tall statues of snarling lions that guarded the door.
"Don't touch those, Adam," Nick cautioned wearily while Amber continued to sob and cry.
"Come this way." Emilie led them toward the warmth and comfort of the sitting room that Joda had recently vacated.
Nick glanced around at the heavy, wine colored velvet drapes pulled closed against the night. Solid velvet chairs fronted the huge hearth where some coals still burned. The ceilings were easily twenty feet high. Books lined the walls in sturdy shelves while sculptures and paintings waited in the shadows.
He'd heard the stories about the house that Jacque de Ferrier had built for his family. The reality was much more impressive.
What the hell am I doing there?
Emilie threw some light kindling on the embers in the fireplace while Nick told Adam to sit down on one of the big chairs. He sat Amber next to her brother, wedged between the wide arms where they both looked at him with big eyes that gleamed in the light from the fire.
"Let me get that," Nick offered when he saw Emilie start to lift a larger log. He picked up the wood and added it to the small fire, poking it until the flames were reaching higher in the hearth.
Emilie had already picked up the baby and put her into her lap, talking gibberish to her and smoothing back her dark curls. Adam got up from the chair and climbed beside her, asking her questions about the house and the statues in the hall.
"Here!" Joda entered the room and walked up to the baby. "Give her some of this."
Nick looked between Emilie and the older woman whose white hair flowed down past her hips. "What is that?"