“She must have heard by now,” Marsha said, “that Oliver’s back.”
“She’s talked to him a little. People in town are trying to get her to spill what she knows about Oliver and Selena. But she’s not gossiping about the family.”
“Of course she’s not.” No matter how angry Bethany might be at her brother for being gone so long, she’d still protect him.
“Is Camille okay?” Dru asked.
“They’re keeping her for a day from the sound of it. But she’s going to be fine. Oliver and Selena, though . . . he wants to love those two so much. Selena’s terrified to let him try.”
Dru watched Joe and her sister for a while before responding. “Selena’s afraid he’s going to run again.”
“We all are.”
Dru raised an eyebrow. “Except she’s a runner, too. All those years ago from Belinda. From her problems with her husband. From Chandlerville again, from the sound of it. And now Oliver’s crowding her too much, too soon. Maybe so he can do what he thinks he needs to for the family—for me and Brad and you and Dad—and then leave again himself.”
Marsha took in the peaceful picture of Bethany curled next to the foster father who’d forever claimed her as his own. Tears rushed. Blinking her eyes, she kept them at bay.
“We can’t let them go,” she said. “Oliver or Selena. We can’t lose Camille.”
“We won’t.” Dru leaned her head on Marsha’s shoulder. “Not without a fight. Not forever. Not even if they do leave. We’ll make sure they know we’ll always be here for them. The way you’ve let Bethany know. And look, she’s back. She’s with Dad when it matters. Camille will have her chance to know us, too.”
“Family stands up for family.” The way Oliver had pushed back against Selena’s husband’s asinine demands downstairs. Marsha kissed Dru’s temple.
Her daughter’s eyes watered, too. She smoothed her hand over her belly. “Camille belongs with us.”
Marsha dug into the pockets of the light cardigan she wore to counter the artificial cold of the CICU. She passed over a bundle of unused tissues. “The way your baby will belong?”
“It would break my heart”—Dru sniffed—“for my baby not to grow up knowing . . .” She stepped back. Stared at Marsha, her secret out. “You knew?”
Marsha pulled her into a hug. “That you and Brad don’t want to wait until fall to get married, for more reasons than your dad’s health? You’ve been pushing your food around on your plate when you come for Sunday dinner. You usually have more energy than the rest of us combined, but Brad’s been obsessed with you getting your rest since Joe’s heart attack.”
She eased Dru away.
“Plus,” she added, “you’re blooming, honey. You’re more beautiful than I’ve ever seen you, and that’s saying something. Your fiancé obviously thinks so, too, the way he watches you when he thinks no one will notice. I’m so happy for you both.”
Dru laughed, her tears spilling over. “I’m a watering pot. He doesn’t know what to do with me. He likes it better when we fight, and then we make up. Now he just sits there when I get like this and holds my hand and waits for me to turn back into my old, cranky self.”
“Oh, the cranky will come as the hormones surge and your feet swell and you both are freaking out about how the rest is going to work, now that you’re adding a new life into the mix of your jobs and your marriage and everything else you both love to do around town.”
“We’d already do anything for this baby,” Dru gushed. “Anything. We stay up at night, dreaming of how it will be, everything we’ll have once we have our own family to raise. I don’t know how you and Dad do it, so many kids from so many different places, and somehow you made us all feel like we were your priority.”
“Each of you was.” Each of them still was. Every child Marsha and Joe had fostered still belonged to them. Would always belong with them. “Just like this baby, and Camille, if she’s Brad’s, will be your priority from now on. That’s how love works. No matter how full your heart feels, there’s room for more when someone you love needs you.”
“Like Camille and Selena need Oliver, regardless of what some paternity test says. They’re meant to be together, Mom. We can’t let them screw this up again.”
Chapter Nineteen
Selena gathered her purse from the small table in her daughter’s hospital room. She was still wearing her jogging gear from that morning. She smelled like her run and like a mother who’d been scared out of her mind for the last four hours. She needed to clean up before she tackled more drama.
“You’ll make the right decision.” Belinda had settled into the chair beside Camille’s bed as soon as Selena stood.
Once Camille had been moved to the pediatric unit and fallen asleep, Selena’s mother had split her time between pacing back and forth across Camille’s tiny room grumbling about Parker, and silently pacing in the hallway outside. She’d stepped back in a moment ago, saying Oliver was waiting to give Selena a ride home. Where, Selena had no doubt, she and Oliver would be dealing with Camille’s questions, Parker’s latest asshole move, and Oliver’s determination to intervene on Selena and Camille’s behalf. All before Selena could get herself cleaned up and back to the hospital in her own car.
“Is there a right decision?” she asked.
“You’re worried about the money Oliver wants to shell out?” her mother asked. “And what it means?”
“I don’t know what any of this means. Or how I’m going to explain what happens next to Camille.”
Belinda pulled her newspaper from the canvas bag she’d had the presence of mind to grab when they’d raced out of the house with Camille. Selena’s mother had brought her bag, Camille’s flower quilt from her window seat, and Bear. Meanwhile, Selena didn’t even have her purse. Her mother had said she’d sit with Camille while Selena took whatever time she needed to pull herself together.
“One of these days,” Belinda said, “you’re going to have to completely trust someone.”
“I trust you now.” It was still a little shocking, how easy and right that felt.
“Did you ever really trust Parker?”
“Did you ever trust Daddy?”
“Gabriel . . .” Belinda slipped on the sliders she used to read, then pushed them up to rest on the top of her head. “Your father wasn’t cut out for family. I knew that when I married him. But you were on the way, and we loved each other, and I thought he’d grow into the rest. Just because he couldn’t, just because Parker thought success meant money and things and a family everyone in his corporate world could admire . . . doesn’t mean every man, even one who’s had trouble settling down, won’t come through if you give him a chance.”
Selena shook her head. “After all these years. After how much you disapproved when Oliver and I were dating . . . now you’re practically shoving me at him.”
Belinda laid her paper on the table by the bed. “It’s okay to want him, Selena. It’s always been okay, even in high school when I was terrified of how reckless you two were being. I didn’t want to believe how much you loved Oliver. How much you needed him. And I didn’t want him to make you even more unhappy than you already were. But I believe that he loved you back then, no matter how badly the two of you ended things. I think he could be good for you still, if that’s what you want.”
“But what . . .” Selena thought of all the dreams she’d fought about building a life for her and Oliver and Camille. “What if Camille turns out to be Brad’s?”
“And you’ve given your heart to a man who isn’t her father?”
Selena nodded.
“A man,” her mother added, “you think won’t want you or your daughter once he doesn’t have to feel responsible for you?”
“He’s trying to be responsible. But . . .”
“You want to be loved.”
And Selena so wanted for that love to be Oliver’s. Look at the way he’d held her and kissed her at the Dixon house. The way he’d talked so car
efully with Camille when she was upset, and tried to help her understand. Even how he’d overstepped and pushed back against Parker downstairs when it had technically been none of his business. It all sounded so good.
But was it love?
“If it’s not going to last,” she said, “I have to put a stop to it, for Camille’s sake.” For both their sakes.
You could destroy me . . .
“How?” her mother asked. “Camille’s asking her own questions. She’ll be looking for her own answers. You can try to stop what you’re feeling for Oliver. But you can’t decide for your daughter who and what she’s going to care about. Trust me. I’ve done the legwork.”
“But what if she’s hurt all over again?”
“What if she loves the Dixons and Oliver, or Brad, or all of them, and everything turns out fine?”
You wouldn’t have been able to stay away from me whether Camille was involved or not. And it terrifies you, what that could mean.
“What if I mess it up again?” Selena said, voicing her deepest fear. “What if I can’t love Oliver enough to stop . . .”
To stop being terrified.
“You can, Selena. Take my word for it. I’ve seen you with your daughter. Kristen Beaumont can’t stop talking to people about how the kids at school adore having you sub for them. You’ve given me a second chance, and I know I haven’t made that easy. You don’t know how not to love, honey. You’re just going to have to trust the rest of us—including Oliver—to love you back.”
“Thanks, man,” Oliver said to his brother. He punched the call closed and tossed his phone onto his truck’s dash. “Travis says to take as long as we need.”
Selena didn’t move in the seat beside him. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left the hospital, driven down Main, grabbed the takeout Dru had called in for them at the Whip, and finally pulled into Belinda’s driveway behind Selena’s junker.
“How the hell,” Oliver said, needing a target for the frustration he’d been suppressing for hours, “did you manage to make it all the way south in that heap?”
She swiveled toward him. “Fred’s good as gold. He’s never let us down.”
“Fred?”
“Flintstone.” She waited for Oliver to work it out.
He smiled when he did. “Does that make your daughter Pebbles?”
“Cricket.” Selena tucked her hair behind her ears. “I call her Cricket. The way she’s always loved to play outside. She hops all over the place, dances, rolls in the grass, like a—”
“Adorable little bug. I get it. You never used to be able to sit still, either. Like mother, like daughter.”
He watched some of the wariness ease from Selena’s expression. Hopeless, bottomless love took its place.
“Camille likes to spread out one of Belinda’s quilts,” she said, “and lie in the sun and read. Over by—”
“The camellia bushes? I saw her out there the other afternoon. It made me think of us, when we’d hang out back or in some field somewhere, like the one in Bethany’s painting in the Dream Whip.”
“Yeah. I saw it. The first time I did, it made me think of Camille.”
“Why?”
“You.” Selena looked down at the fingers she’d clasped in her lap. “And me. It was my birthday, and we made love by the tree Bethany painted, just before we . . . the week before I broke up with you. I’ve always told myself that was the afternoon we made Camille. Even if I didn’t know for sure, I’ve always wanted her to be yours. I see so much of you in her. But wanting doesn’t make it so, Oliver. I appreciate what you did this morning. But I don’t want you to feel obligated—”
“She’s my family, Selena. As much as Dru and Travis and Fin and Teddy and all the other kids.”
“Yes. But . . .”
“But what?”
“It’s different with her. With you and me and her. I couldn’t bear Camille being just an obligation for you. For Brad or for your parents.”
“You know my family better than that.”
“But do I know you? Really? What do you want, Oliver?”
She was the one who’d given up on them when they were kids. He should have gone and found her in New York. Maybe then she wouldn’t have married that slime Parker. Oliver should have kept loving her until she was strong enough to love herself better. But that was seven years ago. And even then she hadn’t known if he was what she wanted.
“You first,” he said. “Stop making this about a daughter we may or may not have together. Camille will be taken care of and loved, whether I’m in the picture or not. Your secret’s out. But you’re still pulling away, waiting for some other shoe to drop. Tell me what this is really about. One minute you’re kissing me. The next you’re telling me to back off because you don’t need me in your life unless I meet some list of conditions you seem to add to on an hourly basis. Why—”
“Why are you here with me now?” Selena demanded. “Why aren’t you at the hospital with your family, or over at your parents’ house looking after their kids? Because you’re trying to make everyone happy? Which, by the way, is impossible. Or because being here for me now, or at the hospital for Camille this morning—worried and angry and out-of-your-mind furious at Parker on her behalf—is what makes you happy?”
Oliver clamped his hands around the steering wheel. He knew what she needed to hear. Why couldn’t he just say it? “I’ll give you everything I can, Selena. I always would have if you’d have let me. I didn’t come back to town thinking this would happen. I can’t honestly tell you I wanted it to. My family needs me to keep doing the work I do. Working to help them is what my life’s been about pretty much since I left Chandlerville. But—”
“But what? You’ll take one for the team with me and Camille? Be a good guy and pay for whatever it takes to be involved in our lives, too. Love me a little whenever a client doesn’t need you—as long as you don’t have to commit emotionally for any longer than you want to. Until I wake up one day and realize I’ve been alone all along. And that you’ve been finding someone else to console you, because being with me and my daughter has just gotten too damn complicated for you to handle?”
Selena’s rant hiccupped to a halt.
She’d inched away, her back pressed against the passenger door.
“Parker?” Oliver asked.
Don’t think you can bully me, she’d said when Oliver first confronted her about Camille. And after the ugliness that had gone down in the ER, he had no trouble believing her bastard of a husband had been mistreating her long before she filed for divorce. Oliver was going to meet Parker Gryphon one day. His next excuse to travel north, he was hunting the slime down and working a few things out man-to-man.
“He cheated on you?” he asked.
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“Slept around?”
“And around.” Selena’s laugh had Oliver wanting to use the travel app on his phone to book a red-eye to New York that very night. “But Parker is a good provider. And he was willing to keep providing, as long as I could adjust to our arrangement.”
“What arrangement?”
“The one he’d made entirely on his own, where he found a ready-made family that gave him the appearance of stability he needed. And he gave me the security I’d been so desperate for when he saved me from having to run back to Chandlerville at eighteen and beg my mother for help. He provided for Camille what on the outside looked like a family that any little girl would love, in a stylish high-rise apartment in the heart of Manhattan . . . and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t abandon her to that, Oliver. She deserves to be surrounded by real love, even if it’s only mine.”
“And what do you deserve?” Oliver asked.
“I . . .” Selena’s lips trembled, just like her daughter’s did when she lost control.
“Whatever this is between us, I don’t want it to stop again. But you can stop it if you’re determined to. Like when we were teenagers. I was loving you the only way
I knew how then, too.”
“And now your way is by throwing money at people to keep them from expecting more. Like you do with your family. Like this morning with Camille in the ER. I know I sound paranoid. But I’m not setting myself or my daughter up like that again. Especially with someone I love as much as I’ve always loved you.”
Selena looked at him, into him, shocked by what she’d revealed.
Before he realized what he’d done, Oliver had hauled her closer. Or maybe she’d launched herself at him, stretched across the truck’s center console, her hands gripping his arms, her beautiful eyes searching. Like in his dreams, it was just them, and Selena was needing him like she wouldn’t survive without him. The way he wouldn’t without her.
They took each other’s kiss, and he was transported back to where they’d been as kids, where they’d always be—loving each other with everything they were. With Selena in his arms, he’d be home for as long as she’d let him have her. He framed her face with his hands, angling her mouth for more. Her fingers threaded through his hair, gripping and urging him closer, their kiss roughening, desperate.
This was what he wanted.
More. And then more. And always. He’d always wanted it with Selena. No matter how many women, how much time, how much work he’d used to fill the emptiness, or how far away he’d traveled . . . being here, home, with Selena had always been where he’d belonged. Enough to keep moving on forever if he was never going to have her back.
She was still in her workout clothes. He kissed down to her neck, tasting salt and sun.
“I think of you when I run,” he whispered into her ear, feeling her tremble. “I was thinking about you the night before I came back, after I was supposed to have let go of the past as part of my recovery . . . but I couldn’t stop myself.”
He kissed her lips, the tip of her nose. He watched her eyes flutter open.
“Anytime,” he said, “I’m free of the work I’ve filled my life with, whenever I try to sleep, when it’s quiet and just me—you’re always there, making me want you. All of it, everything I’ve done since I left has had something to do with you, Selena, and how good we once were for each other. How much I want that back. I’ll never be free of you.”
Let Me Love You Again (An Echoes of the Heart Novel Book 2) Page 22
