by Robin Kaye
Erin swallowed back her nervousness and stepped into the kitchen. Cam leaned against the counter beside the coffeepot.
Janie slid out of her chair and right into Erin’s path. “Erin, you’re finally up,” Janie said with an excited bounce. “Are you coming with us to the park after breakfast?”
“No, sweetie. I wish I could but it’s my day off and I have other plans. But you and your dad will have fun. It’s a beautiful day.” Erin hadn’t looked at Cam, but she felt the heat of his gaze.
“Coffee?” Cam asked.
She checked her watch and shook her head. “Actually, I’m running late so I’ll just go. Have a nice day.”
She waved a hand and turned.
“I’ll walk you out. Janie, eat your breakfast, I’ll be right back.”
Erin didn’t slow down, but Cam caught up to her before she could shut the door. “Are you running late, or just running?”
“What I do on my day off is none of your business.”
“When will you be home?”
Home. His home, not hers. She realized then that she’d never really had a home. Sure, she and her mother had lived in plenty of places, but not one of them was a home—not the kind of home Cam had with Janie. “Do you give your employees curfews?”
He winced. “I was just wondering if you’ll be home for dinner.”
She wrenched open the door of her car and climbed in, jamming her key into the ignition. “No, I won’t.”
He stood there, holding door. “Erin, look—”
“No, you look. I’m off the clock. If you want to talk to me, you can do it on your own time—not mine.” She tugged the door closed, though she knew if he wanted to keep her there, she’d never have the strength to fight his hold.
She was thankful Cam gave in and took a step back from her car. She drove off, watching him grow smaller in her rearview mirror, his hands stuffed in the front pockets of his jeans, staring as she fled.
***
Cam knew Erin was mad. He deserved it. Could he have fucked things up any worse than he had? He didn’t think so.
Maybe Erin would get over her anger enough to talk to him when she came home. He didn’t know what he was going to say, or how he’d make things right, but from the way she’d run out of there, it looked to him like he’d have plenty of time to think about it.
He’d been up all night listening for her footsteps, afraid she’d leave and never come back. Not that he could blame her. The worst part about it was that he knew he’d hurt her. He hadn’t meant to, but he had. He’d been so panicked when he’d realized he hadn’t protected her. He would never intentionally put a woman at risk. And when he thought he had . . . well, he’d lost it for a few seconds, but that was all it took to destroy the most amazing sexual experience of his life.
“Daddy? How come you’re standing in the middle of the street?” He blinked, focused his eyes on Janie, deftly erasing the vision of Erin wide-eyed and naked, straddling him. Janie leaned out of the door, one arm holding the doorjamb and the other the storm door, feet on the threshold, her little body bowed out.
“I don’t know.” He started back across the lawn, feeling more fatigued than he’d like to admit. He was used to being up all night. He was even used to constant stress; neither was new to him. But today his exhaustion was different—it was as if someone had parked a fire truck on his chest.
“You’ve been out there forever. I poured milk on your cereal and it’s turned to mush. You said you’d be right back. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” He sat at the table in his new spot—the spot across from Erin’s. In the center was a vase of fall flowers. He wondered where Erin found a vase. He hadn’t known he’d even owned one.
Janie had set the table, a folded napkin sat on a placemat to the left of his bowl and a tablespoon to the right. Placemats that Erin had found somewhere in her hours of reorganizing his house.
In the week that Erin had been there, she’d somehow managed to leave her mark on every place he looked. She’d been a whirlwind, rearranging everything from the hall closets to his bookshelves—hell, even his medicine cabinet wasn’t off-limits.
Erin claimed it helped her think when she was stuck on her thesis.
He’d spent one very enjoyable evening watching her thoroughly trash his office. She’d emptied the wall of bookshelves while wearing yoga pants.The waistband and hem of the tank she wore didn’t quite meet, leaving a few inches of smooth and muscular stomach exposed. All her bending and twisting and stretching and reaching had him grateful the newspaper covered his lap. She eventually returned all the books to the shelves using her own form of the Dewy Decimal System he termed the Erin Crosby Color and Subject System. He had no clue how to find anything but it sure looked pretty—just like her. His office became awash with a riot of color and life, something he realized Erin added to everything she touched—including him and Janie.
In between his books, he had found a rock she and Janie had picked up at the stream they’d sat beside while having a picnic lunch on a nice day. He had also spotted an old blue Ball canning jar filled with colorful buttons Janie had collected that they sometimes used during math lessons. On his desk sat an art project, a small cardboard box they’d glued colorful fall leaves onto, shellacked, and filled with pencils and markers.
“Daddy?”
He hadn’t noticed, but he must have been staring off into space. His attention snapped back to Janie. “Janie?”
She wrinkled her nose the way she did whenever she was trying to put pieces of a puzzle together. “Did you and Erin have a fight?”
He’d never been so tempted to lie to his daughter before. All through her illness, he’d told her the truth. He might not have volunteered information, but he refused to lie when answering her questions. “Not so much a fight, just a case of bad communication—she misunderstood something I said and it hurt her feelings.”
Janie nodded looking like she was seven going on seventy. “Did you say you’re sorry?”
“I tried to explain, but—”
“She drove away. Yeah, I sorta kinda watched.”
“It’s not nice to spy. I told you to eat breakfast.”
“Sorry.” Janie sounded anything but. “She’s coming home later, isn’t she?”
“She said she would.”
“Good, then wait until she comes home and then tell her you’re sorry for saying something stupid.”
“What makes you think I said something stupid?”
“Because Erin doesn’t get mad about stuff unless it’s stupid or hateful. You’re not hateful.”
Smart kid and even smarter nurse/nanny. What he’d said was stupidity incarnate. He was still trying to come up with a proper parental response when Janie wrapped her arms around his neck and rubbed her cheek against his, the scent of Ivory soap, Cocoa Puffs, and his little girl surrounding him. “I love you, Daddy, even if you say stupid things sometimes.”
“That’s good, because I love you no matter what too.” He kissed her cheek, took an extra-long second to hug her, and then set her on her feet. “I’ll get the dishes, you get your sneakers on, and we’ll head to the park.” He gave her a pat on the bum and she took off like a shot.
It took him a lot longer to get up the energy to stand than it took Janie to run up the stairs.
Chapter Six
Erin pushed open her apartment door, dropped her bag and the stack of mail she’d collected on the table, and walked directly into her bedroom.
She shed her clothes on the way like leaves in an autumn windstorm. She was mentally and physically exhausted—all she could think about was pulling down her blackout shades, crawling into her own bed, and sleeping away the rest of the day.
She wished her brain had an on/off switch. Unfortunately it was stuck on repeat, intent on reliving every second of the last two disastrous en
counters with Cam. She turned her face into the cool pillow and realized she was crying. She’d never cried over a man before, but then she’d never been thrown so far off-kilter by one either. One second she’d thought she’d died and gone to heaven, then she pulled the Go-Directly-to-Hell card. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
A banging at the door thundered through the silence.
Kendall.
Erin had called her on the way home and left a voice mail canceling their plans for the evening. The banging continued. And knowing Kendall, she’d bang on the door until someone called the cops, and then she’d take all of her anger out on them before turning it on Erin.
Erin got up, reached for her robe, and dried her tearstained face with the tail of the terry-cloth belt. “I’m coming.” She didn’t even look through the peephole; she just unhooked the chain and pulled the door open.
Kendall stood with her fist at face height, ready to either punch her or beat on the door more. In her other arm she held an alarming array of long garment bags, probably containing formal dresses for the benefit Erin had bowed out of—unsuccessfully, from the look of things.
“You didn’t get my message?”
Kendall stepped inside, giving Erin no choice but to back up—Erin was barefoot while Kendall wore sadistic, dominatrix-like boots planted shoulder-width apart. She quelled her with a once-over and back again. “Did you get the license plate number of whatever it was that ran you over and dragged you a few miles?”
Erin clenched her teeth so hard, her jaw ached and her temples throbbed to give variety to the pain. She shook her aching head, regretting her inability to hold back tears. Crying did nothing more than give her a horrible headache.
“I know what you look like when you’re sick, and this is not it. What’s wrong?”
“I’m not feeling well.” Which wasn’t a lie. A night of no sleep, self-recriminations, and a double dollop of disillusionment was enough to make any woman look and feel like not-quite-dead-yet road kill.
Kendall continued her visual autopsy. “You had sex.”
Erin was well aware of that fact. She was sore in places she’d forgotten she’d had. Actually, she was sore in places that she’d never felt before.
“If you had sex with Cam, why do you look like a raccoon that tried to tango with a truck? Was it horrible? Is he into scary kink? Is the size of his penis an inverse reflection of the size of his hands and feet? I’m only asking because Cam O’Leary wears what the nursing staff swears is a size fourteen shoe, and even I’ve noticed how big the man’s hands are—it’s difficult not to when every nurse in the hospital talks of little else.”
Erin had never noticed the size of Cam’s feet or hands, and she couldn’t believe the size of his penis in relation to his hands and feet was the subject of discussion and speculation for an entire staff of single female nurses.
Kendall gave her a you’re-so-naive head shake. “You’ll catch flies with your mouth hanging open like that. Now answer the question.”
“Fine. Long story.” She counted the answers off on her fingers. “No scary kink. And no inverse reflection.”
Kendall rearranged the garment bags over her arm, “Do you really think that ‘long story’ schtick is going to work?” Her voice went up an octave and she spoke so slowly Erin might have been confused with a remedial preschool student on the wrong side of the bell curve.
Kendall strode into Erin’s bedroom where she laid out the garment bags on the bed. “I brought you shoes to match, now all we have to do is pick out the perfect dress and you can tell me your very long story of woe while I fix your hair.” She tapped her top lip with two fingers, like a little lip drum roll. “I’m thinking a dramatic updo—very sexy.”
“I’m not going.”
“Oh, yes, you are. You are not backing out on me last minute. If you’re not there, who am I supposed to talk to?”
“Your fiancé?”
Kendall waved her hand like she was swatting a gnat. “No, silly, he’s supposed to talk business to everyone else at the table. He doesn’t have time to talk to me.”
Erin wanted to smack Kendall and tell her to get a clue. The man never had time to talk to her.
“And believe me, I have to listen to David schmooze so often I can recite whole conversations like a good Catholic can recite the mass without the need for a priest—well, except for the readings, because those change.”
Erin sank onto the one spot on her bed not covered with dresses. “Yes, I know.”
“Besides”—Kendall ignored Erin’s sarcasm—“there’s a friend of David’s I want you to meet.”
“No, Kendall.” Erin shot to her feet and tightened the belt on her robe. “This is where I draw the line. The last thing I need, after last night’s disaster, is another one of your setups.”
“This is not a setup, it’s an introduction. And what made last night so horrible? You haven’t told me anything remotely resembling a disaster.”
“And I won’t. You’ll have to take my word for it.” There was no way she would tell another soul what had happened. Not even her best friend. “Suffice it to say, it wasn’t the act that was the problem; it was Cam’s immediate reaction afterward.”
“It’s natural for a man to second-guess his actions. Cam O’Leary has always struck me as a very deliberate person. He just doesn’t seem the type to fall into bed with someone. The fact that he did just that, and that the someone was an employee at the time, would definitely be enough to freak a man like Cam out. Give him a break. Did he apologize for whatever it was he said?”
“No.”
“Let me guess.” Kendall drumrolled her lips again. “You never gave him the opportunity. Somehow I’m not finding this at all shocking. Hmm . . . I wonder why?”
“Because you’re just that good? Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.”
“I won’t. I’ll be too busy twisting yours.”
***
Cam carried a sleeping Janie to bed at ten. She’d been trying to wait up for Erin, and he didn’t know which of them was more disappointed that she’d lost the battle.
By eleven he was pacing.
By eleven thirty he broke out his police-ban radio, worried that Erin had been in an accident. How many women had he pulled out of smashed cars with the Jaws of Life?
When headlights cut through the window, he let out a relieved breath—that was until he saw her. Cam blinked his eyes, wondering if maybe the headlights had done something to his vision. She glided up the front walk like someone you’d see on the red carpet. She wore a champagne-colored gown that made her look like a cross between a Grecian goddess and one of the faeries that filled the bedtime stories his mother had told him. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a complicated mass that made him want nothing more than to dig his fingers into it, find the pins, and take them out one by one. Well-placed tendrils escaped to curl around her cheeks and jaw and highlight the length of her graceful neck.
Erin fumbled through her jewel-encrusted clutch, pulled out her keys, and unlocked the door. The room was lit only by the small lamp on the entry table, so he wasn’t sure whether or not she saw him sitting there.
“You’re home.”
“I’ve returned to work. This isn’t home—not to me. This is my job.” Erin didn’t turn toward him; as a matter of fact, she turned away—giving him a view of the back of the dress. It was held up with straps that looked like large diamond-encrusted chains, and went straight down her ballerina-worthy bare back, meeting just above her bottom in a jewel-encrusted hollow circle which was ruched with the skirt, highlighting her backside to perfection.
“Where were you?” He took a deep breath and memories of their every second together flipped through his mind like cards through a Vegas dealer’s hands. His fingers itched to touch her; her scent surrounded him, called to him, taunted him.
He closed the gap between them, but even though he was closer to her, he wasn’t close enough. He doubted he’d ever be close enough. “I was worried.”
When she turned toward him, her gaze slammed into him with the force of a battering ram. The shock in her eyes made it clear she hadn’t been aware of his nearness. Her eyes were made up, all smoky and sexy, and they looked bigger than usual, the color sharper either as a result of her anger, the low lighting, or the makeup.
Her eyes had haunted his every waking moment since she’d slammed the bathroom door on him last night. “Is something wrong with Janie?”
“No.”
“Did you have a call?” She opened her clutch and checked her phone. “I kept my phone on me.”
“No, Erin, it’s just that I didn’t know where you were or when you’d be—” Home was the word that wanted to fly off his tongue but he caught it before it escaped. For some unknown reason, the word home was a point of contention with her. “I didn’t know when you’d return. Janie waited up for you, she fell asleep on the couch a few hours ago.”
“I’ll see her in the morning.”
“Erin . . .”
She was no longer meeting his gaze—she stared over his left shoulder.
“I want to explain . . . apologize . . .” Beg for mercy was more like it, but that wouldn’t be at all attractive.
“No, Cam. That goes against the ‘move-on-and-pretend-it-never-happened’ agreement.”
“I never agreed to that. All I’m asking is that you hear me out, then I’ll drop the subject forever. You have my word.”
“I think the words ‘Oh, God no’ pretty much covered it, don’t you?”
“I already explained that—I didn’t protect you and I’ve never put a woman at risk because of my lack of . . . planning. I freaked out for a second there. I’m sorry. I didn’t handle it well.”
“Cam, it’s not just that and you know it.”
“You’re right. God, Erin, you’re an employee. I took advantage—”