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Ned. If she’d been
disconsolate a minute ago, she was fired up now. Nobody, not Ned with his
seductive hazel eyes and incandescent smile, not Edie with her territorial
testiness, not Melanie Steele with her haughty affectations— nobody was
going to keep Claudia from catering this cotillion successfully. If it meant
working nonstop for the rest of the afternoon, running the kitchen in jeans and
a ponytail, frosting the cake at the very moment Glenwood’s finest young ladies
were being presented to society, she would do it. If it meant locking Ned out
of the kitchen, out of her thoughts, out of her heart, she would do it.
    The
party was going to be Claudia’s personal triumph. She refused to consider any
other outcome.
    She
was swinging through the kitchen door when she felt Ned’s hand on her shoulder.
“I’ve got a lot to do,” she warned him, ordering her body not to respond to his
touch.
    “I
know,” he said. She heard no suggestive undertone in his voice, only quiet
concern. “Listen, Claudia. Bring everything you’ll need for tonight.
Everything. You’ll have a room upstairs, your own private bathroom. We’ve got
towels, bath salts, beds, easy chairs…whatever you need. The house is yours.”
    She
opened her mouth to object. She had a perfectly fine shower at home. She had towels.
She had a bed—which she hadn’t had time to make that morning.
    She
could imagine what the upstairs of Ned’s childhood home would be like: the
sumptuous bedrooms furnished with antiques, the private baths with their brass
fixtures and inlaid tiles, the hallways as wide as Claudia’s entire house. The
elegance. The class.
    Contrary
to Ned’s claim, this house wasn’t hers. But given how hard she was going to
have to slave during the next few hours to make this party come out right…
    She
deserved the run of Wyatt Hall. She deserved to pretend the house was hers. And all these troublemakers—Melanie, Edie, and most of all Ned with his
alluring lips and his mesmerizing touch—had better stay out of her way.
     
     
     
    Chapter Seven
     
    4:45
p.m.
     
    CLAUDIA
RESTED HER HEAD against the high lip of the claw-foot tub and sighed. The air
in the bathroom was steamy with the tart scent of apple blossoms. The water
swirling around her tired body was thick with fragrant bubbles.
    Downstairs,
the third batch of chocolate cake layers was chilling in the refrigerator. She
didn’t trust Edie not to sabotage her cake yet again, but Ned had promised to
protect it with his life. He had a way with Edie.
    He
had a way with Claudia, too, she admitted. More than the lavish decor of this
bathroom, more than his generosity in opening a bedroom suite for her, more
than his insistence on guarding her chocolate cake… Oh, yes, Ned had a way
with her.
    The
scented bubbles of her bath caressed her flesh and made her think of him. The
warmth of the water melted her tension the way his hands had when he’d rubbed
the small of her back. The rising vapor whispered across her skin the way his
breath had an instant before he’d kissed her.
    And
kissed her. And kissed her.
    She
forced her eyes open and looked around once more, taking note of every
luxurious detail in the room. This was what John Edward Wyatt IV was all
about. She mustn’t let herself forget that.
    Pandemonium
reigned downstairs, but tucked away in her cozy second-floor retreat she was
completely shut off from the musicians setting up on the balcony, the
bartenders in the solarium, the waiters, the grounds crew stringing spotlights
along the driveway. She couldn’t hear anything but an occasional bubble braking
against her chin.
    So
much still to do. The cake to frost, the entrées to heat, the appetizers to
arrange on trays. But all she wanted to do was soak in the tub, imagining what
her life could have been like if what Ned’s mother had said about love at first
sight were true. She closed her eyes again and fantasized that the warm,
lulling water was Ned’s fingertips,