Love, All (Camp Firefly Falls Book 19)

by Tamsen Parker

  “I don’t want to be with someone who thinks of me as a problem to be solved, so I think we’re done here. I need to use the bathroom before we go.”

  Nate looked as if he had more to say, but she summoned every particle of fight me in her body and directed it at him in a stream of don’t you fucking dare. Apparently it worked, because he shut his mouth with a click and flexed his jaw. “Of course. I’m going to grab a soda out of the fridge. Want anything?”

  Wow, Georgina would be proud of her son. Playing the host even when they’d just had a blow-out fight.

  “No, thank you.” She’d just refill her water bottle, and she could do that at the bathroom sink.

  She followed Nate out of the bedroom and down the hall, turning into the bathroom. When she flicked on the light, she was confronted with what looked like a sea’s worth of narwhals. The pastels and fluffiness of the décor was maybe a little young for Chloe, but her daughter would’ve loved it all the same. Narwhals on the towels and on the shower curtain—there was even a narwhal head sticking out of the wall with a pink fluffy bathrobe hung on its tusk.

  Goddamn you, Nate Carter, for getting some things tantalizingly right, but the most important thing so very, very wrong.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nate straightened his tie. Or maybe made it more crooked. Hard to tell. He never wore the damn things. It was one of the reasons he’d become an engineer instead of a lawyer like his dad. Hell, the sales guys didn’t usually want the engineers to wear suits and ties on sales calls, said it made them look “less authentic.” Because apparently all engineers wore nerd T-shirts and custom Chucks. Okay, so most of them actually did, but still. What you wore had nothing to do with the quality of the work you did.

  And since he was about to pitch a project that they would need to take him seriously for, he needed to look serious. Like someone who could meet with DOD staffers and people in the military. Okay, his tie still had tiny R2D2s all over it—a birthday present from Van—but if you weren’t looking at it close up, it just looked like a pattern. A pattern on a piece of silk that was trying to strangle him.

  That was fine. It was kind of hard to tell whether it was hard to breathe because of his tie or whether it was hard to breathe because he’d felt as though he was half-alive for the past couple of weeks. He’d finished up camp in a daze, feeling like he was going through the motions. He’d still taught his lessons to campers and played matches with Birk and Heather, but his heart hadn’t been in it. His heart was in a little house twenty minutes away with the woman he loved and her amazing kid.

  But it was probably sitting out on the crooked front steps because Ruby didn’t want it, and he couldn’t blame her for that. He’d fucked things up real good.

  Couldn’t think about that right now, because he needed to go into that conference room and pitch his new project to Jeremy. And he couldn’t fuck that up, too.

  It was a good thing he’d left camp early, because being so close to Ruby and not being able to see her had been eating away at his soul. He couldn’t have known it would come in handy when he’d arranged for the offset schedule with Heather, but he was definitely grateful to Past Nate for planning to leave after the first week of August. It was convenient for convincing his superiors that he was serious about this new project he was pitching, too.

  He took his laptop and made his way to the conference room, earning a few jibes about how fancy he looked on the way. Through the glass wall, he could see Jeremy chatting with Allen, Suzie, Helen, and Roy. All the big guns, huh? That was a good sign that Jeremy wasn’t blowing him off.

  Gripping the handle, he took a deep breath before he walked in. “Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today. I’ve got a pitch for a project that would create a bridge between Unicorn Robotics and United Maneuvers. I’m really excited about the prospect of working with people from both areas of the company to create mobile, robotic first responder units…”

  ***

  Clementine rumbled down the highway, her trunk packed with Chloe’s riding clothes and everything else she’d need for camp. They’d gone over the packing list one last time the night before, and if her daughter was missing something—tough.

  The radio station they’d been singing along to had started to fuzz out with static, and after searching for a new one but finding nothing, Ruby shut it off. She’d been feeling kind of fuzzed out herself for the past couple of weeks. Not blurry, but muted. Nothing was as good as it should’ve been. She should feel really fucking great about going to drop Chloe off at this camp that they’d scrimped and saved and busted their asses for her to get to. She was proud of herself, of them. But excitement was something she had to muster because…

  Nate should’ve been here, with them. Or hell, he probably would’ve offered to make the three-hour drive in his Volvo instead of hers, so she could avoid this gnawing sensation that she and Chloe were going to break down on the side of the highway and then she would have to just live there because she couldn’t afford a tow truck, not to mention the bill from the repair shop. Maybe there’d be a stream nearby, and she could be the old lady who lived out of her station wagon down by the stream? Was that as sad as living in a van down by the river? Or was it sadder?

  She prayed to whatever the hell Nordic gods had kept Clementine running this long to get her to camp and back and then, in a week when she had to pick Chloe up, down and back again. She’d asked a lot of her little car over the years, and now she was going to ask some more. But after this trip, if Clem needed a break, well, she could have one.

  Luckily, Clementine just kept rolling.

  “Hey. Mom.”

  Sounded as if it wasn’t the first time Chloe’d tried to get her attention. “Yeah, Chlo, what’s up?”

  Ruby plastered a little smile on her face, because even though she was sad and lonely and full of regret, Chloe didn’t need to think that was about her. It wasn’t, at all, so Ruby would put on a brave face and cry into her ramen when she got home tonight.

  Chloe looked at her, tilted her ten-year-old head in a way that made her look far older and far wiser than she was. “Are you okay?”

  “Me? Of course.” Ruby forced her smile a bit wider even as tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “I mean, I’ll miss you while you’re away, but I’ll drown my sorrows in all the shrimp ramen I can eat since I won’t have to share with you.”

  Chloe stuck her tongue out, but it was only a few seconds before her expression settled back into pensiveness.

  “Are you sad? About Nate?”

  Dammit. Nothing like being called on your breakup sulking by your kid.

  “I’m a little sad. But things were never really going to work out, so we had a nice time over the summer and now he’s back in Boston.”

  “That’s not why you broke up, though.”

  Ugh. Since when had her kid gotten so observant? Of course, she wouldn’t notice the pair of socks she’d left in the living room for days, but this…

  No, that hadn’t been why they’d broken up. In fact, it was the opposite of why they’d broken up—he’d wanted for her and Chloe to come up to Boston, make a life together for the three of them. And the ridiculous thing was that if Nate had just gone on his merry way at the end of the season without a peep about them being a thing beyond that, she would’ve likely been ticked off. Thanks for the memories and the awesome sex, check you later! Fuck you.

  Ruby flicked her indicator on and took the exit, coasting down the ramp and taking a right at the stoplight at the end. “No, that wasn’t why we broke up.” How to explain this in an age-appropriate way? “Nate is a very nice man, but… You remember how we talk about that it’s nice to have a partner, but you need to be able to stand on your own two feet? That’s why you’re going to work hard in school so you can get a good job.”

  “Yeah, I know. What does that have to do with Nate?”

  “Nate…didn’t understand that. He barged in and tried to fix everything he th
ought was wrong. I work hard to keep our little family running, and he wanted to change everything, without asking how I felt about it. That’s not cool.”

  Chloe’s mouth wrenched to the side. “So he tried to help?”

  Gut punch, right where it hurt. “He did, but in a way that was condescending and disruptive and disrespectful.”

  “But he didn’t mean to?”

  This child. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good your intentions are.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t try to make you breakfast in bed for your birthday again this year?”

  Ruby cracked a smile. It had taken her over an hour to clean up the kitchen after she’d tried to choke down the half-burnt, half-runny scrambled eggs with bits of shell in them. “You’re a kid; he’s a grown-up. You made a mess in the kitchen, and he wanted to upend our lives without asking if we were okay with it. My job as your mother is to help you learn from your mistakes and be a good person. That shouldn’t be my job with a partner.”

  “Okay.”

  Ruby gripped the steering wheel hard enough that her knuckles turned white. It wasn’t Chloe’s job to be her friend or her therapist or her life coach. It was Chloe’s job to make mistakes and learn from them, work hard toward what she wanted out of life, and try to be the best person she could be.

  She tried to keep her tone light, but her voice came out tight when she asked, “What are you thinking about, Chloe-bear?”

  Chloe shrugged, her slim shoulders going up by her ears. “I don’t know. Just that Nate seemed to make you happy, and you acted like you liked him a lot. That doesn’t happen much. And I don’t need a new dad or anything because you’re better than any of my friends’ parents, and if he was mean to you, he can go jump off a cliff. But it kinda sounds like maybe he just made a mistake. A big one, but…I don’t know. People mess up sometimes. It doesn’t make them bad people.”

  She’d raised a good kid. A smart, strong, passionate kid who might have some things to teach her back. And for all that she’d wanted to punch him for it at the time, Nate had been right to ask what she was teaching Chloe by being so rigid. She wasn’t ready to call Nate or head up to Boston after she dropped Chloe off, but she could at least make it clear to her kid that Chloe had made a good point.

  So she reached over and ruffled Chloe’s hair.

  “You’re right, kiddo. No one is perfect, and they shouldn’t have to be. I’ll think about it, okay? And in the meantime…” Ruby put her blinker on and then turned right onto the gravel drive to go under a timber archway that read Trillium Fields. After they crested a rise in the drive, they could see a huge barn with a few riding rings, as well as open pastures where horses were out grazing in the August sun. “We’re here!”

  ***

  “Nate, honey, how are you?” Yep, just like his mom to pick up after a perfectly measured two rings.

  “I’m good.”

  “And how are the girls?”

  That’ll kick a guy in the head. The girls. His girls. Ruby might bristle at being called a girl, but his mom called the women she played bridge with every Tuesday night “girls,” too, and not a one of them was younger than mid-fifties. There was no reason to point it out either since his mom wouldn’t be seeing Ruby anymore because he’d screwed up so royally. He wasn’t ready to admit it because it hurt his heart too much that he’d lost them. “Fine. They’re fine. Busy as ever. Chloe’s at riding camp and Ruby’s working. You know.”

  Sure. That was convincing. But his mom let it go.

  “Good, good. So is this a courtesy call just to let us know you’re alive or were you calling for a reason?”

  He was, in fact. “Jeremy and the rest of the Unicorn and United Maneuvers C-suite asked me to spec out what it would take for me to develop those mobile first-responder robots I was telling you about. When I said that I’d like to head the team for it, he said of course, that I’d be a natural fit for the project and that he’d been impressed by the leadership I’d been displaying since I got back from camp.”

  “That’s great.”

  Nate tapped his foot against his brand-new coffee table because his mom’s words said one thing, but her tone said another. “You don’t sound like it’s great.”

  “Of course it’s great. I know you’ve been wanting to work your way over to United, and this sounds like a perfect way for you to do that. And I’m so proud of you for taking the initiative to bring it up to Jeremy. It sounds as though you’ve been doing a great job at work like I always knew you could.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I’ve worked there since I graduated from CMU, and they’ve given me two title bumps and half a dozen raises in that time. How much better did you want me to do?”

  “Nate.” Uh-oh. Maybe it hadn’t been wise to get snippy with the bear. He’d always appreciated having his mom on his side because she was the quintessential mama bear, but when she turned that roar on him? He was arguably a grown bear himself, but it left him shaking in his fur. “You have accomplished so much, and I’ve never been anything but proud of you and your sister. You’re both hard workers, you’re both very bright, personable, and responsible. I couldn’t have asked for better children. Well, I could’ve, but I probably wouldn’t have gotten them.”

  He snorted. “So what’s your point?”

  “My point is that you’ve always had it easy. I’m not saying you didn’t work for everything you have, because I watched you work to get into MIT, to get into CMU, to get your job. I’ve watched you during countless matches on the tennis court. But as hard as you’ve worked, I’ve always felt as though you had a reserve you weren’t using. Like you could’ve worked harder, but you were fine with where you were and what you’d been given, so you didn’t need to bust your tush for more.”

  If his mother never said tush again, he’d be okay with that. Aside from that, his kneejerk reaction was to argue with her. It wasn’t true. He’d worked his ass off. But somewhere deep down he could admit that she was right. He’d always been comfortable. And he hadn’t made himself uncomfortable in order to do more or be more or have more. Even when he’d been frustrated with his position at work, he hadn’t gone out of his way to change it until now.

  “Nate? Are you seething over there?”

  He blew out a long breath. “No. I mean, I’m not proud of it, but I don’t think you’re wrong.”

  “It doesn’t make you a bad person. And you’ve still got a whole lot of life left to pull out all the stops. It sounds as if you started. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Can I stop you from asking me a question?”

  “Oh, hush. But no.”

  Georgina Carter was a piece of work. Good thing his dad was so mellow because if they’d been two peas in a pod, they would’ve no doubt destroyed each other by now instead of being in their thirty-fifth year of wedded bliss.

  “Go on.”

  “What changed? And don’t tell me you finally had a great idea. That’s part of it, but you could’ve found another way to go for this if you’d wanted it badly enough.”

  Yeah, his mouth was already open to use that excuse, but that’s what it would’ve been. An excuse. He could see the real reason standing right in front of him as clear as if she were really there. Ruby. Without knowing it and without even trying to, she’d rubbed off on him. Maybe cleaned up some of his soft, sloppy edges by insisting he be better than he’d been.

  He’d been good because he wouldn’t have gotten a taste of her in the first place, but to keep her, he’d had to step up his game. Be better, more considerate, more dedicated. And it had been so fucking worth it. Yes, he’d screwed it up, badly, but for a while…he’d felt good about himself. Hell, the best he’d ever felt, even if he’d had to work for it. Maybe that’s what he’d enjoyed about it? The work? She’d demanded a lot of him, and he’d stepped up to give it to her. And at the end of the day, it hadn’t even felt all that much like work. It had just felt like being a man that Ruby deserved.

&nb
sp; “Georgie? Are you coming?”

  Ah, his dad was trying to get his mother’s attention. “Go ahead, Mom. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Okay. And you know you can call anytime. We’re always here.”

  Yep, they always were. And they’d been there without being obtrusive and overbearing, and maybe he could think about how they’d done that, because he clearly hadn’t gotten all the memos on that one. Maybe he could put all of his considerable analytical powers and his entire reserve of energy and everything else he had into figuring out how to…win Ruby back wasn’t right. She didn’t need to be won; she wouldn’t appreciate it if he tried. She’d tell him to go fuck himself all over again.

  It was a matter of letting Ruby know he was here, that he wanted her more than anything else, and he’d take whatever pieces and parts she’d be willing to give him. And if she needed something, all she had to do was ask. Or hell, if he could figure out some way that she wouldn’t even have to ask, that might be better. He loved how proud Ruby was, and she damn well should be. She’d never had the luxury of being “good enough.” But getting the woman to be okay with accepting help, not because she needed it but because it would make her life way easier and he had plenty to offer…that would be the trick.

  “Thanks. Tell Dad I say hi. Love you.”

  “Love you, too. Now I’ve got to kick your dad’s butt at cribbage.”

  ***

  Ruby fidgeted with the little notebook in her hands. Mr. Landry had said he’d have time for her this afternoon, finally, so she’d spent any minute she could spare, including her lunch break, honing her list of reasons why he should give her a promotion and a raise to go with it.