Read Online JUST ONE MORE NIGHT by Fiona Brand - Free Book Online Page A

downstairs she had forgotten to close the door. The full weight of her decision to invite the only man she had a passionate past with to the scene of her seduction, hit home.
    If she had been thinking straight she would have asked someone to come with them. A third person would have canceled out the tension and the angst.
    Relieved when Nick didn’t appear to notice her room or the exotic makeover she’d given the bed, she ascended another small flight of stairs. Pushing the door open into a small, airless attic, she switched on the light. Nick ducked underneath the low lintel and stepped inside.
    He stared at the conglomeration of old furniture, trunks and boxes. “Did Katherine ever throw anything away?”
    “Not that I’ve noticed. I suppose that if the ring is anywhere on the property, it’ll be here.”
    As always when she thought of her aunt, Elena felt a sentimental softness and warmth. She knew Katherine had adored all of her nieces and nephews, but she and Elena had shared a special bond. She had often thought that had been because Katherine hadn’t had children of her own.
    Feeling stifled by the stale air and oppressive heat, Elena walked to one end of the room to open a window. The sound of a corresponding click and a cooling flow of air told her that Nick had opened the window at the other end.
    “Where do we start?” Nick picked up an ancient book, a dusty tome on Medinian history.
    “Everything on that side of the room has been searched and sorted.” She indicated a stack of trunks. “This is where we need to start.”
    “Cool. Sea trunks.” Nick bent down to study one of the old leather trunks with their distinctive Medinian labeling. “When did these come out?”
    “Probably in 1944. That’s when the Lyon family immigrated to New Zealand.”
    “During the war, about the same time my family landed. I wonder if they traveled on the same ship.”
    “It’s possible,” Elena muttered. “Although, since your family owned the ships it was unlikely they would have socialized.”
    Nick flipped a trunk open. Another wave of dust rose in the air. “Let me get this right. My grandparents would have traveled first-class so they wouldn’t have spoken to your relatives?”
    Still feeling overheated, Elena ignored her longing to discard her cardigan. “The Lyons were market gardeners and domestic servants. They would have been on the lower decks.”
    With a muffled imprecation, Nick shrugged out of his tightly fitted waistcoat. Tossing it over the back of a chair, he unfastened another button on his shirt, revealing more brown, tanned skin.
    Dragging her gaze from the way the shirt clung across his chest, Elena concentrated on her trunk, which was filled with yellowed, fragile magazines and newspapers.
    Nick, by some painful coincidence, had opened a trunk filled with ancient women’s foundation garments. He held up a pair of king-size knickers in heavy, serviceable cotton. “And the fact that some of them settled here in Dolphin Bay was just a coincidence, right?”
    The tension sawing at her nerves morphed into annoyance. She had never paid any particular attention to her family’s history of settlement, especially since her parents lived in Auckland. But now that Nick was pointing it out, the link seemed obvious. “Okay, so maybe they did meet.”
    Nick extracted a corset that appeared to rely on a network of small steel girders to control the hefty curves of one of her ancestors. “It was a little more than that. Pretty sure Katherine’s grandparents worked for mine.”
    Elena vowed to burn the trunk, contents and all, at the earliest possible moment. “I suppose they could have been offered jobs.”
    He closed the lid on the evidence that past Lyon women had been sturdy, buxom specimens and pulled the lid off a tea chest. “So, maybe the Messena family aren’t all monsters.”
    Feeling increasingly overheated and smothered by the cardigan, Elena discreetly undid the buttons and let it