Read Hot Christmas Nights Online
Authors: Farrah Rochon
Hot Christmas Nights (8 page)
* * *
Aiden felt as if he would crawl out of his skin as he waited for Nyla to open the door to the tiny apartment above the bakery. That she’d agreed to let him come up to use the restroom and get a cup of coffee before he continued on to Zurich was more than he’d expected.
“I’ll put the coffee on,” she said. “I have a travel mug that you can take with you.”
Aiden pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a weary breath as he sat on the sofa.
He’d tried to get her to talk this out on the three-hour drive back from Rome, but her rote response was “I can’t talk about it.”
Dammit
.
How had he let that admission about telling Cameron slip? He thought it was something he would take to his grave. Yet, in a way, Aiden was relieved that it was finally out.
He could never regret the outcome—he’d rather have Nyla mad at him for the rest of his life than to have her stuck in a miserable marriage with his womanizing brother. But Aiden had always felt a measure of guilt over the pain and humiliation she’d suffered. The more adult approach would have been for both of them to be up front with Cameron from the very beginning, when they’d first realized that the attraction between them was turning into something more serious. All of this could have been prevented.
Aiden ran his hands down his face. After the magic of yesterday and last night, he couldn’t believe they were back here again.
He jumped up from the sofa and walked around the room. He stood before the framed black-and-white photos on the wall and was nearly done in by the remorse that overwhelmed him. It could have been the two of them, walking along the streets of Paris.
Aiden tore his eyes away from the photos.
He walked over to the window that overlooked the cobblestone street. He prayed that snow would start to fall again. Maybe if it did, he could buy himself some time. Although, if the past few hours were any indication, Nyla wouldn’t care if he had to drive back to Switzerland in a blizzard.
He glanced down at the computer desk next to him. The words
Peachtree Street
scribbled on a yellow legal pad caught his eye. Aiden lifted the pad, his eyes roaming over the addresses listed, along with what looked like building dimensions.
Nyla picked that moment to walk back into the room. “The coffee is ready,” she said.
He held up the legal pad. “What is this?” She stared at the pad in his hand, saying nothing. “What are these addresses, Nyla? Have you been looking into places in Atlanta?”
“That’s not your concern.”
The blood in his veins started to quicken. “You’re moving back home, aren’t you?” he asked, afraid to acknowledge the excitement thrumming through his blood, but unable to stop it. “You’ve been planning to move back.”
“I was,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest and straightened her shoulders. “But I’m not sure I can anymore. It would have been hard enough being back home, but after what I learned today...”
Panic constricted the air in his lungs.
“Nyla, don’t.” He rushed over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t let what happened today stop you from moving back home. Look, if you can’t find a way to forgive me, that’s something I’ll just have to live with, but I can’t live with the thought of you staying out here, isolated from your family, not pursuing this dream you’ve wanted for so long, because of what I did.”
Her chin dropped to her chest and a soft cry reached out to grab Aiden by the throat. He put two fingers underneath her chin and lifted her face. Brilliant tears streamed down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s not as if I can go back in time and change what I did. It shouldn’t have any bearing on your decision to move back home.”
“Would you change it if you could?” she asked.
He pulled in a deep breath and shook his head. “No,” he answered honestly. “I love you too much to let you be unhappy. And I would rather take that misery on my own shoulders for the rest of my life if it means you wouldn’t be unhappy.”
Her body shook with the sob she cried. “I don’t want you to be unhappy, either, Aiden.” She looked up at him, her tear-soaked eyes so hauntingly beautiful they stole his breath. “You were right,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “We’ve suffered enough.”
Aiden didn’t dare to hope, but he had to ask. “Are you saying...?”
“I’m saying that I don’t want to live without you. I want to go home, and when I get there, I want to be with you.”
His knees went weak with the divine joy that coursed through his body. Aiden captured the back of her head and gently pulled her to him. He kissed her with everything he had inside him. He didn’t want to let her go. Ever.
“God, I love you, Nyla.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered. “From the very beginning, you’re the one I loved.”
Later, Aiden lay on his back, tracing light circles along Nyla’s damp, naked back. He’d never thought such bliss was even possible, but over the past few hours, Nyla had given new meaning to the word.
She tapped him on the arm. “Look at the clock.” She looked up from where she lay on top of him and smiled. “It’s Christmas.” She pressed a kiss to his chest. “Merry Christmas, Aiden.”
He cupped her jaw in his palm and ran the pad of his thumb back and forth across her cheek. “Merry Christmas, Nyla.”
Epilogue
N
yla tightened the scarf around her neck as another blast of rare near-freezing temperatures made the air coming off the fountain even colder. The New Year's Eve tourists crowded around them, all wanting to get a picture in front of the historic site.
She looked over at Aiden with a skeptical frown. “Are you sure you want to drink this? Who knows what's in this water?”
“You're the one who said that if I threw three coins into Trevi Fountain I would return here with the woman I love. If the legend states that the couple who drinks from this fountain will remain faithful and in love forever, we're drinking from this fountain.”
Her brow arched in amused curiosity. “So now you believe in the legend?”
A grin slipped across Aiden's lips. He tugged her forward and kissed her behind the ear. “I'm here with the woman I love, aren't I?” he whispered.
“Well, I guess that means we shouldn't argue with the legend.”
She cupped her hands under the running water. Bringing her hands to her lips, Nyla sipped and held her hands out for Aiden to do the same.
He smacked his lips and made a satisfied
ahhh
sound.
“This makes it official,” he said. “You're stuck with me.”
Nyla wrapped her arms around him, linking them behind his head. “There's no place I'd rather be.” She pressed her lips to his. “Whether it's in Atlanta, or Tuscany, or on the moon. As long as I'm with you, I'm exactly where I want to be.”
* * * * *
For all the wonderful people out there who tango with me…page after page, from one story to the next. Thank you! And for all the wonderful people who are just now hearing the music. May I have this dance?
For my biggest fan—my mom.
Christmas Tango
Opening Act
Chapter 1
A
round of thunderous applause filled the Mildred E. Bastian Theater, and as Wendy Kincaid finished her closing speech, walked offstage and disappeared behind a heavy velvet curtain, she beamed with pride.
The cozy campus theater was filled to capacity, including the VIP sections rimming the back row and the balcony, and Wendy couldn’t have been more pleased. This would make the first year that she wouldn’t end up owing the St. Louis Community College rental fees on the back end because she had finally accomplished her goal and filled every seat. That alone was reason enough for celebration but definitely not the only one. The other reason that she was so amped was because this year’s fall dance recital had been the best one yet.
She’d been on pins and needles all evening as one group after another had taken to the stage and dazzled the audience. Thank God there hadn’t been any mishaps or injuries, only loud, enthusiastic applause. And, judging by the looks on the faces of various audience members every time she’d peeked out from behind the velvet curtain, the recital had done exactly what it set out to do—celebrate the art of dance, spectacularly.
The little ones had been the cutest, with little pink tutus circling their waists and matching pink bows tied around the buns at the crowns of their heads. They ranged in age from three to five years old and she didn’t think there was one in the bunch who wasn’t missing at least one tooth.
They’d gone on first because they tired easily and their attention spans weren’t very long, and had made an absolute mess of their carefully choreographed and endlessly rehearsed ballet number. But they’d been so precious that Wendy could hardly begrudge them the fact that they forgot almost every single step that she and her assistant had taught them. It was enough that all fourteen of them had made it through the performance without any of them stopping to pick their nose or running to the front of the stage to greet a family member in the audience.
Her teens, bless their hormone-crazed little hearts, had gone on second and by the time they were done, she had to restrain herself from running out onstage and initiating a group hug. Not only would they have never forgiven her for embarrassing them if she had, but she would’ve also lost major cool points for outwardly showing so much affection.
They would’ve returned the hug, though, no doubt about that, because each and every one of them was well aware of how far they had all come—both artistically and personally—in the short time that they’d been together.
When she first opened the doors of the Wendy Kincaid Dance Studio five years ago, she’d been twenty-eight and filled with dreams of working with celebrity musicians, choreographing music videos and concert arrangements. But just like most of the dreams that she’d secretly harbored throughout her life, that idea hadn’t exactly panned out. Instead of attracting the high-profile attention she’d been hoping for, the dilapidated, single-story schoolhouse that she spent most of her savings renovating had only attracted the attention of children from a nearby housing project. They had wandered in after school, sometimes alone and sometimes in small groups, asking questions and poking around in the studios, and then they brought their parents.
Unable to deny the desperate need for local recreational outlets that provided safe alternatives to what the little ones would find in the streets
or
the pile of bills that keeping the studio open was steadily creating, Wendy had begun enrolling small classes and keeping her offerings simple. But as word of her studio spread beyond the borders of downtown St. Louis, into the outlying suburban communities, her classes had grown larger and larger, until she had to hire both a full-time and a part-time assistant and create an official class schedule. Now her studio offered ballet, tap, ballroom and a variety of contemporary dance classes, as well as weekly Zumba, yoga and Jazzercise sessions.
Her youngest student was a cherubic three-year-old and her oldest was a sassy seventy-five, and she enjoyed working with all of them.
But she especially enjoyed working with her teen girls.
Not that it was easy, because it definitely wasn’t. Teenagers, especially girls, were surly and temperamental, self-conscious and unpredictable. But they were also brutally honest when they didn’t know you and were afraid to trust you. She’d used that honesty and lack of trust to goad them into letting their guard down and expressing themselves physically. Trust had come later and so had the mentoring that she unwittingly found herself engaging in. Under her guidance, her girls had soared beyond their neighborhoods and their personal tragedies and each had come into her own.
And in the process, so had she.
Money and fame, Wendy had discovered years ago, weren’t what was important in life. Personal growth and positively impacting people’s lives were. The art of dance was. That was why she had struggled to keep the studio open all these years and why she’d scraped, scrimped and saved until the term
creative accounting
had practically become her middle name, to make sure that it stayed that way.
She’d be lying if she said she didn’t sometimes still think about what her life might’ve been like if she had actually followed her first dream, but whenever she did, it was never more than a fleeting thought. Well, maybe a little more than a fleeting thought, but still. She was happy and what she had to offer to the world made other people happy. Wasn’t that all that really mattered?
What about making yourself happy?
The thought came out of nowhere, creating a wrinkle of irritation in the center of her forehead that she used tired fingers to massage away. She was happy. Wasn’t she? That was what she’d told the talent scout from the Greeley Dance Company a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it? That she was happy running her own little dance studio and being her own boss? For the most part, she meant it, too.
Except, of course, that the Greeley Dance Company was world-renowned and a little voice in the back of her mind refused to let her forget it. The scout’s persistence had almost worn her down right there on the spot, but she’d made one too many snap decisions that had turned into major regrets over the years to agree to anything except thinking about their offer. Oh, but it was tempting. Greeley was offering her the one thing that she’d given up hope of ever having—a professional choreography career with a world-renowned dance company—and she wanted that so badly that it was almost like a living, breathing thing.
But at this stage in her life, was it realistic to think that she could actually have it?
Before heading home for the night, she checked in with her assistants about closing up after the recital, and then collected her jacket and purse from the dressing room she’d used as a makeshift office.
Tomorrow was Saturday and she was the only one who had early-morning classes scheduled, which meant that she needed all the rest she could get between now and then. As it was, she was half-starved, exhausted and on the verge of trading her vintage Volkswagen Beetle for a double cheeseburger and twenty uninterrupted minutes of sleep.
Wendy was still thinking about the decision that she had yet to make when she drove off the theater’s parking lot a little while later, stopped at a red light and dug her cell phone out of her purse. Besides her parents, there was one other person whose opinion on the subject mattered and after the phone rang twice on the other end, he answered.
“What’s up, beautiful?”
Warmed by the sound of his deep, baritone voice, she smiled. It was so contradictory to his personality. Underneath that hot-sex-on-a-platter voice, he was really more like the Sherlock Holmes of finance and everyone knew that Sherlock never did anything without first thinking it to death and then running it by Watson. There wasn’t a spontaneous bone in Frazier Abernathy’s body, a fact that really hadn’t bothered her until the offer from the Greeley Dance Company had appeared on the horizon.
Think about the offer,
he’d said.
Make sure it’s really what you want to do. You have responsibilities here, you know
.
And, of course, he was right. He was always right. She did have responsibilities here, which was why she told Frazier that she’d turned Greeley down. It was easier to lie to him than to suffer through his endless lectures about weighing pros and cons. She didn’t want to weigh pros and cons. For once, she just wanted to jump before looking both ways and see what happened. Was that too much to ask?
“I figured you were moping around because you were in meetings all evening,” she said, pushing aside her thoughts and focusing on traffic. The
Five Guys Burgers
take-out sign flashing up ahead caught her attention and her stomach growled ferociously. She gave in to it and activated the turning signal. “So I thought I’d call and let you know that I’m coming over, and bringing double cheeseburgers and milk shakes with me. What do you want on your burger?”
* * *
Frazier Abernathy couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Just to be sure that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, he checked and then double-checked the figures that his computer had come up with. All of the totals looked correct, but computers couldn’t always be trusted. Could they?
Telling himself that they couldn’t and that there was at least a slight chance that there was a miscalculation somewhere on the page, he reached across his desk and dragged an electronic adding machine toward him. His fingers flew over the keys and the longer he punched in numbers, the deeper the frown on his face became. Finally, he gave up, tossed the spreadsheet aside and relaxed back in his chair.
When was that woman going to learn?
Probably never,
he thought as he yanked the knot in his tie loose and blew out a strong breath. For as long as he and Wendy Kincaid had been best friends, which was something like twenty-five years now, she’d always been too concerned with whatever was going on up there in the clouds, where her head was most of the time, to be bothered with what was happening down here on earth, where everyone else’s were.
Dumping the bulk of her savings into an old, broken-down schoolhouse was the worst decision she could’ve possibly made and Frazier hadn’t wasted any time telling her that five years ago. As her financial adviser, he would’ve been remiss in his duties if he hadn’t sufficiently warned her and, as her best friend, he cared enough about her not to want her to throw good money after bad. But that was exactly what she’d done and the spreadsheet on his desk proved it yet again.
The Wendy Kincaid Dance Studio was just barely holding on by a thread and, despite every piece of advice that he’d given her to the contrary, Wendy was still ridiculously absentminded when it came to keeping track of expenditures and terrible at following through with collecting what he felt were already absurdly low student tuition fees.
For the past four years, she’d barely turned a profit, narrowly missing sliding over into the red by
this much
. This year, the situation was even worse.
The only bright side was the fact that the studio had recently been granted nonprofit status by the government, which meant that it could now receive funding from grants and donations to help with the cost of upgrading the facilities, and recruiting and maintaining staff. Maybe somewhere along the way he could talk Wendy into hiring a bookkeeper, both for her own good and, as her financial adviser, his sanity.
Suddenly restless, Frazier got up from his desk and went to stand at the window in his twentieth-floor office. The panoramic view of the downtown St. Louis skyline was beautiful at night, especially now that the Arch had been refurbished and lighting had been added for effect, and work on the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial had been completed.
To the east of his office building was Kiener Plaza and on any given day or night he could look down on hundreds of people taking part in some sort of local outdoor event.
And to the west was the Old Courthouse, made famous by Dred and Harriet Scott, slaves who had set a precedent when they petitioned the court for freedom from slavery, and also by the slave auctions that were once held on the steps out front.
During the day, the French colonial and early-American architecture that dominated the downtown area was nice to study and appreciate, but it came alive at night, thanks to strategic lighting and a little bit of imagination. That was what he’d always liked about downtown St. Louis—the constant activity and the mix of old and new. And it was why, after being away from his home city for nearly a decade, it was the only area that he would consider living in when he decided to come back.
Whether or not he was staying, however, was still up in the air.
As if Frazier had conjured it, an image of Wendy rose in his mind and lingered there. He’d dated many women through the years and some of them he had cared for deeply. But he’d never really been in love, not even when he stood before a justice of the peace two days after high-school graduation and married Monica Miller, his high-school sweetheart.
Wait, that wasn’t quite right.
The truth was that he’d never really been in love with a woman who
wasn’t
Wendy Kincaid. His marriage had only lasted eleven months, but by then he’d already been quietly in love with Wendy for years.
On some level he’d probably always been in love with her, now that he was thinking about it. Besides the fact that she was smart and funny and outgoing, she was also the most exquisite-looking woman he had ever seen. Her milk-chocolate skin was like silk and she moved inside of it so gracefully that it was like watching water flow.
She’d been dancing since she was three and after thirty years of dedication to her craft, her five-foot-ten-inch frame was lithe and almost boyish, which he supposed was par for the course. But as a slightly lopsided, devilish grin curved his lips, he thanked God that there were exceptions to every rule and in Wendy’s case, the exceptions were her toned, powerful legs and her perfectly rounded, plump butt. When he was a teenager, he wondered what those legs would feel like in his hands, but now he was a man and he intended to find out what they felt like wrapped around his neck.