by Kait Nolan
It took him about twenty minutes to figure out what she’d noted, and by then he hauled out his calculator. An hour and a half later, he’d plowed through the rest of the records and had pages of notes of his own. If these numbers meant what he thought they meant…
He called his mother. “Where are you?”
“At Liz and Pete’s. What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“I need to talk to you. Stay put. I’m coming over.”
Loading up the books and his dog, he drove over to his aunt and uncle’s house. The moment he pulled to the curb he had cause to regret not asking his mother to come to him. From the look of things, the entire family was here. A quick, instinctive survey of vehicles showed him Norah’s car wasn’t among them. Not that it meant anything. She could just as easily have ridden with one of the others.
He wasn’t ready to see her again.
But it was too late to change his plan. Grammy was waving from the window. Bracing himself, Cam climbed out of the truck and headed inside. Everyone was gathered in the living room. No Norah. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
“What the hell is this? A summit meeting?”
“We were trying to figure out if it needed to be an intervention,” Grammy said.
Shit.
“Is Norah with you?” Aunt Liz asked.
The extra beat it took him to find his voice was the kiss of death. “No.”
“Then we were right,” Reed said. “You are having problems.”
“And that’s any of your business why?”
“No one knows where she is. She’s not answering her phone. And the last person we know saw her was Violet, who said she left the nursery this afternoon looking like you’d punched her in the stomach.” Mitch looked like he wanted to return the favor.
That was certainly a switch from what he’d seen. “She was perfectly calm when she left me.” No fight, just straight-up rationality, moving on to business as usual. With a short detour to clean herself out of his life with cold, clean efficiency.
“What did you fight about?” Grammy asked.
Cam struggled for patience. He hadn’t come here expecting an ambush. His mistake. “We didn’t fight.” He’d made sure of that, hadn’t he? Cutting her off at the first sign of conflict because he couldn’t deal with the confrontation and just wanted it over. But maybe she’d been more upset than he thought.
Absolutely nobody looked like they believed him.
“Look, did you try talking to Molly? Norah was going to check in with her on the petition. She’s probably holed up somewhere working on a new campaign.” Which he could verify with a few swipes of his phone, but God knew that damned app had given him more grief than it was worth. He didn’t want to check it again to find her halfway to…anywhere that wasn’t here.
Aunt Liz moved off to grab the phone, presumably to follow that lead.
“You can all take potshots at me later. I need to talk to Mom about city business. In private.”
They relocated to Uncle Pete’s study. Cam shut and locked the door behind them, which caused his mother to arch a brow.
“Not one word about her, Mom.”
Sandra Campbell Crawford knew when to choose her battles. Cam fully expected she’d pick this one when he least expected it.
“You said this was something to do with city business.” She nodded at the books under his arm. “What are those?”
“The copies I made of the city financial records. Norah was analyzing them for one of her projects. And she noted something unusual.”
“What kind of unusual?”
Cam laid out what first Norah and then he had discovered. “It was subtly done, but you see here? The digits are transposed. It starts with small amounts. And if it was just that, maybe we could chalk it up to human error or dyslexia or something. But over the next year and a half, they get bigger and bigger. If I did the math right, we’re talking about a difference of near to a hundred thousand dollars of city funds.”
“Dear God.” Sandra scooped a hand through her hair. “How far back does it go?”
Cam chose his words carefully. “Best I can tell, it started when you were out on medical leave. When Vick took over extra duties because Leigh Billingsly had to go on bed rest. Since she only came back half time after the baby was born, she probably just picked up where the books left off and didn’t go back to check the work that was done in her absence.”
“Cam, this is a huge accusation.”
“I know it. And maybe I’m wrong. But what if I’m not? Vick’s been living large when almost everybody’s hours and salaries have been cut to the bone. He’s just bought an SUV that’s almost as much as his annual salary. Where’s he getting that money?”
Sandra sat back and sighed. “I just can’t believe he’d be embezzling from the city.”
“Then how else do you explain these numbers? The system is obscenely antiquated. We’ve talked about it for years, but we haven’t ever done anything about it because there was always some other financial priority. We’ve got to look into this.”
“And we will, but quietly. Both because I’m not willing to make accusations without more definitive evidence and because if it’s true, I don’t want to spook him into covering his tracks.”
Sandra crossed to pick up the cordless phone on the desk. “Robert, it’s Sandra. No, no, I’m fine. Listen, are you busy? There’s something I need to discuss with you. No, it’s probably best if Cam and I come to you. We want to keep this on the down low. I need you to open an investigation into Vick Burgess.”
Chapter 22
Norah left Molly’s primed to knock Cam down a few pegs and make him listen, whether he wanted to or not. So the fact that he wasn’t home put a real crimp in her plans. Since she’d rashly left her key after packing her stuff, there was no waiting inside. Damn it.
So she sat in her car. Courtesy of the fact that half her stuff was in the back, she had plenty of clothes to layer for warmth. The temper helped. Her phone kept blowing up with calls and texts from the Campbell clan. She hadn’t listened to the voicemails and hadn’t answered the texts. Given that the theme of most had been Are you okay? Norah figured that despite Molly’s promise of secrecy, someone else had blabbed something. Maybe Liam had spoken to Mitch. She wasn’t talking to any of them until she’d talked to Cam himself and had the chance to pry his head out of his ass.
The bravado and the fury wore down considerably over the next two and a half hours. When her watch ticked over to nine and he still wasn’t home, she questioned whether he was coming at all. For all she knew, he could be drowning his idiocy in drink up at the Mudcat. When she confronted him, she wanted him sober.
Giving up for the night, she cranked the engine. On the second leg of her K-turn, headlights swept over her car. Cam’s truck. Nerves tangled in her belly at the sight of it. Had he been home before now? Seen her initial reaction? She parked her car again and got out, waiting as he did the same.
“Did you forget something?” Flat, expressionless tone. Oh yeah, he’d been home and he was pissed.
He’s worth the fight.
“Yes.”
Hush ran circles around her, and Norah paused to love on the dog.
“We can work out some kind of visitation for Hush while you’re here,” Cam said grudgingly.
How civilized of him. She didn’t wait for an invitation, just climbed the stairs. After a brief hesitation, Cam followed, unlocking the door. With a sarcastic wave, he gestured her inside. Norah stalked into the loft. Behind her, he shut the door and stood, limned in the lamplight, glowering.
“I came to tell you that this whole non-confrontational, learned helplessness bullshit is not going to work for me.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know you’ve had bad experiences with important people in the past just up and leaving you without you having a say, but you don’t come all the way after me in Chicago just to skulk away without a word.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
She stepped into his space, close enough to feel the heat of him. “Fight. With me. For me.” She laid a hand over his heart and found it pounding. “Because this is worth it. We’re worth it.”
“So…what? Some grand gesture from me is supposed to outweigh your dream job?” He spun away from her to pace. “How long would that last? How long until you start blaming me for what you gave up?”
She’d planted this idea in his head. When he’d ridden roughshod over her reasons for not being with him. And she’d believed it then. But that wasn’t who she was anymore. “That’s exactly what I was thinking after I saw you this afternoon. That I gave up my entire world for you.”
Back to her, Cam’s head drooped, his broad shoulders slumped.
“I’ve had a really good reminder the last two weeks, of exactly what that world is like. And you know what? My world sucked.” He straightened, turning as she continued. “Seventy hour work weeks. Colleagues who are convinced I got to the top on my knees or on my back rather than through my intellectual capabilities. Professional connections who are more than willing to believe the lies Philip has spread about me. A city where people I saw every single day of the last two years don’t even know who I am.”
He frowned, confused. Score one for her for throwing him off balance.
“I got headhunted by Peyton Consolidated before I ever left for Chicago. Before I knew Philip had started a personal vendetta against me. Gerald Peyton offered me everything I ever wanted professionally. And I turned him down cold.”
“What?”
“I told him what I’d been on my way to tell you. That I’m committed to staying here in Wishful, to building something on the foundation I started.”
He looked like she’d just told him the sky was green. “But the lawsuit—”
“The lawsuit didn’t change anything. It’s true he left the door open in case I changed my mind. That’s what I was talking to Cecily about when you overheard us.”
“You said you’d be a fool not to take the job. Under the circumstances, even I agree with you.”
With a bracing breath, she took the leap. “Then I’m a fool because I’m not going anywhere.” The bloom of terrified hope on his face had her stepping closer, cupping his cheek. “You said you’d always choose me because I was worth the risk. Did you think I wouldn’t do the same?”
He reached for her, hands curving around her hips even as he said, “But…you went to Denver.”
“How do you even know that? You didn’t take a single one of my calls.” She hung on lest he decide to break the tenuous connection between them.
“I tracked your phone.”
“Seriously? You’ve based your entire freak out on a snippet of eavesdropped conversation and the GPS location of my phone?”
Cam winced. “Yeah?”
Norah shoved back her irritation. “Peyton Consolidated is a big mover and shaker in urban redevelopment circles. I went to Denver to convince the CEO that rural tourism would be an excellent means of diversifying his investments and that he should start in Wishful.”
“Wait a minute. You turned this guy’s fantastic job offer down and then went to ask him to invest in something else?”
She nodded.
“Did he bite?”
Norah couldn’t help but be a little bit smug. “He loved the idea so much, we both went up to Balenmore, Colorado to meet with their tourism coordinator to get an inside look at how they made rural tourism work for them and generate ideas on how we could do the same here.”
“So…this whole time you’ve been gone, you’ve still been working on a plan to save Wishful?”
“Between meetings with my attorney, yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“I couldn’t tell you before I got back because you weren’t talking to me. And when I came to tell you today you didn’t want to hear my pretty speech, remember?”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was afraid if I talked to you, it’d give you the chance to break things off. Then when you didn’t contradict me and I came home and found all your stuff gone, I was sure of it.”
“You pissed me off. It really hurt me that you could believe I’d walk away from you so easily.”
“It hurt me to think it. I was angry and exhausted when I came after you. And then to hear that…it was like Melody all over again, and I guess it just triggered me.”
“Wait, what?” She thought back to what the family had told her. “Aunt Liz said you went up to surprise her and came back in just over twenty four hours, broken up.”
“Yeah. We’d made arrangements to meet on campus. I got there early, in time to hear her talking with a friend, saying she knew she was never going to pry me out of my hick town and she had to find some way to tell me she was never coming back to it. That it was a conversation long overdue but she wasn’t a monster who could do that while my mother was on her death bed.”
“Okay, leaving aside the fact that you have a serious problem with eavesdropping, Miranda was right. She was a bitch.”
Cam didn’t disagree. “I turned right back around and headed home. Called her from the road to say Mom was having a relapse and that I didn’t think it was going to work out between us.”
“You let her off the hook.”
“Should’ve done it two years earlier. I knew when she headed off to George Mason that it wouldn’t work. I just couldn’t deal with the confrontation then.”
“So this afternoon you were trying to let me off the hook and avoid that confrontation?”
“Something like that. If I wasn’t what you wanted, I wasn’t going to beg and I didn’t want to stand in the way of what you did.”
It was, in a way, noble and self sacrificing. And completely misguided.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I love you, and I don’t want to be the one to put you in a cage.”
“Cam.” She cupped his cheek and waited for her throat to unlock. “What we have between us isn’t a cage. I’m sorry I went off half-cocked without talking to you. I was panicked and angry, and I didn’t think about bringing you into it because you weren’t a part of that life. That wasn’t meant as a reflection of how I feel about you or us. I could’ve cleared that up while I was gone, but I didn’t want the first time I told you to be in a voicemail. The fact is, I’m stupidly, deliriously, completely in love with you. And I can prove it.”
“You already proved it. You’re here.” He brushed her lips with one of those gossamer, tender kisses that made her feel cherished.
She still had to tell him about the land, but as he pulled her closer, she decided it could wait. “Does this mean we’re done fighting?”
“God, I hope so.”
“Good, because I’m really ready to make up.” Bracing her hands on his shoulders, she leapt, wrapping her legs around his waist and fusing her mouth to his.
Cam took about a nanosecond to get on board with that plan. With a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, he hitched her higher. In a dozen strides, he was kicking the bedroom door shut. They fell to the bed, gasping, grasping, rolling, desperate to get to skin.
Norah tugged off his shirt and then her own, when it got caught around her shoulders. She took her mouth on a sprinting journey down his torso as she made quick work of his belt and jeans and found only him beneath.
“Behind on laundry,” he muttered, dragging her back to return the favor. Both brows winged up as he found her bare as well. “What’s your excuse?”
“Optimism. I was banking on fabulous make up sex.”
“You make optimism look really good.”
They dove at each other, gorging themselves on touch and taste in frantic, greedy bites, as if the speed and heat could eradicate the distance of the past weeks. Fevered, she scissored her legs around his and rolled until she straddled him. Capturing his hands, she curled her fingers through his, pressed them back against
the bed and lowered herself, glorying as he filled her in one long stroke. She held at the edge for a long, humming beat, body gripping him, the last of the space between them gone.
At last. She was home.
Cam freed his hands, pulling her down to take her mouth in a kiss that left her branded. She began to move, driving him with a blistering pace that sent them both careening toward the peak. His tongue danced with hers, echoing the rhythm she set. She took him deeper with every rocking thrust, her muscles coiling, his breath straining as skin slid against slick skin, until she shattered, dragging him into the free fall with her.
Boneless and quivering, Norah lay draped over Cam, her face pressed into his throat. Her heart—or maybe it was his—she couldn’t tell—continued to gallop as little aftershocks trembled through them both.
Cam’s hand slid limply down her thigh. “That was…”
“Cathartic.”
“I was going to say mind blowing.”
“That too.” She folded her hands across his chest and propped her chin so she could see him. “I missed you. Not just this—although definitely this—but everything else. You’re the first person I think about in the morning, the one I dream about at night. You’re the one I want by my side, Cam. A partner in the truest sense of the word. I don’t ever want you to have reason to doubt that again.”
He stroked a knuckle across her cheek, a feather light touch that soothed, even as it aroused. “I’m not perfect. I’ve got issues, and I’ll do stupid things. But I learn from my mistakes. I won’t doubt you again.”
She kissed him, softly, sweetly and then grinned.
“What’re you smiling about?”
“I’m still wearing my socks.”
“How is that possible?”
“They weren’t all that important in the get naked portion of the program.”
He rolled her beneath him. “I take that as a personal challenge.” He pressed his hips forward to prove it.
“Then I suppose you’re honor bound to rectify the oversight.”