The Night Remembers Read Free Page B

professional models, used to displaying their bodies before the eyes of both man and camera, changed anywhere there was room. They created privacy simply by turning their backs.
    "Hey, Daphne." Elaine hurried up to her employer, her voice several octaves higher than usual in her excitement. Her glossy brown bob swirled around her face as she moved, revealing glimpses of the large baroque pearls that adorned her ears. "Suzie just told me the most amazing thing."
    "I'll just bet she did," Daphne said dryly as she continued to match the dresses, which had been hung haphazardly on the metal clothes rack, against the list attached to her ever-present clipboard.
    "Well," Elaine prodded, hazel eyes wide with curiosity. "Is it true?"
    "Is what true?" Daphne didn't look up. Maybe if I ignore her, she thought, she'll go away.
    "Is that gorgeous blond hunk really your ex-husband?"
    "Modesty forbids me to comment on the 'gorgeous' part," said a warm, masculine voice from behind them. "But I am her ex-husband." Daphne didn't turn around but she knew he was smiling. She could hear it in his voice. "That is, if this elegant lady is the same Daphne who used to wear bell-bottom jeans and homemade tie-dye T-shirts."
    "Tie-dye T-shirts? Daphne?" Elaine's eyes got even wider, her head bobbing back and forth as she tried to look at both Daphne and the "gorgeous hunk" at the same time. "You've got to be kidding."
    "He isn't." Daphne spoke up before Adam could reply. "Believe it or not, those T-shirts were among my very first efforts at design." She put her clipboard down on a nearby metal chair and turned around to face the man who had once been her husband. "Hello, Adam."
    "Hello, Daffy," he said, calling her by that ridiculous nickname that no one else had ever dared use. "It's been a long time."
    "Yes," she agreed, because she could think of nothing else to say. It had been a long time.
    And, yet, Daphne felt as if it hadn't been any time at all. He was having the same effect on her he'd always had. Just the sight of him, close up like this, was doing strange things to her heartbeat. But what else had she expected? She had never, not once in the past eleven years, ever stopped loving him. Not even when she was married to Miles.
    They stood there, silently staring at each other, seemingly oblivious to the models and stagehands swarming around them. They didn't even seem to be aware of Elaine, standing wide-eyed with ill-concealed curiosity by Daphne's elbow.
    "So," he said softly, reaching out to gently grasp her shoulders. The neckline of her dress had fallen to one side, as it had been designed to do, and his hand made direct contact with her warm flesh. Daphne could feel the separate imprint of each long finger curving around the delicate bones of her shoulder.
    Such gentle hands , she thought, her mind instantly going back to all the times he had touched her, just so. He had always had gentle hands, big as a linebacker's, but infinitely gentle. Infinitely skillful. Indisputably the hands of a surgeon.
    "Let me look at you." He held her away from him as his gaze ran over her assessingly from the top of her elegantly tousled head to the toes of her bare strappy evening shoes, and back up again. "You cut your hair."
    Whatever she had expected him to say, it hadn't been that. Cutting her previously waist-length hair had been the least of the changes she had made.
    "Yes," she said again. Her hand fluttered to the back of her neck, fingering the soft, clinging tendrils and then, before she stopped to think about it, she reached up and touched the thick lock of blond hair that fell over his forehead. "So did you," she said, smoothing it back with a proprietary, almost wifely gesture.
    She didn't seem to hear his swift intake of breath at her gentle, careless caress.
    Wonderingly, she touched the tiny crow's feet at the corner of his left eye. Her fingers whispered over one of the twin creases that ran from nose to mouth in either lean cheek. His