Alone and what?
He analyzed his emotions, trying to put a name to them, and then realized that he was miserable—that was how he’d felt in spades since getting to GiGi’s house—alone and miserable. And as if something was missing for him.
Never before had he felt that way.
But today...
Today was god-awful.
God-awful and grim.
It was like being in some kind of nightmare where he noticed every single glance that passed between those couples. Every secret smile. Every private joke being shared. Every touch. Every shoulder nudge. Everything!
And each and every single damn one of those things had stabbed at him and made him think of Vonni. Made him want her and wish she was there with him so he could be having those same things with her.
It was so damn bad that he couldn’t stand being in that group and having it happen again and again.
So he kept escaping into the house, away from the brunch on the patio....
He closed his eyes and suffered the ripple of just how rotten he felt even thinking about what was going on out there—with Lang and Heddy, Jani and Gideon, Seth and Lacey, Cade and Nati, GiGi and Jonah....
He’d never experienced anything like it before, and he didn’t know what to do with himself.
He didn’t know how to make himself feel better. How to get out of this black hole when Vonni was the only thing he could think of that made him see light.
And there was just one way to have Vonni....
He dropped his head back and looked up at the summer sky outside the window in disbelief.
Having Vonni required him to do exactly what he’d sworn he would never do. What he hadn’t wanted to do.
But suddenly he wasn’t so sure he didn’t want to do it....
Not when he was thinking about doing it with Vonni.
Did that mean that he did want to get married now? he wondered, shocked at himself. That he did want to have kids and do the whole domestic dance?
You better really think about this....
Coupling up with Vonni...
Marriage.
Kids.
Living with another person.
Being answerable to that other person. Not coming and going as he pleased. Adapting to someone else’s schedules and needs and tastes.
And kids? The constant caretaking and doing for and looking out for. The homework. The school functions and soccer games and birthday parties. All that he’d done until he was blue in the face being one of the oldest of ten kids in the same household....
And yet...
Why was it that when he pictured doing all of that again—every bit of it—with Vonni, it wasn’t unappealing?
Now, that was odd.
But he started to think about last night, about this morning, about how it had felt to have Vonni in his house, in his bed. And it occurred to him that that had been different than with any other woman, too.
Regardless of how long he was with a woman, of how much he cared for her, he’d refused to cohabitate. As far as he was concerned, living together was just marriage without the paperwork and it wasn’t the paperwork he objected to.
And when a woman he was involved with spent the night he always felt as if he had a houseguest—someone who, regardless of how much he liked them and liked being with them—didn’t quite fit. It somehow put things out of balance and made him less comfortable than when he was on his own.
But now that he thought about it, he realized that that wasn’t how it had been last night. Last night had been great. It had been just the way every other minute with Vonni had been since he’d met her—easy, comfortable, relaxed....
Better even...
Better?
Not only had it seemed as if she fit, but he’d felt better having her there?
Come on, he silently cajoled himself in disbelief.
But it was true.
And no matter how much he picked at it and analyzed it and tried to deny it, the truth was that, yes, being with Vonni, having Vonni in his house, in his bed, had actually felt better than being alone....
Just the way having her here today would have made him feel better.
“So I’m a hypocrite,” he said to himself.
But he wasn’t, and as the conclusions he’d come to sank in, he understood why.
He hadn’t been posturing or putting on a false front when he’d said he didn’t want to ever get married or have a family or do the domestic thing again. He’d meant it wholeheartedly.
He just hadn’t known that it wouldn’t stay true if he met that Certain Someone.
That just one Certain Someone could turn his whole world upside down. Fast. And be a complete and total game changer.
For him, that one Certain Someone was Vonni.
“ZsiZsi says what’re you still doin’ in here and come out!”
It was Lang’s son Carter’s voice—and difficulty saying G’s—that barged into Dane’s thoughts.
He turned to face the little boy, and just seeing him made Dane smile.
He loved Carter and had a lot of fun with him—Fun Uncle Dane.
And as Fun Uncle Dane, he’d taken Carter to the zoo, to the park, swimming. He did whatever needed to be done with him if he was in the best position to do it—like taking him to the bathroom a little while ago.
None of it had been such a big deal. And now, thinking of having kids of his own—kids who were his and Vonni’s—with Vonni right there beside him, it just didn’t seem the way it always had to him. It didn’t seem like the chore it had been when he was a kid himself, looking after younger siblings and cousins. It seemed okay. And he was somehow all for it.
“I’ll be right there, buddy,” he told Carter.
“ZsiZsi says to drag you,” Carter announced, charging him, grabbing him around the leg as if it was a tree trunk and trying to drag him.
Dane laughed at the attempt and took a step with the leg Carter clung to. “I’ll drag you,” he told the three-year-old who was giggling at the ride.
But Dane did finally leave the den—with Carter attached to his leg—and headed back to the brunch, hoping still that it wouldn’t last much longer.
Only now he wasn’t hoping that so he could escape the rotten feelings the gathering had been giving him.
Now he hoped it wouldn’t last much longer because he had somewhere else he needed to go before he could get to Vonni.
And getting to Vonni as soon as he could was suddenly the most important thing he’d ever done....
Chapter Eleven
“Hi, Mom.” It was early Sunday evening when Vonni connected with Elizabeth for their video chat on the computer.
Because she hadn’t wanted to talk to her mother—or let her mother see her—so soon after leaving Dane’s house this morning, Vonni had emailed, said she had a lot to do and asked to postpone their usual Sunday-morning date until six o’clock tonight.
It was actually six-thirty and Vonni didn’t feel any better than she had when she’d left Dane. But she had the crying under control and after spending her Sunday afternoon at the animal shelter with Charlie she’d applied cold compresses to her eyes, then done her makeup to hide the telltale signs of more tears on the way home from the shelter.
She’d also done her hair so it was loose around her shoulders. She’d been afraid that pulling it back might draw undue attention to how her eyes were red under the concealer she’d used.
“Hi, honey,” Elizabeth responded from in front of her own computer. “Did you get everything done that you needed to today?”
“Pretty much,” Vonni answered. “How was your day?”
“Audie and I took Dashell to the airport—he left today—and that was about all we did,�
� Elizabeth said cheerily. “If I’d have talked to you this morning I was going to ask you to pick Dashell up in Denver so you could meet him. But when I got your email I thought you probably wouldn’t have the time....”
“I wouldn’t have,” Vonni said, too emotionally worn out to repeat the fact that she had no interest in being hooked up with her mother’s boyfriend’s single son.
Then Elizabeth leaned closer to the screen and said, “Have you been crying? You always get those red cheeks when you’ve been crying....”
“Maybe I just got a little too much sun today with Charlie,” Vonni said, thinking it was a plausible excuse. There was no way she was telling her mother about Dane and their night together. Or how incredibly—and surprisingly—rocked she’d been by getting up this morning to the realization that she had to put a stop to everything with Dane. Or how she’d felt all day long as if an important, long-term, serious relationship had just ended—which didn’t make any sense at all.
So to avoid getting into it, she said, “I did get some kind of upsetting news, though....”
She went on to tell her mother about the Burkes, the refusal to give her a partnership again and the edict from Howard Burke that she teach his new fiancée how to do her job. “At which point it looks like Mr. Burke could give her the shop as a wedding gift and—if I stayed—I’d just be working for her....”
It was somewhat comforting to Vonni to listen to her mother’s outrage on her behalf. When Elizabeth had vented for a while she settled down some and said, “What are you going to do?”
“Well...” Vonni shrugged. “I’m going to finish out the weddings that are coming up for the next four weeks—I don’t want to abandon my brides at the last minute and four weeks seems like a reasonable amount of time—”
“What about the ones after that? You’ve still done the work and those brides are expecting you to coordinate, too.”
“I know,” Vonni said, feeling guilty about that. “But there’s no time I can leave when that won’t be true—I’ve put in two and three months of work and gotten to know the brides from weddings that won’t happen until Christmas. One that’s a New Year’s Eve wedding. I’ll just have to use the next four weeks to introduce Mr. Burke’s fiancée to everyone and hope that they like her and that I can have her up to speed by the time their big day arrives and she’s their coordinator. None of us really have a choice....”
Vonni paused before she shored up her courage and said, “Then I think I’m going to take the job with Camdens.”
There wasn’t a lot of conviction in her words because as the day had worn on she’d worried more and more about it.
Not about the job itself, but about seeing Dane again.
Even if it was only here and there during the negotiations and contract signing, even if there was only a small chance of running into him when she was working within the Camden organization, she still wasn’t too sure she could handle it. So if she felt as if she had another, better option, she probably wouldn’t accept the Camden offer. But it was still an offer too good to refuse, especially now that she was facing what she was facing at Burke’s Weddings.
She just hoped that today was a particularly bad day. That she would come out of this funk, stop thinking about Dane, stop wanting Dane, stop wishing things could be different between them, so that a glimpse of him every now and then would come to mean nothing.
After all, she’d reasoned with herself, between having the rug pulled out from under her at Burke’s Weddings and then having to come up for air after last night with Dane only to end things with him, she was feeling unusually raw. But maybe in a few days, when the shock had worn off, when she’d put in her notice with the Burkes and gotten a lawyer to handle Camdens, she would feel better and everything would be okay.
“What do you think about me taking the Camdens offer?” she asked her mother.
“I’d want you to do it cautiously....” Elizabeth said.
“I have the name of a lawyer Dane Camden says hates the Camdens. Dane says the lawyer will make sure the deal is all to my benefit if I hire him to negotiate a contract. I haven’t talked to the lawyer yet—I’ll call him tomorrow and see what he has to say—but between the two of us and whatever you can think of, too, I’ll try to have all my bases covered. Dane says I can even add a clause that gives me enough out-the-door money—if for any reason I end up leaving—to start my own business.”
“So they really are trying to make up for what they did to Grampa.”
“He didn’t say that outright, but yes, I think that’s what’s behind this.”
“Not that you aren’t fantastic at what you do, honey. Or that getting you wouldn’t be huge for them.”
Vonni smiled weakly at her mother’s praise. “Absolutely,” she said facetiously, even though she didn’t doubt her own job skills. “But what do you think about that—going to work for the people who did what they did to Grampa?”
“I can tell you what your grandfather would say if he was here—he’d say this is good coming from bad, and he’d be all for it.”
“You think so?”
“He would want to know you’re protected—you know he kicked himself for not being smarter about keeping his formulas from anyone being able to get their hands on them. But I’m glad to hear you’ll get a lawyer to look out for your best interests—and all the better if it’s someone who doesn’t like the Camdens. Maybe he’ll be especially tough on them and make sure you come out ahead no matter what.”
“But you don’t think Grampa would feel like I’ve crossed over to an enemy camp?”
“Honey, really, I think it would give him some satisfaction to know that the Camdens are willing to do anything to have you and that you’ll make them pay dearly for it—he’d see that as a win for him in the end. He’d say it’s just what the Camdens deserve—having to put a whole lot of money in the Hunters’ pockets after all, only this time it’s on the up-and-up and going into the right pocket.”
That did sound like what Vonni remembered of her grandfather.
“So just stick it to them—for Grampa’s sake and for your own,” her mother concluded.
Vonni laughed. “I’ll do my best.”
“Now tell me about the house—you emailed that you found one after we talked last Sunday?”
Vonni told her mother all about that and was in the process of giving her the website address where her mother could see pictures of the place when there was a knock on her apartment door.
“That’s probably Mrs. Dunwilly,” Vonni said.
She’d run into Mrs. Dunwilly when she’d come up the outside stairs in tears this morning. Seeing that had alarmed the elderly woman, who had stopped to ask what was wrong. Vonni had only claimed to have job problems, expressed her appreciation for Mrs. Dunwilly’s concern and said she’d be fine.
But obviously wanting to comfort her, Mrs. Dunwilly had vowed to check on her later to see if she was all right and bring her a loaf of the homemade banana bread she was making this afternoon.
Vonni opted to leave out the emotional part of that encounter and told her mother only about the banana bread.
“Well, go and have your company,” Vonni’s mother said. “Audie and I are headed out for dinner, anyway. But why don’t we do this again Tuesday or Wednesday night so you can tell me about the house inspection and letting the Burkes know you’re quitting and what the lawyer says and...you just have too much going on to wait a week, honey.”
“Okay,” Vonni agreed before they said a quick goodbye and Vonni disconnected just as the second knock sounded.
“Coming,” she called, hoping that her neighbor—who, despite never letting any small infraction go unnoticed or unreported, also had a caring side—wouldn’t stay long.
She just wasn’t up to any more talking. Or thinking. Or even being awake. She f
elt so awful she thought that as soon as she could get Mrs. Dunwilly to leave she was going to crawl into her bed, pull the covers over her head and just pray for a miracle to wipe away all memory of Dane Camden so she could feel better tomorrow.
And it would take a miracle for her to feel better tomorrow, she thought as she took a deep breath and tried to seem okay as she opened the door.
Not to Mrs. Dunwilly at all....
“Dane.”
Her shock at seeing him was compounded by the fact that not only was he there, he was carrying a dog in each arm—her dog, Charlie, and the other dog named Ralph that they’d played with at the shelter last Sunday and that Vonni had seen again today when she’d been there earlier.
Ralph stayed put. But Charlie recognized Vonni, got excited and tried to leap out of Dane’s grasp to get to her.
Vonni caught him as Dane said a simple, “Hi.”
“Hi...” she echoed, her own voice laden with questions as she settled Charlie against her, wondering what in the world was going on. She was completely at the mercy of emotions warring between the thrill of seeing Dane and wishing he wasn’t there.
Because she knew herself. And she knew that she just needed to sever things or she wasn’t going to be able to resist him. That was why she’d left this morning; that was why she’d told him they couldn’t be together anymore.
And now here he was.
When she stood frozen and unsure what to do, Dane said, “Better let me in before Mrs. Dunwilly sees the dogs.” He nodded over his shoulder at her neighbor’s door.
“That’s who I thought you were,” Vonni said, still hesitating because she was aware of how risky it was to let him into her apartment.
She was wearing summer-weight green-and-white polka-dot pajama pants and a bright green T-shirt that was loose enough to conceal the fact that she was braless. The loungewear just didn’t feel like enough armor against the draw of Dane.
And he was dressed in jeans and a plain black polo shirt that made him look so good it flashed through her mind that she needed him the way she needed air to breathe.
But she couldn’t have him, so certainly letting him in was dangerous. The problem was, when she’d left him this morning, she’d concealed her true feelings for him, playing it light and breezy, and she couldn’t suddenly let those true feelings show and make a drama out of him being there. No matter how dramatic it felt to her.
A Camden Family Wedding Page 18