The Hot September Nights

Chapter I

Aurélienne Blackwood day had started out badly and gone downhill from there. She'd thought the worst was the snag she'd hit at noon when a paparazzo had followed her into a deli and drawn so much attention to her that she'd left without her lunch. She figured it had actually hit rock bottom about twenty minutes ago.

She had learned to live with people who unsettled her. Strangers on the street routinely pointed or stared. Paparazzi and reporters emerged from nowhere, startling her with the flash of their cameras, assaulting her with questions inevitably designed to expose something anything-personal or sensational about any member of the Blackwood family.

She was accustomed to the attention. She wasn't always comfortable with it, but she had come to accept the near constant publicity that came with being a Blackwood. Her baby pictures had appeared in the national press, as had those of her siblings each time her wealthy, now-retired father and her mother, a princess who had given up an entire kingdom to marry him, had produced more progeny France had watched her grow up, and over those years she had learned to handle the disconcerting situations that occurred with astounding regularity

She pretended she could handle them, anyway, which was the best she could hope for considering how unsure of her self she often tended to be. But when Ethan Kensington III had answered her knock on her brother's door, she had been forced to admit that no one had ever unsettled her more than her brother Jackson's best friend.

She hadn't seen Ethan in ten years, but he still disturbed her. Not the way strangers did when they encroached upon her privacy. But in a far more fundamental and primitive way. The man was six feet, two inches of sandy-haired, carved and sculpted muscle, tension and testosterone. His steel-gray eyes had a way of looking at her that made her feel totally exposed, totally vulnerable. And she had never once been in his presence without feeling she would be to tally susceptible to him if she didn't keep her guard in place, He had also just become the only man who'd ever driven her to drink.

Granted, the drink was a rather excellent California chardonnay that she'd found in her brother's wine cellar. And having a glass gave her something to do while she waited on Jackson's deck for him to get home. But discovering that Erhan Kensington III could still make her uneasy enough to seek the first available excuse to avoid his company had her frowning at the nearly empty crystal goblet. That, and the fact that she didn't want to be where she was to begin with.

She had planned to work tonight. As far behind as she was, she desperately needed those uninterrupted hours. But her father had insisted her work could wait. He considered it far more important that she used her time to track down her brother and have Jackson's sign a trust amendment he had forgotten to sign when he'd been in Richmund last week.

Her dad, who ruled the Blackwood multimillion-dollar empire from a suite of offices ten stories above her decidedly more modest one, had informed her she could work late tomorrow night.

Having to make a two-hour drive from Richmund to Newport News frustrated her enough. In the time she spent on that round-trip alone, she could have done serious damage to the piles on her desk. But her mother had started exerting her considerable influence on her time, too. Just that morning, her mom had informed Aurelienne that she would have to give up her position as director of the scholarship program she helped administer if she intended to assist with fund-raisers like the gala charity auction she was currently working on twelve hours a day to have ready for next week.

It hadn't mattered that the auction was for the West Coast Shelter Project, her mom's new favorite charity. Or that Aurélienne had insisted that she truly could handle both. Her mother had said there was absolutely no need for her to work that hard.

What Aurélienne did had nothing to do with need as her mother had meant it. It had to do with feeling that she was earning her own way.

Smoothing the hem of her short red jacket over her white slacks, she settled back in the deck chair. Not liking her mood, hoping to change it, she told herself she might as well enjoy the break.

The effort lasted long enough for her to cross one knee over the other One low-heeled sandal dangling from her French-manicured toes, she restively swayed her foot and glanced past the wide, tiered deck and her brother's sailboat moored fifty feet beyond the cedar railing.

To be continued...