It's a Boy!

by Victoria Pade

  Heddy remembered that they were his cousins whom she’d met at his grandmother’s house. “Hi, Cade. Hi, Jani...” she said with even more of a question in her voice as her confusion mounted.

  Lang continued to address Heddy. “This is the formal transfer of the handling of the grant and all future business dealings between you and Camden Inc. From here on, Cade will be overseeing the grant, paying out the start-up money that hasn’t already gone into the new facility and equipment, and making sure you have everything you need—all as we agreed. And Jani will work with you the rest of the way, with hiring and getting everything going both on your end and on ours. Okay?”

  “Okay...” Heddy said tentatively.

  “You guys on board?” he asked his cousins.

  “Whatever you need,” they said in unison.

  “Then this officially ends my business connection with Heddy,” Lang said. He handed Heddy two business cards: one Jani’s, one Cade’s, each with extra numbers written on the back. “I just gave her your cards, complete with cell and private landline numbers,” he said into the phone.

  Cade assured her that he would touch base with her tomorrow and Jani said she’d call in the morning and maybe they could have lunch. They both also told her to feel free to call them anytime for any reason, even at home.

  “Okay... Thanks...” Heddy said, now even more confused.

  Then Lang said, “That’ll do it for tonight. Thanks, guys.”

  Goodbyes were made—with a “good luck” thrown in by Cade—before Lang ended the call and put the phone in his pocket.

  “That was weird,” Heddy said softly.

  “I just wanted you to know up front that the business deal is still on. The grant, the help getting set up, the arrangement to sell through Camden Superstores—it’s carved in stone. Nothing can or will change it, no matter what you say to me tonight.”

  “I just won’t be doing business with you...” she said, feeling even more uneasy.

  “No, you won’t be,” he said. “Because I want this—you and me—” He took her hand in his and pulled her to stand closer in front of him, keeping hold of it once she was. “To be strictly personal.”

  Heddy’s concerns for her business future went away. But she was afraid to hear what he might have to say next because her own vastly mixed emotions put her at a loss for how she would respond.

  “How are you?” he asked then, nothing business-like about him suddenly. “After Saturday night... Are you all right? You seemed all right Sunday morning.”

  When they’d made love for the fourth time before she’d left him.

  “I know I’ve been a little nuts, so maybe you have, too?” he suggested.

  “Why have you been nuts?” she asked to avoid answering his question.

  He didn’t beat around the bush. He seemed completely honest as he told her about being scared silly by what their spending the night together had unleashed in him. About the strength of his feelings for her. And as he confided in her, as he said wonderful things about her, she suddenly had the thought that this man standing in front of her was her Lang. The Lang she’d become familiar with, comfortable with. The Lang she’d gotten to know and to let know her. The Lang who had made it easy for her to be in awkward situations such as his family dinner and the auction at his country club. The Lang who had made love to her. The Lang she wanted to be with.

  He was the Lang she’d been thinking about incessantly since she’d met him and even more incessantly since leaving him on Sunday morning.

  The Lang whose arms she wanted to rush into right at that moment. The Lang whose lips she wanted to kiss. Whose hands she wanted on her. Whose naked body she wanted beside hers.

  But as he went on to tell her what he wanted, to talk about a future with her, a future as a family—the worst of her buttons was pushed.

  While he might seem like her Lang, she was desperately afraid that too much of her was still Daniel’s wife. Tina’s mother. And that she couldn’t be all Lang was asking her to be.

  “Oh. No,” she said, interrupting him.

  The no stopped him cold and his expression said it had hit him like a brick.

  Heddy hated seeing that. Hated what she knew she’d just done to him, knowing that the other woman he’d cared deeply about had rejected him and now so was she.

  “I’m sorry, Lang,” she said with everything she was feeling in her voice, with tears in her eyes. “I just can’t—”

  “You can. You’ve gone on since you lost your family, Heddy, and you have to keep going on. Do that with me!”

  He was understanding. He’d been understanding all along. But he couldn’t understand everything. He couldn’t understand what Heddy wasn’t sure she understood herself. The fear she had about moving too far away from Daniel and Tina. She couldn’t do anything that made it seem as if they hadn’t been the most important part of her life. As if they could be easily replaced. Or replaced at all. Ever.

  Not even with Lang.

  Or Carter.

  “I can’t go any further than I have,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m not sure I should have gone as far as I did...” She had to fight to keep from crying as guilt warred with that part of her that wanted this man and what he was asking of her. “It’s just that you’re so... You’re great, you really are, and I sort of got carried away—”

  “You just moved on, Heddy. The way you should have. The way you need to. We’ve both done enough of the just-existing-in-the-present thing because we’ve really still been attached to the past. Now it’s time to have more. To have each other. And a future. Together.”

  She shook her head fiercely. “For me the past can’t just be erased, Lang. That would be awful. I’m what’s left of Daniel and Tina.”

  “I’m not asking you to forget them. They’re a part of you and I know that. I’m okay with that. I’m just saying that that was an album of pictures from before. Now start a new album. Put that one someplace special to you, someplace that you can keep it with you, take it out and look at it again whenever you need to. But start a new album with me now.”

  And Daniel and Tina would just become what? Old pictures that barely meant a thing. That became irrelevant because they were from a different life, one that had been put up on a shelf eventually to be forgotten...

  “I can’t. I just can’t!” she insisted, pulling her hand out of his and retreating until she had herself backed against a wall.

  “Just think about it.”

  “No. I can’t.” Because to think about it might make her consider all she was saying no to. And how much she might want it... “I don’t need to think about it. I just can’t do it. I’m sorry. And if you want to pull the grant, if you don’t want the cheesecakes—”

  He shook his head, looking so good but so sad. “That’s why we had that call before I started,” he said in a low, deep voice that was gravelly with his own emotions. “The business is separate. We still want to sell your cheesecakes. That all stays the same, with Jani and Cade and whoever else will make it work the best way it can for you.” He swallowed hard enough that she saw his Adam’s apple bob. “It just won’t go on with me.”

  Not with him...

  Nothing would go on with him.

  This was the end.

  Heddy felt hot tears rolling down her cheeks but she couldn’t stop them any more than she could turn her back on the ghosts of Daniel and Tina to be with Lang.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “So am I,” he said softly in return, sounding every bit as bereft as she did.

  Then he crossed to the door and left.

  And that was when the real sobbing began for Heddy.

  Sobbing just like she’d done for Daniel and Tina.

  Only now it was for Lang.

  And Cart
er.

  And her.

  Chapter Ten

  “Okay, I’m not going to let this happen,” Clair said decisively. “I’m calling in the big gun.”

  “No! Don’t—”

  “Aunt Kitty? Would you come in here, please?”

  Heddy had been caught by her cousin yet again. Dabbing at damp eyes. Putting her face in the freezer in the hope that the chill would keep them from swelling and turning red.

  In the two weeks since she’d ended things with Lang and confided everything to her cousin, Clair had been with her through the numerous crying jags, the sudden bouts of out-of-nowhere tears that Heddy couldn’t control. Having heard what Lang had said to Heddy two weeks ago, Clair’s opinion had changed and she was strongly in favor of him. She’d talked herself blue in the face trying to convince Heddy to put everything behind her and go to him, to change her no into a yes.

  But it hadn’t worked.

  And now, after Clair and Kitty had spent their Saturday helping Heddy take her shop apart, Clair found Heddy in silent tears once again and had apparently reached the end of her patience.

  “Don’t tell her!” Heddy whispered to her cousin just as Kitty came from the shop into the kitchen.

  But Clair ignored Heddy’s command and laid the whole thing out for Heddy’s mother.

  “I knew it! I knew you were going to fall for that man and that something was wrong,” Kitty said when Clair was finished. “You’ve been owlish and quiet and sad, and I knew it wasn’t over Daniel and Tina. Plus I wondered why I wasn’t hearing anything about Mitchum’s son anymore and why Jani and Cade Camden were coming up instead. They took over for him?”

  They had. Just the way everyone had promised. Cade had overseen the closing on the commercial kitchen that was now in Heddy’s name and fully paid for. He’d made sure the equipment she and Lang had picked out had been delivered and also paid for in full. He’d dealt with legal papers of incorporation that would help Heddy with taxes, as well as setting her up with business managers.

  Jani had been working with her on everything else—implementing the next stages of Lang’s start-up plan. She’d helped interview staff. She’d talked Heddy through the basics of running a large-scale operation. She’d introduced her to the purchasing people she would be dealing with on a regular basis with Camden Superstores. And she’d generally helped to put her in a position where she would be able to accomplish what was turning into a much bigger endeavor than Heddy had realized it would be.

  “Yes, they took over for him,” Heddy confirmed as she and Clair and Kitty sat around the kitchen table.

  Heddy deflated considerably from the overly cheery front she thought she’d been showing her mother up to that point and merely fought to keep from crying again. But in spite of all it was taking to maintain her composure, she saw her mother mentally pondering what she’d just learned, weighing it and then seemingly coming to some sort of resolve that straightened her spine and made her sit up stiffly.

  “So history did repeat itself,” she said then. “There’s something about those Camdens. I just knew he was going to get to you. But this one was serious?”

  “Serious enough for me to have hurt him,” Heddy lamented.

  “And obviously you love him,” her mother stated matter-of-factly.

  Heddy didn’t say anything to that because she’d been trying not to think about it. Trying not to admit it to herself. As if that would make it untrue.

  “And I love you,” Kitty said sternly, “and I want you to be happy. I want you to have a full life. Like you had with Daniel. But just because you had that with Daniel doesn’t mean you can’t have it again, with this man—if it has to be with this man.”

  “She thinks she’ll be erasing Daniel and Tina completely if she doesn’t keep herself as some kind of shrine to them,” Clair said, voicing her perspective.

  “Well, that’s not true,” Kitty said definitively. “The awful truth is that Daniel and Tina aren’t with us anymore, and sacrificing yourself to their memory? That isn’t going to bring them back. That’s just going to be wasting your own life. And I won’t let you do that!”

  Heddy laughed sadly. “Now you’re pushing for me to be with a Camden?”

  “I’m not thrilled that he’s a Camden,” Kitty said in no uncertain terms. “But I want you to be happy. You deserve to be happy again. And if a Camden is what it takes, then I’ll live with it.”

  “There would have to be interaction between you and Lang, between you and the rest of the Camdens...” Heddy pointed out.

  “Today’s Camdens aren’t responsible for what was done to your grandfather and me,” Kitty said, as if she’d given this some thought even before now, and as if maybe Heddy’s grandfather or her father might have had some input. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll also keep in mind that today’s Camdens have done right by you. And if this Lang character behaves himself and treats you well and you can have a good life with him? Then that’s what counts for me. We’ll let the rest be ancient history.”

  Kitty Hanrahan stood and hugged Heddy where she sat in the kitchen chair. “Get me and your dad on that country club golf course again and I’ll even think about forgiving them,” she added.

  Heddy laughed but felt her eyes well up once more when her mother continued.

  “This doesn’t mean you’re forgetting Daniel and Tina. Hold them in your heart. We all do. But it’s your life that’s left. And you need to go on with it.”

  “Which is what I keep telling her!” Clair said.

  “Easier said than done,” Heddy muttered in a cracked voice.

  “But it needs to be done just the same,” Kitty decreed.

  Kitty and Clair both had to get home then. Heddy said her goodbyes still sitting at the table. Thinking. Awash with emotions.

  It helped to have her mother’s approval. It was good to know that a rift in the family wouldn’t be caused one way or another.

  But it didn’t take away all of Heddy’s misgivings. She still had a sense that she belonged to Daniel and Tina. And to give herself over to someone else, to Lang, to Carter, was to somehow admit that Daniel and Tina were gone once and for all.

  What her mother had just said, what Clair had also been telling her for the past two weeks, did take some of the weight off her shoulders, though. And pushed Heddy to come to new terms with the facts.

  The hard, harsh truth was that Daniel and Tina weren’t coming back.

  And not giving herself over to Lang and Carter didn’t change that. It just left Heddy alone. With her memories. With some pictures. But with nothing else.

  Memories and pictures that wouldn’t go away if she did make Lang and Carter her family.

  And Heddy decided that maybe it was time she heard the message that everyone was trying to send. Embraced it.

  And did actually move on.

  With Lang.

  Lang.

  Just the thought of him, of the look on his face when she’d turned him down, the thought that she’d hurt him the way she had, the thought of not having him for the past two weeks or now or maybe ever, put her close to tears again.

  She missed him so much!

  And she hated that she’d hurt him.

  And she wanted to see him so badly that it hurt her.

  So what was she doing? she wondered. Was she punishing herself? Would suffering the way she had since the last time she’d been with Lang bring Daniel and Tina back?

  Of course it wouldn’t.

  So what was the point?

  To be some kind of long-suffering widow?

  That phrase made her smile.

  Daniel had always joked when the inevitable conversation had come up about one of them outliving the other. He’d always said she was his and no one else could have her, that she would
just have to be a long-suffering widow.

  But it had been a joke. And while he might not have wanted anyone else to have her when he was alive, she knew without a doubt that he also hadn’t ever wanted her to be unhappy or miserable. The way she was now without him and without Lang.

  And Lang was right here. Now. Wanting her.

  Or at least he had two weeks ago.

  And somehow she suddenly knew deep down inside that even Daniel wanted her to do something about that. Something better than what she’d already done.

  “I won’t forget you. Neither of you. Not ever,” she said into the air, speaking to her late husband, her lost little girl.

  And of course she wouldn’t forget them. Or love them any less than she had when they were alive, than she had since losing them.

  But she also loved someone else now, too. Two someone elses. Lang and Carter. Without taking anything away from what she’d had, what she’d felt for Daniel and Tina.

  This was just that new album that Lang had talked about her starting. An album she knew she needed to start for her own sake.

  An album she wanted to start.

  And fill with new pictures while she still held that old album and those old images near and dear to her.

  Unless it was too late...

  She hadn’t heard a single word from Lang since he’d left here that Tuesday night. Cade hadn’t so much as mentioned him. Jani had said only that Lang had given her step-by-step instructions of where to go with the business. Nothing else.

  He’d made good on his word when it came to business, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t hate her....

  Still, she decided that she couldn’t let even that possibility keep her from going to him. From apologizing to him. From seeing him again and at least trying to make some amends of her own.

  And if he shot her down?

  She hoped he wouldn’t.

  But in spite of that possibility, she had to put herself in the line of fire to find out if there was any chance at all that they might actually have that future he’d offered her before.