More Than Just One Night (The Selwood Sisters Novellas) by Claire Baxter

Chapter
1  
     
    Cora couldn’t believe she’d done it. True,
the evidence was sleeping alongside her, and gorgeous evidence he was, but if
someone had told her yesterday that she’d be spending the night with a man,
she’d have laughed. Loudly. Since her husband’s fatal heart attack, she’d had
enough to contend with just getting through each day; she hadn’t had the time
or desire to even think about...well, this sort of thing. And if someone had
told her that she’d be spending the night with a younger man, she’d have
asked them what they were on.
    But last night, she’d met Alex, and six years
of celibacy had ended in spectacular fashion. She turned her head on the pillow
to gaze at his face, all sharp angles and firm lines in the sunlight streaming
through the window. No salt and pepper in his black hair, but then there
wouldn’t be, would there? Because he was only…what? Early thirties? Thirty-five
at a push.
    What would he think when he saw her in
daylight?
    Oh, hell, that couldn’t happen. What an idiot!
She should have gone back to her own room while it was still dark. Now she had
a problem. Not only how to get out of bed without waking him, but how to make
it from his room back to hers without being seen by all sorts of people on the
way. Any number of them could be delegates at the same conference, which meant
there was a good chance of bumping into someone she knew, and if her
obviously-from-the-night-before dress didn’t give her away, her bed hair
definitely would. Gah! How had she got herself into this situation?
    The covers were tangled between his legs, and
there was no way she’d be able to extricate them without disturbing him. No
chance of doing the only-in-the-movies glide out of bed with the sheet wrapped
around her, then.
    She edged her way across the bed, then went
for it, swinging her legs over the side and rising to her feet in one movement.
Holding her breath, she looked back at Alex, but he didn’t so much as murmur in
his sleep. She exhaled with relief. Now to find her clothes.
    Having gathered all her belongings she locked
herself in the bathroom and turned on the light. With trepidation she looked in
the mirror and her hand shot to her mouth. The make-up smudges beneath her
eyes, made her look even older than her forty-two years. She looked nearly as
bad as she felt, and that was pretty bad. Too much wine.
    She could only be grateful that she hadn’t
been seen in this state by the thirty-something eye-candy sleeping in the other
room.
    What had she been thinking, dropping off to
sleep like that?
    What had she been thinking when she’d made
the decision to sleep with him?
    She shook her head at her reflection. She
wasn’t this woman. She didn’t make snap decisions; she was a planner to the
point of obsession, and she certainly hadn’t planned to do something so out of
character.
    After scrubbing her face, she scrambled into
her clothes, hurrying in case he woke while she was in his bathroom. The alcohol
had been a factor, of course, but wasn’t to blame entirely. The truth was,
she’d been thoroughly flattered when Alex had flirted with her. It had been so
long since a man had shown any interest in her at all, and the shock of finding
herself on the receiving end of his attention had made her lose all semblance
of common sense. It was the last night of the conference with no scheduled
activities, so when he’d suggested dinner, she’d been happy to share a table
with him.
    There was a big difference between sharing a
table and sharing a bed, of course, and she had no reasonable explanation for
making the leap from one to the other. She’d felt as if she were role playing,
and being away from home had contributed to a sense of an alternate reality. The
knowledge that no one need ever know what she’d done had been the clincher. She
could, so she had. Simple as that.
    She had no make-up in her handbag, but she
did find a comb, and she flattened her hair into something