Nighttime Sweethearts

It worked. Her mother cooed with startled pleasure. “You won’t be sorry. You’re going to love him, Cynthia.”

So love was okay, and probably tumbling, too, as long as the suitor was mommy-approved. Her own cynicism took her by surprise. As she got ready, she managed to salvage a tiny bit of the enthusiasm she had first felt this morning by entertaining a fantasy just as probable as red roses and apologies.

What if it was him? What if the baron was the mystery man who had kissed her last night? Her mother had said he’d left early. Had he wandered down to the beach?

Not that she had detected even a trace of an accent. But then wasn’t it possible that a wealthy, well-traveled, well-educated German might speak without an accent? Maybe the raspiness of that voice had been a disguise.

She remembered that voice with a shiver. A voice made of gravel and silk. Impossibly sexy, utterly masculine.

An hour later Cynthia wondered if her mother might have been right.

What was not to love about the singularly handsome and charming young baron? If she had met him twenty-four hours ago, would she have considered him?

He was blond. He had intense blue eyes and a perfect cut of feature. He was casually, but tastefully, dressed, tan and extremely athletic looking.

But he was most definitely not the man she had met last night. She had known before she had even heard him speak, known as soon as she had seen him sharing the table with her mother as she entered the restaurant.

She was not sure how she had been so certain, but she had felt the ache of deep disappointment, which she was willing to admit was a funny reaction given the fact that if it had been her mystery man, she fully intended to greet him by slapping him across the face!

“You’re as lovely as your mother promised,” the baron said, giving her the full wattage of his smile.

Cynthia was pretty sure the young woman at the next table nearly fainted when he bent over Cynthia’s hand and placed a kiss on it.

It was a gesture of such old-world courtliness that she really should have appreciated it. Instead, she snuck a quick look around the room. The man from last night could be anyone here! He could be watching her right now! She felt a tingle of excitement as she contemplated that possibility.

The baron pulled back her chair, and over the next hour proved himself to be attentive, witty and charming.

To Cynthia, despite his considerable charm, the baron did not seem quite real.

She was not sure how it was possible that a man who had emerged from the shadows and then melted back into them, who had been far more dream than reality, could seem so much more real than the handsome flesh-and-blood man vying so nobly and sweetly for her attention.

She found herself scanning the restaurant over and over again, hoping to see someone who would be familiar in some way. In what way she wasn’t quite sure. She had not even seen the face of the man who had claimed her lips last night.

But as he had walked away, leaving her lips still tingling from the sensuousness of his kiss, she had seen the dark silhouette of his powerful build, been captivated by his grace, had been left with the sensation she would know him anywhere.

Restless thoughts stirred within her. Was she ever going to see him again? How? It felt as if she had to see him again, as if she could be returned to the sleeping state she had been locked in for so many years if she did not see him again.

Suddenly the baron and her mother seemed like a trap, a trap that would return her to that state of not quite living that she had accepted for far too long.

“Excuse me,” she said abruptly. “I just thought of something I have to do.”

“Nonsense,” her mother said, blinking at her with sweet warning. “Everything you have to do is for me, and we have nothing so urgent that we can’t spend a few more minutes with our charming companion.”

Cynthia stared at her mother, but she was seeing something else.

A young girl—herself—leaning over the bed of her dying father.

“Promise me,” he whispered, his last words, “Cynthia, promise me.”

“What?” she asked desperately. “Anything.”

“I’ve brought her nothing but unhappiness,” he said sadly.

They both knew he meant her mother. It had been a marriage made in hell, the spell of her father’s great looks soon waning in the face of his desperate unsuitability for her mother’s blue-blooded world.

“Cynthia, always look after her. Make her happy.”

She had promised, and it was that simple. Had it been a hard promise to keep? Yes. But duty came before passion. Those were the rules in the real world, the rules of her mother’s world.

There had been a boy in high school who had tested that resolve, from the wrong side of the tracks, as surely as her father had been. She could still remember the way her arms had felt wrapped around the leather of his jacket as she rode the back of his motorcycle.

She could still remember his name.

Rick Barnett.

Her mother had found out about him and had ordered her to end it. And she had. Cynthia had witnessed firsthand her mother and father’s exhausting and impossible efforts to marry two worlds. But more, Rick had brought out a wild side she would have been just as pleased not to make acquaintance with. That long-ago boy had brought her to the edge of her self-control—

“Cynthia,” her mother said sharply, bringing her back to earth. “Quit looking at me like that, as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

She felt as if she had seen a ghost. What had made her think of Rick, now, after all these years? When the pain of that loss finally had seemed dull and a long, long way away?

The baron’s hand covered Cynthia’s, and he smiled at her. “On the other hand, my dear, you may look at me any way you choose.”

Her mother giggled. “Oh, how utterly lovely you are, Wilhelm.”

Cynthia snatched her hand away, feeling oddly as though she had been unfaithful by letting another man touch her. She leapt up from the table.

“Really,” she said, “I must go.”

“But I was just going to ask Wilhelm to tell you about his yacht. That’s how he arrived here at La Torchere. He’s moored—”

Cynthia scrambled away, not even glancing back when her mother called after her indignantly.

She knew exactly where she was going and she didn’t stop until she arrived back at the beach that had enticed her last night.

It looked different in the day. A scene off a postcard of a perfect vacation—white sands reaching out to turquoise waters, palm trees swaying in a light breeze—but something essential was missing. The magic. The mystery.

Cynthia settled on a lovely wrought-iron bench that had been placed strategically at the sand’s edge overlooking the beach. She looked out over the tranquil waters, jade-shaded in the early morning light, trying to recapture something of what she had felt last night. Was it possible she had dreamed it?

Her gaze stopped on a large rock protruding from the tranquil waters of the cove and her breath caught in her throat. Something of what she was looking for—the essence of her experience—was in that rock.

Had it been there last night?

Had it been there before?

Of course it had to have been there! Huge rocks didn’t just appear in the water off the shore. The rock had the shape and size of a bear, massive and restless, the power unmistakable.

“Hello, my dear.”