“I just realized I was wasting precious time. If I stay in DC, I’ll never be more than Camille Buchanan . . . waitress.” I force a smile to thwart her from worrying too much. “I’m going to head upstairs for a bit. Mind if I borrow your laptop?”
“Go right ahead, sweetie. I’ll make us some supper. You’re probably famished. I hear they don’t feed you on airplanes anymore.”
She strides off, waving in the air and cursing the airlines under her breath.
I grab her computer from the coffee table and lug my bag up to my room. My head pounds, the pain pulsing behind my eyes. I’m dehydrated and exhausted. After boarding the flight to Nashville, we were forced to wait another hour while they investigated some burning smell coming from the cabin. When we finally left and landed in Tennessee, I waited in line for two hours for a rental car because apparently every flight heading to the Northeast was canceled thanks to Winter Storm Knox.
With the laptop in hand, I collapse on the familiar worn comforter, sprawling across my bed. Cracking the lid, I check my email before composing a quick note to an old friend from Georgetown currently residing in West Hollywood.
Hi, Nina!
Guess what? I’m finally moving west! Were you still looking for a roommate? I’m leaving DC sooner than anticipated. Let me know. I can be on the next flight out.
XOXO,
Camille
PS – Are you still working at that casting agency off Ocean Ave?
PPS – Miss you!
I grin, recalling the fun and mischief Nina and I used to get into back when I was some innocent freshman exploring newfound freedom in one of the most exciting cities in the world.
In a way, maybe what happened today is for the best. It’s forcing me to act on my dreams, taking away any choice I may have had to prolong it. And who knows what would’ve happened two months from now? Ronan may have wanted to keep me around longer and longer, and who knows if stupid me would’ve agreed. I’ve known women who’ve gone years as nothing more than glorified fuck buddies, kept under wraps by men who fill their heads with just enough hope to keep stringing them along.
Pulling my phone from my bag, I see a handful of missed calls; all with 202 area codes. One after another. Each call separated by a minute or so. I don’t have to second guess what I already know: they’re all from Ronan.
The bar across the top of my screen tells me my battery’s at one percent, and it may as well be because I’m not calling him. It’s pointless. He’s not my boyfriend. We weren’t romantically involved. And I don’t need another surprise visit from the FLOTUS when she finds out we’re still communicating.
Besides, I know what he’ll say. He’ll convince me to see him again, and he won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. And I’ll cave in because, well, he’s Ronan Montgomery, and my ability to resist a handsome man who makes me feel light on my feet and dizzy with sweet reveries only goes so far.
I exhale, allowing myself to experience one last, vivid memory of his lips on mine, his hands in my hair, and his weight on my body before I release it for good. He was never mine to keep—none of them were. Our passionate nights were on borrowed time, and the meter just happened to expire earlier than expected.
An irrational, sharp pain fills my chest when I think about him moving on, if only because I selfishly wanted to keep him to myself just a little while longer. He’ll get over me eventually, and he’ll probably wind up married to Lydia Darlington. Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, even if it pains me to think about it.
I let myself dwell just a little while longer before I plug my phone into the wall and head downstairs to spend more time with my sweet mother.
***
A blanket of snow coats our front yard. It’ll be gone by noon, but it makes for a beautiful view as I sit in the kitchen and lick a spoonful of cinnamon oatmeal. Mom left an hour ago to put in a few hours. Since retiring last year, she’s taken to volunteering at the library fifteen hours a week.
I’ve got the whole house to myself for the next couple of hours. Nowhere to go. No one to see.
I pull the familiar scent of my childhood home into my lungs. It’s like a fuzzy blanket, a hot cup of cocoa, and a big hug wrapped up in one. I’m not used to this much quiet, but I imagine it could be therapeutic.
A wooden birdfeeder attached to the kitchen window with plastic suction cups catches my eye. Inside, a tiny little brown bird perches on the edge, nibbling at the seed.
“What are you doing here? You should’ve flown south by now.” I smile and rinse my bowl in the sink, and the bird flies away.
Lucky little thing.
I skip down the steps to the lower level family room, fully content to veg out with the remote and a stack of my mom’s celebrity gossip magazines. She’s partially to blame with my obsession with all things glamour. Mom’s style is the epitome of understated, but she always appreciated a good red carpet gown.
Mindlessly turning pages and simultaneously flipping channels, I mute the TV when I hear knocking. It’s possible that it’s my imagination, but I cock my heard toward the stairs, waiting to see if I hear it again.
A few seconds pass, and the sound of three hard knocks echoes through the house. It’s the middle of the morning on a Monday. Unless it’s one of my mom’s crazy neighbors or a FedEx delivery, I’m not sure who else it would be.
I sit the magazine and remote aside and head upstairs, my heart pounding at the intense recollection of my surprise visitor at the hotel yesterday.
A break in the curtains on the front picture window shows a shiny black SUV in the driveway, and the pounding of my heart radiates through every extremity before traveling up my throat and pulsing in my ears.
Mustering all the courage I have left, I count to five and open the door.
THIRTY
Ronan
“Why?” My jaw tenses. “Why’d you run off?”
I don’t waste time with simple pleasantries. I didn’t fly to Oakdale, Tennessee to waste time with small talk.
“Ronan, what are you doing here?”
My elegant Camille stands in the door of her mother’s home in plaid pajama pants and a faded gray t-shirt, her dark hair piled into a messy bun and her face stripped of makeup.
“You disappeared,” I said. “You didn’t return my calls. I was concerned.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says.
“Don’t lie to me, Camille.” It’s cold as hell outside, but I’m burning. “Did someone threaten you? Is that why you ran?”
Her gaze falls to my shoulders, then to the cement steps under my shoes. “Come in.”
I step inside a quaint split level, welcomed by modest décor and 90s-era furnishings.
“Why haven’t you taken my calls?” I ask.
“I don’t have the disposable phone anymore,” she mutters.
“Where is it?”
“It’s gone, Ronan.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” she says, her eyes pleading along with her words. She takes a step back, her arms crossed and posture guarded. “Let’s just go our separate ways and not make this into something bigger than it needs to be. I don’t want any trouble.”
“Any trouble?” I laugh, stepping into her space. She refuses to meet my gaze. “I don’t understand. We had a great weekend together. We were looking forward to the next nine weeks. Something had to have changed after I left. What happened, Camille?”
She peers over my shoulder toward the window. “Did you come alone?”
“Oliver’s in the car. Why?”
Her chocolate eyes grow round as her fingers cover her lips. “Oliver.”
“What?” My brows meet. “What about him?”
“He’s always with you.”
“Right. He’s my assigned agent. Required to go everywhere I go.”
“He’s . . . he’s . . .” She runs past me, glancing out the window and taking a closer look. From where
I stand, I can tell he’s on his phone. “It’s been him all along.”
“What are you talking about?”
She collapses on a nearby loveseat, her head in her hands.
I take the spot beside her, hooking my arm around her back.
“Your mother,” she says. My heart drops. “She came to my room yesterday morning, just after you left.”
“Oh, God.”
“You shouldn’t be here, Ronan. She made it very clear that I’m not to have anything to do with you.” Camille turns to look out the window again, and we watch as Oliver ends his phone call. “I guarantee you he was just speaking to your mother.”
Her words send a chill to the room.
“When I got home yesterday,” I say, “someone had slid a postcard of the Melrose under my door. And a packet of photocopied journal pages was on my bed.”
She points at her chest. “My journal pages?”
I nod, lips pursed.
“She told me she’d taken precautions. That she knew everything we’d done, every place we’d met. She said she had my journal.”
“Did she threaten you?”
Camille chews her lip. “In not so many words . . .”
“Fuck.” I run my fingers through my hair. Just being here with her is putting her safety in jeopardy, and out of everyone, I’ve seen firsthand the lengths my mother is willing to go to to get what she wants.
I rise.
“Where are you going?” Camille stands.
“I need to buy us some more time,” I say, staring at Oliver through the window.
“More time? No. Ronan. We’re done. I don’t want to be involved in any of this. I don’t want to look over my shoulder the rest of my life.” She places a hand against my chest, and I cover it with mine.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “You think she’s going to let you walk away just like that? After she clearly threatened your life? You think she’ll be content knowing some little twenty-four-year-old has the power to take down the Montgomery name? You clearly don’t know what that woman is capable of.”
Camille’s fingers tremble, and I lift them to my lips, staring into the brown eyes I’ve come to associate with the only true freedom I’ve known in almost thirty years.
“So she’ll kill me anyway.” Her words are flat, weighted with fear and a lead balloon.
“She convinced you to stay away from me,” I say. “But how can she guarantee you’ll never spill her secrets? There’s only one way.”
“Why would she offer me millions of dollars to go away?” Camille asks.
“Because it was a short-term solution to a long-term problem, and in her eyes, you’ll be long gone before you ever see it.”
Camille lowers herself into the sofa, staring blankly ahead. “I’ve been so careful all these years. I did everything I could to avoid the very thing happening right now.”
An ironic laugh leaves her pretty lips, and she pulls in a ragged breath.
“It’s all my fault. I brought you into this. You agreed to a simple arrangement that no one in their right mind would’ve turned down, but you didn’t agree to any of this,” I say. “Which is why I promise you, Camille, nothing is going to happen to you. I’ll make damn fucking sure of it.”
I pull her into my arms again and away from the view of the window, cupping her pretty face in my hands and crushing her trembling lips with mine.
“I’m not done with you yet, Camille,” I remind her. “I’m going to handle this, and when it’s over, we can pick right back up where we left off.”
Her eyes squeeze shut.
“Let me deal with Oliver for now. I’ll call you shortly. Keep your phone near,” I say.
***
“How’d it go?” Oliver asks when I climb into the passenger seat of the rental Suburban.
“Not well.” I sigh, glancing out the window. I can’t look at the bastard without wanting to knock him out. “We’re done, Oliver. She wants nothing to do with me.”
“Probably for the best.” He peers over his shoulder as he backs out of her driveway.
“Couldn’t agree more. The last thing I need is some prostitute attached to my name.” I huff. “Don’t know what I was ever thinking.”
“I thought you were crazy for wanting to get involved in that mess in the first place. Tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. I just sat back and let you do your thing. Figured you needed to get it out of your system before you get serious about your future,” he says.
Everything about our conversation is typical and casual, and I have a hard time believing Oliver could betray me like that, but it’s the only logical explanation. He’s been there all along, from the minute I first saw her and for every meeting since. With all those spur of the moment meet-ups and last-minute location changes, someone would’ve had to have tailed me twenty-four seven for the last month in order to catch them all. Oliver makes sense.
“Want to grab a bite?” Oliver asks, smirking. “If we can even find a decent place in this one-stoplight town.”
“I have a headache,” I say. “Not hungry. Just take me back to the hotel. I’ll just hang out there the rest of the day.”
“Seriously?” he asks, turning to look at me. “You’re going to sit inside a musty little room in the Motel 6 the rest of the day?”
I shrug. “May as well. What else is there to do around here? I’m not trying to be seen, Oliver. The last thing we need is for the whole world to know I was in Oakdale, Tennessee for no apparent reason. If they go digging hard enough, they just might link me to Camille, and then what?”
“All right, all right.” He places a palm in the air and pulls into the parking lot of our hotel. “I guess I’ll be in my room then . . . until tomorrow . . . doing nothing. At least they have HBO, I guess.”
His job as my personal Secret Service agent requires him to be by my side at all times, but we’ve been known to break the rules a time or two over the years.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. If you want to drive around town or grab a bite to eat, by all means, go for it.”
He pulls into a parking spot not more than fifteen feet from our respective hotel rooms, and I pull the key from my pocket. We climb out, and he escorts me to my room before heading back to the Suburban. Inside, I watch out the peephole until he drives away, and then I call Camille to come pick me up.
***
“I can’t believe I’m doing this. You’re lucky I still have this rental car.” Camille’s delicate hands grip the gray plastic steering wheel of a white Honda Accord.
She pulls away as soon as I’m inside, and we drive back to her mother’s house.
“I’m going to err on the side of paranoid,” she says when we pull into the driveway. “Stay here.”
Climbing out and running to the attached garage, she punches in a code and returns to pull the car in. Oliver would get in so much trouble if anyone knew he ‘lost’ me, and I smirk to myself at the thought.
For the first time in years, I’m one hundred percent untethered and untracked. And it feels fucking amazing.
THIRTY-ONE
Camille
“Would you like something to drink?” I lean against the kitchen counter as Ronan stands before me.
Never in my life did I imagine that someday the son of the President of the United States of America would be hanging out in our tiny little kitchen in Oakdale.
But here he is.
In the flesh.
Looking like he could still jump my bones despite the graveness of this situation.
My mom is going to freak out when she comes home.
“No, thank you. Where can we go to talk?” He looks so handsome today in his creamy cashmere sweater with the button down and tie sticking up at the collar. Ronan couldn’t dress down if he tried.
I feel silly in my pajamas. I should’ve changed, but the second he left, all I could do was sit paralyzed by the living room window with my cellphone in my shaking hands.
“Yeah.” I motion for him to follow me down to the family room. The house is a mess. Mom’s slight hoarder tendencies, coupled with the fact that she was always too busy working to pick up the house on a regular basis, have given our house a permanent cluttered, if not homey, feel over the years. “Sit wherever you’d like.”
He glances at our sagging plaid sofas before perching on the end of one. I reach for the remote on the coffee table, shutting off the episode of Judge Judy playing in the background.
If Ronan is judging the surroundings, he does a good job of hiding his true feelings, and I appreciate the courtesy.
“So what’s next, Ronan?” I ask, clapping my hands across my lap. “Where do we go from here? And what kind of target am I going to have on my back when the powers that be find out I’m harboring President Montgomery’s son in my basement?”
“This past weekend.” He clears his throat. “Something changed in me.”
I sink into the sofa across from him, hooking my arm around the edge and picking at a loose thread. I need to keep my hands busy to distract myself from the fluttering in my chest.
“I felt free with you,” he says, “in a way I’ve never felt with anyone before. You’re easy to be around, Camille. You’re playful and genuine and sexy.”
My chin tucks as a warm blush covers my cheeks. If any other man said those words to me, I’d smile and graciously thank him, barely giving myself a chance to let them sink in. But they feel different coming from him.
“I’m not saying I fell in love with you,” he says. “But I’m saying I probably could if I let myself. And that says a lot, because I don’t even fucking believe in love. And I know you don’t either. But tell me you felt it. Tell me you felt that spark of something so real it terrified you.”
I did. I felt it. And I shoved it so deep down inside me it couldn’t possibly see the light of day.
“I don’t know what’s real or what’s not anymore,” I protest.
DARK PARADISE - A Political Romantic Suspense Page 16