It was a good thing she was firmly sitting down or she would have stumbled, with her typical style and grace. “What? You mean your
family
doesn’t even know?”
He gave a shrug that wasn’t really an answer at all.
She stared at him, appalled. “Let me get this straight. You seriously had major surgery—someone drilled a hole in your skull and stuck a knife into your
brain,
for heaven’s sake—and you didn’t bother to mention this little fact to your family?”
“Technically, they removed a piece of skull and used a laser, then put the skull back. But yeah. My family doesn’t know.”
“I don’t understand. I had the impression from the way you spoke of them that you’re all quite close.”
“We are.”
“And you didn’t think they might want to know that you had a brain tumor removed?”
She couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around it—and her brain was completely intact, thank you very much. From all he had told her, his family was filled with wonderful people who gathered around each other in times of need. He had talked about his brother the wounded soldier and his other brother who had lost his wife with deep love and compassion—and yet when he needed that same hand of support, he had shut them all out.
“What good would it have done to worry everyone? Doctors first found the tumor the week before my pop’s wedding. They weren’t sure then whether it was benign or malignant. I couldn’t ruin things for him with that kind of news. And then we decided to go for the surgery while Pop was on his honeymoon. Again, I certainly wasn’t going to call him on his cruise and tell him to rush back to sit at my bedside when it was completely unnecessary.”
“Okay, I suppose I can give you that one. But what about the rest of them? Good grief, you have enough siblings for a basketball team with a couple of alternates! You don’t think a single one of them would have come to help you out?”
He winced a little at her raised voice—apparently his headache wasn’t completely gone. She was sorry for that but not sorry for her sentiment.
“It was my call and I made it. My family can be overwhelming and I didn’t want everyone fussing around me. A few trusted members of my household and corporate staff knew and that was plenty.”
She frowned, sensing something else at play here. He had purposely isolated himself from his family. Why? He obviously loved them. She would have thought he would automatically turn to them during what could have been a life-threatening health condition.
None of it was her business, she reminded herself.
“You can disagree with my decision,” he went on, his voice stiff. “But if you are unable or unwilling to promise you can keep this information to yourself while my family is here, I am very much afraid I can’t honor our employment agreement.”
She gaped at him. “Let me get this straight. You’re basically threatening to fire me before the paperwork even goes through if I so much as
think
about telling your family about the major brain surgery you neglected to mention to them.”
“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”
Oh, good grief. She threw up her hands. “Fine. Mum’s the word, then. I already told you I wouldn’t tell anyone. If that includes your family, so be it. Am I allowed to tell you I think you’re completely wrong? You obviously care a great deal about your family or you wouldn’t be going to so much trouble to have them all here for Christmas. I fail to see the point of even
pretending
to have a loving relationship if you shut them out when you need them most.”
“Duly noted. Now can we talk about something else?”
She
should
make some excuse and go back to bed but their disagreement seemed to have had an energizing effect. She didn’t feel tired at all, though she would undoubtedly pay the price in the morning.
“Sure. How is your headache now?”
“Better. Thanks. In case you wondered, coddling me isn’t in your job description.”
She was quite certain nagging him about his family wasn’t in there, either. “Consider it a bonus. I like to give my employers extra bang for their buck,” she said.
“Do you?” he murmured.
She could detect absolutely no innuendo in his voice but for some ridiculous reason, she could feel her face heat, anyway. She was suddenly aware again of the intimacy of the situation, the two of them virtually alone except for her sleeping child, in a darkened house, in front of a cozy fireplace.
“And you can see how well that’s been working out for me.” She tried for glibness.
“Temporary setback. You’ll get back on track.”
His confidence in her warmed her more than the gas fireplace.
The lines of strain seemed to have eased around his mouth, she saw with relief. Now he just looked lean and dark and compelling, especially with his hair a little messy and evening facial hair shadowing his features. Maybe it was the surroundings or the memory of him out with his horses but he didn’t look like the perfectly groomed executive right now, more like a sexy, slightly disreputable outlaw.
“Tell me how you became a hotel manager.”
“Assistant manager,” she corrected. “I was working my way up to manager, remember? Unfortunately, my one big shot at glory is now a pile of ash and rubble down by the lake.”
He smiled a little, as she intended. “Assistant manager, then. Why hotel management in the first place?”
She settled deeper in the comfortable chair, her mind retracing the steps that had led her to this moment. “I told you my mother died when I was in high school, right?”
He nodded. “How did it happen?”
“She worked the front desk at a small seaside motel owned by her good friend, just for a little spending money. It was only about a mile from our house and in good weather she liked to ride her bicycle to work. One night she never came home. My dad went out looking for her and finally found her mangled bike and my mom about thirty feet away. Hit-and-run driver. The police never found him. They said she died instantly.”
He flexed a hand as if he wanted to reach for her. “I’m so sorry.”
The pain of that original loss had never quite left her. Her life up to that point had focused on clothes and makeup and boys and studying hard enough to earn a scholarship, since her dad repeatedly lectured her they couldn’t afford tuition otherwise.
Her mom had been a constant source of encouragement, her biggest cheerleader. She had been funny and warm, someone everyone in town liked.
“After she died, her friend who owned the motel knew money was an issue for us. She hired me to help out during the summers and after school. I think at first I did it because it helped me feel closer to my mom but then I realized I really enjoyed it. I did check-in, housekeeping, took reservations, even learned a little about repair and maintenance. Wherever she needed help, she turned to me.”
“You must have done a good job.”
“I don’t know about that. I guess. I do know that even though I was still in high school, the owner put a great deal of trust in me and I didn’t want to let her down. It was the very best on-the-job training I could have received.”
Eliza had fantasized about taking over the Seaswept Inn eventually, but then the economy in the area took a hit and Karen had been forced to sell.
“After I graduated from high school, I was able to get a scholarship and obtained a degree in hotel management. I always wanted to open a small inn somewhere.”
Nothing big, just something she could dabble in while raising her family, too. How many times had Trent promised that when all his plans became reality, he would be able to buy her any inn she wanted? Countless. Like so many other plans they had made together when things were good, those dreams had died along with him.
“When my family arrives, you should talk to Lucy, my brother Brendan’s fiancée.”
“Oh?”
“This summer, she turned one of the historic silver-dynasty mansions in Hope’s Crossing into a bed-and-breakfast. I stayed there during my dad’s wedding and was really impressed.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“Yes. The thing is, Lucy is relatively new to the hospitality industry. I think it’s safe to say she’s still trying to figure things out. With your years of experience, you could probably give her all kinds of great tips.”
She couldn’t deny she was flattered. “Of course. I don’t know how much insight I can offer but I would love to talk shop with her.”
“Lucy is a marketing genius. Knowing her, by now she probably has network connections throughout the industry, including people who might be looking to hire someone with exactly your skills. I can have her put out some feelers for you, if you would like.”
She couldn’t afford to turn down his help. “Thanks.”
“I’m assuming you want to stay in Idaho.”
“If possible. Maddie’s doctors are all in Boise. I don’t want to have to start over somewhere new.”
“That makes sense.” He was quiet for a long moment. “How is she, really, if that’s not too intrusive a question? She seems perfectly healthy to me.”
“Right now she is. We’ve had a really good year. There’s a chance that will continue indefinitely. Some children with atypical cardiomyopathy never end up needing a transplant. Their condition is managed with a pacemaker and medication.”
“I hope that’s how things go for you and Maddie. She’s a great kid who deserves a normal, happy childhood.”
She smiled, touched by his words. “I agree. That’s been my prayer for her from the day the doctors first suspected her condition.”
“You’re a good mother. She’s lucky to have you.”
His quiet words seemed to seep into her own heart, past all her fears and inadequacies, warming a tiny space that had been cold and alone for so very long. “Thank you.”
“I mean it. I know it can’t be easy to have a child with health issues, especially when you’re on your own.”
“I’m not some kind of a saint, Aidan,” she said, her voice low. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that. Sometimes the strain and worry over her seems more than I can bear by myself. I cry myself to sleep some nights, wishing with all my heart that we could have that normal childhood you were talking about. Sometimes I’m so damn angry at God or fate or whatever for making my baby have to suffer. Other times, I just want to pick her up and run away to some tropical island somewhere and pretend everything is fine.”
She had never told anyone that before. Not even Trent. By the time he died, their relationship had been so strained, she’d kept most of her deepest emotions locked away for fear of completely unbalancing the precarious load that had become their lives together.
Why she had confided in Aidan, she didn’t quite know. Something about the night and the fire and the snowfall seemed conducive to sharing secrets.
She shouldn’t have said anything. She barely knew the man—
and
he was her employer. He didn’t need to know how tangled and chaotic her psyche could be.
“You’re probably wondering what kind of hot mess you’ve hired.”
He smiled a little and she was happy to see no trace of the pain that had etched his mouth earlier. “Actually, no. I was just thinking that while I truly regret the circumstances that led to meeting you, I can’t be sorry I did.”
His low words and the expression in those vivid blue eyes seemed to shiver through her. He wasn’t looking at her like he thought she was crazy. She saw admiration and respect and something else, a spark of something hot and hungry that sent nerves suddenly jumping through her stomach like butterflies doing the
paso doble.
She caught her breath. She was imagining things. She had to be. It was only a trick of the firelight. Aidan Caine, gazillionaire tech genius and all-around geek hottie, couldn’t possibly be interested in
her,
the perpetually stressed single mother he had rescued literally off the street the day before.
“I should go. It’s late and I have a busy day ahead tomorrow.”
If she didn’t leave, she would make a complete fool of herself over him. Hadn’t she just told him how she wanted to escape her problems and pretend they didn’t exist? He was the ultimate fantasy, the gorgeous and insanely wealthy man who would swoop in and rescue her from the stress and angst of her life.
And the whole brain-tumor thing, knowing he had walked through the valley of the shadow and all that. It brought out all her nurturing instincts and made her want to cradle his head to her breast and take care of him.
She could just see herself falling hard for him—and ending up battered and bruised emotionally.
Not
what she needed.
He rose as well. “Sorry I kept you up so late.”
“You didn’t. I...enjoyed talking with you.”
The flames flickered over his features, making him look rakish, slightly dangerous and infinitely appealing. She swallowed, trying to will herself to move toward her room but something seemed to hold her in place.
“Good night,” she murmured, at the same moment he said her name. Only her name, and then he murmured something that could have been a curse or a prayer and the next moment he stepped toward her and lowered his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Y
ES
. T
HIS
.
Eliza caught her breath at the first touch of his mouth on hers, firm, minty, delicious. He smelled so good, leather and sage and perhaps a hint of peppery citrus.
Some little voice in her mind whispered this was a lousy idea but she shoved it hard into a corner, tossed a big pile of mental debris on top of it and turned back to relishing his mouth against hers.
The attraction she had been fighting since she walked into the darkened kitchen—okay, let’s be honest, since she opened her eyes the day before and found that lean, compelling face gazing down at her—seemed to simmer through her, frothy and bright.
He kissed like a man used to taking what he wanted from the world, with single-minded concentration—as if he wanted to tease out every secret, every fantasy.
She was completely unprepared for the riot of sensations he evoked. How could she be otherwise? Nothing in her very limited experience could have prepared her for
this.
She had been so alone for so very long. The chance to lean into someone else’s strength, even for a moment, seemed like a wonderful gift wrapped up in shiny paper with a diamond-studded ribbon around it.
If she had her way, she would stand here in the dimly lit room the rest of the night indulging herself in the decadent kiss, like a child stuffing sweet after sweet in her mouth, even though she knew they would make her sick later.
She might have, if the wind outside hadn’t suddenly picked up, moaning under the eaves like some kind of warning siren.
She froze as that voice of caution suddenly managed to make itself heard again. What on earth was she doing? She was kissing Aidan Caine—
really
kissing him, tongue and all.
Okay, that sealed the verdict. She had absolutely no sense of self-preservation.
With one grand burst of self-control, she eased away from him, trying to catch her breath and reorganize the wild frenzy of her thoughts into some semblance of coherence.
He gazed at her for a long moment, his eyes a deep and vivid blue, and then raked a hand through his hair.
“For the record,” he said, his expression a bemused sort of regret she didn’t want to see, “that’s not part of your job description, either.”
She drew in a ragged breath, willing her racing pulse to slow so she could think straight. Why, oh, why hadn’t she listened to that warning voice? She should have slipped back into her room the moment she walked out into the kitchen and found him there.
“That’s probably a good thing,” she managed to say in a deceptively casual voice, “unless you want to have job applicants lined up from here to Boise.”
His laugh had an edge of surprise to it, as if he had expected some other sort of reaction from her.
“I mean it. I don’t want you to think I expect anything from you. I won’t forget again that you work for me.”
And that quite effectively put her in her place.
“Neither will I,” she murmured. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I really do need to try to sleep.”
“Good night.”
She didn’t have far to go to her rooms, which was probably a good thing since she felt so shaky and off-balance. Wouldn’t it be a lovely end to this strange encounter if she tripped over a side table or something and went sprawling at his feet?
Much to her relief, she managed to make it to her room without completely embarrassing herself—more than she already had, anyway.
Once inside, she closed the door behind her and sank into the wingback chair. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath and she could hear each rapid beat of her pulse in her ears, each surge of blood through her veins.
What in heaven’s name had just happened?
That kiss.
She could still taste him on her lips—minty, male, completely delicious.
She buried her hot face in her hands. She was
such
an idiot. She remembered her own eager response, the clutch of her hands around his back and the way she had kissed him with that wild urgency and she wanted to die.
She had just tangled tongues with
Aidan Caine,
for the love of all that was holy.
What was the matter with her? She hadn’t even
thought
about another man in three years, too busy scrambling to care for Maddie’s needs, to keep the financial wolves at bay, to rebuild their lives. Romance had been the last thing on her mind.
She had been too damn busy to think about how lonely she was, how she missed a man’s arms around her and someone else’s steady strength to lean upon.
She dropped her hands and gazed into the darkened sitting room. When had she
ever
had someone else to depend on, except the early few years of her marriage? Since her mother’s death, she basically had been forced into emotional self-reliance. Her father had never been demonstrative and losing the wife he loved and depended upon hadn’t suddenly turned on some magical switch.
Trent had been wonderful in the beginning. The perfect boyfriend. She wouldn’t have married him if she hadn’t been sure she could lean on him. She could honestly say the first two years of their marriage had been everything she wanted.
But gradually things began to shift. The minute that plus sign showed up on the pregnancy test, it seemed as if everything had changed.
Financial success became the only thing that mattered to him, to the point of obsession—and not just financial success, but
instant
financial success. He had pursued one get-rich-quick scheme after another. Day trading, direct sales, real estate flips.
If someone else had made a dollar at something, Trent had been determined to make a thousand.
After Maddie was born with a heart defect, achieving success had become almost a compulsion.
She would have been thrilled with a steady paycheck, decent health insurance, but he wouldn’t listen.
“This is it, babe. The big payoff. I swear it.”
How many times had he said those words to her? At first, she had been stupidly proud of him for working so hard to support their family. Gradually, that had become the only thing that mattered to him. Not her, not Maddie. Just adding more zeros to their bank balance.
His last grand idea had actually been a good one, surprisingly enough. He had come up with the concept for a revolutionary new productivity app and had begun working with a developer friend of his from college.
He had been determined to sell the idea to one of the big Silicon Valley companies—and of course, Caine Tech had been his first choice for their forward-thinking products and phenomenal success rate.
Somehow through a friend of a friend, he had finagled a meeting. Not with Aidan, she knew that. Trent had called her after leaving the company, ranting about how he had been fobbed off on a couple of lower management flunkies who didn’t have the imagination or brains to see the genius of his idea.
After a few moments, the rant had turned despondent and she had spent a few moments trying to play the supportive wife while inside she had been completely exhausted and wondering how much longer she could do this.
He had told her he was going to stop off for a drink. Just one, he’d said, because he deserved it after that complete waste of time.
Two hours later, he was dead in a single-car accident—or at least she hoped it was an accident. She would never know if he had hit that barrier intentionally or just been too impaired after
six
drinks.
For a man obsessed with providing for his family, Trent had been remarkably shortsighted. He had racked up thousands in debt—and had missed their life insurance payment three months before his death.
She released a long breath now, trying not to think about that terrible chapter in her life. She had grieved for her husband and the life she had once imagined for them together and his death had reinforced that Eliza could only truly depend on herself.
* * *
L
ONG
AFTER
E
LIZA
returned to her room, Aidan sat in the dark kitchen trying to analyze what the hell had just happened.
He wanted to blame a hundred different things. The warm, seductive intimacy of the quiet kitchen, the pain medicine he hated that seemed to make him act in strange ways.
The hard truth of the matter was that he had
ached
to kiss her, quite fiercely. As he looked back on the past few days, he realized this attraction had been simmering inside him almost since the beginning.
The attraction part he fully comprehended. Eliza was a beautiful woman, with that silky spill of honey-streaked hair, the green eyes flecked with gold, the little smattering of freckles across her nose. Hers was a soft, understated beauty, fragile and sweet and deeply appealing.
This aching hunger inside him might be a normal, perfectly understandable physiological reaction to a beautiful woman—especially considering he had been living like a monk for the last three months.
Acting upon it was a completely different story.
She worked for him! He had a firmly held personal policy not to become entangled emotionally with the people who worked for him. He tried not to be cold or harsh about it, only resolute.
While he cared deeply for long-term employees like Sue and Jim, Louise, a few others in his trusted circle, he had learned not to combine romantic relationships and business. They created a toxic mix for everybody involved, as he had learned from bitter experience early on when a few overambitious women had tried to take advantage of him—including one miserable lawsuit he would prefer to forget.
Eliza worked for him, which automatically made her completely off-limits to anything like heated kisses in the early morning hours. Yes, her employment was temporary and maybe a bit unorthodox but that didn’t change the underlying philosophy.
Beyond that, Eliza was not his usual sort of woman. He typically was drawn to sophisticated, urbane women after the same sort of relationship he wanted—casual, easy, uncomplicated.
A young widow with a medically fragile child—however adorable Maddie might be—didn’t strike him as someone who would be amenable to a quick fling.
The reminder served as the same bracing shock he would have gotten from sticking his face in the snow.
So. Lesson learned. He had to avoid intimate conversations with her in seductively quiet rooms. He could do that. Now that he was aware of his attraction to her, he would just have to be careful to keep out of situations where it might become an issue.
He had always been able to compartmentalize easily and had learned to shove aside the unimportant in order to focus on higher priorities.
He knew people thought him cold and emotionless. Even his siblings accused him of it. He wasn’t. He felt things just as deeply as everyone else—maybe even
more
deeply—but his long and difficult grieving process after his mother’s death had one good side effect in that he had learned through it how to put aside fears and hurts and loss and distill his concentration toward meeting his goals.
He considered his single-minded focus one of his greatest strengths—and he would simply apply the same principle to the quandary of Eliza Hayward.
Forgetting that intense kiss wouldn’t be an easy task but he would just have to force himself to try in order to return things between them to a professional level.
She would only be here for a few weeks. How difficult would it be to shove down his inconvenient attraction for that time, especially since he would no doubt be distracted once his family arrived?