To Catch a Camden

by Victoria Pade

  “No, nothing. That sounds good,” she said, realizing only in that moment that she hadn’t thought beyond the dinner and so hadn’t considered whether or not to ask him in. Had he not made the suggestion she might have been at risk of having him say good-night at the door and leave.

  And she wouldn’t have liked that.

  “Can I make coffee or pour some iced tea? Or I have soda,” she offered, beginning to come back to herself now that she was on home turf.

  “No, thanks. Just go in and put your biscuits away. I’ll wait out here for you.”

  “I’ll be right back,” she answered as she unlocked and opened her front door.

  Inside, out of his sight, she finally did take a few of those deep breaths he’d recommended.

  Then she popped into her guest bathroom for a quick check in the mirror. No mascara smudges. Blush still adding color to her cheekbones. Left to fall loose, her crazy curly hair was still as tamed as it ever got. And the khaki slacks, white tank top and tailored red shirt she wore open all remained wrinkle-free.

  The only thing she did was reapply a little lip gloss, and then she went back outside.

  She still didn’t turn on the porch light because it attracted bugs. In the dark, the swing was in such deep shadow that had she not known Derek was there she wouldn’t have noticed him.

  But he was there. Sitting in the center of the swing, angled to his left, with an ankle propped on the opposite knee and his arm across the top slat, waiting for her.

  Once her eyes had adjusted and she could see him, she was struck all over again by how ruggedly handsome he was. And after not having any time alone with him through the dinner, it felt as if this was only the beginning of her time with him today.

  He’d left her no option but to sit in the lee of his arm and that was just what she did.

  When she was fully settled, he said, “Now tell me why the hell you were so stressed out tonight. Did I do something?”

  “No,” she assured him without hesitation. “I really appreciated that you never left my side. It was just me....”

  “It can’t be that you don’t like crowds—there weren’t any more people there tonight than at your barbecue and you were just fine. Was it us? All of us? Too many of us? Was somebody there an old lover?” he added with some levity.

  Gia managed to laugh. “No, it was just me.... My ex-husband came from a family like yours...sort of....”

  “A family like mine? In what way?”

  “Big. Close. In business together,” she said, sanitizing it. “I was married to Elliot Grant—of Grant Moving and Storage.”

  “I know the company. We used them when we moved our offices from three different buildings into the one we’re in now. They do commercial moving and storage, not residential, right? They move businesses, corporations, things like that.”

  “Right. I’m not surprised you’ve used them, they make sure to keep their competition to a minimum, especially in Colorado.”

  “I guess I didn’t know it was owned by one big family the way Camden Superstores is.”

  “Uh-huh. Elliot is one of eight kids and he has thirteen cousins who all—along with his parents, aunts and uncles—own and operate the company.”

  “Those numbers beat ours—they are a big family.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, come on, stop holding out on me. I told you last night about the worst mess I’ve made. So what gives with the ex and the ex’s family that triggered you looking like you wanted to hide under a table all night tonight?”

  She’d already learned that Derek was insightful and perceptive and observant, that there wasn’t much he missed. It was part of what she liked about him. Except maybe now.

  “Grant family dinners were not fun,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t be satisfied until she was honest with him.

  “Were they bigger than tonight’s?”

  “No, about the same—some of the cousins and one brother live out of state, where they keep an iron-fisted presence in a couple of other places. But the Grants weren’t very welcoming to people who married into the family—”

  She was close enough to Derek to see his confused expression. “They weren’t?”

  “Oh, no. Grants are born Grants or they aren’t really Grants,” she said, adopting the imperious tone that they had used. “Elliot’s mother and the other wives of the older generation aren’t even considered real Grants. Long marriages have given them more insider status and made them as bad as the real Grants when it comes to those of us who were new. But their sisters-in-law—the two women born into that generation of Grants—never let them forget that they weren’t real Grants and if they got divorced, that would be it for them.”

  “That would be it for them....” he repeated melodramatically and with a slight chuckle. “Now, that sounds scary. Would they be hunted down? Shot like dogs? What?”

  “No, but...” Gia shrugged. “Anyone who isn’t a Grant is an outsider. Divorce makes you not only an outsider but an enemy. And outsiders are treated bad enough. Enemies... Well, I think that can actually get dangerous....”

  He frowned again. “Okay, explain—dangerous how, and you only think that, you don’t know for sure?”

  “I didn’t know a lot about the Grants for sure. I wasn’t privy to inside information, and when it came to the business, Elliot would say that it was nothing I needed to know—”

  “Ooh, that sounds familiar,” Derek admitted. “That’s what my great-grandfather used to say.”

  “But I was married to Elliot for seven years and there were things I overheard here and there. Sometimes I’d pieced it together with what I heard elsewhere....”

  “Like what?”

  “Like something I’d hear on the news later about vandalism to another moving company’s trucks or a competitor’s storage facility catching fire. Once I heard something about being underbid, then later they were all laughing about how that guy’s rubber wouldn’t ever be hitting the road again....” She shrugged once more. “You kind of get an idea for what happened. And then I saw what went on when a sister-in-law divorced one of Elliot’s brothers—”

  “They weren’t just thugs in business?”

  “I don’t know that the Grants are thugs,” she said. “I know that they pay to have anything done that they don’t want to do themselves, and I can’t see any of them actually getting their hands dirty—”

  “So you figure they hire out the dirty work.”

  “I only know that they aren’t upstanding people. They have power and money and feel entitled to do whatever they want—or as they see it, need—to make money and succeed and get their way. They aren’t ethical—they make sure they’re friends with and big contributors to other people in power, and that’s helped them buy their way out of anything.”

  “Why does it feel like somewhere in your head you said like the Camdens?”

  So he was a mind reader....

  But when she didn’t confirm or deny it, he didn’t push it. “What went on when your sister-in-law wanted out?” he asked instead.

  “She was welcome to go. Empty-handed and without her little boy.”

  “Who had Grant blood so he was a real Grant.”

  “That’s how it works. And like I said, they have lots of money and power and really good lawyers and friends who are judges. First they did a horrible smear campaign against Linda that made her look like the most unfit parent on the planet—which she wasn’t at all! But by the time they were finished, the best she got was three hours of visitation every other weekend, under court-ordered supervision by the Grants. Then they made even those three hours impossible for her to actually ever arrange and no matter how hard she tried, there just wasn’t anything she could do. By the time I left Elliot, Linda had only seen Bobby twice in six months.”
/>   “For three hours, with an in-law watching.”

  “I felt awful for her. She just lost that little boy to them and there was nothing she could do.”

  “And you couldn’t risk backing her up?”

  “I offered...behind Elliot’s back,” she said in a quieter voice, knowing it wasn’t rational but still somewhat leery of bringing down any of the Grants’ wrath. “But her lawyer said it wouldn’t help. It was just my word against what looked like proof that she was unfit, and that anything I said would just get shot down. I was still willing, but Linda said no. She said she didn’t want to be responsible for what my life would be like with the Grants—or even with Elliot—if I did.”

  Derek took a deep breath and exhaled. “Why did you marry this guy—and into all of this?”

  “I honestly, honestly have no idea. He seemed like the nicest guy. He’s very personable—you can ask Tyson. Even he liked Elliot until I was years into the marriage. Elliot is smart. Good-looking. Charming... I knew he was close to his family, that they all worked for the family business and that it was very successful, but I had no idea of anything beyond that. And to tell you the truth, I had fantasies of belonging to a big, close family—”

  “You’d only had your grandparents and you’d lost them just before,” he recalled.

  “Right. Plus, while we were dating I only met his parents and a few of his brothers and sisters—I never went to a big family dinner or saw the dynamics of it all. His family was kind of standoffish, but Elliot wasn’t. As I told Tyson at the time that I was going out with Elliot, not his family....”

  “But when you got engaged...still no inkling?”

  “No. They warmed up a little and I thought that was just the beginning, that it would get better from there. They threw a big wedding shower for us, but at that point Elliot was all about being with me and we were the guests of honor, so everything was revolving around us—like with the wedding, too. It was only afterward that I started to see the way things really were....”

  “With his family. But what about him? Did the marriage go instantly south, too, or did you keep on the blinders awhile longer?”

  The blinders...

  He was referring to what she’d said the night they’d walked home after having ice cream.

  “No, the marriage didn’t immediately go south,” she said, finding it more difficult to talk about this than about the entire Grant family. “For the first year or so we were like any married couple—happy, settling in, getting to know each other, in love—”

  “How long did you date before you got married?”

  “We met at a benefit for the Botanical Gardens and there was six months of dating, another six engaged and planning the wedding.”

  “And after the first year of marriage?”

  “It was a case of a relationship going bad by inches,” she said, again with some difficulty. “The marriage suffered at the expense of how close he was to his family. They came first—and I mean that literally. A phone call from any one of them and he went running day or night for even the smallest things. It didn’t matter if I was miserably sick, if I needed him for something, if we were on a vacation—everything stopped, he went to his family and I was just out of luck. Little by little it wore on me.”

  “But you were his family—you should have come before anything except maybe an emergency somewhere else,” Derek said, as if what she was describing was unfathomable to him.

  “That’s how I thought it should be, but that’s not how it was. Once, about five years in, I was in the emergency room with a broken wrist and his brother got a flat tire—”

  “And he left a wife with a broken bone to fix a flat?”

  “He did. And he didn’t come back. I had to call Tyson to pick me up when my wrist was set. I was really getting the picture by then that I would never be even a close second to his family.”

  “Is that when you left him?”

  “No. I was having doubts about him, about us, about the future—”

  “About the fact that the kissing had stopped?”

  Oh, more of her words haunting her—from when she’d marveled that Larry and Marion still kissed without either of them having to force it....

  But she was in this far, she decided she might as well not try to sugarcoat anything.

  “Yeah, the kissing had stopped. By then I was like...” This just wasn’t easy—not to talk about and relive, and not to explain. “When Elliot and I first met, I was something he really wanted—the way a kid wants a Christmas present. So he was great. He couldn’t have shown more interest, he couldn’t see enough of me, he wanted to please me any way he could. He swept me off my feet—”

  “Then it wasn’t Christmas morning anymore.”

  “At first it was still good, except for his family, but I just thought...you know, in-laws...” she said with exasperation. “I blamed them for calling him away all the time, not him for running to them, and I hadn’t started to get an idea of their other...practices...so I just thought they were a pain in the neck.”

  “Then the newness of the favorite Christmas toy wore off?”

  Gia shrugged. “Yes,” she said because there was no better way to describe it. “He barely knew I was alive or cared if I was,” she admitted. “Whatever—that got to be a word I hated! Everything I tried to talk to him about, everything I asked of him, he wouldn’t so much as look away from watching TV or playing a video game or texting or doing something else on his phone, and he’d just say, ‘Whatever.’ Which meant that he hadn’t heard a word that I’d said. It just got to be like I didn’t exist. Or if I did, it was only on the very edges of his life. I guess I was the Christmas gift on display on a shelf in the living room rather than a totally forgotten one hidden on a shelf in a closet. But I was still just stuck on a shelf.”

  “And you stayed for seven years?”

  “We were married,” she said, “and I kept hoping that things would change, that the spark would come back....”

  The spark she’d tried putting back only to be rejected....

  “What made you finally leave—especially given that these people were not kind to anybody who did?”

  “I’d been thinking about it for a while when Elliot decided we should start having kids—which was just after what I’d watched happen to Linda.”

  “So faced with a token marriage to a husband who neglected you and pressure to have kids you would lose to the clan if you ever left after that—”

  “And the fact that by then I had some idea of the Grants’ seedy side and I was not proud to be part of it even by association—”

  “You decided to get out.”

  “I did. Which became a nightmare of a battle for both me and for Tyson—he was my lawyer against the Grants’ team of lawyers through a process that they dragged out for three years.”

  “Even without kids and a custody fight?”

  “I’d inherited my grandparents’ place when they died, and Elliot said he knew more about those kinds of things than I did, so he should take care of it. He decided the best thing to do was to sell it. But I never saw any of the money from it—he said it was safe and sound for the future—”

  “But without a future with him, that money was rightfully yours.”

  “It was. And Tyson went after it—”

  “Which set off a three-year battle?”

  “We fought over that for two and a half of the three years. That was when Tyson and I finally gave up the idea of seeing any of that money. Instead, Elliot offered me this place—only because his last tenants had been college kids and it was completely trashed. But by then, I just wanted it all over with, so I agreed.”

  “And that was when you met the Bronsons....”

  “When I got the house, yes.”

  “How long have you
actually been divorced?”

  “A year.”

  “And since then? Have this guy and his family left you alone? Or are we at risk of a drive-by shooting sitting out here like this?”

  “It’s pretty dark back in this corner, so I think we’re safe,” she joked. “No, once it was over, I stopped existing for the Grants. I saw my former mother-in-law with one of Elliot’s sisters and two of his brothers at a restaurant not long ago and they all looked right through me, as if we’d never met.”

  “I’m sorry,” Derek said sympathetically.

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “Not only for you getting snubbed by your former in-laws, but for all of it.”

  Gia laughed. “Well, that’s more than Elliot ever said.”

  Derek bent the elbow of the arm resting on the slat behind her so he could bring one hand forward and move her hair from the front of her shoulder to the back of it. Once he had, his fingers returned again to brush a few strokes against the side of her neck as he peered into her face, studying her. His feather-light touch eased her tension and replaced it with something tingly and titillating that scattered through her like glitter.

  After a few minutes of studying her as if he was searching for something, he shook his head and said, “How that guy could watch TV or text or play video games rather than look at you, talk to you, kiss you...I’m finding it hard to understand.”

  “You? The king of losing interest?” she teased.

  “Me. Yeah...”

  Just saying the word kiss had triggered the need in Gia, so when he leaned forward then to do just that, she met him halfway.

  And while it hadn’t been on her mind for more than a few seconds in advance, the first meeting of mouths really was what she needed in so many ways. Not only had she been longing to have him kiss her again since she’d stopped him the night before, but it helped her to believe that she hadn’t completely lost her appeal—the way just recalling the end of her marriage had made her feel.

  Gia was instantly lost in kissing him. Her hand went to his chest without his encouragement this time, and when his other arm came around to enclose her in that splendid circle of biceps, she sank into him.