by Lizzie Shane
Rachel scooted closer to her mother on the couch, resting her head on her mom’s shoulder. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you too, Mama.”
Her mother put her arm around her. “I know, baby. I’ve always known.”
And just like that, all was forgiven. The power of a mother’s love.
If only everything could be so easy with Cam.
Chapter Thirteen
“Hold up, dumbass.”
Cam didn’t miss a step as he walked to his car, speaking over his shoulder to his oldest and most annoying sister. “You can’t actually expect me to respond to that.”
“And yet you do.” Carly jogged to catch up to him. “And I’ll stop calling you that when you wise up and stop screwing up your life.”
Since she wasn’t going away, like a fly buzzing around his head, he turned to face her, leaning against his Land Rover. “I assume you’re going to tell me how I’m screwing up my life?”
“What are sisters for?”
“Unconditional love and support?”
“I think that’s grandparents. Sisters are supposed to keep you humble and tell you when you’re screwing up.”
He cocked his head. “I don’t think that’s actually a rule.”
“Well, it’s my rule.” Carly paused to wave as their parents drove past them in the Cayenne he’d bought for them last Christmas, followed by Ashley and her brood. Shelby had already headed home. When they were alone in the driveway, Carly turned to him, hands on hips. “What do you want to happen with Rachel?”
He’d had a feeling that was where this was going. He should have gotten in the car and driven away. “What do you mean?”
“Am I supposed to pretend I didn’t notice how protective you were of her all night?”
He folded his arms. “She was uncomfortable. It’s overwhelming, meeting all of you.”
“So that’s why you couldn’t take your eyes off her?” Carly asked skeptically. “Because she was overwhelmed and you’re such a good guy?”
“Is there a point to all this?” Cam gave his sister his most intimidating frown, the glower that put rookie pitchers in line when they were too full of themselves to let him call the freaking game. His sister merely smiled.
“Do you have a plan to win her back?”
“I thought you were rooting for the librarian.”
“That was before I found out Rachel was Miss September.”
Cam frowned. “Am I supposed to know what that means?”
“Two years ago you were like a robot. You never admitted you were upset by your divorce, never showed any emotion—which was frankly a little creepy—but I figured you were just putting on a good face. You’ve never been good at talking about mushy feelings stuff, and it had to suck to be pissed at her but feel like you couldn’t really be mad at her because she might be dying—”
“I wasn’t mad at her. You were the one who hated her.”
“Well, yeah, you’re my kid brother. She was the enemy on principle—but it was hard to hate her when she was sick and she’d always been so nice to everyone. It was you I worried about. Robot Cam. But then all of a sudden something changed. It was September and you were optimistic and dopily happy. We’d never seen you like that and Miss September was what we called the mystery girl we all figured you were dating.”
Cam tipped his face back toward the house so she couldn’t see his eyes. He hadn’t realized he’d been so obvious.
“And now tonight, the way you were with her—it was like you were aware of where she was at every second. You were never like that with Erika. You guys were friends and you worked as a couple because you cared about one another, but you were never protective of her. She was never yours.”
Cam worked his jaw, still studying the Christmas lights on the house so he didn’t have to meet his sister’s eyes. “Rachel doesn’t want anything to do with me like that.”
“Can you blame her?”
His gaze snapped to hers at that. “I thought you were on my side.”
“I’m on the side of love, baby brother, but I talked to her tonight and I gotta say, I can see her side of it. I don’t know if I would have done any differently.”
“Are you kidding? She hid Sofie from me.”
“Why didn’t you tell her about Erika? Why let her find out like that?”
He’d asked himself that a thousand times. He’d had so many reasons at the time, all of which felt inadequate now. “I was waiting for the right moment.” At her look, he rolled his eyes. “We were having fun and everything was easy and light. That time with Rachel was my escape and I didn’t want to bring all the real shit going on with Erika into it.”
“Did you know about her background? Her parents. Her baggage with married men.”
“I knew,” he admitted.
Carly rolled her eyes. “A not-quite-ex-wife you were supporting through cancer even though she’d dumped your ass when she got diagnosed might have been something you needed to mention.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide it from her. It’s not like I never would have told her. I was just putting it off. We’d only been together a few weeks. I thought there’d be time.”
“Really?”
He met Carly’s steady gaze, admitting the truth. “I was afraid she’d run. I wanted her to fall for me before I told her. I wanted her to be invested, so she’d stay.” And he’d never liked talking about the hard stuff.
He didn’t share his troubles, not with anyone. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Never let them see the effort. It was all about making it look easy. He didn’t want to admit his own lack of perfection.
And here he’d been giving Rachel a hard time about her own perfectionism complex. God, what a mess.
Carly sighed. “You still suck at communication, you know that? If you don’t tell her who you really are and what’s really going on with you, it isn’t you she’s falling for. It’s just the perfect image you’re projecting. You gotta be honest. About what you want. About why you’re scared you won’t get it. Talk to her.”
“I’ve been talking to her.” He wasn’t making the same mistakes.
“Yeah? So she knows why Erika left? And you’ve told her that you still have feelings for her?”
“I do not still have feelings for Erika,” he protested.
“For Rachel, dumbass. You’ve told Rachel that birds sing when she walks into a room and you want to be more than just her baby daddy? But that you’ve had a whole no one will ever love me complex ever since Erika left?
“I don’t have a complex. You’re horrible, you know that?”
“I love you,” Carly reminded him. “And I want you to be happy.”
“Not everyone is happiest when they’re talking everything to death. She could completely shut me down.”
“True,” she acknowledged. “But it doesn’t hurt to try.”
“You’re not the one laying your heart open.”
“Also true.” She folded her arms, staring up at him. “So I guess you have to decide if you’d rather lay your heart open or pine with unrequited love for your baby mama for the rest of your life. Tough call.”
“You’re the worst.” He reached for her, tugging her into his arms.
“Love you too. Dumbass. Now go get your girl.”
* * * * *
The text was making her nervous. Can we talk? sounded entirely too ominous.
Rachel had just finished picking up the wine donated for the mystery bags at the Russell House fundraiser when the message came in on the morning after Sofie met Cam’s family.
She’d promised herself she was going to stop assuming the worst and try to be more flexible—but that was easier said than done as she pulled into the TD Events parking lot. Picking up the wine hadn’t taken as long as she’d scheduled for it, so she’d told Cam she had a window of time if he wanted to meet at the TD Events offices right away.
He’d texted b
ack almost instantly that he was on his way.
Reminding herself to stop worrying, she began unloading the wine. It would need to be brought to the hotel ballroom on the day of the event, but in the meantime her office was the only place she could think of to store a hundred bottles of wine where they wouldn’t freeze. She was loading the fourth box onto the hand trolley when Cam’s Land Rover pulled into the spot next to hers—and she reminded herself again not to give in to the panic bunnies.
She was turning over a new leaf. She wasn’t trying to control things so much. She would be good with spontaneity and surprises. She would.
“Hey. Need a hand?”
It was ingrained to say no, to insist that she could do it herself, but she was determined to stop shooting herself in the foot. “Sure. That’d be great. Thanks.”
He wore jeans and a sweater, but still managed to look like a GQ cover spread as he hitched up a box and stacked it on top of the others on the hand trolley. He tilted it to maneuver it toward the building and Rachel shut the tailgate before rushing ahead to hold the door open.
In the lobby, Cam tilted his head to read the label on the boxes as they waited for the world’s slowest elevator. “Big party?”
“It’s for the fundraiser. We’re having mystery bags—wine, whiskey, chocolates, coffee—pretty much anything we could get people to donate. Some bags will be more valuable than others, but for twenty-five bucks the patrons can roll the dice and choose a mystery bag. It’s another way to engage the people who want to support the hospital but can’t afford to bid on the big ticket items.” She nodded toward him and Cam flushed.
“It feels a little weird to be a big ticket item. I hope people actually bid. It’s just batting practice.”
“People will bid,” she assured him as the elevator arrived. She stepped in first, holding the door open as he wheeled in the trolley. “Trust me.”
“I am.” The doors closed as she tried not to shiver at the throaty promise behind the words. “You’re good at this. I don’t think I ever really thought about all the details that go into an event like this.”
“Trista had most of it set up before she went on vacation.” The elevator door opened on the third floor and Rachel held the door again as he maneuvered the wine out. “Though the mystery bags were one of my suggestions. I’d seen a similar thing done at another event and recommended it when we were doing our initial planning.”
She led the way down the hall toward her office, trying not to flush self-consciously when her colleagues glanced up to watch her pass with Cameron Cole.
They unloaded the wine, stacking it in the corner of her office, and went back down for the next load. The conversation remained light and easy, general chit-chat about Cam’s charity involvement and the various events that Rachel had coordinated in the past. She could almost convince herself that she’d been worrying over nothing—except she was reasonably certain he hadn’t come to chat about the fundraiser.
Cam waited until they’d piled the last box of wine into her office. The tower of alcohol made the already cramped confines of her office feel even more claustrophobic. He nodded toward the open doorway. “Do you mind if I close the door?”
Rachel forced a smile that she hoped didn’t look as sickly as it felt. “Go ahead.” She moved around behind her desk, waving him toward the chair opposite and hoping the businesslike approach would set the tone. “What can I do for you?”
He lowered himself into the chair. “I was hoping we could talk about—well, about a lot of things I guess. I’m sorry to bother you at work—”
“No, this is a good time.” She folded her hands on the desk, keeping her expression polite. “What’s on your mind?”
“My sisters like you.”
She blinked, startled by the apparent non sequitur. “Um, I liked them too.”
“Carly called me an idiot for not telling you about Erika before—and she was right.”
“Cam. You’ve already apologized—”
“I know, but I didn’t explain.”
“You said she had cancer,” she argued, not sure she wanted more of an explanation. It felt entirely too personal.
“Ovarian cancer. Pretty advanced by the time they found it. She’d been ignoring her symptoms, putting off going to the doctor because I’d started talking about having kids and it was easier for her to avoid going to her gynecologist than it was to tell me she didn’t want to go off birth control after all. We’d talked about it when we first got together and she didn’t want kids at the time, but we were twenty-two then and I figured she’d change her mind. When I started talking about being ready, she didn’t object, so I assumed she was onboard. The diagnosis—she called it a wake-up call. She said life was too short and we wanted different things and she couldn’t pretend anymore. We’d been going through the motions for a while. Doing all the things you should do without ever really talking or connecting.”
“Cam…” She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable with how much he was revealing.
“At first, I thought she’d snap out of it. I thought it was a reaction to the diagnosis—and it was, but she never changed her mind. She moved out that week, went to live with her sister. I talked her into putting off filing for divorce—she had access to the best doctors in Colorado as long as she stayed on my insurance. She kept doing work with the team’s charities. She worried that the press would come after me, twist it to look like I’d left her when she was sick, so she always denied the separation rumors. She told people she was living with her sister because I had to travel with the team so it was easier to manage her treatment living with someone who wasn’t always coming and going. By the time I met you, she was in remission, but we hadn’t filed for divorce because the doctors said there was still a chance of recurrence.”
Rachel swallowed. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I should have. I just—when I met you, it was like my wake up call. I’d been going through the motions, feeling like I was faking everything, and you felt real. I never had to pretend with you. It just felt right and I didn’t want to bring all that baggage into it.” He shook his head. “You came into my life at a really complicated moment and I didn’t handle it well. And then when you left it was like the rug being yanked out from under me. I should have told you—I don’t want to have any secrets from you. I want you to feel like you can talk to me, not just about Sofie. I want…” He trailed off and when he spoke again she had the feeling he’d changed what he was going to say. “I want us to trust each other.”
Her chest felt tight as she swallowed thickly. “I want that too,” she murmured, though she wasn’t sure how good she was going to be at it. They had so much history between them now. Could they come back from that? Could they trust one another again?
She bit her lip. “So how do we do that?”
Chapter Fourteen
It wasn’t a date.
Rachel kept telling herself that. She and Cam were meeting to go Christmas shopping for Sofie together while her mother watched the baby. That was all it was. An effort at co-parenting and being more open and trusting with one another.
But she was as nervous as if it was a date.
Ever since the conversation in her office when he’d told her about his ex, she’d been finding it harder and harder to keep him at a safe mental distance. She found herself remembering the first time they met, the memories no longer twisted by bitterness and recriminations.
She’d been volunteering at a cystic fibrosis fundraiser TD Events was throwing, all part of her plan to meet Trista and score an interview with the premiere event planner in the Denver area. She hadn’t noticed Cam, totally focused on making a good impression on Trista—and it had worked. At the end of the event, Trista had asked her to come by for an interview in a couple weeks and Rachel had let herself celebrate with a single glass of champagne on the balcony.
She hadn’t expected Cam to join her with a fresh bottle and a glass
of his own. She was usually so guarded around men, so careful with her heart, but he’d congratulated her—somehow knowing she was celebrating without even knowing why—and something had clicked into place. She didn’t remember the details, didn’t remember what they’d talked about. She only remembered the feeling. Like she was alive for the first time, just like he’d said, electrified from the inside by a spark she’d never known was missing.
She wasn’t impulsive, but with him she had been. And it had been magical. But could they really get that magic back? Did she want to?
Cam rang the doorbell promptly at six. Rachel had barely had time to rush home and change after work—which meant she hadn’t had time to obsess over what she was wearing. Much. She was barefoot in jeans and a soft red sweater when she rushed to the door, past her mother spooning yogurt into Sofie’s mouth at the table.
Cam stood on the front step—and once again he looked like something out of a freaking magazine. Coat open, hands shoved into the front pockets of faded jeans, the beginning of beard scruff on his cheeks. Then he smiled and her chest tightened at the familiar grin. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Heat warmed her cheeks and she told herself it was just a reaction to the cold outside. “Come on in. I just need to grab my shoes and my purse.”
He came into the entryway as Rachel rushed to find shoes and socks—and his grin turned outright dopey as he clapped eyes on Sofie. “Hey there, baby girl! Whatcha got there? Is that yogurt?”
Rachel ducked into the bedroom, giving herself a quick and ruthless lecture on keeping her head. Just because he was insanely hot and went gooey at the sight of their daughter and actually appeared to be a genuinely good human being who would financially support his ex-wife through cancer even after she left him…she’d lost her train of thought. She’d been going in a don’t-fall-for-him direction, but she couldn’t seem to remember the reasons why.