He paused with his first bite halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t expected her to answer him so easily and honestly. “You don’t need to lose weight.” When she raised that censuring eyebrow again—he’d never met a person in real life who could raise only one eyebrow—he said, “What? You don’t.” He meant it. She wasn’t thin, no, but everything about her seemed like it was where it was supposed to be, relative to everything else. She looked like she belonged in the kind of body she had.
She considered him for a long time, like she was trying to decide how to respond. “I may have been a little ambitious when I ordered my bridesmaid’s dress,” she finally said, rolling her eyes as if disgusted with herself, then transferring her attention to her plate and setting to work slicing the chicken breast on her salad into smaller pieces. “Its ability to zip up is going to depend on my caloric intake over the next week and a half.”
She reminded him of Christie that way. She had also always been vowing to shed pounds she didn’t particularly need to lose. “Why do women do that? Why not get a dress that actually fits?”
“I really, really, wanted to be a size ten. I guess I thought standing in front of three hundred people in a five-hundred-dollar dress would be good incentive.” She sighed. “The problem is I really, really like eating.”
“So you’re an eleven. Whatever.”
“Twelve. Sizes go in twos.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea.”
He shrugged and resumed delivering his first bite of meat to his mouth. “Oh my God,” he groaned. It was almost orgasmic the way goose bumps rose on his arms and his tongue ignited with pleasure. He sawed off another, bigger bite of the gorgeously bloody meat. Nothing was going to be as good as that first bite, but…oh, fuck it was as good. Months of mess tent glop—or worse, freeze-dried field rations—had put his taste buds into lockdown. But now. This was a million times better than he had remembered. Maybe the premature end of his army career wasn’t going to be all bad.
But, no, this was hollow comfort. He would give up steak forever if it meant not having the only thing he was ever good at taken away from him.
He shook his head. He’d never been one to dwell on could-have-beens. What he had now was steak. Damn good steak. He took another bite and sighed.
Jane cleared her throat.
Right. He’d forgotten for a moment that he and steak had an audience for their little reunion. Jane looked like she was trying not to laugh. But at the moment, he didn’t care—his meal was too delicious.
He couldn’t help wondering if sex was going to be this good, too, once he finally had it again.
Tonight. He’d find out tonight. See? Upside. The army was lost to him, his hopes of becoming an officer dashed, but it was going to be a lot easier to get laid back home. He sawed off a piece of steak and plopped it onto Jane’s plate. “You have to try this.”
“I can’t, I—”
“Eat it.”
“I don’t generally like my steak so rare. When I do eat steak, I—”
“Eat,” he commanded, raising his voice a little.
She ate.
He’d give it three seconds. Just like her footsteps at the airport earlier—click-click-click.
“Oh my God.”
There it was. He smirked as her eyes slipped closed in ecstasy. Her hair was kind of messed up. Her ponytail had suffered some collateral damage in its battle with the convertible. It wasn’t a bad look on her, and with her eyes closing on that low moan…well, he was really looking forward to ditching her and getting on with his return-to-civilian-life list.
“I have this mental list going of things I missed while I was deployed, and steak is close to the top of it,” he said, sawing off another piece of meat and setting it on her plate.
To his surprise, she didn’t object, just cut it into smaller pieces, like she had done with her chicken, and popped one into her mouth, huffing a small sigh as she chewed.
“Atta girl,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want some bread?” He shoved the bread basket toward her.
There was a beat of silence. Then she said, “You are a bad man.”
He grinned. “Bad is subjective, don’t you find?”
“What else is on this list of yours? Driving a really fast dude-car, I assume?”
He grinned. “Guilty as charged.”
She looked at him for a long time, then pushed the bread basket away without taking any. “I’m surprised you didn’t stay in Thunder Bay and come down next week with your mom for the wedding. I’m pretty sure they have steak and sports cars in Thunder Bay.”
“Well, let’s just say that the pickings are kind of slim in Thunder Bay as it relates to some of the other items on my list.”
He wasn’t about to tell her that he had been planning to stay in Thunder Bay until the wedding. Right now, in fact, he should have been eating his return-to-Canada steak cuddled up in bed with Christie. But, as he had so recently and jarringly learned, that role was currently occupied by someone else. So he’d turned tail, “surprise, I’m home early” bouquet in hand, and headed back to the airport to book a flight to Toronto for the next day. Then he spent the night in a hotel, without even seeing his mom. He hadn’t wanted to face her, to show up on her doorstep jobless and girlfriendless. What was he going to do? Move back into his childhood bedroom? No, better to get the hell out of Dodge. Even if it meant he still had to go back to his unit later, once the discharge paperwork arrived, and turn in his kit.
“I would have thought you’d want to spend time with your mother,” Jane went on when he didn’t answer. “She must have been really worried about you while you were deployed.”
“She’s not really the worrying type.”
She aimed her gaze at him, two mossy-muddy lasers trying to beam into his soul. “I can’t imagine any mother not worrying about a son overseas fighting ISIS.”
“Technically, Operation Impact is a mission to assist Iraqi security forces,” he said, wanting to deflect her from the topic of his mom. He might not have been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with jihadists, but it hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park.
“Still,” she said again, clearly unmoved by the distinction he’d made and clinging obstinately to her own interpretation of the emotions of a woman she’d never met. “I’m sure your mother worried.”
He shrugged, unsure how to say that his mother had been the worrying type once, but she had understandably given up on him after the drama of his teen years. He didn’t deserve his mother’s worry, had squandered it well before he deployed overseas.
Jane turned her attention to her salad, having finished the donated steak. “Well, I’m sure Jay worried about you,” she said as she cut her cucumbers into small pieces to match the meat she’d similarly subdivided.
She was sure Jay had worried about him. Not she knew Jay had worried about him. She imagined he had. Suspected it. Meaning Jay hadn’t said as much.
It was a knife to the gut.
“I was so surprised to find out Jay had a brother,” she went on.
And why don’t you go ahead and twist that knife, Jane?
But what had he expected? For successful, upstanding Jay to be bragging to his friends about his fuck-up of a little brother?
Half brother, he corrected himself. Jay would probably make that distinction, and God knew the two men had always been different.
“How are you enjoying everything?” Saved by the tiny waitress.
He shot her a grin. “I have to tell you, I’m just back from being deployed in Iraq, and this is the best food I’ve had in a year. It’s a hell of a way to welcome home a soldier.” He was being shameless, playing the military card. Would her eyes have widened with that mixture of hero worship and lust if she knew about the circumstances surrounding his departure from the Canadian Forces? He pushed the thought aside. Even though the loss of his career was gutting, he would do it all over again if he had to. There was no way he could stand by and watch
Becky be attacked like that. No. Way.
He started to feel that familiar surge of adrenaline that always came when he thought about the attack. He tried to follow the instructions from the shrink they’d made him see after his first deployment and searched for something to anchor himself in the present. A person. A conversation. A habitual behavior. Something that would tip him into a less toxic feedback loop.
“Our steaks are known for their incredible flavor,” said the waitress. “The taste just explodes on your tongue, doesn’t it?”
He cleared his throat. Shameless flirting was probably not what Dr. Salinger had had in mind, but it would do. “I completely agree. I can’t imagine anything I’d enjoy having exploding on my tongue more than this steak.” He grinned at the waitress and waited a beat before adding, “Well…almost anything.”
He was watching the server, but he heard Jane’s quiet intake of breath. Jay would never say something so rude. But his suggestive talk had worked. The claws of panic were loosening their grasp on him.
The server winked, and the moment she left the table, Jane shot him a disgusted look.
It was just as well. He had a reputation to live down to and a babysitter to ditch.
* * *
Good Lord. Watching Cameron order dessert from their toy poodle of a waitress was like watching the opening of a porno—a badly scripted porno at that. Their server was already touching his military-style buzz cut. What was next? Would he whip off his shirt so she could admire his tattoos—he had to have tattoos, right?—and feel his biceps?
He was attractive, Jane would admit, if you went for the “I’ve overdosed on testosterone” type, which obviously their server did. His dark hair was buzzed so short it was impossible to tell what it would look like in a civilian setting, but he had nice eyes. They were a vibrant bluey-green she would have thought were colored contacts except she was certain that Cameron MacKinnon was not the sort of man who wore colored contacts. He was wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt that stretched tight over his muscled arms. She wondered what the inevitable tattoos would be. Probably some bullshit tribal symbols that he thought meant “brotherhood” but actually meant “motherhood” or something. She shifted in her seat. The idea of using a needle to permanently mark your skin with ink was so…unsettling.
He finally settled on a brownie sundae. A giant brownie practically the size of her head, topped with an obnoxious amount of ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream. And a cherry on top. Of course.
“What are you, eleven?” she asked after the server had delivered the dessert and mustered the strength to peel herself away from Mr. Operation Enduring Freedom.
He picked up the cherry and scraped it with his teeth, stopping short of biting it off its stem. He had straight white teeth, which didn’t really accord with what Jay had said about his childhood in Thunder Bay. His mom worked hard, but it sounded like there was never enough money for things like school field trips or sports equipment, much less orthodontia. But this guy, with the crazy tropical-sea eyes, strong, square jaw, and blindingly white teeth, looked like he could be in a Listerine commercial. He reminded her of Gia in that way—some people won the genetic lottery.
He set the cherry down on the plate and loaded his spoon with a huge bite of ice cream and whipped cream. “Not eleven. Twenty-seven, actually.” He turned the spoon over and stopped short of pressing it down on his tongue. “I just enjoy licking things.”
A jolt of anger left Jane breathless as Cameron did just that—let the ice- and whipped-cream-loaded spoon slide slowly against his extended tongue while he stared at her with a completely neutral expression. When he was done with his bite or lick or whatever, he kept that even, level gaze fixed on hers. A good ten seconds of silence passed before she realized with embarrassment that she was just sitting there staring at him like an idiot or like—God forbid—their besotted waitress.
“Keep it in your pants, would you?” she said. No wonder Elise had sent her on this thankless babysitting mission. The man was a genuine menace. She was surprised he hadn’t done something worse than burn down a barn and get a girl pregnant. Though for all they knew, he had. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“I thought we already established that my mother and I are…not close. So, let’s see, that would be no.”
“Well, I hope you’re not planning to talk to the female guests at your brother’s wedding that way.” She sounded like a teacher giving a lecture in detention. But it was his fault. He was like a child—an ice-cream-eating, dirty-minded literalist. And she was starting to fear that she wouldn’t be able to do what Elise had charged her to do: prevent this man from ruining the wedding.
“Probably not,” he said. “Probably just you.” He tried to hand her the spoon. “Want a bite?”
Chapter Three
Cam knew he was being an ass. It was like landing in Toronto had prompted him to immediately start living down to his reputation. It was a familiar groove to slip back into, and he simply couldn’t help himself. Jay didn’t know the man he had become, or had been trying to become. Nor did his mom. They didn’t know that three years of military service had given him some much needed perspective on his lot in life. That he’d drawn a line when he’d signed up for the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment, a reserve regiment of the Canadian Forces headquartered in Thunder Bay. On one side was his old life, on the other, the army. The army and Christie: those were the things that were supposed to have made him into a better man.
At least he hadn’t told Jay and Mom about his now-dead plan to go to university so he could become an officer. The discharge aside, what had he been thinking? He wasn’t post-secondary material.
Anyway, none of it mattered now. Meeting people’s expectations was easier than upending them. He’d spent most of his life doing that, and, perversely, he was good at it.
But, he reminded himself as he pulled the Corvette into a municipal parking garage, Jane didn’t have any expectations of him. Or she hadn’t until he’d started harassing her at the steakhouse. “So what’s your deal?” he asked, jogging around to her side of the car before she could get out and offering her a hand. ’Vettes were notoriously low, and it could be hard to hoist yourself out of them. “How come you’re free to babysit me on a Wednesday afternoon?”
She ignored his hand and levered herself out of the car. “I’m not babysitting you.”
He raised his eyebrows as he led her to the pay station and stuck his credit card in.
“I’m not really sure why you find it so incredible that your brother and future sister-in-law would send someone to greet you at the airport.”
Yeah, nice try. But he let it slide. “Why you, though? You don’t have to be at a job of some sort? You’re independently wealthy, what?”
She barked an incredulous laugh at that. “I’m about as far from independently wealthy as it’s possible to get.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, eyeing the fancy jeans. “You clean up too well.”
“Oh, I do okay now, but my dad died when I was a kid, and my mom didn’t really have any skills, so things were…tough for a while.”
“You’re a self-made woman.” He respected that.
“I guess I am.” The corners of her mouth turned up a bit. She liked that notion. “But still in touch enough with my roots to notice that you’re probably going to pay more to park that thing for a week than you did to rent it.” She cocked her head at the machine, which was printing a receipt that was, in fact, for a startlingly high amount of money.
He had plenty of money saved. While on his two tours he’d had no living expenses, so the vast majority of his pay had gone into the bank, and for the year in between them, he’d lived cheaply, socking away all his bartending tips and living in a room above the bar. He’d been saving for tuition. Now that that wasn’t the case, he had a comfortable cushion to rely on while he found his feet and figured out what the hell to do next. But he didn’t want to admit that Jane had been ri
ght about the car, so he pocketed the receipt and said, teasingly, “And how did you make your millions? Let me see. I bet you’re…an investment banker. Or maybe a teacher.” She was something rigid, he’d bet, something where she got to boss people around and adhere to rules.
“Actually, I’m a young-adult novelist.”
“Seriously?” That was the last thing he’d expected her to say. He held the exit door for her, and she preceded him onto a busy downtown sidewalk. “Would I know your books?”
She scoffed. “I doubt it.”
That stung, but he wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was only saying that he was too old to know her books. But it kind of felt like she was suggesting he was sub-literate. He wasn’t a scholar, sure, but he wanted to tell her that his Kindle was pretty much the only thing that had kept him sane—if he could call himself that—on his two tours. But that would make him sound a little too desperate for her approval. So he settled for, “Try me.”
“Well, I’ve been at it since university, so I have a bunch of books out. They’re part of a series called the Clouded Cave, and it’s turning out to be pretty popular. I’m writing book seven right now.” She was picking up speed, both with her feet and with her words, deftly dodging slower-moving pedestrians. “The series is about a girl named Stephanie who’s exploring a cave, and it turns out to be a gateway to another world. She takes some friends with her in subsequent books.”
“Like Narnia,” he said. “Actually, like a lot of books. Alice in Wonderland.”
She was looking at him oddly. “Yes. Portal fiction. There’s a reason it endures.”
“Portal fiction?”
“Kids cross over into another world through some kind of portal or door—the wardrobe, the looking glass. In mine, it’s a cave.”
“Right. So why does it endure?”
“These kinds of stories let kids be heroic. They let them practice skills they don’t get to use in our ordered, capitalist world—both the characters and, vicariously, the kids reading the books.”
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