“I can see that.”
“See what?”
Eve turned as Charlotte came in from the dining room, a pink martini in hand. “Can I offer you one of these, darlin’?”
“No, thanks, Grandmother. I’ll have wine with dinner.”
“The same,” Mitch said.
“Good.” Charlotte sipped it with satisfaction while Mitch studied the pictures on the walls.
“Mr. Best has a high regard for family,” he observed. “I’m assuming these are all relatives, right?”
“Understatement of the year,” Eve murmured. “There’s a reason the walls are all painted white.”
The ceilings in the house were high, which meant there was a good ten feet of wall space on which to hang more pictures than anyone should see outside of a gallery. When she’d first moved here, Eve had wondered how Anne could stand it, but then she’d realized there were as many from her side. A cluster of their immediate family hung over the sofa. Portraits marched up the wall next to the staircase, forming their own staircase pattern up to the second floor. There were black-and-white pictures on either side of the windows, and over the sideboard, and flanking the wall unit that housed a flat-screen television.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a little pride in one’s heritage,” Charlotte said.
“Does he know who all these people are?” Mitch asked.
“We all do, young man. They’re our family. In fact, if you’d like to-”
“Grandmother, I’m sure Mitch doesn’t want to be introduced to every person in the room,” Eve put in.
“That’s the second time you’ve interrupted,” her grandmother informed her crisply. “Where are your manners?”
Eve blinked. “I’m sorry.”
“As I was saying, Bests have been in these parts for nearly a hundred and fifty years. It’s quite natural that Roy would want to preserve as many reminders of where he comes from as he can. Of where you come from, lovey doll.” She looked at Eve over the rim of her glass. “I look forward to the day when I can tell your children the stories attached to these pictures.”
She was not going to get into that discussion with Mitch standing there.
“Do you like children, Mr. Hayes?”
Oh, God. Somebody stop her.
“I have to confess I haven’t given it much thought. I have nieces and nephews, but I don’t see them very often.”
“Eve is going to have beautiful children,” Charlotte said with satisfaction. “Roy’s eldest girl married young, only eighteen, and hers are lovely. You’ll see them when they get here. That Christopher reminds me of Roy when he was a boy.”
“Grandmother,” Eve said desperately, “I’m going to show Mitch the upstairs.”
“Don’t get up to any monkey business,” Charlotte warned. “Your cousins will be here any minute.”
It took the entire trip up the staircase under the watchful eyes of people in top hats and crinolines before the scalding blush faded from Eve’s cheeks. “I’m sorry about that,” she said to Mitch. “She’s a handful. Says what she wants when she wants.”
“Nothing wrong with that. If, as you say, she lost everything, it’s natural she’d value what she’s got left-her family. And their pictures.”
“I meant about the monkey business. Honestly, I think she thinks I’m still thirteen and playing spin the bottle.”
He grinned and pulled her into one of the bedrooms. “You have a problem with spin the bottle? Because let me tell you, you are amazingly kissable when you blush like that. You can spin in my direction anytime.”
“I am not blushing.”
“Are so.” With the pad of his thumb, he brushed the arch of her cheekbone. “Right here.” He touched the other cheek. “And here.”
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“You took me up on a dare.”
“We agreed. We can’t go down there and pretend to be a couple.” His touch on her face was mesmerizing. In spite of herself, anticipation built as his fingers skimmed her jaw. “They’ll see right through it. Especially Grandmother.”
“Who’s pretending?” he breathed, and kissed her.
And there they were, right back under the ivy at the benefit. His mouth, so soft and yet so assured, coaxed hers open as she allowed the dammed-up desire that had been cooking inside her all day to burst free. She melted against him and slid her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, hauling him against her so that his big, hot body was fused to hers.
It was only for a moment. In just a moment she’d stop kissing him, stop falling into this fog of need that seemed to blow up between them and blot out reality.
Dimly, she was aware of noise below, but her senses were so filled with the scent of Mitch as his temperature rose, with the touch of his hands as they slid urgently down her back, with the taste of his lips and how they seemed to stoke the fire deep inside-
“Eve!”
Something small and hard rammed into her legs like a freight train and she gasped, jerking out of Mitch’s arms. Stupidly, she stared at the dark-haired boy wrapping her leg in a hug.
“Eve, it’s my birthday! Did you bring me a present?”
Mitch stepped back and sanity flooded in. Behind him, Emily, Eve’s cousin and Roy’s youngest daughter, hung in the doorway with the earphones of her iPod around her neck. She looked as embarrassed as Eve felt.
“I couldn’t stop him,” Emily said. “He came barreling into my room and then saw you guys across the hall.”
She hadn’t even noticed that Emily had been in her room. What if she and Mitch had gotten carried away, as they always seemed to do whenever they let themselves be alone together? Both Emily and Christopher might have gotten an eyeful that would have warped them for life.
Chris jumped up and down. “Present, present, present-”
“All right, all right, little man,” Mitch said as if he’d known the boy all his life. “The present’s in the car. I’ll get it. And happy birthday, by the way.”
Eve hugged Emily and followed Mitch and Chris downstairs. Now all she had to do was figure out how to keep the kid quiet-or at least distracted. Because what he’d interrupted certainly qualified as “monkey business.”
IN FORTY HOURS of digital TV footage, Mitch had not seen Eve as uncomfortable as she was now. She sat opposite him at a table laid out as artistically as a painting-Anne Best’s work. The lady might not be whipping out fouettés in Swan Lake any longer, but she sure knew how to bring art into daily life.
It was too bad that the whole scene reminded him of one of the photographs behind him on the wall-beautifully posed, with no indication of the emotion rolling around underneath.
“So, Mr. Hayes, where did you meet our Eve?” Charlotte Best asked after neatly cutting up her slab of roast beef.
“At the station,” he replied. “I was there on business.”
“What kind of business?”
How to put this without giving away too much? “I work for a network. We think her show can reach a wider audience, so I had some proposals for her.”
Emily snickered, and her mother frowned at her across two place settings.
“How long ago was this? Since we saw you at the benefit last night, I’m assuming it was before that.”
“That afternoon, in fact,” he said, just as Eve kicked him under the table.
“You only met yesterday?” Charlotte’s plucked eyebrows rose. “My, my. What a fast worker you are.”
“He was kissing her,” Christopher said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Gross.”
“Chris!” His mother, who had been introduced to Mitch as Karen, tried to hush him.
“Well, he was,” Chris said.
“You don’t need to point it out,” Karen’s husband, whose name Mitch had forgotten, told him. “Eve might not have thought it was gross.”