It was the middle of the afternoon, so the cafeteria was plenty busy, and several people spoke to him. Bits of conversation were audible above the clank of flatware and the hum of people’s chatter. Everyone asked about Erik. Or the upcoming basketball game on Friday. He seemed to answer all comers, but he didn’t exactly linger over them.
And that response wasn’t altered whether or not the person to approach him was a man or a woman, she noted.
Then, when his tray was loaded with a plate of meat loaf, potatoes and salad, he didn’t find a chair in the cafeteria, or head to the courtyard beyond the tall windows overlooking it. He simply pulled a thin wallet from his back pocket, flipped out a few bills for the cashier, and strode right back out of the cafeteria again, his demeanor neither welcoming nor standoffish.
She chewed the inside of her lip. What kind of a teacher would a man like that be? Stern, authoritative? Factual and removed? She certainly couldn’t imagine him kicking back in his chair behind the large metal desk she remembered her high school teachers possessing, grinning in response to the rowdiness of a roomful of teenagers.
He was far too serious for that.
She walked out of the cafeteria, still watching him walking ahead of her, the tray held capably in his long-fingered hand.
She knew the man was strong. And she knew—having seen him in one of the worst situations a parent would ever find themselves—that he could be incredibly gentle with his son.
Realizing that she was still staring after him even when he’d entered the elevator for the second floor, she felt her cheeks heat and glanced around, hoping nobody noticed her hovering there in the corridor like some gawking groupie.
The fact was, she knew certain things about Cameron and she was enormously curious to know more, and it wasn’t all caused by the fact that her hormones had unfrozen with unseemly haste the first time she’d ever seen him.
But Cameron Stevenson was a family man, pure and simple.
So it didn’t matter what sort of effect he had on her.
She wasn’t going down that road ever again.
Chapter Five
“You came!”
There was a wealth of delight in Erik’s young voice when Faith stuck her head in the door of his hospital room the next afternoon.
She pushed open the door wider, laughing a little. “Considering the way you’ve called me three times since this morning, did you think I’d forget?” Erik’s first call had been at eight o’clock, and since then he’d gotten progressively more creative in his persuasive entreaty to visit him.
She hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she’d planned to drop by all along. It might well have ruined his fun.
But her laugh hiccupped in her throat when she realized that Cameron was in the room, too. He was sitting in the corner, a stack of paper in his lap. For some reason, she’d expected him to be at the school.
“Hello.”
“Ms. Taylor.” He looked back down at the sheet, and began slashing his red pencil across it.
Faith pitied whoever the student was who’d completed that particular assignment. As for her, she felt pretty well dismissed, and didn’t much care for the sensation.
But, she deliberately reminded herself, she hadn’t come to see Cameron. She’d come to see Erik. So she focused on the boy. “How are you feeling today?”
He pulled a face. “They don’t let me do nothing here. I don’t see why I gotta stay here ’til tomorrow. I wanna go home now.”
There were two chairs in the room, with Cameron occupying one. Yet she didn’t feel comfortable enough to pull up the second, so she stood beside Erik’s bed, instead. “They just want to make sure you’re all healed up in here—” she lightly riffled her fingers through his mop of hair “—before you go climbing drainpipes.”
“Drainpipes?”
“Don’t give him ideas,” Cam murmured from the corner.
“I’ll tell you about ’em later,” she whispered, sotto voce.
Erik grinned.
Cameron did not.
She eyed the video games still stacked beside Erik’s bed. “You have your games, at least, to keep you from getting bored.”
“Dude, you got no idea how boring it is, though.”
Dude? Her lips twitched. “I could bring you a book.”
He looked askance and she laughed outright. “The horrors of it, huh? But I thought you liked going to the library for story time with Miss Emelda.”
“I do. ’Cause she’s got the best stories. But I don’t gotta read them.”
“Don’t have to,” Cameron corrected.
“Yeah. That.”
Faith slid another surreptitious glance toward Cameron only to find his gaze not buried in his schoolwork, but firmly fixed on her. Wishing she would leave?
“Well. How do you feel about checkers?” She pulled out the travel game she’d stuck in her purse before coming to the hospital, and showed it to Erik.
“Cool.” Erik scooted up on his pillows, folding his legs. “Can we play right now? Huh?”
She set the game on the mattress. “If it’s all right with your dad.” Cameron seemed to have gone very still and she lifted her eyebrows, giving the man plenty of opportunity to stop them. But he just nodded after a moment, then started scrawling with his red pencil again, his movements sharp.
Faith chewed the inside of her lip. His uncommonly stark expression tugged at her.
Erik noticed nothing amiss, though. His hands were busy as he unfolded the checkerboard right there on the bedding below his folded legs and doled out red and black checkers. “Come on, Faith.”
She slowly perched her hip on the mattress. “I see you’re not a novice, here.”
“What’s a novice?” His fingers rapidly placed the pieces—both hers and his.
“A beginner.”
Erik laughed. “Me ’n’ Dad play all the time.”
“Guess it’s a good thing we’re not playing for money then.” She couldn’t help looking at Cameron again, adding another brushstroke to the painting of him in her mind. “Because I haven’t played checkers in a really long time.” Maybe Cameron didn’t want anyone else playing the game with his son.
Yet that idea didn’t feel right, either.
“You go first.”
“I thought black went first?”
“Yeah, but you’re the girl, so you gotta go first.” Erik shook his head as if the matter were obvious.
“Well, I need all the help I can get against a regular player like you, so I’ll take advantage of such chivalry.” She slid a piece diagonally forward.
“What’s chivalry?”
Dead, according to a good number of her friends. “It means being very courteous to women.” She pushed another piece forward.
“Huh.” Erik backed up his first piece with a second. “Dad says that’s what we men gotta do.”
Another unexpected brushstroke.
She blindly pushed another piece forward, which Erik immediately captured. He crowed and set her man on the blanket beside the board. After he made another capture, though, she decided she needed to pay a little closer attention. Erik’s chivalry might have extended to allowing her the first move, but it certainly didn’t extend to showing mercy once the game began.
Cameron watched Faith slowly fold up the sleeves of the khaki long-sleeved shirt that should have looked more official than appealing, and slide a little more fully onto the bed. He noticed her next move was made with far more deliberation than the previous ones.
He also noticed that Erik was thoroughly engrossed. His head hunched forward a little. Faith’s blond head hunched forward a little. Their two heads didn’t quite meet over the checkerboard, but it was close.
He set aside the math tests he was grading and rose, quietly leaving the room. Neither Faith nor Erik seemed to take note, and that was fine with him.
In the hall outside, he pressed his head back against the wall. There should’ve been an ache inside him. And be
cause there wasn’t, he found a new ache.
And he couldn’t get the sight of their heads over the checkerboard out of his head no matter how hard he tried.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there when the door to Erik’s room swished open and Faith touched his arm.
“Are you all right?”
He hadn’t been all right since the day Laura died. “Needed to stretch my legs.”
Her lashes lowered, hiding her expressive eyes. “I’m sorry if you think I’ve been…intrusive.”
He straightened up at that. “Why would I think that?”
“Well—” she exhaled a little. “I can tell you don’t really want me around here. But once Erik is released and back to normal, he’ll quickly lose his fascination with me.”
“I never said I didn’t want you around.” Irritation shortened his voice. If only that were the problem.
Her changeable eyes looked up at him at that. He could handle the curiosity and challenge glinting in them. But the vulnerability?
“Right,” she returned. “That’s why you glower every time I come within five feet of you and your son.”
“I don’t glower.”
“You couldn’t even say hello to me when I arrived.”
“Erik gushed enough for both of us.”
She huffed, skeptical. “Please. You also hated the toboggan yesterday. Thank goodness I didn’t bring him a snowboard, which I strongly considered. Why don’t you just admit it?”
“I don’t hate it.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I hate the fact that, no matter how hard I try to protect him, he still manages to get hurt. Okay?”
Her lips parted for a moment, then closed. “He’s seven,” she finally said. “He’s bright and curious. Accidents can sometimes happen.”
“And sometimes people don’t survive them,” he said flatly. “If you hadn’t been there to get him out—” His throat closed. “I owe you. Okay? And I don’t like owing anybody. Particularly when I should have prevented what happened in the first place. I should have known that Bodecker kid was filling Erik’s head with stories. I shouldn’t have taken Erik to the wedding in the first place. There’re a lot of things I should have done, and I didn’t.” He wasn’t speaking only of the past weekend, either. His should-haves went back a lot further than that.
She was silent, her eyes not entirely convinced.
“I used to play checkers with my wife. Erik’s mother,” he said abruptly. “In fact, on our first date, she prodded me into it.” He’d come bearing tickets to the ballet, figuring the ethereal art lover whom he’d first spotted at a gallery showing would have been enchanted. Instead, they’d ended up sitting cross-legged on a checkered blanket in a city park, using the pattern on the blanket as the board, and torn pieces of French bread as their playing pieces, and he’d been the one enchanted.
“I’m sorry.” Now, Faith looked stricken. “I had no idea.”
How could she? And it wasn’t the fact that another woman was playing checkers with his son that tore at him. It was the fact that looking at another woman playing checkers with his son had made him feel things he had no right to feel.
Even before the checkers, he’d felt things whenever Faith Taylor was in the vicinity. He didn’t want to feel…anything.
“It’s not you,” he said gruffly. “I just—”
“—miss your wife,” she finished softly.
He closed his eyes. He’d loved Laura. But he hadn’t changed his life for her until after she was gone and it was too late.
Did he miss her?
He wasn’t even sure of that anymore.
He scrubbed his hand down his face, leaving Faith to her assumption. “I need coffee.”
“Frankly, you look like you need a good night’s sleep more than you need caffeine,” she countered evenly. “I suppose you don’t want to owe the staff here at the hospital, either, for doing their jobs. What have you been doing? Staying with Erik around the clock?”
“Yeah. That’s my job.”
Her lips compressed. “And you’ll be able to do it so-o-o well, when you’re comatose from lack of sleep.”
“I sleep.”
“Where?”
“On a cot in Erik’s room.”
Her gaze drifted up and down his body, clearly taking a mental measurement. “Must be mighty comfortable,” she said after a moment. “Is that why you had him put in a private room? So you could hover nearby 24/7?”
He’d requested a private room because that’s what the Stevenson family did. Hell, when he’d been seven and getting his tonsils removed, his parents had not only had him in a private room, but with a private nurse, as well.
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Go get your coffee, Cameron,” she murmured after a moment. “And some food. I’ll stay here with Erik, if you think I can be trusted to keep him from harm, that is.”
His breath hissed out between his teeth. “It’s not a matter of trust, dammit.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Then what is it?”
How to admit to her reasonably posed question that he—a grown man—felt panicked nearly every time his son was out of eyeshot?
Faith waited, her heart squeezing at the shadows that darkened his eyes from melted chocolate to obsidian. “How do you take it?” she finally asked.
He looked at her. “What?”
“Your coffee.” She lifted her hands when he started to shake his head. “Don’t argue. I’m here. I might as well be of some use. And I’ll bring back a milk shake or something for Erik, if that’s all right.”
The shadows slid behind sharp curiosity. “Why are you doing this?”
The question hovered between them for a moment. From down the hall, she could hear the rattle of a cart being rolled along the tile floor. Music was coming from a nearby room. The peds unit was decorated as cheerfully as any peds unit could be, but it was still a hospital.
Yet, as her brother had pointed out the other day, she’d entered the doors and ventured beyond the cafeteria.
Again.
Voluntarily.
“Truthfully,” she said at length, “I have no idea. Maybe I just think Erik’s a pretty terrific kid.”
“He is.” His jaw slanted. Centered. “Black. No sugar.”
She should have guessed.
He started to pull out his wallet, but she waved her hand. “We’ll settle up later.” And before she could let her common sense tell her she was absolutely nuts for becoming even the slightest bit involved with the Stevenson men, she strode down the hall.
There was a faint itching at the base of her spine, and she knew that Cameron’s gaze was following her.
Then she turned a corner and knowing she was out of range, she stopped. Drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her heart was thudding.
It barely calmed down when she made it to the cafeteria and selected some items to take back to Erik’s room. But, she figured wryly, if she were going to have a heart attack, at least she was in the right place to do it.
She thought she had herself more or less in control when she carried the tray back up to Erik’s room. There was a good possibility her brother wouldn’t much care for her bringing the boy the gargantuan chocolate milk shake, hamburger and French fries, but the boy’s glee when she set them before him was worth any amount of trouble she might hear from Chris. And Cameron didn’t put up any protests, either, when she handed him the tall coffee along with a plate of roast beef and all the fixin’s.
“How’d you know I’d like roast beef?”
She lifted her shoulders. “Lucky guess,” she demurred. There was no point in telling the man that she’d asked the cashier if Coach Stevenson had shown any particular preference beside the meat loaf that, if she hadn’t been surreptitiously watching him the way she had the day before, she could have warned him to avoid.
“Eat up,” she insisted when he didn’t touch the food. “Before it gets cold.”
“What about you, F
aith?” Erik spoke around the French fry he was shoving into his mouth.
“Actually, I’m meeting a friend for an early dinner.”
“Are you gonna go now then?” He eyed the checkerboard. “Or can we play another game?”
“You’ve already trounced me at two. But maybe we can play another time.”
“Yeah. After you come t’bogganing with me. Can you toboggan?”
“Questioning my prowess because I’m a girl?”
He wrinkled his nose. “Huh?”
She laughed. “Yes, I can really toboggan. And snowboard, for that matter. Can’t say I’m expert by any means, though. I’d actually rather have skis on my feet than do either.”
“Dad likes to ski, doncha, Dad?”
“What about you?”
Erik shook his head. “Never gone. Dad went b’fore Christmas, though, huh, Dad?”
“What did you do while he skied?”
Erik rolled his eyes. “Visited Grandma and Grandpa in Denver. They had me go to a party.”
Which sounded like a fate worse than death, judging by his tone. And Faith couldn’t help but wonder if Cameron had skied alone, or if he’d had company that he hadn’t wanted his son interfering with.
Her mood turned south.
“Well, like I said, I’ve got an early dinner. So I’ll catch you on the flip side, ’kay?” She lifted her hand and Erik high-fived it. “Take care, sweetie.” She winked at him, letting her gaze skate over the boy’s father, and sped out the door.
She hurried through the pediatric wing before she could come up with some reason to stay. Her feet dragged a little when she passed the nursery with its wide window overlooking the collection of bassinets. A nurse sat in a rocking chair, crooning to the tiny baby in her arms.
Faith paused, watching. A frazzled-looking young man joined her at the window after a few minutes. He stared through the glass with disbelief and adoration all rolled into one.
“Which one is yours?”
He pointed. “Baby girl. Last one on the right.” He shook his head. “Don’t even have a girl’s name picked out, because my wife was so convinced it would be a boy.”
All He Ever Wanted Page 7