A Sweetheart For The Single Dad (The Camdens Of Colorado Book 8)

by Victoria Pade

  Completing the nothing-but-functional outfit was a pair of ordinary canvas sneakers. After leaving work to change at lunch she’d brushed all of her hair into a plain ponytail.

  But still the boys seemed intent on impressing her. Tyler took this opportunity to boast that he’d developed his rodent disposal skills because most of the time he was the man of the house now that his dad had had to return to over-the-road truck driving. Something that had happened when his oil-changing franchise had gone under because the Camden Superstore offered the same service.

  Tyler referred to Camden Superstore scornfully and Lindie caught Sawyer’s pointed gaze at her. She thought she could read his mind—these boys probably wouldn’t think quite as highly of her if they knew her last name.

  But he didn’t give her away and she merely praised Tyler for being so helpful around the house while silently accepting the blame for yet another infraction.

  It took until midafternoon to clear the drains and then the foursome moved on to breaking down old, decaying picnic tables that were to be replaced.

  It was a less dirty job and Lindie was amused at how impressed Eric was at her skills with a screwdriver bit in a cordless power drill—talents gained helping to build Habitat for Humanity houses. It was something that Tyler called him on as if she needed defending.

  “Girls can do things like that,” Tyler said as if Eric had insulted her.

  “But she’s such a girl,” Sawyer put in with some orneriness. “I think that’s what makes it so surprising.”

  “I’ve never had complaints about that before,” she countered.

  “I’m not complaining about you being a girl!” Tyler pointed out.

  “Me neither,” Eric declared.

  Sawyer sighed, adding under his breath, “Yeah, I’m not complaining, either.”

  And Lindie was left wondering why he’d said it at all if it was so reluctant.

  The turnout had been good and headway was made on the park until dusk before an end was called. But there was still plenty left to be done and everyone was encouraged to come back on Saturday—and to return their gardening gloves and other tools to the community center before they left.

  Volunteers, center employees and kids alike filed inside again to put away their supplies before people began saying good-night and heading out. Since Sawyer was helping to collect equipment, Lindie was, too, as both Tyler and Eric hung back for no good reason, still finding things to talk to Lindie about.

  Until Sawyer said, “Okay, boys. Good work today. Thanks for all you did.”

  “Are you coming back tomorrow?” Eric asked Lindie.

  Lindie looked to Sawyer for a clue as to whether or not he was. But he didn’t give her one. Instead the arch of one of his eyebrows seemed to ask the same thing without imparting the information she wanted.

  Counting on the likelihood that he was—and by then fully invested in helping these people anyway—she said, “I am.”

  She wasn’t quite sure what Sawyer’s small smile meant at that answer but it bore some resemblance to the smiles it elicited from the boys before Tyler said, “Then we’ll be here, too.”

  Lindie heard Sawyer’s sigh but she didn’t think the boys did. Then he said, “Are you guys walking home or getting a ride?”

  “Tyler’s sleeping over and I just live across the street,” Eric said.

  “So we’re walking,” Tyler finished.

  “Go on, then, before it gets completely dark,” Sawyer commanded, putting an end to their lingering.

  “We could wait and walk you out, too,” Eric suggested to Lindie.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Sawyer muttered under his breath.

  Lindie jumped in to say, “Thanks, but you guys go on. You must be starving. Go home and have dinner.”

  They stumbled over themselves saying goodbye to her but finally left.

  “Apparently you’ve made two conquests,” Sawyer said when they were gone.

  Lindie wondered why he sounded so annoyed. “They did a lot of work, whatever the reason was. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Yeah, but...sheesh!” he said, exasperated.

  “You just can’t handle the competition?” Lindie asked with a straight face.

  She wasn’t sure whether he was going to be outraged or amused but his laugh was spontaneous. “I thought it was you who wanted to be with me,” he shot back.

  Had he been viewing today as being with her, instead of just an opportunity to show her a thing or two?

  Hmm.

  She left that alone, though. “And you knew I was volunteering to have the chance to talk to you so you picked the worst job on the list just so you could stick it to me. Did it disappoint you that the boys stepped in to make it easier on me?”

  He grinned. “You didn’t just say ‘stick it to me.’”

  Maybe not the best turn of phrase she could have chosen but she wasn’t going to let him turn the tables on her. “I didn’t say it the way you’re taking it. At least the boys aren’t lechers!”

  “Oh, you are kidding yourself, lady.”

  “They’re nice boys.”

  “They are,” he agreed. “Nice, normal boys. Who did not rush to help Marie or Mrs. Watley or lovely little Grace.”

  Marie and Mrs. Watley were both large and substantially matronly older women. And the “lovely little Grace” was thin and fit, but seventy-nine.

  “And if they had worked with them,” Sawyer added, “you can bet there wouldn’t have been all that clumsy flirting.”

  “It was sweet. And funny,” she said. Then she held up her palms and looked down at her overalls. “And it’s not like I came dolled up, as my grandmother would say.”

  “I don’t think it makes any difference how you dress,” he said after a glance in the same direction and a return to looking at her face. “It might help if you put a bag over your head, but other than that...” He left the rest unsaid. “But please, don’t come in anything ‘girlier’ tomorrow or one of those boys might actually keel over. Plus chaperoning the two of them is all I can take—if you attract any more minions I might lose it.”

  So he would be there tomorrow.

  Rather than comment on that, Lindie went back to her earlier goad. “Because of the competition.”

  He laughed again. “You think I don’t have better game than a couple of twelve-year-olds?”

  Lindie shrugged.

  “I’m gonna take you down the street and buy you a sub sandwich with anything you want on it just to prove it.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Wow. Yeah. You do have game. Was that supposed to be an invitation to dinner?”

  “A full twelve inches—if you want it. Piled high with whatever you take on it.”

  “Do I have to call Eric and Tyler back to chaperone you?”

  “All right, all right, all right,” he conceded with another smile and no repentance whatsoever. “What do you say? A sandwich down the street? You didn’t come for the lunch today, so I’ll buy you a half-assed dinner for your hard work.”

  And then she could talk to him and make some of the strides in getting to know him that she’d hoped to make while working with him today.

  That was all there was to it.

  It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that as flattering as it had been to have the boys fawning over her, she felt a little robbed because she hadn’t been able to talk to Sawyer.

  “Deal,” she said. “But if that’s the extent of your game, it’s pretty sad.”

  * * *

  Taking their separate cars, Lindie followed Sawyer to the brightly lit sandwich shop.

  She would have liked to be able to change into other clothes and do something different with her hair and makeup. But she hadn’t come prepared for anything other than outdoor maintenance so she looked the same as when she’d left the park. And so did Sawyer, in jeans and a gray hoodie that somehow didn’t dim his handsomeness one iota.

  “I was surprised that so many people ca
me out to help—even more of them tonight when they got off work,” she said as they sat in one of the unpadded booths and unwrapped their sandwiches. He’d ordered the largest sandwich on the menu and still his hands dwarfed it.

  Lindie tried not to notice, taking a bite of her much smaller turkey sub.

  “Nobody is happy about what’s happened to that part of Wheatley,” Sawyer replied.

  She really didn’t want him on his soapbox again. The problems a Camden Superstore caused were becoming more and more clear to her on their own every time she was in Wheatley. It was Sawyer himself who she’d been assigned—and wanted—to get to know. So to keep from going down that other path again she said, “I wasn’t sure whether you were working on the park tomorrow or if you had other plans.”

  “But you guessed right. You figured I’d be there so you said you would be, too.”

  “I like helping out,” she said quietly. “So what have you signed us up for? Should I wear a hazmat suit?”

  “Hmm. That might keep the boys away,” he mused. “We’re picking weeds. There’s an overgrown area that needs to be cleared out for the chess pavilion.”

  “There’s going to be a chess pavilion? Will there be a lot of use for that?”

  “Actually, I’m sponsoring it for my own sake. There’s one on the Sixteenth Street Mall down in Denver and a whole lot more of them in California—my family’s vacation spot every year when I was growing up—where my dad and I would go to play. It was something I really liked doing with him so I lobbied for one here. I figured as long as we were fixing up this park anyway—”

  “There’s a big interest in chess in Wheatley?”

  “I’m working on it.” The chuckle that went with that was wry and said the answer to her question was no, there wasn’t an overwhelming interest in chess. Not yet, anyway. “I’ve taught a lot of the kids at the center. But like I said, the outdoor tables are really for my own sake. I got the agreement for it because I’m footing the bill. It’ll only be four tables but I was thinking that it was something I wanted to do with Sam one day.”

  Two tiny frown lines creased the spot between his eyebrows, as if there was something else going on when it came to that subject. Lindie recalled having that same sense the first day they’d met when he’d said his son lived in Wheatley “for now.”

  “Sam is your son,” she said, hoping to inspire him to open up about whatever was going on.

  “Right. Sam is my four-year-old. So far we’re just working on learning the pieces but I’m having trouble getting past the knights being horses and him making them charge through and knock down all the other pieces. We’ll get there, though. My dad did with me and I will with Sam.”

  The mention of his father eased the frown and turned the corners of his mouth up.

  Interpreting that, she said, “You have a good relationship with your dad and you want to duplicate it with your son.”

  “My dad is great,” he stated simply.

  Since that seemed like as good a segue as any to air out some of the past, Lindie said, “Tell me about your dad. I don’t know anything about him except that he was engaged to my aunt Tina a long time ago.”

  “Tina. The debutante who was more in Howard Camden’s league than my middle-class dad’s and the engagement that nearly cost him his construction business.”

  Lindie’s aunt Tina had been one of the children of an airline magnate and, yes, the Larson family had been close behind the Camdens on the social ladder.

  “But my dad,” Sawyer went on, “was—and still is even at sixty-eight—a good-looking guy who the ladies have always loved.”

  Sitting across the table from Sawyer and seeing for herself how drop-dead gorgeous he was, Lindie had no problem believing that his father had been a lady-killer. She did find it difficult to believe that he could have been any more attractive than his son. But her mind was wandering and she tried to rein it in and listen to what he was saying.

  “So until Howard Camden pulled his sh-shenanigans—it didn’t matter even to a debutante that he was in a lower tax bracket.”

  “Uncle Howard’s shenanigans...” she repeated. “I’d like to hear your side of what happened.”

  “Why? Because you want to make sure you don’t admit to something you don’t have to?”

  “Because I’m not sure I know the worst of it and I’d like to have the whole picture.” Her grandmother had thought the journals left some things out, so they couldn’t be certain in these situations if they had all the facts.

  “My side of what happened.” He took a bite of his sandwich, clearly to give himself time to consider whether or not to answer.

  Lindie merely waited, eating a potato chip.

  After a moment he’d apparently made his decision because he said, “According to my dad, he met Tina Larson when he did some work on the Denver Country Club. She asked him out the first time and they hit it off. She was even the one to start talking about marrying him. That was what led to him proposing. But Howard Camden wanted her—my dad says that he’d seen it when they’d all been at the country club or at parties and things at the same time. He said the guy couldn’t take his eyes off her. He even flirted with her right in front of my dad after they were engaged. But my dad’s not an insecure guy, he wasn’t threatened. Tina was his and he wasn’t worried about it. Instead he felt pretty much on top of the world—a beautiful rich girl had pursued him and wanted to marry him. He had his own construction company and it was doing well. He’d won bids on four different major projects so he needed to hire more people and expand. Top of the world,” Sawyer repeated.

  Another bite of sandwich, another pause. More silence from Lindie as she merely waited and listened when he spoke again.

  “Dad was busy, but not so busy that he had to neglect Tina. Until things started to go wrong.”

  “Things like what?” Lindie asked.

  “Expensive mistakes started being made in orders for materials. Wrong addresses for deliveries, then there were delays and extra costs for reloading and getting the materials to the right places. Shoddy workmanship caused all kinds of problems—failed inspections, time and money to bring things up to code, some damage to the company’s reputation. Fights broke out among the workers, which had never happened before. There were walkouts. There were scheduling mistakes that left clients mad and put Huffman Construction in breach of contracts. The IRS suddenly came out of the woodwork to do an audit of the books—”

  Instigated by a Camden connection within the IRS—that was one of the things she knew. But she didn’t tell him that.

  Sawyer took a breath, shook his head and said, “Within months of getting engaged to Tina my dad was overwhelmed with business problems. The company was in serious trouble. He was on the verge of losing everything. He had an obligation to his workers and his clients to get things back in hand. His focus had to be on that. He had no choice but to spend long hours dealing with one disaster after another.”

  “And he needed to postpone his wedding to Aunt Tina on top of having hardly any time to spend with her.”

  “You got it,” he confirmed. “My dad says that Tina was patient and understanding at first. But he’d had to leave her in the lurch over and over again and after a while...” Sawyer shrugged. “There were parties and country club functions, weddings of friends—not to mention celebrating their own engagement—and a whole slew of other social obligations that she wanted and needed to go to. She got tired of going to everything alone.”

  “Enter my uncle,” Lindie supplied.

  “Right. Enter Howard Camden. He ran in the same circles Tina did. He was at the same parties and weddings and whatnot. And there he was...understanding and sympathetic.”

  “And also handsome and charming and fun. That’s how I remember my uncle.”

  “Little by little Tina was spending more time with him than with my dad. All the while—my dad had no doubt—Howard Camden was making it clear to her how much he wanted there to be more betwe
en him and Tina.”

  “Until there was.”

  “What put it over the top was a rumor that surfaced that it wasn’t only business keeping my dad busy. That he was having an affair with a woman who worked for him. He wasn’t. But when Tina confronted the woman—encouraged to do so by your uncle—she confirmed the rumor.”

  Lindie cringed.

  “That was it for Tina,” Sawyer said. “She broke off the engagement and there good old Howard Camden was, waiting to comfort her.”

  Sawyer had finished his sandwich and his chips and he sat back, angled slightly on his side of the booth to prop an elbow on the seatback. “My dad could never prove anything,” he told her. “But he’d heard about the Camdens—that they’d do anything to get what they wanted. When someone my dad hadn’t slept with claimed he had, he started to piece things together. The woman in the office had started around the same time as a handful of construction workers. That was also when all the problems had started. Problems that stopped once he fired the woman and when the workers—having accomplished their mission—all quit. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were Camden plants to sabotage him, keep him busy and away from Tina so she could become open season for your uncle.”

  Lindie again didn’t say anything, letting only her silence confirm it.

  “My dad went to Tina to tell her what he suspected but with no way to prove it—because tracks had been well covered—she just didn’t buy it. She said she was in love with Howard, she was going to marry him, and that was it.”

  “Was your dad heartbroken?” Lindie asked compassionately.

  “And mad as hell,” Sawyer said with a humorless laugh.

  “But he recovered?” she asked even though she knew he had. GiGi’s research had told them as much.

  “It took some time. The woman who claimed to have had an affair with him had also made a mess of the books and he ended up owing the government back taxes and penalties. His business reputation had suffered a hit so the business came close to going under but he managed to pull it out of the fire.”

  “And he did end up married,” Lindie pointed out.