She wanted to explain how because she had loved Hadley she had protected him as best she could from reality. Had lied and covered up for him on occasions too numerous to count
Released from the secret caverns of her heart, the spoken words were covered in her husband’s blood. Cameron was looking at her like she was a crazy woman who just might pull a knife from the soapsuds and plunge it into his heart without compunction.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I was his enabler.”
While confined to a hospital bed, Cameron had watched his fair share of hit-and-run psychiatrists on daytime talk shows, and he had something to say on the matter. How long had this poor woman been blaming herself for circumstances out of her control?
“If you ask me, that’s just a fancy name for somebody nice.”
“Or a euphemism for a murderer.” Patricia’s voice was as flat as a death knell. “If only I had been strong enough to help Hadley face his weaknesses instead of always covering for him, maybe my children wouldn’t be without a father. If only I wouldn’t have allowed him out on such a snowy night... I should have known he would head to the bar and would insist on driving home despite the roads being so treacherous.”
Expecting Cameron to back away from her in horror now that he knew the truth about her, Patricia focused on the hint of gray in his mustache and the unforgiving lines of the mouth it sheltered. She awaited his condemnation with her back ramrod straight, subconsciously welcoming it as her due.
But Cameron did not back away. Instead he stepped forward and wrapped her as gently in his arms as he would any wounded creature. And when she tilted her face to his and searched his eyes in bewilderment, he traced with his thumb the track that solitary tear had left upon her cheek. Her heart leaped at the intimacy of the gesture, its wild beat striking against his own, pounding out a savage song of fear—and need.
“Honey, you might as well blame the barkeep who served him more than the legal limit allowed,” he murmured softly into her ear. A sense of protectiveness unlike anything he’d ever felt before corkscrewed through his body. Her hair was soft against his cheek and smelled of sweet spices. He breathed deeply of her fragrance, reveling in the perfect fit of her body to his. An angel, she wanted nothing more of him than simple compassion and understanding.
“But we both know that wouldn’t be right, either. Nobody forced alcohol down your husband’s throat that night he went and got himself killed. Each of us is responsible for our own destiny. And each of us has our own reasons for doing what we do.”
His words were heavy with double meaning. When Patricia discovered the real reason he’d signed on, he doubted she would be as forgiving of him as she had of the husband who had not deserved her devotion. Her honesty was too brutal to bear. It was like looking directly into the sun. It burned an image onto the retina that was permanent.
His arms fell loosely to his side, and he took a deliberate step back.
Patricia was as moved by Cameron’s sudden gentleness toward her as she was startled by his abrupt withdrawal. “You’re right, of course,” she murmured. “Each of us has our own reasons for what we do.”
The sound of roughhousing in the next room vibrated throughout the house, a loud reminder of why she would continue her fight against all odds. Patricia was glad of the diversion. It helped her shake off a mood too somber. After all, the possibility of romance with this drifter whose arms had gone around her in comfort was almost as ludicrous as pretending there was anything more permanent between them than a wrinkled contract.
She understood Cameron’s need to revisit his childhood home, but it was dangerous to consider his pilgrimage as anything more than the temporary desire to re-experience his youth. After all, a man as good as Cameron was with his hands and his head and his heart wasn’t likely to remain a drifter long. Some nice, unattached woman without a ready-made family was bound to snatch him up and find a permanent spot for his boots under her bed.
Patricia felt a painful twinge in her chest at the thought. As attached to his grandfather’s legacy as Cameron seemed, she wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t secretly hoping to buy the ranch back someday and start his own family here. Unfortunately the cost of nostalgia didn’t come cheap, and even if he could scrounge up the money somehow, Patricia wasn’t interested in selling.
She did not reprimand her boys for making too much noise. To her, their laughter was the sound of healing in its purest form. Unlike the elegant museum her father had designed to impress the world, she loved this old house for the humble way it absorbed a family’s bumps and bruises and made them its own. The notches on the kitchen door that marked the presence of a previous generation were now joined by her own children’s as a visual reminder to her that life goes on.
Chapter Seven
At midnight, Cameron opened one unfriendly eye and checked the clock ticking on his nightstand. Annoyed to discover that he’d been lying awake for the better part of two hours, he rolled over and punched his pillow, determined not to lose another precious minute of sleep. After staring at the ceiling for an interminable length of time, he finally drifted off only to be taunted in his dreams by a collage of confusing images. Standing in the midst of an empty arena, he bowed to the sound of laughter. An old man with a Colt .45 commanded him to make a man of himself. Wearing a crown that proclaimed her official queen of the buckle bunnies, Bonnie winked at him behind a kissing booth where a string of acquaintances awaited their turn. Two boys dressed in old-time Western wear held him hostage with nothing more than their index fingers, and an angel in a pink angora sweater and skintight jeans beckoned him with outstretched arms and pursed lips.
She looked achingly familiar.
Bathed in a sheen of sweat, Cameron awoke with a mouth full of goose down pillow.
He arose a few short hours later wondering how he was going to face himself in the mirror. Patricia’s tender display of vulnerability yesterday had left him unsettled and sexually frustrated. Though he had long ago realized that buckle bunnies could never fulfill his deeper psychological need for closeness and intellectual stimulation, Cameron couldn’t deny the fact that there was a decided void in his life that only a woman could fulfill.
The fact that he wasn’t willing to make a commitment to anyone complicated matters. Bonnie’s infidelity had hurt him deeply. Perhaps less because of any real emotional attachment he had felt than the fact that she had so blatantly used him. As long as he was winning, all was lovey-dovey. But two summers ago when he’d hit a slump, Bonnie had turned as nippy toward him as a northern gale just before it dumps six feet of snow. Before Cameron knew what hit him, she had taken up with one of his old buddies who just happened to be having better luck in the arena than he. A bull goring him with both horns and trampling him to mincemeat beneath his hooves couldn’t have inflicted more damage to Cameron’s ego. The experience left him as wary as a wolf.
The thought of rubbing Bonnie’s upturned nose in a nationally televised win was only part of what motivated him to tape up the ribs he had broken in semifinals and risk his life for a championship buckle. A buckle that would help him reclaim his heritage and his pride. A buckle that was going to make a lifelong dream an eventuality.
Still no hunk of metal, regardless of how big or prestigious, could keep him warm at night, and Cameron’s thoughts turned again to the luscious creature who had tempted him in his dreams. Since lying in bed was getting him nowhere fast, he struggled out of his blankets, hoping that a hot cup of coffee and a cool shower would put those haunting images out of his mind.
Against the first weak light of day, the ranch house looked silent, dark and curiously inviting. As a child, he had always liked the thought of being the first up in the morning and relished opening the day like a shiny gift-wrapped package. Dawn in the high country was growing chillier with the approach of winter. A man who liked to sleep in the nude, Cameron was spurred into action by the nip of cold air on bare fle
sh. He slipped into his work clothes and pulled on his boots with an efficiency of movement that gave little indication of the permanent ache that had settled into bones and joints too long abused by hard living. A moment later he was out the door and unintentionally rousing a couple of emus from their sleep as he passed by the corral. Tossing a rude gesture in their general vicinity, he stole into the main house as silently as a burglar.
Funny how after all these years he could still remember every creak in the floorboards. Not wanting to wake his parents on their only day to sleep in, Cameron had memorized the chronic ills of this house on his weekly trek to watch Sunday morning cartoons on their old black-and-white set. Tiptoeing over each woody chirp brought back a sense of déjà vu so intense as to make him pause in mid-step to consider it.
He found himself standing in front of the bedroom that had been his parents’. It was Patricia’s room now. The door stood ajar, and he assumed she had left it open out of necessity in case the baby cried out.
As Cameron gazed into the room, his breath caught in his lungs. He felt a sharp, masculine reaction at the nearness of the sleeping figure on the bed. She was beautiful. Wrapped in a floral sheet like a butterfly escaping its sweet cocoon of sleep, the woman was a vision any artist would long to capture on canvas. Her chestnut-colored hair was spread like a curtain of deep satin upon her pillow. A hint of lace caressed white shoulders. Untouched by any cosmetic attempts to improve perfection, she seemed a goddess, ethereal and radiant in the first rays of the sun spilling through her window. Cameron found the simple cotton gown she wore more alluring than any expensive negligee made for the express purpose of driving a man wild.
Feeling suddenly a voyeur, he wondered how he would possibly explain himself if for some inexplicable reason Sleeping Beauty were to awaken and discover him gawking at her. He forced his feet to move on, but neither a sense of guilt nor self-will could compel his mind to relinquish the erotic image that made the need for his shower to be a very cold one.
Patricia was not a morning person. Never had been. No matter how early she went to bed the night before, daybreak always arrived too soon. She slapped her alarm clock as if holding it personally responsible for bringing on the day before she was ready for it Moaning, she burrowed deeper into the warmth of her bed-covers. Heaven, she had decided long ago, would be the luxury of an entire unplanned morning to languish in bed.
Unfortunately motherhood was not conducive to the fulfillment of such fantasies. She knew too well that if she didn’t drag herself out of bed right now, her chances of getting a shower were nil. Any minute now the baby would be clamoring for breakfast, an ordeal certain to be followed by the agony of trying to awaken Kirk. The lad had his mother’s grumpy, morning disposition, and the two of them clashing over a bowl of oatmeal wasn’t a pretty sight. Undoubtedly in the midst of breakfast Johnny would remember a crucial piece of homework that he had neglected to do and would demand his mother’s undivided attention. As if his brother and sister were capable of feeding and dressing themselves on their own.
Patricia groaned once more for good measure before bravely throwing off the covers. Immediately her body was covered with goose bumps. Oh, to have the money to adequately heat this old house!
Her feet hit the cold floorboards running. Experience had taught her that the best cure for morning frigidity was jumping under a hot shower just as fast as the tired, old pipes would pump it. Bleary-eyed, she made her way to the bathroom. The fact that light was leaking out from around the bathroom door didn’t necessarily surprise her. Despite repeated warnings about wasting energy, the boys often left the lights on after a midnight foray to relieve themselves. She was mumbling something or other about money not growing on trees when she stumbled into the bathroom. Cameron was just stepping out of the shower as she closed the door behind her.
Patricia was too surprised to do anything but gape in disbelief. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to turn around or even to blink as he snapped a towel off the rack and wrapped it around himself with lightning speed. Steam rose from his body in curling white tendrils. Water glistened in crystallite beads along his broad shoulders and dripped in rivulets down the smooth plane of his chest. She found Cameron’s sleek, muscular physique very much to her liking. The man could have been sculpted out of marble by Michelangelo. He was close enough to touch, and Patricia had to fight the urge to run her fingertips over a map of thin, jagged scars marring the surface of an otherwise perfect body.
“You’re early,” was all she could manage to stammer.
Unable to decide whether her tone was apologetic or accusatory, Cameron countered that blinding flash of the obvious with a cockeyed smile to hide his own mortification. “Or maybe you’re right on time.”
As if he wasn’t already self-conscious enough about standing half-naked at attention in front of the boss lady, Cameron was doubly embarrassed to be doing so in a bathroom that smelled so utterly feminine. Just because a fellow might be tempted to sniff at the heavenly fragrances standing guard along the ledge of the tub while he was under the shower, didn’t make him the kind of man who got into anything kinky, he hoped she knew. Just one who couldn’t resist this particular lady’s distinct scent. At the time it had not seemed particularly untoward when he chose to use a dollop of her shampoo to lather up his hair. Now all he could do was wonder how in the world he was going to hide it from her when the bottle was in plain sight with the cap off and her light floral odor emanating from his skin.
Cameron felt her eyes follow the path of his blush all the way from the base of his belly up to the roots of his hair. He dropped his own gaze to encompass the swell of her breasts against the thin cotton of her gown. The flicker of desire in his eyes burst into a blue blaze that threatened to consume them both. Seconds stretched between them. The look they shared was steamier than the heat fogging up the mirror. Through a haze of mist, they regarded each other as warily as two jungle cats.
“Mom!”
Patricia almost jumped out of her skin at the sound of Johnny pounding on the door. She frowned. The last thing she needed to do was explain to her ten-year-old how she and their foreman had ended up in the shower together.
She pulled the door open to face her son. A cloud of condensation enveloped the boy who had far more pressing things on his mind than his mother’s obvious discomfort.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
So am I, Cameron almost added with a feral look in his eyes. But not for breakfast...
Patricia grabbed her son’s arm for support and guided Johnny toward the stairs. “Well, so much for my shower,” she sighed.
“If you don’t mind waiting outside a minute, I’ll get changed and let you in. I’d be glad to rustle up breakfast for the crew.”
That voice sounded a whole lot like his, but Cameron wasn’t sure. Surely a fellow who couldn’t so much as scramble an egg without burning it would not utter such an altruistic statement.
“You really wouldn’t mind?” Patricia asked, her eyes widening in surprise.
“Not at all,” Cameron lied. “That is, as long as cold cereal’s good enough for you.”
“It’s what we always have,” Johnny reassured him.
His mother refrained from cuffing him and shot him a look of censure. “Not always,” she protested.
“No, not always,” the boy quickly amended with an insincere lift of his eyebrows in Cameron’s direction.
“And besides,” Patricia interjected on an apologetic note, “the deal is I’m supposed to feed you, not the other way around.”
“It would just be for one morning. You go on and take your shower and don’t worry about a thing. I can handle it.”
Had he lost his mind? He would just as soon try milking a Brahma bull as fix breakfast for a gaggle of hungry ragamuffins. His friends would have a hay day if they could see him wrangling big, old goofy birds and wearing an apron to boot. If the paparazzi got hold of such a damning snapshot, he could kiss any promotional cont
ract goodbye forever.
“Thanks,” Patricia said. “Thanks a lot.”
A man could have gotten a toothache from the sweet, appreciative look she gave him.
“Think nothing of it. Take your time,” he replied, making a sardonic mental note to make himself a dental appointment. Had it not been for the fact that he’d been so befuzzled in his state of undress at finding Patricia in the same room with him, Cameron was certain he would never have gone and trapped himself like this.
She stepped out in the hall and waited for him to get dressed. When he emerged moments later, an escort service was awaiting him. Johnny led Cameron down the hallway. As the bathroom door closed softly behind Patricia, he could hear the soothing sound of water running in the shower. It conjured up decadent images of a cotton nightgown abandoned upon the floor and a lithe body stepping gracefully over the lip of the tub. That dulcet sound was joined by the dubious harmony of a baby’s wail. The discordance jarred him from pleasant illusions and plunged him into reality headfirst. What in the name of sanity had he let himself in for?
Patricia was hit full in the face with a blast of cold water. Hot water was at a premium, and Cameron had apparently used most of it up. On top of that, he had adjusted the showerhead so it fit him comfortably. Still, she wasn’t complaining. The fact that the man had actually offered to lend a hand with breakfast was not to be taken lightly. Had her own husband been as helpful, she would have fallen over in shock. They all would have starved if Hadley had been in charge of feeding them.
She was less amused than disappointed to find the cap off her shampoo bottle. Her generic brand couldn’t possibly compete with that masculine, slightly musky scent Cameron used. Even after a hard day of reshingling her roof, he smelled too good to be true. If a woman could bottle such a scent, Patricia figured she could make a fortune.
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