‘Wait a minute!’ Nick smiled and held up his hand. ‘Can you translate that into English?’
‘Oh. Sorry. Well, print runs can range from—’
She explained. Print runs. Sell-throughs. Wholesalers, and distribution, and dealers. And he listened. Tried to listen, anyway, but it was tough. This astute woman—this knowledgeable businesswoman—was the same girl who’d never balanced a checkbook in her life, until he’d shown her how.
‘I never had a checkbook before,’ she’d said, when he’d almost gone crazy the first time the bank had phoned to say their account was overdrawn.
‘That’s unbelievable,’ he’d snapped. ‘How could you never have written a check?’
‘I charged things. I mean, I had accounts wherever I needed them.’
That was the first time he’d really understood how different they were. They weren’t just a rich girl and a poor boy trying to make a marriage work, they were people from planets at the opposite ends of the galaxy, struggling to find a common language.
‘I’m boring you.’
‘What?’ Nick blinked. ‘Boring…? No. Not at all. I’m just fascinated by, you know, how you’ve changed.’
‘I’m not eighteen anymore,’ she said quietly.
He nodded. ‘Seven years is a long time.’
‘A lifetime.’
Nick cleared his throat. ‘Are you—are you happy?’
‘Yes.’ Or, at least, she’d thought she was happy. Until the dreams. Until last night. ‘Yes,’ she said, and smiled brightly. ‘I’m very happy. I love my work. And I love Boston. I’ve made lots of friends, and I’ve got this wonderful apartment… What about you? Are you happy?’
Nick hesitated. He hadn’t hesitated a month ago, when a reporter on This Week had slyly posed him the same question. ‘Of course I am,’ he’d said.
‘Nick? Are you happy?’
‘Sure.’ He smiled. ‘Life’s been good to me.’
‘I know. I see the Brennan name everywhere. In fact, I stayed in a Brennan hotel the last time I was in Dallas on a book-signing tour.’
He grinned. ‘And? Did it win the Holly Cabot seal of approval?’
His smile made it all right; there was no anger to the words this time, the way there’d been last night.
‘Absolutely. Fresh flowers in the room, chocolate on my pillow at bedtime. Nothing was missing…’ Except you.
The cup slipped from Holly’s hand and clattered against the table. Coffee oozed over the polished wood.
‘Here,’ Nick said, ‘let me—’
‘No. That’s okay.’She stabbed at the spill with her napkin, then got quickly to her feet. ‘Well. I guess it’s time to clean up. Why don’t you take a pot of water from the kitchen and heat it over the fire so we can do the dishes?’
He nodded. ‘Sounds like a good idea.’
He stood up, his gaze following Holly as she walked to the kitchen. There’d been something in her eyes, a moment ago. Regret? Pain? No. He was seeing what he wanted to see—and what did that mean, anyway? There was nothing to see, nothing to look for except that which he’d come for in the first place.
Closure. And, thanks to the storm, and the enforced intimacy of the long night, he had that.
He could leave today, knowing he’d made peace with his past, and with Holly.
Holly. Once she’d been his wife, and his lover. Now, at long last, she might just have become his friend.
And that would have to be enough.
* * *
‘What’ve you got in this thing, anyway?’ Nick grunted as he heaved the ice chest from the trunk of Holly’s car. ‘Rocks?’
‘Supplies,’ she said, hurrying ahead of him to open the door. ‘Here. Put it on the counter.’
‘Supplies, huh?’ He groaned as he set the chest down and turned towards her. ‘I brought “supplies”, too. They didn’t weigh enough to give a guy a hernia.’
‘Well, I told you, I’m going to be staying a while. And I’m going to be working up some recipes. I’ve got a new book to write.’
Nick leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. ‘One Hundred and One Ways to Cook Chicken?’
Holly laughed. ‘More like a hundred and one ways to cook lobster.’
His brows lifted. ‘People can dine on the cheap eating lobster?’
‘I write for a different crowd now.’ Holly wrinkled her nose. ‘Two-income households, lots of money but no time to cook during the week, so they go all out on Saturday and Sunday.’
‘Ah. Yuppies.’
‘Or whatever they’re called today. How about you?’