All I Want for Christmas...: Christmas Kisses\Baring It All\A Hot December Night by Lori Wilde & Kathleen O'Reilly & Candace Havens

Author:Lori Wilde & Kathleen O'Reilly & Candace Havens
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780373797318
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

4

THEY REACHED AN unspoken agreement that night. Chloe kept her clothes on, and Eric kept his thoughts to himself. Chloe.

Chloe Skidmore. She had remembered her name when he said it. The sound was so familiar to her. She wondered what her married name was. She wondered about her husband.

“I’d like to use your computer,” she said politely, after dinner was done, after the strains of Beethoven were playing softly through the room.

“There’s no record of your marriage.”

She was surprised that he had looked. Surprised that he cared. “Maybe you were looking in the wrong places.”

“And you know the right places?” He raised one brow in the manor-born style designed to quash any question like a bug. The Marshall family had mastered the supercilious brow. His father, Edwin Marshall. His mother, Tinsley. Their only son, Eric.

“How are your parents?” she asked, deciding to change the subject.

“Old, bitter, rich.”

She smiled at the thought.

“You remember them?”

Oh, yes, she remembered them. She disliked them both. The Marshall family, the Price family, all the families that lived in the hills of Pine Crest. Sure, the Skidmores had lived in a mansion, but they didn’t belong there. She remembered that as well.

Her nod was jerky and tight, as was the lock in his jaw.

They were two sides of the same coin. If the fates flipped heads, your life was awesome. Tails, then you kept flipping the coin over and over again, trying to not be tails.

“Why are you a paramedic?” It was a noble profession, an honorable profession, but not exactly a silver-spoon sort of job. She’d figured that he would have been a lawyer. Harvard or Yale. Maybe Stanford if he’d developed a wild hair. Of course, Eric had always had a wild hair.

For the first time, his gaze seemed familiar to her. Rebellious, a little bit defiant and nervous, all at the same time. “I hated law school.”

“Yale?” she asked. Edwin Marshall was a third-generation graduate.

“Stanford.”

Chloe laughed. “I bet Daddy was horrified.”

“It was either that or William and Mary.”

A state school. “Quelle horreur.”

“Did you ever go to school? You always bragged that you were going to NYU.”

Memories swirled like wispy figments, flitting through her brain, just out of reach. Some things were so clear. Some things, like leaving her home and venturing out into the world of college or men or making money, were still a big ol’ question mark.

“Graduated top of the class, with a degree in finance,” she lied in grand Chloe Skidmore style.

“And after that?”

She lifted her shoulders in a casual shrug.

He was watching her, studying her and something akin to sympathy entered his eyes. “It’ll come back. You suffered a blow to the head, on top of the trauma of the fire. It’s pretty common, actually.”

And she was back to feeling the victim. She hated that feeling, hated the idea that she was dependent on him. Hated even more that all she had to do was leave. But she couldn’t. No, that was the hardest truth of all.

Needing something to distract her, she looked around the comfortable room, instantly noticing what was absent.

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