Now, he snorted as he turned the treadmill to a faster clip that had him running hard on a slight incline. What a bunch of hype. Total crap, really. He hated it. Hated what he’d become, and he still hated it.
Yet…
Inside, an unfamiliar awakening was taking place, a desire. A damn near aching need. Since that morning he’d played sexually with Cammie, it had spiraled into some kind of weird obsession that left him half afraid of his own susceptibility. Why had he done it? Why had she? And though those three little words she’d spoken had momentarily stopped him, when he’d sought to regain the mood, she’d placed one soft palm against his thudding chest.
“I—I don’t know what I’m saying!” she whispered in horror. “I’m sorry, Ty. I didn’t mean it.”
He hadn’t cared. Not really. He was only intent on recapturing those luscious pink lips, but the mood was completely severed and nothing was going to put it back together at that point.
In fact, Cammie had suffered serious remorse, if he’d correctly interpreted her actions, which he was certain he had. She’d clasped her arms over her bare breasts in a thoroughly offended maiden pose, her eyes wide and round. And though he’d known her reaction was to her own confession, he’d found her sudden scruples both irritating and sweet. The innocence of it caught him unawares, and while he sorted through some conflicting emotions of his own, she yanked on the tangled mess of her shirt and rolled from beneath his weight to stand trembling at the edge of the bed.
It hadn’t helped that her hair was a wild, unruly cascade of reddish curls flowing around her face. Or that her eyes glimmered a blue so deep he felt lost in them. Or that her limbs and mouth quivered from emotion. She was as beautiful as any woman he’d ever seen, and Ty stood by in numb amazement, wanting back those intense moments between them.
And that’s when he made his mistake.
Reacting on impulse, he climbed off the bed and dragged her into an embrace. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as cooled off as she was, and when she felt the hard evidence of his arousal, she whimpered in dismay and stumbled backward, away from him, until her back was up against the wall.
“Cammie…look…” he started to say, unable to clear his head enough to utter a thought. Everything about her distracted him, and though it hadn’t been that long since he’d spent a night with Missy, it suddenly felt like a century. He wanted Cammie so badly it was embarrassing. And he couldn’t think of one single thing to say except, “I want you,” which was painfully clear already.
Her arms held him at bay. She shook her head. “I’ll leave,” she said, her voice still echoing the horror of her own sensuality. He knew what she was thinking, and he wanted desperately to let her know it was okay.
“It’s okay to say ‘I love you,’ ” he told her reasonably, but she uttered a moan of pure misery and ducked beneath his arms, putting the space of the room between them.
Her hands pressed against her cheeks, and she half doubled over, reacting in unmasked hysteria. “It is not! Oh, Lord, I’m such a sickening fool. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. No, no,” she said, warding him off with one outstretched arm as he would have crossed to her again. “Please, please, leave me alone. Just go away—for a while—and let me be. Oh, I need some space,” she groaned as if in pain.
“You’re making a bigger deal of this than you need to.”
“Shut up, Ty,” she said without any real heat. “Just go—”
He’d had no choice but to leave the bedroom. He’d tried to reach her with a silent entreaty, but she’d turned her face away, unwilling to look at any part of him.
Now, looking back, he was torn between wishing he’d handled himself differently, that he hadn’t fallen into the silken trap of his own emotions and nearly made love to her, and the certainty that he should have just forged ahead, ignoring her whispered pledge of love, and made love to her with all the pent-up physical desire and passion they’d ignited in each other.
“You’ve come a long way from worrying about her being your sister,” he growled beneath his breath.
“Did you say something?” the same teenage-girl employee yelled from halfway across the room.
Ty inwardly sighed. A heavyset woman on the treadmill next to him turned around in confusion and yelled back, “No!” to the girl, thereby saving Ty from another round of adoration by his would-be fan.
He’d had a hell of a time getting Cammie to put down her bag and stay with him. She’d been determined to move to the Goosedown Inn, or maybe just drive her rent-a-car back to Seattle. Only serious persuasion on his part had kept her at the cabin, and since that time, though they’d shared the same space, their conversations had been on general topics such as the education system, the state of the world as a whole, and the long term effects of global warming and El Niño. It was interesting, Ty had noted with a certain amount of self-deprecation, that the subtext body language denoted her anxiety, and though he’d tried to convince himself that she was overreacting, whenever Cammie spoke he could later only remember her tongue, teeth and feminine gestures, the look in her eyes, or the shine of her hair.
So, what did that mean?
He had no idea.
Snatching the towel from around his neck, he wiped down his face as he simultaneously lowered the speed of the treadmill to a walk. Finally, he turned it off, then stood there a moment, regaining his sea legs, so that when he stepped off he wouldn’t stumble and fall, a phenomenon of riding the treadmill too long.
The girl, whose leotard swelled and tightened in all the right places, gave him a bright smile as he returned from the changing room wearing a lightweight black nylon jogging suit over his sweat-dampened clothes.
“Missy was here,” she chirped in a voice as bright as her smile.
Ty drew a mental picture of Missy Grant, his sometime paramour: a pretty, thirtyish woman who longed to be twenty-two again, if one could base an assumption on her dress and manner. Ty had found her uncomplicated and easy to be with, but their worlds were as different as far-flung stars and he knew, as with everything else at Bayrock, that she was merely a nice diversion for him. At first she seemed to feel the same. She told him she was looking for fun, not a husband, nor a father-substitute for her only child. The relationship had run a fairly smooth course until he started forgetting to call. Complete apathy on his part. That’s when he learned about the true Missy.
She’d rung him and rung him and rung him, and tried her darnedest to get him down to Rodeo Bob’s, her place of employment and the restaurant and bar that he himself owned and that his friend Corky ran. Ty had danced around the whole thing. It was a shame about Rodeo Bob’s, however, as he’d liked hanging out with Corky and some of his buds.
But he’d had no intention of leading Missy on any further. It was over. Although occasionally, when he was desperately lonely, he thought about calling her, just like the other night…
That was his problem, he realized with a rush of relief. Loneliness! That was why he’d wanted Cammie so badly. She didn’t hold some strange spell over him. It was just lack of sex, pure and simple, that was making him feel so out of control, anxious and vulnerable, too.
Leotard-girl broke into his thoughts with, “I hope you don’t think I’m being nosy. It’s just that I know you and Missy were seeing each other, but I don’t know…” She chewed on the edge of her finger, eyeing him hopefully. “Sometimes things don’t work out, I guess.”
“I guess,” Ty agreed. Thinking of Missy still made him feel like a heel.
“So, what are you doing now?” the girl continued.
He read her pinned-on name tag: Karma. “I’m heading back to the cabin to work,” he answered curtly. Good grief. Karma. Were all parents half crazed when they had children? He sometimes wondered if parenthood sucked all the brains out of people?
“Oh, that’s right. Missy said you had a houseguest.”
Ty jerked around in surprise, then covered the movement by digging into his gym bag. He hated being the spe
culation of anyone. Wasn’t that why he’d left Los Angeles in the first place? And here he was, in this small tourist town, suddenly the center of attention. It was the same damn thing, except on a smaller scale.
“A friend,” he admitted, heading for the door.
“Girlfriend?” she couldn’t help calling after him, but Ty was through the door and onto the street, letting the afternoon sun touch his tense face.
Girlfriend…
No, she wasn’t his girlfriend, but she wasn’t any kind of sister to him, either. He didn’t know what he expected her to be, but the idea that she would be leaving soon, a topic neither of them discussed but nevertheless lay between them like some huge, impenetrable wall, filled Ty with a sense of longing and dismay that couldn’t be swept away by some platitude like “She’s just come to reacquaint herself with family” or “She lives in Los Angeles and there’s no way you can be with her.”
There were issues they needed to discuss, he realized as he walked up the street to his cabin. A watery sun shone down and made an attempt to warm the ground, but the April breeze still blew chilly and strong, reminding him that winter was just a tiny step behind the nodding daffodils and rhododendrons.
It would be warm and sunny in L.A., maybe even hot. He rolled the idea around in his head, and though there was a prick of disgust, it wasn’t the same kind of out-and-out revulsion he used to feel when he thought about his one-time home.
Maybe I’m healing, he thought with a certain amount of cynical amusement. That kind of quote was nineties psychobabble of the worst type. It sounded deep and important, when in reality it was just a bunch of words. It was a symptom of the bigger illness he’d run away from as fast as he could go.
Like you’re so much better off now…
Ty sighed heavily. Though he could dismiss a lot of things out of hand, he couldn’t dismiss his feelings for Cammie—complicated though they were—and when he pushed open the gate and walked to the front door, he grew annoyed at himself at the sense of expectation suddenly firing his blood. Just knowing she was inside thrust his body into teenage hormone mode.
But she wasn’t inside, as it turned out. Ty strode through the cabin’s few rooms and ascertained that disturbing conclusion very quickly. Had she left for L.A. without telling him?
Fear stabbed his heart and he threw open his bedroom closet door, relieved to see her overnight bag still in its place, her clothes neatly hung on their hangers. So, she was around somewhere. Possibly taking a walk along the waterfront. He hadn’t seen her on his return, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have stopped in somewhere for a bit of touristy-type shopping.
At least he hoped that’s what it was.
Two hours later, he was starting to worry. Twilight had settled over the water, sending streaks of waving illumination across the moving surface from the many lights winking along the waterfront. Standing outside on his back deck, Ty cradled a beer between hands that were fast growing numb from the sharp wind feathering his face, neck, and any part not suitably covered. It was his first beer since Cammie’s arrival, his first alcoholic drink of any kind. He’d been afraid he’d made a fool of himself that first night, and he’d steered clear of everything until now. He wasn’t an alcoholic, but he definitely could abuse the stuff now and again. He’d paid the price in many whopping hangovers, and now, as he tipped back the bottle, he wished there was some other form of anesthetic for the torture that ailed him.
Do you really think she’s left you? Do you?
A soft knock on the front door drew his head around. Spirits rising, he reentered the house, set his beer on the counter and moved quickly to admit Cammie.
“Where the heck have you been?” he demanded with more impatience than the situation warranted.
But it wasn’t Cammie. It was Missy. In a dark-blue sweater and skirt, her blond hair twisted into a makeshift bun and clipped with a rhinestone barrette, her anxious face covered with mounds of makeup, she looked a bit like an over-the-hill starlet, desperately seeking her one big chance.
“Where have I been?” she echoed. “Where have you been? I don’t hear from you for months and then you finally surface at the club today.”
“Surface?” he asked blankly, his brain frantically searching for a way to ease her out of the way before Cammie returned.
“Well, Karma says you’ve been there before, but she said she actually talked to you today. She said you talked about me.”
No way out of that one without creating a serious problem. Still, Ty hung by the door, reluctant to invite her inside. Nothing good would come of it, for him or for her.
“Karma’s a friend,” Missy added unnecessarily, stepping around him without an invitation, trailing a cloud of perfume in her wake. Its flowery scent wafted upward, thick and sweet and cloying. It seemed to mask everything else, and Ty realized belatedly, as his stomach jolted, that he hadn’t eaten all day and his beer wasn’t settling well.
Missy’s hands reached for him, and it was all he could do to keep from backing up. She jerked playfully on his collar. “So, you have company, huh? I’ve never known you to entertain. I always thought you were kind of a hermit.”
“Yeah…well…” Gently, he disengaged himself from her grasping fingers, softening the rejection by holding her hand and leading her to the couch.
“Did you sell that property yet? I don’t see a real estate sign anymore.”
“It’s still on the market. The sign just fell over.”
“Not very good business, would you say? I mean, who’s your agent again? They should be johnny-on-the-spot. I’d fire them and get someone else.”
Ty almost smiled. “Who would that be in Bayrock? Someone else from the same office?”
“Oh, I know it’s small, but there’s got to be someone else, doesn’t there?” Missy shrugged out of her navy jacket. Her breasts were large and somewhat matronly, making her seem heavier than her true build. Ty couldn’t help comparing them to Cammie’s, and he found he preferred Cammie’s smaller breasts and petite shape.
A moment later, he could have kicked himself for his musings. What was happening to him?
“Jerry, I’ve been thinking—” Missy began, when the front door opened once again and Cammie stood in the aperture.
She wore a soft green sweater, her ubiquitous denim jeans, and a pair of suede boots. Her hair was held back in a ponytail by a rubber band, and her cheeks were flushed pink from the weather. Aqua eyes glittered with lustrous good health, and the warm smile she greeted him with melted all Ty’s concerns. There was something going on between them that neither could deny. Maybe they were both having a little trouble facing it, but its existence was unmistakable.
And then Cammie’s gaze fell on Missy.
“Oh, hello,” she murmured.
Missy’s face was a frozen mask. “Hello,” she answered shortly, turning accusing eyes on Ty.
“Missy Grant, this is Cammie Merrill,” Ty introduced. “Cammie’s a friend from a past life.”
“Really?” Missy’s lips tightened in reserved judgment.
“Missy and I are friends in the present,” Ty went on, feeling a shift of mood in the room that surprised him. Being male and a confirmed bachelor, he wasn’t as quick to pick up the underlying messages, but when he did, he wanted to laugh out loud. The two women were sizing each other up, deciding who had the most valid claim! He gazed at Cammie with affection. Didn’t she know it was no contest? But it was gratifying nonetheless that her emotions were involved at a deeper level than he’d suspected.
It took an excruciatingly long time before Missy Grant decided to take her leave. Even then, she hesitated by the door, clearly resenting the fact that Cammie was invited to stay while she’d worn her welcome into the ground.
Jealousy ran through Cammie’s veins like green poison. She was shocked by her reaction, even though it wasn’t that unexpected if you looked at it right. But it made her feel small and insecure, as so much of the past two weeks had. She didn�
�t trust herself with Ty. Good Lord! Their frantic petting was proof enough of that!
As soon as the door swung shut behind Missy, and Cammie had wiped her moist palms on her thighs, she turned to meet Ty’s stripping gaze. That’s what it was, too: stripping. Oh, not that she felt he undressed her with his eyes, though there was certainly an element of that in there, too, but because she felt he looked right through her into her soul. She was naked in front of him; all manner of deceptions lost to his knowing eyes. She’d felt that way the whole two weeks, and whenever she started to feel the least little bit safe, her mind cast back to those fervent, groping moments on his bed and her peace of mind shattered.
Still, she couldn’t leave. She’d tried and tried. But apart from that first day, when she’d tossed together her belongings and bolted for the door, stopped by Ty’s strong hands and even stronger persuasive manner, she hadn’t physically attempted another departure. Any other leaving took place entirely in her head, a war she continually fought. In some ways this was absolute paradise, the fulfillment of her fondest, most impossible fantasy, but in another way, it was like Eve plucking the apple in the Garden of Eden: she knew it wasn’t right, wasn’t real, wasn’t good. They had nothing to build on, no future to plan. The most she could expect from Ty was a long-term affair in a faraway town or village in some far-flung corner of the world. He wasn’t going to come back to Los Angeles, for the “role of a lifetime” or anything else. She couldn’t even ask him without appearing like she had her hand out. No, this was Ty’s life now, and though he hadn’t actually taken off and headed to a new place yet, it scarcely mattered, for that new place would be just as remote as this current one. That, she knew for certain.
Someday Soon Page 18
