A Sweetheart For The Single Dad (The Camdens Of Colorado Book 8)
Page 18
So much about Sawyer.
About how he looked. Every angle of that handsome face, that crooked little dent in his chin, those crystal-blue eyes, that body...
About how much she wanted to be in that same bed with him again, up against that body, to feel those muscular arms around her, to have her face pressed to his chest...
About how sweet and kind and caring and considerate he was.
About how smart, how calm and patient and reasonable and rational and levelheaded.
About how conscientious and responsible he was.
About how funny he was and how much fun she always had with him.
About how right everything felt when she was with him.
And about how much she wanted to be with him. At that moment and for the rest of her life.
About how, if she ever did have kids, he was who she would want to have kids with.
He was such a good dad on top of everything else, she thought. He was good with Sam and he’d been good with Carter. He’d been fair; he’d done his best to give equal time and attention to both little boys. He hadn’t showed any favoritism; he’d given his full concentration to each of them when it had been called for.
But still she’d seen for herself the competition between them, and the way it had led to disappointments and frustrations and resentments.
What if she just didn’t have kids? she proposed to herself.
She did keep remembering Sawyer telling her last Sunday night that anything was worth being with her. Now she asked herself if being with him was worth anything to her.
Almost anything—that was the answer.
But she wanted kids. She wanted a family. She always had.
And now she wanted those kids, that family, with Sawyer.
It felt selfish.
But she couldn’t escape it regardless of how hard she tried.
She wanted that man.
And she wanted to have kids with that man.
So how was she going to fix it? How could she have Sawyer, have kids with Sawyer, and avoid Sam or her own kids ever feeling any of what she’d felt growing up?
No one had known the way she’d felt growing up. It wasn’t as if she’d shouted it from the rooftop. She’d been ashamed of thinking that her grandmother might like everyone else better. Of the times when she’d tried to outshine her cousins and her own siblings to keep that from happening. Of worrying about being overlooked in the crowd.
Sawyer had suggested that they could be on the lookout for it happening. That they could head it off.
Was that possible? If they tried to make sure right from the beginning that Sam knew he wasn’t being replaced if there were other kids? If they took every measure to merge Sam and any other kids into one cohesive family—the way she and her brothers and sister and cousins had all eventually come to be?
Was it possible to prevent the suffering she’d gone through and the lingering influence of it if—because she knew what to look for and was watching for it—she pulled out all the stops to make sure that neither Sam nor any other kids felt as if they had to compete for their parents’ love and attention?
Was it possible to keep Sam or any of her own kids from ever feeling the way she had? The way friends had felt about their own half siblings?
Maybe they could try...
It was the second glimmer of hope she’d had and this time she clung to it.
Wasn’t trying to head off problems all that any parent could do for their kids?
All that any parent could do was their best to make their kids feel safe and secure and special in their own right.
All any parent could do was their best.
Certainly it was what she would do.
And she knew she could trust that Sawyer would, too.
And if—fingers crossed—their kids and Sam never had the foundation of their young lives shaken the way she had, maybe they could better weather sharing Sawyer.
If Sam had his own room in whatever place they lived, if everything was unfailingly equal, if there was never a bigger deal made of any one kid, or any one event for any one child, if they guarded against anyone feeling shortchanged...
Sawyer had said he wouldn’t let it happen, she recalled.
And he’d also said that it was him who felt as if he had shortchanged Sam last Sunday, but that Sam hadn’t seemed to notice because he’d gone overboard a little with a special gift.
If they went to all those lengths, if they were vigilant, could she feel all right about a life with a man who already had a child?
Or was she fooling herself because she wanted Sawyer so much?
She did want him. So much. She couldn’t deny that.
But maybe this really could be okay, too. As long as she stayed on top of it. As long as Sawyer stayed on top of it.
It might not be perfect, she recognized that.
It wasn’t what she’d planned.
But sometimes life just didn’t happen the way it was planned.
“Most of the time life doesn’t happen the way it’s planned,” she said as she took the wet cloth away from her eyes and sat up.
She might have planned not to get involved with a man who already had kids but if anyone was worth altering her plans for, it was Sawyer. Sawyer was worth accepting whatever complications came with him.
Sawyer was worth the need to be a little extra watchful over the feelings of Sam and any kids they might have.
Sawyer was worth taking extra pains to blend families.
Being with Sawyer, having Sawyer, she realized, wasn’t worth almost anything.
It was worth anything at all.
She sat for a moment with that thought, imagining a future with him and her family at Sunday dinners, imagining herself as the instant second mother of Sam and making a place for him in her house and her life, imagining herself having her first precious baby without any of it being a first for Sawyer.
And, no, it wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined before she’d met him. But with him in every picture, it was exactly what she wanted now.
If he was still interested in letting her make those adjustments. Because now the question was could she fix the problem she’d created with Sawyer?
That wasn’t something that needed to be thought about, it was something that needed action. And she couldn’t wait even another minute to take that action.
She just didn’t want to take it looking the way she was afraid she might look after two days of sobbing.
She got off the bed and went into her walk-in closet, taking a close look at herself in the mirror on one wall of the space that was really a small room in itself.
The cloth over her eyes had helped some of the redness and swelling, and she thought makeup could help even more. So that was the first thing she did—she fixed her face.
When she’d done the best she could with that, she brushed her hair and opted to leave it in the wild-lady disarray that the natural waves fell into if an effort hadn’t been made to tame them as they dried. Then she yanked on jeans and a gray tank top, slipped her feet into a pair of sandals and rushed out of her closet.
That was when it occurred to her that she’d never been to Sawyer’s place.
He’d told her that he had a loft in one of the high-rises in lower downtown Denver, but that was all she knew.
And maybe it was better if she called first, anyway, rather than just surprise him.
She left her bedroom to find her cell phone but once it was in her hand she hesitated.
What was she going to say?
What if he didn’t want to talk to her?
What if he didn’t want to see her ever again?
But she couldn’t let herself think about those things. She couldn’t let more fear stand in her way now.
So she pulled up his number to place the call and tried to ignore her own rapidly beating heart as she waited for an answer.
When the call didn’t go to voice mail, when he did answer, she froze for a split second before she s
aid, “Sawyer? It’s me. Lindie.”
The sound he made was sort of a laugh, sort of a sigh, sort of sad-sounding. “I know.”
Because his phone recognized her number and told him. But at least he’d answered knowing it was her.
“Can we talk?” she asked, terrified that he might say no.
“I guess that’s better than you calling the cops on me.”
“Why would I call the cops on you? I just wanted to talk and realized that I’ve never been to your place so I called for an address and directions.”
“I’m parked outside your house, Lindie. I thought that’s what you were calling about.”
She hurried to the window in her living room and peered out the plantation shutters.
Sure enough, there he was, his SUV at the curb in front of her house. She could see him sitting behind the wheel.
“What are you doing out there?” she asked.
“I brought Sam home, headed for mine and somehow my car came here instead.”
“To do something I should call the cops for?”
“To sit here and wonder how the hell to get through to you and make this work. Because I really want this to work, Lindie.”
“Come in,” she said, trying not to cry again, this time with relief and joy and hope.
She ended the call, set her phone down and continued looking through the shutters as he got out of his car.
Watching as he walked up from the curb, she just couldn’t take her eyes off of him. He had on jeans and a crew-neck white T-shirt with the long sleeves pushed above his elbows—nothing special and yet she was so glad to see him again that to her he’d never looked better.
He reached her front stoop and she hurried to the door to open it.
“Come in,” she repeated when he seemed to stall just outside, closing the door when he did step across the threshold.
Then she turned for a closer look at him and saw faint signs that this past week hadn’t been any easier for him than it had been for her. A slight paleness to his usually robust coloring, a slight deepening of the lines at the corners of his eyes, a slight hint of all-round fatigue as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.
“I hope to God you didn’t call me to talk about business,” he said as if he might lose control if she had.
Lindie shook her head. “I called to tell you I’m sorry.”
“I guess I need to know for what. Because if it’s just an ‘I’m sorry but I still don’t want anything to do with you,’ I don’t want to hear it.”
He was ragged, very near the end of his rope. His tone, his temper—she could hear the fraying restraint in every word that was laced with weariness, a shadow of anger lying just beneath the surface.
But since she couldn’t blame him, she accepted it as no more than he had a right to.
“It’s more like an ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a dope and I want a lot to do with you.’”
His eyebrows went up but he didn’t say anything, waiting for an explanation as they stood there in her entryway.
But now that she’d admitted that much to him, the rest flooded out without even considering that they were still standing just inside the doorway. She told him all she’d thought about, what she’d realized, the conclusions she’d reached.
“If you still want to try to work it out,” she said quietly when she’d finished, “I do, too.”
“I’m not happy that you did what every other damn woman has done to me—keeping your fears to yourself instead of sharing them with me before they became a problem,” he said.
Lindie’s heart beat a little harder. “I know.”
“You blindsided me the same way they did and cut me off at the knees with it.”
“I know. But I told you, there wasn’t a time or a place or a reason for me to tell you before. It isn’t something I go into business meetings and announce, and you were only supposed to be business. I can promise you it’ll never happen again—I’m not really the suffering-in-silence type.”
“There’s nothing else you’re keeping quiet about?”
Lindie laughed a little. “No.”
“And now you’re okay with Sam?”
“I was never not okay with Sam. I just don’t want him or any other kids I might have with you to come up second place.”
“I’m not going to let that happen,” he said, sounding more like the man she knew him to be: reasonable, rational, no longer angry. “And everything you said about making sure he has a room of his own wherever we live, making sure he’s a part of the family we have—that’s all stuff I’d be fighting for if you hadn’t come up with it yourself. But I can’t stand here—here and now—and say that there will never be a scheduling conflict, that I won’t ever have to make a choice of whose Christmas program I go to and whose Christmas program I have to wait to see a recording of.”
“I know. I just think—now—that maybe it won’t be as much of a big deal to kids who aren’t looking at it through my perspective.”
“And you’ll be able to handle it, looking at it through your perspective?”
“I hope so. I’ll try.”
“And if it bothers you?”
“I’ll throw a fit and you’ll definitely know it,” she assured him with a smile.
He stepped close enough in front of her to clasp her shoulders in those big hands of his, peering down at her. “Good,” he said as if he meant it. “I don’t ever want you not to tell me what’s going on in your head.”
“Right now what’s going on in my head is a lot of wondering where we go from here,” she said, not wanting to ask if he really had been proposing to her last Sunday night but dying to know.
“I think we go on to your bedroom and—after a while—get some sleep that I don’t think either of us has had all week. Then we go on to me probably facing the legion of Camdens next Sunday so we can all prove to you that we can be in the same space as nothing but the people who care about you and the people you care about. You do care about me, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“And somewhere in there, I think we go on to my telling you that I love you, Lindie Camden. That I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love you, and you go on to tell me—”
“I love you, too,” she said quietly.
He took a deep enough breath for it to expand his chest and then deflate it when he exhaled as if that was what he’d been waiting to hear.
Then he pulled her up against him, wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
“And somewhere in there we also talk about if you’re going to marry me,” he said.
“I am.”
“And what kind of ring you want, and what kind of wedding you want, and when and where and—”
But the warmth and strength of his muscular body was infusing her with such peace and comfort—and raising desires she’d been fighting all week—to the point that talking suddenly wasn’t what she wanted more of.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said, apropos of nothing but what she was feeling. “Can you just stay tonight and be with me from here on and we’ll just do the rest as it comes up?”
“I can,” he answered, tightening his arms around her. “You’re stuck with me from here on, like it or not.”
“I do like it,” she whispered.
He reared back then and when she tilted her face away from where it was resting against his pectorals he kissed her. A long, deep kiss that Lindie let herself drift away on until he ended it and looked into her gaze with those beautiful crystal-blue eyes.
“I really do love you,” he said, his voice raspy and full of emotion.
“I really do love you,” she countered.
“Don’t ever let me lose you again—not even for a week.”
“Till death do we part?”
“Not even then.”
“Okay,” she agreed happily as she rose up enough for another kiss.
Another kiss that only confirmed just how much she belonged with this man.
So when that kiss ended she took his hand and led him to her bedroom.
Where they could have the start of what she knew would be many years together.
The start of a whole lifetime together.
Just the way she knew, in her heart, they were meant to.
* * * * *
From New York Times bestselling author
Jodi Thomas comes a sweeping new series
set in a remote west Texas town—where
family can be made by blood or by choice...
Keep reading for an excerpt from RANSOM CANYON by Jodi Thomas.
http://www.harlequin.com/harlequinexperience
We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin Special Edition story.
You know that romance is for life. Harlequin Special Edition stories show that every chapter in a relationship has its challenges and delights and that love can be renewed with each turn of the page.
Enjoy six new stories from Harlequin Special Edition every month!
Visit Harlequin.com to find your next great read.
Connect with us on Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!
Other ways to keep in touch:
Harlequin.com/newsletters
Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks
Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks
HarlequinBlog.com
Ransom Canyon
Jodi Thomas
Staten
WHEN HER OLD hall clock chimed eleven times, Staten Kirkland left Quinn O’Grady’s bed. While she slept, he dressed in the shadows, watching her with only the light of the full moon. She’d given him what he needed tonight, and, as always, he felt as if he’d given her nothing.
Walking out to her porch, he studied the newly washed earth, thinking of how empty his life was except for these few hours he shared with Quinn. He’d never love her or anyone, but he wished he could do something for her. Thanks to hard work and inherited land, he was a rich man. She was making a go of her farm, but barely. He could help her if she’d let him. But he knew she’d never let him.