The Camden Cowboy

by Victoria Pade

  And itching just a little for that, too…

  Chapter Four

  Lacey didn’t get back to the guesthouse on Friday until almost midnight. There weren’t any lights on in the main house. She had no way of knowing if that meant that Seth had gone to bed, if he was sleeping elsewhere, or even if he was sleeping in his own bed but not alone—those were the unwelcome and inappropriate thoughts she’d had as she’d let herself into the small bungalow.

  One way or another, she had not gotten to see him again on Friday.

  On Saturday she was up at 4:30 a.m. and out the guesthouse door by five. And again there was no sign of Seth.

  It was after ten o’clock Saturday night when Lacey returned to the Camden ranch, and this time as she trudged wearily from her car and past the main house, the scent of Italian food drifted out to her through the open French doors that formed the kitchen’s rear wall.

  Who was cooking at ten o’clock on a Saturday night?

  “Hey! Are you just getting home from work?”

  It was Seth Camden’s voice that called to her and before Lacey could make herself look for him, she thought, Please don’t let him be over there with a date….

  “I am,” she answered, turning her head in the direction of the main house.

  No one was in sight except Seth. He was standing at the kitchen sink, looking at her from the window over it.

  Her first impression was that he was fresh from a shower—his hair was combed back and appeared to be slightly damp, and his face had a sort of just-scrubbed look to it. He also wasn’t dressed for public display—he was wearing an ancient crewneck sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and left ragged, and—from what she could see of his waistband—a pair of extremely faded jeans.

  But he could have just had an evening of crazy-wild lovemaking that had left him and his partner hungry so they’d showered, thrown on just anything and decided to fix themselves a late supper.

  That was the scenario Lacey imagined in a way that both titillated her with the fantasy of herself as the partner, and tormented her with the thought that there might be another woman in that role. Another woman who just wasn’t in the kitchen at that moment. Because surely a Camden—and particularly one as gorgeous as Seth—would not be spending Saturday night alone…

  “Hang on a minute,” he said, turning to the stove to peer into a pot before he came back to the kitchen window.

  “Are you cooking? At this hour?” Lacey ventured.

  “Yep. Want to eat?”

  He said that so easily. Seemingly without the kind of second thoughts that were already going through her mind about why she should say no.

  But Lacey had had a cold hamburger for lunch and a protein bar out of her purse for dinner. Her options inside the guesthouse were crackers or cereal. And in that instant it seemed silly not to follow his lead and just say yes.

  So that’s what she did.

  “I would love to eat! It smells wonderful and I’m starving.”

  Oh. But what if there was a date somewhere on the verge of making an appearance in the kitchen…

  For one instant, she’d forgotten what she’d been fretting about. She really was tired…

  “My pasta water isn’t boiling yet,” Seth was saying. “And I just started to put a salad together—I’m about fifteen or twenty minutes away from eating if you want to make a pit stop.”

  Lacey had no doubt she looked like something the cat had dragged in. Which added another reason she hoped some bombshell girlfriend wasn’t going to appear. But it also occurred to her that she could use fatigue to rescind her acceptance, so she said, “Are you alone in there?”

  Seth made a show of glancing over his shoulder at the otherwise empty kitchen before he brought his blue eyes to her again. “Unless there’s somebody here I don’t know about,” he said as if the question was odd.

  So no date. No evening-long romp that had prompted a late supper. Just Seth.

  And me….

  “Do I have time for a quick shower? I’m kind of grungy,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Then I’ll be right back,” Lacey said with way more glee than she wanted there to be in her voice.

  Renewed energy surged through her. She picked up speed as she rounded the pool and let herself into the guesthouse. The minute she’d closed the door behind herself she began a frantic unbuttoning of her blouse as she kicked off her shoes. Then down went her slacks to be flung onto the couch as she headed for the bathroom for the fastest shower in history.

  After barely toweling off, she again opted for speed—and, taking Seth’s lead, comfort, too—and put on her most comfortable undies and bra, a fresh pair of white shorts and a simple red V-neck T-shirt. Then she bent over to brush her hair from the bottom up, catching it at her crown in a rubber band, before she applied a little blush, a little mascara and some lip gloss. Then she slipped her feet into a pair of sandals and went out the guesthouse door, her fifteen-hour day a faint memory.

  Seth was setting two places at one of the small poolside tables as she rounded the pool to join him.

  “I was afraid I might be intruding on a date or something,” Lacey said. Her two nights of wondering if he was with a woman spurred her to fish a little.

  “Nope, no date. I don’t do much of that, actually,” he said, again as if he had no qualms about being perfectly honest.

  And since that was the case, Lacey said, “So a girlfriend or a fiancée or a wife or someone isn’t going to jump out of the bushes?”

  “No girlfriend. No fiancée. Definitely no wife.”

  In other words, he was free as a bird…

  Not that it mattered, Lacey told herself. She just hadn’t wanted to come face-to-face with a woman who had claim to him. She didn’t want to be the third wheel.

  “What about you?” he countered. “Boyfriend? Fiancé? A husband lurking somewhere while you’re out here in the boonies building a training center?”

  “With my schedule?” she asked with a laugh. “I couldn’t keep a houseplant alive, let alone a relationship.”

  “You do work a lot,” he said.

  Lacey didn’t know why, but it sounded like he didn’t approve of that so she skirted around the topic. “What about you? Why are you eating so late?”

  He smiled as if she’d scored some sort of point. “I was working, too. But not by choice. I had a cow that needed help calving out—”

  “Calving out—does that mean she was giving birth?”

  “It does. And she needed help. I was doing that until about an hour ago. Then I came home, cleaned up and decided to go ahead and cook what I’d been planning to cook earlier.”

  “So you made what’s causing those fabulous smells coming from inside?”

  “All by my lonesome. And with tomatoes and onions and garlic and basil that I grew.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  He grinned. “Maybe you should reserve judgment until you taste it. But you can do that now—everything’s ready, I just need to bring it out. And I recommend the wine I opened—the chef has already had a glass and tells me it’s pretty good.”

  Lacey laughed. “So you’re a glass ahead of me, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Just one.”

  “A glass of wine sounds great. Let me help carry things out.”

  He didn’t refuse the offer, so Lacey followed him into the kitchen where together they managed to collect a bottle of wine and two glasses, a bowl of pasta, another of salad, and a basket of bread.

  Outside at the table once again, Seth poured the wine and encouraged Lacey to help herself to the food. One bite of the thin strings of pasta with the sauce made from fresh produce and Lacey moaned her approval.

  “That’s wonderful!” she marveled when she
’d swallowed. “And you made this?”

  He smiled. “I take it you don’t cook?”

  “I can’t even boil water,” Lacey admitted. “Many attempts were made to teach me to cook because that’s what girls are supposed to be able to do. But growing up, I refused to cooperate with anything that came with that stipulation. It was my blanket rule and I stuck to it—if my brothers didn’t have to do it, I wasn’t doing it.”

  “Just to make a point?”

  “Just to make a point.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know if I ever refused to do anything growing up just to make a point. Or if I would have gotten away with it if I had.”

  “I never did much of anything that wasn’t to make a point. And then I got older and lost that freedom—in order to have any role in the Kincaid Corporation I had to do jobs my father considered suited to a woman. Until now.” Lacey tasted the salad of butter lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, carrots and red onions—all of which Seth said he’d also grown. It was topped off with his own secret dressing that was vinegary with an herbal accent to it.

  The fact that he’d made his own salad dressing, too, recharged Lacey’s curiosity about him so she backed up the conversation a little and said, “I would be surprised if any man made this meal, but a Camden? Didn’t you eat all of your meals with a silver spoon after they were prepared by your family’s own personal chefs?”

  He laughed, took a drink of his wine and said, “Oh, you haven’t met my grandmother…”

  “The one from Northbridge?”

  “Actually, I really only knew one grandmother because my mother’s parents died when I was too young to even remember them. But yeah, the one from Northbridge. We call her GiGi—her name is Georgianna, and Grandma Georgianna was a mouthful, so somewhere along the way it got shortened to GiGi. She raised us all—with the help of my great-grandfather and a husband-and-wife team who have worked for her forever. GiGi was unquestionably captain of the ship, but all four of them took care of my two brothers, Cade and Beau, my sister, January, and our cousins, Dane, Dylan, Derek, and the triplets, Lang, Lindie and Livi.”

  “There was a plane crash, wasn’t there? That killed a big portion of your family at once?” Lacey said, recalling that from her college course.

  “There was. When I was eleven. There was a trip planned for the adults—fishing for the men, shopping for the women, while the kids all stayed at home with the nannies—”

  “So there were nannies,” Lacey said. One of her assumptions of how the Camdens lived had just been confirmed.

  “There were then. Before the plane crash we lived in our house with our parents, and our cousins lived in their house with their parents, and H.J.—our great-grandfather—had retired because of a heart condition and moved in with GiGi and Gramps. And Margaret and Louie—the married couple I told you about. They live above the garage. They—and Gigi, who’s very hands-on—do most things or oversee what’s hired out.”

  “And in your own houses with your own parents, there were nannies. And were there cooks and maids and butlers then, too?”

  “My mother and my aunt were more into the high-society status than GiGi ever was, so yes to cooks and maids and housekeepers in our homes with our parents. But I don’t remember a butler anywhere around, no.”

  She was teasing him and he seemed to know it—which Lacey appreciated. But the conversation was satisfying some of her curiosity about him.

  “So your great-grandfather—H.J., the person who had gotten the whole Camden ball rolling—retired at one point? I thought he worked right to the end of his life?”

  “Information from your college course?” he assumed.

  “Yes.”

  “H.J. had turned the running of Camden Incorporated over to Gramps, my dad and my uncle, and moved in with GiGi and Gramps about three months before the plane crash. He was still vital, just slowing down. Then, two days before everyone was set to go on the trip, H.J. fell and hurt his back. He ended up at home but in traction, and there was no way he could travel. GiGi says she didn’t care about the shopping trip—if you knew her you’d understand that—so she volunteered to stay home to look after H.J.—”

  “Ahh, so that’s why your grandmother and H.J. weren’t on the plane,” Lacey said, as she finished her meal and settled back in her chair with her wine.

  “But everyone else was,” Seth said solemnly.

  Lacey knew from her college class that there had been suspicions that the engines on the private plane had been tampered with, possibly by one of many people who resented the Camdens because they considered themselves wronged or cheated by them.

  But the crash had been so devastating that there hadn’t been enough of the plane left intact to prove anything. Which some people considered fitting since the underhanded maneuvers, manipulations and machinations that H.J. and his son, Hank, were suspected of had never been proven, either.

  “You were just eleven—how old were the other kids left behind?” Lacey asked quietly, sympathetically.

  “I was the oldest of the grandkids. The youngest were six—my sister Jani and the triplets. The other five kids were seven, eight and nine.”

  “Not babies but still, little kids.”

  “Yep,” he said sadly. “Ten scared, freaked-out, upset kids.”

  “I know when my mother died—Hutch and Ian were twelve, I was ten—it was awful. No amount of money or status or anything made that any better. But at least we still had our dad. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to lose him, too….”

  “Well, we had GiGi. And H.J. and Margaret and Louie,” Seth said. “GiGi brought us all to her house, let us know that from that minute on that’s where we were going to live, that she loved each and every one of us, that we were hers and that there was no question that we were going to stick together—one big family. And that’s just what we did. H.J. went back to work to stabilize the company and get people he trusted to keep things going under his supervision until we all grew up and could take over—so technically he went back to work but primarily in a supervisory role. He did his part in raising us, Margaret and Louie pitched in like surrogate parents and that was that.”

  “How old was your grandmother at the time, when she took this on?”

  “She was fifty-five. H.J. was eighty-eight and GiGi went on looking out for him, too—making sure he ate well, that he took his medications, saw his doctors, that he didn’t overdo it. Margaret and Louie were only forty, so that helped when H.J. and GiGi were a little outdated here and there—not to mention all the other ways they helped out. But we all lived in GiGi’s house near the Denver Country Club in Cherry Creek. That’s where H.J. died at ninety-six, overseeing Camden Incorporated until just the last few months of his life, when he had a stroke and was only lucid part of the time.”

  There was more sadness in Seth’s tone. Lacey realized that regardless of the fact that she’d learned about the Camdens as if they were bigger-than-life, almost fictional characters, the founder of all of Camden Incorporated had just been family to Seth. His great-grandfather. One of the people who had had a hand in raising him after his parents were killed. Someone he’d loved and lost.

  But after a moment of solemn silence Lacey wanted to get the conversation back to something lighter, so she said, “And your grandmother took care of her father-in-law and raised ten grandchildren without someone else to do the cooking?”

  Her attempt to brighten the tone worked because Seth laughed. “Do not discount Margaret—together with my grandmother they could run the country. But my grandmother alone is a little bitty lady with a core of steel and some ironclad views of things. One of those views is that family takes care of family, no matter what—which is why Margaret and Louie have always been considered family and why GiGi wouldn’t even think about farming us out to anyone else or so much as sending any one of us to boarding
school—”

  “But you must have at least been in private school, for the sake of security,” Lacey said, thinking about the rumor that the Camden plane had been tampered with to cause the crash. Surely safety must have been an issue after that if not before.

  “We did all go to private school, yeah,” Seth confirmed. “But other than that, my grandmother did not believe in spoiling us. We made our own beds, we cleaned our own rooms, and all the other chores were revolving. My grandmother worked right alongside Margaret and Louie and we were their assistants—we dusted, mopped, vacuumed, washed walls and windows, did yard work and anything and everything else. GiGi would never ask Margaret or Louie to do a job she wasn’t in there doing with them. In fact, Margaret and Louie are still there and GiGi still works with them even now, when she’s about to turn seventy-five and they’re into their sixties.”

  “And when it came to cooking?” Lacey persisted, going back to the origins of this conversation.

  “When it came to the cooking there was never anyone hired to do that. GiGi and Margaret fixed breakfast—and lunch on weekends and vacations. But Margaret and Louie went home to their own house at six sharp, and, with the exception of some prep work Margaret might leave behind, dinners were just us—GiGi and H.J., while he was with us, and ten kids in the kitchen, all with jobs to do. Then we sat down to eat together and there had to be a damn good excuse for anyone to miss that,” he concluded with a wide smile that told Lacey he was fond of the memories.

  “I never would have guessed that was how you were raised. I think I was more spoiled than you were,” Lacey admitted.

  “Like I said, GiGi has strong opinions on things—not the least of which is how kids should grow up. And that attitude has its roots right here in Northbridge.”

  “She raised you all as if you were living on a farm in a small town rather than within spitting distance of the Denver Country Club?”

  “She did. There’s just no one like her. She’s the salt of the earth, and I don’t know anyone more universally loved than she is. She’s practical and sensible and weathers every single storm with a stiff upper lip, a positive attitude, an eye for how things will work out for the best, and a determination to do anything she can to help—again, probably part of her small-town, everyone-lends-a-hand mentality. I’ve never known her not to have both feet on the ground, or heard of a problem she wasn’t ready and willing to tackle—”