“And you’re away from overly busy streets but near good schools?”
That sounded like the voice of experience...
“Also two of the things I looked for.”
“That’s a lot of kid-friendly, all right,” he agreed. “And now you’re all set?”
“I am. And I can’t wait!”
He nodded stoically. “Be careful what you wish for...”
Jani laughed. “You make it sound so ominous.”
He shrugged. “A kid will steal your heart more than you can ever imagine. It’s actually a little scary. For me? Never again.”
Because of the daughter he’d read the bear book to? The daughter he didn’t still have in his life?
Initially Jani had assumed that he’d lost custody in the divorce and that’s why he no longer saw her. But now she wondered if tragedy had taken his little girl from him. If maybe that tragedy had cost him his marriage, too.
She wanted to know. She needed to know in case it all had something to do with that bar his family had ended up in. Or related in some other convoluted way to the distant past, the Camden misdeeds she was trying to compensate him for. But she was suddenly too concerned with the weight of what might have happened to him to get openly nosy and decided that she should wait for him to seem willing to tell her more.
He proved he wasn’t willing to talk about it yet by saying, “You really do have kids on the brain—I’d think you might have had enough of family after growing up surrounded by so much of it.”
“It’s the opposite actually. Once I got used to being part of such a big family it became really important to me. Then...” She wasn’t going to tell him she only had one ovary or that it was smaller than normal, but she did say, “Well, when I was seventeen I found out I have lower-than-average odds of having kids of my own at all, and it became more important.”
“Oh. I thought maybe you’d decided to have a kid on your own because you felt like you’d waited long enough for the right guy. Or maybe the wrong one left you thinking you weren’t going to waste any more time with men.”
So he’d given it some thought...
That made Jani smile. She opted for continuing in the vein of honesty. “Choice B,” she said.
“So a bad experience with the wrong guy made you decide not to waste any more time with men?” he repeated.
“That might be a little harsh and make me sound like a man-hater, and I’m not,” she hedged. “It’s really about time—and how mine is slipping away. I can’t risk wasting any more of it being on a hunt for a husband and then, you know, waiting for a relationship to develop and grow before maybe he asks me to marry him, and maybe we actually get to the altar.”
“The wrong guy took forever to ask you to marry him and then you still didn’t get to the altar?” Gideon asked.
“It was more complicated than that...”
“And none of my business.”
Again Jani thought that being open about herself might help lead him to be open with her—and ultimately help her achieve her goal. So she said, “No, it’s okay. I don’t have any secrets. I just lost four years believing in someone who disappointed me. He didn’t actually take forever to propose—that happened after we’d been together a year.”
“But getting to the altar?”
“Yeah, that never happened. Instead it was another three years of ups and downs. And with every down... Well, my hope for actually getting to the altar at all got a little less. Then terror sort of put it over the top for me and I was just relieved to get out of the relationship in one piece...”
Gideon’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline. “Terror?” he echoed, setting his half-empty wineglass on one of two square, transparent glass coffee tables.
“Reggie—that’s his name, Reginald Orton the Third,” she said, affection and humor dusting her tone as she remembered how Reggie used to make jokes of saying the whole thing.
“You still don’t hate the guy...”
“No,” she admitted, though this time there was pity in her voice. “I loved Reggie and I wish him well—”
“Despite the terror?” Gideon said in confusion.
“Yeah, even despite that. He isn’t a bad person, but he has a gambling problem. A really severe gambling problem.”
Jani had had enough wine, too, so she put her own glass on the table nearest to her.
“Did you know he had a gambling problem going in?”
“No. Well, I did meet him at a casino night at the country club.”
“That might have been a clue...”
“Less of one than you think. He was there as a guest of another member and he was just doing what everyone else was doing that night. And not to any excess—after we were introduced he paid more attention to me than to the games. So, no, I didn’t know going in that he was a gambler. I heard along the way that he liked to have a good time, but sometimes that’s just what a gambling addiction looks like until you see past the surface. It didn’t really dawn on me until about a year and a half into our relationship that he had a serious—serious—issue.”
“And you were already engaged by then.”
“Right. Engaged, planning the wedding and how soon after that we could start a family.”
“Just what you wanted.”
“Just what I wanted,” Jani said sadly, fighting her feelings as they cropped up.
“But the gambling was serious enough that you were terrorized by it?”
“Because of it, yes,” Jani admitted, a shiver running through her even now at the memory, chasing away any lingering sadness or regret that things hadn’t worked out with Reggie.
“Reggie truly isn’t a bad guy,” she felt compelled to say, not wanting to paint him as a villain. “He was actually a very sweet man. A lot of fun. Kind, thoughtful and personable—”
“You’re giving me a complex,” Gideon joked.
Was he somehow competing with her former fiancé?
“Don’t worry, Reggie could never have made me the dinner you did,” she joked back, thinking that Reggie’s boyish good looks and slight build also couldn’t hold a candle to the pure masculine beauty of Gideon. But she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “All of Reggie’s energies went into gambling. And hiding it.”
“Nothing went into trying to stop it?”
Jani shrugged. “I think he tried. At least he made me think he did. After I realized that he had a problem, I learned everything I could about that kind of addiction, I went to support groups, I went to a counselor for advice on how to help him. How to save him from himself. How to fix him, I guess...”
“But sometimes you can’t fight someone else’s demons—whether it’s drugs or booze or gambling or even cheating exes,” Gideon said.
Jani wondered if he was speaking from experience and gave him a moment to expand on that, hoping he might.
He didn’t, though. He went back to the subject at hand. “But do you think this Reggie guy wanted to be helped?”
“I don’t know. He placed bets on everything you can imagine, things I didn’t even know you could bet on. But he told me he wanted to stop. And, like I said, he gave the impression that he was trying—whether or not he was still doing a little gambling on the sly, I don’t know. I know that for the two and a half years after I found out what was going on, there were times when I believed that he had cleaned up his act, that he was staying away from gambling. Times when there was no indication that he might be gambling so I’d let myself believe that the problem was behind us. Those were the ups, when I’d do some planning for the wedding and think it all might work out—”
“But?”
“But then something would happen to make me suspicious. I’d find something incriminating or I’d walk in on an unusual phone conversation that he’d be secre
tive about. Or I’d learn that he wasn’t where he’d said he was going to be so I’d know he was sneaking around again. Or I’d just catch him taking money out of my purse...”
“He stole from you?”
“A little,” Jani admitted, embarrassed by it. “Just cash. When I learned how bad his problem was, I did everything to make sure he couldn’t get to anything more than that, but yes, he did take cash.”
“Did the guy work for a living?”
“He’d started to sell luxury cars just before I met him. He told me it was only to keep himself busy—I knew his family had money, that he had lived on a trust fund until then. But the truth was that he’d gambled away the trust fund. He was essentially broke.”
“And a liar.”
“You learn that that goes along with addiction,” Jani said fatalistically.
“And his rich family—what was going on with them when he was pilfering cash from you?”
“Again, I didn’t know this at the start. At the start he did say he was on the outs with his family, but he acted like it was just a little family drama, nothing important. And he never filled me in. Later I found out that his family had gotten fed up with helping him pay his gambling debts. His relationship with them—parents and three siblings—improved when we got engaged...”
“Because they figured the Camden coffers are deep and they could bankroll him?”
“The possibility of him marrying me got him back in their good graces, so yes. It took me a while to figure out, but I believe they thought marrying a Camden was a way to pass Reggie off. Then they could go back to just being his family and leave supporting him and covering his gambling losses to me.”
“And in return you could have had the kids you want...”
Jani sighed and once more felt some embarrassment when she confessed, “Yeah, I had that thought. Like I said, I did love Reggie and I know he loved me. And he was sweet and kind and he liked kids. He understood how badly I wanted them and he was ready to jump into that with me, too. So I had moments when I weighed the good against the bad and wondered if I should just accept that he had a problem and still try to have a life—and a family—with him.”
“Your family wouldn’t have let you do that, would they?”
“No one was in favor of it as time went on and they all got wind of Reggie’s problems. They let me know they were worried. But we’re not a family that turns its back because one of us does something the rest don’t approve of or agree with. We just sort of wait it out and stay ready to pick up the pieces if it does go bad. Although by the end of this one, if I’d gone on with Reggie, I’m not sure if my family would have been able to just keep turning a blind eye.”
“What about the terror part?” Gideon asked.
“It was last spring. I thought Reggie was doing okay but he was gambling and I just didn’t know it. I was home alone—we were living together, sharing a condominium, but Reggie wasn’t there when two hulks literally kicked in the door and came in.”
The memory sent a chill through her.
“Yeah, I think that qualifies as terrifying,” Gideon said, shock apparent on his handsome face. “Did they hurt you?”
“No, but there was...some physical contact and a distinct threat.” Another chill went through her as she thought back to how one of the men had had her arms locked behind her back and the other had raised his fist to her...
“They got in my face,” she said without going into detail. “They said they knew who I was, that I could afford to pay them. Reggie owed them ten thousand dollars—he’d been betting on basketball—”
“Don’t tell me he’d used your name and his connection to you as collateral,” Gideon said.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Or they just assumed on their own that a connection with a Camden was enough to insure his debt. I just know they wanted the ten thousand dollars and they wanted it right then.”
“That’s bad...” Gideon said with a dark frown.
“I was scared. I was trying to figure out a way to actually get them the money just to save my own neck when my brother Cade and two of my cousins got there—they were bringing over a piece of furniture GiGi had given me and it was pure luck that they showed up right then. Apparently intimidating me was more fun than dealing with three other men because the thugs got out of there in a hurry and Cade and my cousins took me to GiGi’s house.”
“And they didn’t tell you to get rid of the guy then and there?”
“No, actually I don’t think they trusted themselves to say anything because they were all really, really quiet. They just got me out of there and sort of circled the wagons at GiGi’s in case the hulks showed up there, too.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“We called the police from GiGi’s. But I didn’t know who the men were—it wasn’t as if they’d given me their business cards. I described them, and of course if they’d ever been found they could have been charged with breaking and entering. I gave the police Reggie’s information so they could try to get him to tell them who they were, but I knew he wouldn’t. I can’t imagine what thugs like that might have done to him if he did.”
“And then...”
“I ended it with Reggie. Believe me, two angry, giant, threatening men breaking your front door away from the frame and barging into your house will definitely scare you straight. I kept thinking what if I had had a baby or a couple of kids when that happened? Until then I thought it was only money that was at risk with Reggie, but after that? There was no way I would bring kids into that situation. I not only broke it off with Reggie, I told him not to come anywhere near me or my family again. He left town not long after that. I heard he’d moved to Las Vegas but I hope that isn’t true because I can’t imagine anywhere worse that he could go.”
“And that was when you decided you weren’t going to waste any more time on men,” Gideon concluded, bringing the conversation full circle.
“It broke my heart to have to admit that Reggie and I couldn’t have a future together. But the thought of how much more time it would take to start over from square one was almost as bad. I turned thirty this year—this month—and I’d let four more years go by. Years I couldn’t afford to let go by. I knew I just didn’t have the time to spare and if I really want a family—”
“And you really want a family—”
“I do. So I decided that I just have to have one.”
He nodded his understanding. Then he said, “You know you’re kind of messing with my head?”
“I am?” Jani said, perplexed.
Gideon laid an arm along the top of the sofa back and eased her hair slightly away from her face with his index finger. “To me the Camdens have always been the fat cats—bigger than life, above the problems the rest of us face, made of polished glass so trouble just rolls right off.”
“I wish trouble just rolled right off,” Jani interrupted. “But everybody has stuff. Stuff that sticks. It doesn’t matter who you are.”
“Yeah, and now you keep making me see that. You lost your parents when you were a little kid and got uprooted from your home, your room, the kind of comfort zone a kid needs. You had to deal with maybe not being able to have the one thing you really want, a basic that everybody figures they can have—a family. You got involved with a guy who took advantage of you, who wasted time you don’t have and put you in danger on top of it... You’ve had some hard knocks of your own. And then you go and rise above them—you aren’t bitter, you come out all resilient and still positive and making the best of things... What’s up with that?” he ended on a lighter tone.
“Sorry?” Jani apologized jokingly.
“I want to not like you, you know?” he said in a quiet voice. “But you just won’t let me do that....”
“I could spill red wine on your nice not-kid-friendly white carpet. Wou
ld that help?” she offered.
Gideon laughed, bringing a sparkle to those green eyes. “It’s just a carpet. That probably wouldn’t help.”
“Well, let’s see—after all, we can’t have you liking a Camden...” Jani pretended to reach for her glass and Gideon caught her by the wrist. His hand was big and strong as he brought her arm back and kept hold of it on the cool leather between them.
“Yeah, you’re not supposed to be cute and funny, either,” he said.
There was a warmth in the way he was looking at her that made everything but the moment and the man drift away for Jani.
What was there about him, she wondered, knowing she wasn’t supposed to be feeling so comfortable with him, knowing she wasn’t supposed to be silently urging him to kiss her again the way he had in the parking lot that afternoon. Knowing she wasn’t supposed to be thinking or feeling any of what she was thinking and feeling.
But when he went on looking into her eyes, when he pulled her forward by the wrist, when he leaned in to meet her halfway and did kiss her?
She couldn’t find even an inkling of willpower to resist. She could only close her eyes and kiss him back.
He pulled her nearer then, his other hand going to the side of her face in a caress so tender she wanted to nuzzle into it and purr. But at the same time his lips were parting over hers and she was following her inclination to deepen the kiss instead, as it became more intimate than any they had shared in the past.
Wow, could the man kiss! There was a kind of pure, raw talent in those lips that Jani had never encountered before. Pure, raw talent and something primal and so sensual that it just made her melt into it.
He went on kissing her and somehow she found herself even nearer to him. Near enough to press her palm to his rock-hard chest, to let her other hand float up to his nape when he released her wrist and wrapped his arm around her.
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