“One thing about St. Paul’s. We got our money out of the train on that dress because it’s like a mile down that aisle. Every little girl’s dream. We had the reception at the Copley because the club wasn’t nearly big enough for Mom’s guest list.” She made a derisive sound. “She couldn’t even get everybody into St. Paul’s. So some people were invited just to the reception.” She slumped down further into her seat and leaned back, looking out at the dark rainy night. “What a waste.”
She suddenly turned her whole body in the seat so that she was partially facing Brandon.
“After we got back from our honeymoon my maid of honor told me that Trey had propositioned one of my bridesmaids at the reception. Tried to get her to say yes to a clandestine quickie.
“I’ve always wondered what I would have done if I’d found out on the spot that night. Would I have thrown the whole thing over or would I have given him a chance to explain it away and let the whole thing play out? I don’t know.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Kentucky
She turned back toward the passenger window. “I need coffee.”
“First place we come to, we’ll stop.”
“Promise?”
Brandon smiled.
“Yeah. I could use a jolt of Joe, too. Maybe a donut.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“About donuts? I’m deadly serious about donuts. I could do a whole Bubba Gump list on fried bread and the wondrous things that can be done with it. There’s only one thing in the universe more amazing than donuts and that’s peanuts.”
“How do you keep from turning into massive love handles?”
“You been checking me out, Rose?”
She couldn’t read his expression very well in the dim light, but his tone sounded teasing.
“I can tell the difference between you and the clerk at the Stop and Go if that’s what you mean.”
He laughed.
She was funny.
That was unexpected.
“Sit ups.”
“What about them?”
“I do sit ups. I run on a treadmill. I eat stuff I want, but I don’t eat everything I want.”
“Hey. Was that the Kentucky border sign? Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you go to so much trouble? Usually guys who watch what they eat and work out like that, well, they’re either gay or candidates for magazine covers. Sometimes both.”
“You got me. I have been on magazine covers.”
She barked out a laugh, having no idea that he was being serious.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“You do sit ups?”
“I’d rather give donuts a wide berth.”
Brand shrugged.
“To each her own. At this rate I don’t know how long until coffee.”
They were still creeping along. The rain wasn’t letting up at all. The windshield wipers waved back and forth at top speed, but their rhythmic beating did little to improve visibility. He got out another bag of peanuts.
“Wow. You’re really addicted to those.”
“Maybe. I think if I couldn’t get any I might be willing to kill.”
They’d only passed one car since leaving the cabin. If there was a bright spot in the predicament, it was, as Brandon had said, that it would be impossible to locate Cami in that storm.
“Is that a light?” she asked.
“Yes, it is.”
They pulled under the overhang of a gas pump island and the pounding rain immediately sounded further away. The combination fuel and convenience store was a welcome sight.
“Stay in the car while I get gas. I’ll pull the car up to the door afterward and get coffee.” He smiled. “And donuts.”
Before she could reply he was out of the car letting cold air in. It was still early fall, but the rain had cooled everything down and made it unseasonably chilly. With the heater turned off, the car became instantly cold and she needed coffee even more. She reached for the garbage bag under her feet.
When Brandon got back into the car, his eyes went to the garbage bag she was holding.
“You don’t need to get out. I’ll get what you want.”
“Bathroom.”
The way she pressed her lips together when she said that one word told him that it was a fight he was going to lose.
“We haven’t been on the road that long.” He launched a weak protest knowing it was pointless.
“I’m getting out.”
He huffed, but started the car and pulled up to the store. It was brightly lit and he could see a clerk inside. Otherwise, they were the only people around.
As soon as he stopped the car, she was out and running toward the entrance. He followed and, again, was drenched within seconds. Not that he’d ever gotten completely dry from the last soaking.
“Whew!” The clerk smiled as they dashed inside. “That rain! It’s coming down!” He offered a smile and a nod.
Brandon nodded in return.
“Restrooms?”
“That way.” The clerk pointed to the back.
Brand guided Cami to the rear and, as before, looked inside to be sure there was no threat. He gestured for her to go ahead.
When she came out five minutes later, he was leaning against the wall opposite the doorway with his arms crossed. Her eyes flicked to the way that pose made his biceps bulge before returning to his face. At the same time his eyes ran the length of her tartan flannel pajama bottoms and back to the knit hat she’d pulled over her head just before exiting the car. She knew she looked like a grunge holdover street person and suddenly felt self-conscious about it.
Without a word, Brandon straightened and walked toward the coffee. She followed like she’d been ordered to fall in.
She pulled one of the biggest cups from the stack.
“I’ll have a venti,” she quipped as she set the cup under the dispenser that said ‘big, bold flavor’. “If you want, I can drive for a while.”
Brandon hadn’t anticipated the offer.
That was unexpected.
“Maybe later. If the rain lets up.”
“That’s why you should let me drive now. Too much tension. We should do a rotation thing. Two hours on. Two hours off.”
That plan was a lot more appealing than he wanted to let on.
“Even if I was considering that, I’ve only been driving for an hour.” She shrugged and took a sip of her coffee after putting a full inch of cream on the top. “I’m surprised you’re okay with dairy. Doesn’t take much provocation to get health nuts to start ranting about milk.”
“I don’t consider myself to be a health nut. Just a reasonably knowledgeable and prudent person.”
Brand barked out a laugh.
“Whatever. Let’s see what kind of donuts they have.”
She scoffed, but caught the mischievous glint in his eyes. He was teasing her. Wasn’t there some rule about bodyguards getting too familiar with clients? On the other hand, she had opened the door for that. He was surprisingly clever. When he wasn’t making sure the stick up his ass was firmly in place, he was passable company, too.
There were aisles of poison disguised as food. Close to the register there were two apples and three bananas. She took one of the apples, one of the bananas, and pulled two waters and a cranberry juice out of the case for later.
Brandon glanced at the stash she laid on the counter.
“That’s it?” he asked. “It’s a long time until lunch.”
She looked over her shoulder at the yards of candy, jerky, crackers, cookies, chips, and… “Wait a minute.” She pulled six packages of cashews off the holder then grabbed a pack of hand towels from the auto maintenance section and brought them back to the register.
“Good,” he said. “A growing gi… woman needs protein.” He lifted an eyebrow. “And her towels, I guess.”
She smiled, finding it sort of endearing that he’d made an effort to refrain from calling her a girl.
&nb
sp; They stood at the door for a second, both dreading the dash to the car in the beating rain. He looked down at her.
“On three.” She nodded and brought the garbage bag over her head like a shelter. “One. Two. Three.”
They both ran for the car at the same time. When she pulled her door closed, she was giggling and the sound of it set up a reverberation all the way to his toes. She had a nice laugh.
Just business, Brand.
He shoved the bag of stuff onto her lap as he opened the console drink holder and secured his coffee cup. She put hers in the holder beside his and brought the towel pack out of the bag. After tearing the packaging apart, she reached toward his head with a towel.
He could hardly say no since water was running from his hair down his face and neck. Taking the towel he ran it over his head roughly. When it was drenched like a washcloth in the bathtub, he threw it into the rear floorboard.
“Guess that was a good idea.” He grinned.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Maybe finding a place to wait this out would be an even better idea.”
“Under other circumstances, you’d probably be right.”
He started the car and pulled away, taking a swig of his coffee. The little groan he released at the simple pleasure had Cami’s nerve endings standing at attention.
When they were back on the road, he said, “So. Hand me the donuts and move on to Chapter Two.”
She retrieved the bag of donuts.
“You sure you want to eat this stuff?”
He gave her a look indicating that her question wasn’t worthy of an answer.
Brandon set the bag in his lap, took a bite of one of the donuts and licked his fingers.
“So where were we?”
“You found out from your friend that your groom was a fifth degree douche.”
“Yes. I did. And he was. Is. We sailed around the British Virgin Islands for a week. It was lovely. I was on top of the world. Of course that was before any of the trouble started.”
“Does the trouble include what you learned from the maid of honor?”
“Not really. If that was all there was to this…”
She seemed to get lost in thought before she finished the sentence.
Brandon sat quietly eating donuts, drinking coffee, and concentrating on the headlights finding the dotted center line. After a few minutes he said, “Hey. Did I lose you?”
“What? I, uh, no. Right here. Maybe I need therapy. Telling this stuff… It’s not easy.”
“Maybe you don’t need therapy. Maybe you just need to get it out.”
“You a nice guy, Brandon? I didn’t peg you for a nice guy at first, but you’re starting to seem like a nice guy.”
“What do you know? You’ve got shit taste in men.”
He grinned.
She laughed.
“That can’t be denied.”
“So keep going.”
“Okay. I had a condo right on the Back Bay Fens. So I could just walk straight across the park to get to work. It was nice, even on bad weather days. I loved that condo. He had the penthouse at the Folio. That’s in the financial district and he wanted to live there. When I said I’d like to stay near the museum, at first he laughed. He said, ‘You can’t think I’d consider moving into your quaint little flop, Camden’.
“There was a fight over where we were going to live. I said that, since he didn’t walk anywhere, but kept a car and driver at his disposal, it didn’t matter if he was a mile away from work. He said he couldn’t entertain guests in a place like mine, that I needed to grow up and get serious about my real job - taking care of him.
“Now that I look back on things, I can see clearly that the tug of war over where we were going to live was a turning point. During that argument he made it clear that, not only did he intend for us to live at his place, which was decorated with an obscene lack of taste, but he’d also taken it for granted that I was going to give up my job and dedicate my life to planning and hostessing dinner parties.
“Of course I know how to do that. Everybody who grows up in my world knows how to do that. I just didn’t have it in mind for me. It had never occurred to me that he’d expect me to give up my job. There are probably a thousand people in the world who would kill for that job. He’d always said how proud he was to be with somebody so cultured. It was just part of his pitch.”
She opened the plastic tab that kept the lid of her coffee closed and took a drink. It was starting to get warm in the car again.
“So you moved to his place?”
“Yeah,” she said, so quietly he almost didn’t hear it over the rain. “I did everything he wanted. In the end I gave up my job. Moved to his place, but it never felt like a home. He’d had it ‘done’…” she did air quotes with one hand, “by a New York designer who was brilliant and gay and brilliantly gay.” Brandon sniggered. “So he didn’t want me to make any changes. Moving was just the beginning though. The demands didn’t stop there, but the more I agreed to, the more he wanted.”
When she stopped talking, Brandon said, “Like what?”
“My isolation. He started finding reasons why he didn’t like my friends. He felt like any attention given to them was attention that should have been focused on his needs.
“My clothes. He wanted me to play arm candy and, to him, that meant clothes more revealing than I was comfortable with.
“Everything became a point of contention, a reason to critique and pick at me. Long story short, I never did anything right.
“I never saw my family unless Trey was able to go with me and I knew that there would be hell to pay if they caught on to the fact that I wasn’t happy. One day my doorman rang the intercom and said my father was downstairs. I was panicked. I couldn’t let him come up because, ah, there was evidence of Trey’s displeasure.”
Brandon’s jaw clenched even though he knew this part was coming.
“He hit you.”
“Only when there were no command performances on the calendar for two weeks. Long enough for bruises to fade away.
“I told the doorman to let me speak with my dad. I said it wasn’t a good time. He said he didn’t care whether it was or not. He wanted to see me right then. We argued back and forth about it, but you know, he’s one of those guys. Doesn’t take no for an answer. You find a lot of those at the heads of big companies. He walked away from the doorman and called my cell.
“I told him I’d meet him for lunch, but didn’t plan to actually go. The bruises on my face were new. Fresh from the night before. Trey had thought I drank too much wine at a dinner party. He let me know in graphic terms when we got home.
“Dad said one of my friends had come to see him. Roxanne Radcliffe. She was my roommate at the sorority house my last two years as an undergrad. I ran into her shopping and she could tell something was wrong. I guess if you live with somebody for two years they know you really well. My acting skills weren’t up to the challenge of persuading her that I was okay. Apparently.”
She rifled through the sack of stuff and pulled out the cranberry juice. She took a drink.
Brandon glanced over at her.
“Go easy on that. I’m not seeing Ladies Lounges every few yards out here and, between the venti coffee and juice…”
“Mind your own business.”
He chuckled. She seemed to be growing more confident by the minute. He’d never thought he’d ever find the occasion to think the word ‘spunky’, but that was what popped up in his head.
“Don’t cry to me when you can’t hold it and don’t have any place to go.” He could feel her glare. “I’m just saying.”
They drove without talking while she polished off the banana, each hearing his or her own thoughts and the relentless sound of rain.
“How far to the next town?” she asked.
“You’re the navigator. You tell me.”
“It’s dark,” she said.
He leaned over her and retrieved a palm-sized light from
the glove box.
“Here. It’s a miracle called batteries.”
“Funny,” she said drily. She opened the atlas and starting from the cottage, clearly marked with highlighter, estimated their location. “Jensing? About ten miles?”
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“That’s because I’m not too sure. It’s a guess.”
“Here’s a sign. See if you can read it.”
He slowed down.
“Jensing! Eight miles!” She sounded so excited it was infectious.
He smiled. “See? You learned a new skill. You can navigate by flashlight.”
“Bullet point for my resume,” she said without emotion. “Which I guess is going to need updating.” She attempted to mimic sounding bright and cheerful. “I can explain the gap in my work history. I took time off for abuse and serious downgrading of self-esteem’. But none of that will matter when I attempt to interview with platinum tips at the end of short spikey hair. I’ll never get in the door.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. A list of the right contacts trumps everything. Education. Experience.” His eyes did a quick scan of her appearance. “Style.”
She laughed. “You call this style?”
“Yeah. It may not be Vogue, but it’s a look. Well, what do you know?”
“What?” She looked around to see if she could find a reference point for that question. When she came up empty, she asked again. “What?”
He smiled. “There’s a Waffle House in three miles.”
“No.”
“Yeah. There is.”
“I don’t mean no, there isn’t a Waffle House. I mean no, I’m not eating there.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Too bad. You’ll have to watch me.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Can I have a blindfold?”
He chuckled. “No. We’re trying to avoid calling attention to ourselves.”
She gaped before pointing a finger at her head.
“Whoever came up with this hair suggestion didn’t get the memo. In rural America I stand out like flashing red and blue lights.”
It was still dark as charcoal gray outside because of the dense rainclouds, but the sun had come up and was giving off enough light for him to see the hair she was talking about.
The Biker's Brother (Sons of Sanctuary MC Book 2) Page 5
