“And moving into your basement.”
“They’ll still have their new furniture and TV and bed...” she pointed out, to let him know that his gifts would not go to waste.
He nodded that handsome head of his but didn’t comment. Instead he said, “Well, all I can say is that anybody in trouble should have you in their corner.”
Again Gia wasn’t comfortable with the praise, so she deflected it. “You brought a lot to the table that I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish or give them,” Gia said. “I appreciate that.”
Which was true.
“So we’ll just take it from here,” he said.
She wasn’t sure what that meant and felt uncomfortable asking because she didn’t want to seem avaricious, even on the Bronsons’ behalf. So she just let that hang and said, “I also appreciate this food—it’s great!”
“It is, isn’t it? This place should be around for a while.”
“I’m stuffed, though,” Gia added, pushing away her plate.
“Too stuffed for dessert?” he challenged, having finished his own meal.
“Oh, I have a special stomach compartment for that,” she joked.
He laughed again. “Why don’t I doubt that? But how about if we hold off long enough for me to clear, maybe make some coffee to go with the dessert.... I can make espresso if you like your coffee as dark as your chocolate.”
“I do, actually. But I never drink it this late or I’ll be up all night—”
And why did that get an arch of one eyebrow from him as if that was a tempting idea?
Maybe she was imagining it, because it was gone again a split-second later and all he said was, “So no coffee. More wine, then?”
“Maybe just a quarter of a glass—it might not be far, but I still have to drive home...and I’ll help clean up,” she said, standing when he did.
“Nooo,” he overruled. “This was to pamper and reward you, remember? You sit over there—” he pointed to a built-in, cushioned seating area next to the waterfall “—and I’ll clear this stuff and be right back.”
Gia tried arguing with him, but he took her by the shoulders, guided her to where he wanted her to sit and pressured her to sit there.
In the few minutes he was gone she caught herself relishing the way it had felt to have those big, strong hands on her shoulders and tried to shake off the pleasure she’d found in it.
The view of the sun setting over the rock garden and the waterfall was spectacular, so Gia focused on that in the hopes of gaining some perspective until Derek reappeared, bringing their desserts.
He sat beside her and poured them both just a little more wine. Then he angled toward her and they tasted both the cake and the crème brûlée.
“Okay, this time I like the chocolate better, too,” he admitted.
“I’ll share,” she offered, but he merely laughed at that, propped an ankle on the opposite knee and settled in to eat the sugar-crusted custard.
Lights automatically turned on around them then, and Gia only hoped she looked as good in soft glow as he did.
“I keep wondering,” he said then, “what do I ‘sort of have a reputation’ for?”
It was what she’d said when she’d first arrived.
Gia shrugged, unsure if she should say.
But despite the fact that she never felt as if she had enough time with him, they had been together frequently, for hours and hours on end, and that had established a relaxed air between them. Out of that had come more and more openness, more and more honesty, more and more teasing and giving each other a hard time. And it also allowed her to feel as if she could answer him honestly.
Plus, she was curious about his past and this seemed like a route to finding out about it.
So she said, “Well, there was Sharon—the psychic. And Tyson heard through Sharon that after her you dated two people you met when you were with her—friends of hers. The one with the snakes and another one who Tyson says was weird, too—something about performance art....”
“When I was with her she was into making herself look like a statue of a Greek goddess and then standing on the street fooling people into thinking she really was a statue. It was pretty amazing to see, actually—you couldn’t even catch her breathing or blinking. The trouble was that even when she wasn’t all made up and in costume she liked to spontaneously freeze and go into the act—walking in the mall, sitting in a restaurant, with my family... And when she did it, she wouldn’t stop doing it and come back to life until she felt like it.”
“How long would that take?”
“I never knew—that was part of the problem. I could just be walking along, talking to her, and bam! I’d look over and she was gone. Then I’d find her six feet behind me where she’d stopped in her tracks. And no matter how inconvenient it was or how much anyone tried to get her out of it, she wouldn’t. She sat through an entire Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s in statue mode. It got to be like dating someone who went catatonic without warning and I just had to wait until she came to again.”
Gia tried to suppress a smile but failed. “So three off-the-wall girlfriends—”
“I don’t know that you’d call all of them girlfriends—mostly it was just dating.”
But he’d apparently slept with the snake charmer, if one of her snakes had slithered into bed with him....
“That Sunday dinner was the end for Theresa,” he said, interrupting Gia’s wandering thoughts. “And I’d been seeing her less than a month then.”
“Well, that’s where your reputation came from. With Tyson and me. Maybe you just had a brief streak of strange and out of that we unfairly labeled you.”
Wishful thinking?
“Ah, if only I could say it was just a streak of strange...” he said with a laugh.
“You earned the reputation we gave you with more than the three?”
“I do tend toward women who are a little different...” he confessed.
“Different...” she repeated.
“Unique...with an edge. Sometimes too much of an edge....”
“Bad girls?”
“Sometimes... My first crush in second grade was on Molly Ryker—she drew what the teacher called very naughty pictures on the back of the girl who sat in front of her. Watching her do it...” He inclined his head. “I was hooked.”
“You liked the danger?” Gia asked, knowing that she certainly couldn’t be considered dangerous.
“I think what I liked with Molly was the fearlessness. And that’s—I don’t know—kind of a theme. Bold. Strong. Determined. Dedicated. Women who push boundaries, challenge things. Women with a passion for something. Women who just have an extra element. Who are...let’s say, colorful. It’s been a pattern with me.” He shook his head and laughed as if it had begun to confuse him in some way. “They’re just more interesting....”
“And interesting to you is over-the-top bad girls.”
“Over-the-top has, in the past, helped keep me around for a while longer than run-of-the-mill,” he confirmed. “But bad girls have gotten me into trouble....”
“Into trouble...and an annulled marriage?”
“And an annulled marriage,” he echoed in a more ominous tone than Gia had said it.
“So there are two categories. There’s weird—like Sharon-the-wannabe-psychic and her friends—”
“And there was one who excused herself during Sunday dinner, went into the bathroom and shaved her head just to shock everybody. And there was the one who was heavily tattooed and pierced. And there was a Goth—”
Gia smiled and couldn’t resist goading. “You drank blood and slept in a coffin with that one?”
He laughed and took her teasing in stride. “I would never drink blood, and I didn’t sleep with her so I don’t know if there
was a coffin involved. There’s also been more than one into extreme diet things—they either drove my grandmother crazy trying to feed us their recipes at Sunday dinner or there was one who wanted to play food police and tell everybody what they could and couldn’t eat. And there was one who was into obscure religions—the screechy chanting eventually got to me—”
“Do it,” Gia encouraged, again giving him a hard time.
He laughed. “I value my relationship with my neighbors, so no.”
“And those were only the weird ones? Those weren’t the bad girls who led you to get an annulment?”
He flinched, and she could tell it was a sore enough subject that she needed to be more careful about it.
“Those were the colorful ones,” he amended. “But no, they weren’t the bad girls who got me into real trouble.”
“So what did the bad girls do?” she asked, hating herself for wondering so much what it was he found interesting.
His expression made it clear that he wasn’t proud of what he was about to say. “I was brought into police custody after my tenth-grade girlfriend took me for a joyride in a car I didn’t know was stolen. There was an actual arrest—me and about a hundred other kids got caught trespassing when we went to a party another girlfriend threw at a house she’d broken into that I didn’t know she’d broken into. And there was an incident with a girl in college who took a picture of me from behind and sold copies of it for fun and profit. That was bad enough, but the picture got into a newspaper article about college campuses gone wild—”
“A naked picture?”
“’Fraid so...”
Gia wished she’d seen it....
But she didn’t say that. Instead, as they both set their dessert dishes aside and she turned to face him, pulling her legs up underneath her, she said more gingerly, “And then there was the annulment, too....”
Derek took a deep breath, exhaled sharply and said, “That came out of a trip to Las Vegas this past spring—so I didn’t have the excuse of being young and clueless. I went for a bachelor party and I met a woman—”
“Who you liked because she was either weird or a bad girl.”
“She was the bartender at the party and she just seemed like fun.”
“Which, for you, means something about her was over-the-top or edgy.”
“It didn’t seem like that, no. She was just funny, clever, quick, and that made her fun to talk to, so I spent a lot of time standing at the bar talking to her. Unfortunately, that led to getting really, really drunk. I know the party went on into the early-morning hours, and then I left with her....” He shook his head. “Things are fuzzy after that...but apparently Krista and I ended up taking a walk through a drive-in wedding chapel, where I guess I got married....”
“You don’t remember it at all?”
“Not at all. But there are pictures and a certificate—proof that it happened.”
“Was the bartender drunk, too?”
“Oh, I think she was perfectly sober,” he said. “I think Krista basically set a trap when she’d figured out who I was, and I just fell into it. And once I had, she had those pictures and that marriage certificate to hold for ransom....”
“Did she want to stay married to you?” Gia asked, because that didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility to her. This was Derek after all. The man sitting near enough for her to smell the scent of his woodsy cologne, for her to see his strikingly handsome face awash in golden light, for her to know firsthand how appealing he was.
“No, she didn’t want to stay married to me,” he said wryly. “What she wanted was a boatload of money—that’s what it cost three days later to persuade her to agree to the annulment.”
“If you didn’t pay...”
“She wouldn’t let the marriage be annulled. She said she’d wait awhile and then sue me for divorce and breach of promise. The lawyers thought the annulment would be the cheaper route, so—”
“You gave her the boatload of money.”
“And got the annulment. Then that wasn’t enough. Even though my attorneys had her sign a gag order, her friend—who had witnessed the ceremony and taken the pictures—blogged about it and the whole thing went public anyway—”
“Oh, that’s awful. And a rotten thing to do!” Gia said sympathetically.
“Yeah. But...who we are—the Camden name and position—means we have to be especially careful. There are people out there like Krista—and her friend—and if we do something stupid and give them an open door...” He shook his head in what looked like self-disgust. “I haven’t paid enough attention to that. But this was the worst yet. The worst embarrassment because it couldn’t be written off as teenage stupidity or a college prank. And to have our name thrown around that publicly... I made us a laughingstock. Not a proud moment. Everybody ended up answering for my dumbass mistake....”
It was obvious that he took the blame and was not only embarrassed himself, but ashamed, too, and Gia wasn’t sure what to say. She settled on, “It seems like you’ve learned a lesson.”
He laughed humorlessly. “That’s what everybody is hoping.”
“But you aren’t sure?”
“I’m trying to lay low. Change my pattern. Turn over a new leaf. But...I don’t know... My family is always trying to find me a regular girl—that’s what they call them. But somehow the regular girls they fix me up with either bore me to tears or...I guess I’m the king of losing interest. And then there I am, back again finding someone more...colorful.”
“Tattooed, pierced, chanting, head-shaving, dirt-eating, snake-charming psychics,” she concluded.
He laughed and Gia was glad to see that she’d been able to lift his spirits. “Who said anybody ate dirt?”
“Food police, dirt eating—it just seemed possible for you.”
He chuckled again, shaking his head at her summary and looking more intently at her.
She had the sense that injecting some humor had helped to draw him out of himself, that he wasn’t lost in his own demons any longer, because there was a renewed sparkle to his oh-so-blue eyes as his smile turned slightly wicked.
Which Gia knew meant that he had a comeback for her.
“So I guess somewhere under that good-girl exterior of yours must be a little evil, since the curse of the regular girl never seems to kick in when it comes to you.... What’s your secret, Grant? Maybe you’re the dirt eater?”
Gia laughed. “It’s the real reason I became a botanist—when I’m potting plants I just stuff myself with handfuls of it.”
“I knew it!” he said in mock victory. “I knew there had to be something!”
“And there it is—my deepest, darkest secret...” she said, playing along.
He narrowed his gorgeous eyes at her and leaned in slightly closer to look into hers. “You may not eat dirt, but there’s still a little evil in there.... You aren’t fooling me...I see it,” he said suspiciously.
Gia just smiled, terrified by how much she liked him and unable to curb it even when she tried.
Then he closed the gap between them to kiss her.
It didn’t take any more than that for her to stop trying completely. To give in to what she seemed to want all the time now. To just be kissed by him. To just kiss him back.
His left hand sluiced under her hair to the back of her head to brace her. When his lips parted, so did hers as she let her head rest in that cradle.
He took her hand in his, holding it, rubbing it with his thumb as she got her first introduction to his tongue.
Inviting and enticing and persuasive, he coaxed her to play and Gia did, volleying and toying and fencing right along with him.
There was just something about him....
Every texture, every taste, every nuance was exactly right. Exactly what she wanted, exactly
when she wanted it.
He used her hand to pull her nearer. Then he laid it to his chest and let go of it so he could wrap his arm around her.
It was almost strange how well she fit there. So well she just wanted to burrow into him as her palm absorbed the heat of his body and the hardness of his pectorals to add to pleasures that seemed to be mounting by the minute.
Pleasures that still centered on their mouths that were locked together, sealed in kissing fueled by more kissing, by tongues that frolicked with each other.
Gia was faintly aware of the sounds of the waterfall nearby, but it only seemed to carry her along, to draw her even more serenely into kissing Derek, into being kissed by him so thoroughly that she felt like it was all she would ever need. Kissing him and kissing him. Being held in his strong arms, against his broad chest now, with her hand the only thing keeping them from coming together seamlessly.
She had no idea how much time passed while they were making out. At some point it occurred to her that it had been a very long time, and that it was late because even through her closed eyes she could tell that the moon had gotten high in the sky to add a brighter, whiter glow to the golden illumination of the patio lights.
She needed to stop this, she told herself. To go home. To talk some sense into herself....
As much as she really, really didn’t want to, she knew she had to. So her tongue became a little shy, a little more difficult to catch, and she pushed against the stone wall of Derek’s chest and drew back almost imperceptibly.
He didn’t want to let her go, because he only held her tighter, kissed her more thoroughly.
But just long enough to convey his reluctance before he conceded to the message she’d given, ending that kiss only to kiss her again—and again and again—with restraint he was clearly having to work for.
To Catch a Camden Page 12