“Cool. This summer when I come to babysit, I can take the girls swimming.”
The thought of both girls in the pool, or even near the pool, without Jules there was absolutely horrifying. “Um, sure. That sounds good. So, you have our numbers if you need anything. If you have any questions about anything at all...”
Cam put one hand on the small of Jules’s back and slid his other hand down her arm to link his fingers with hers, then slowly backed toward the door, dragging her along with him. “Jules, Amelia has more experience with little kids and babies than both of us combined.”
Jules turned to face him, her fingers still entwined with his. “Right.”
He smiled over her shoulder at Amelia. “We’ll be just down in the barn if you need us.”
“The barn? Really?” Jules looked down at the dress he’d suggested she wear and the high heels she’d chosen at the last minute. This was, after all, a date. That was apparently going to be in a barn.
Guiding her with the firm pressure of his hand at her back, Cam led her through the French doors and onto the wide deck. “I knew you’d be worried about leaving them. This way, we get our date and you can rest easy about the girls.”
Tears pricked her eyes. She blinked them back in surprise. She wasn’t a crier. She’d figured out, growing up the youngest of four, that tears only made you vulnerable, so she’d learned to hide them.
As they crossed the yard, the first sprinkles of a spring rain splashed down. His fingers tightened around the curve of her waist, sending little sparks of awareness through her. He paused to slide open the door to the barn and she walked in ahead of him. This space was no ordinary shelter for animals on a normal day, with its beautiful, high-arching wood beams, but tonight...
It was magical.
In the center of the large room, she spun, trying to take it all in. The lights were low, twinkle lights crisscrossing from one side of the rafters to the other. At the far end, near the open door, a table was set with china, crystal and flowers.
She sought him out. “Cam, I don’t know what to say. This is amazing.”
He advanced slowly toward her, devastating to her equilibrium in his khaki slacks, crisp white shirt and perfectly tailored jacket. He had one hand in his pants pocket, so effortlessly masculine that had she been any less practical, it’s possible she would’ve swooned.
Cam pulled his hand out of his pocket, holding a tiny remote. He clicked it and some smooth jazz filled the room from speakers she couldn’t even see.
“We didn’t get a first dance at our wedding. So I thought...” He laughed a little. “Honestly, I’m not sure what I thought, but I wanted you to have a first dance.”
She meant to move, to reach for his outstretched hands, but she could only stand and stare and wonder that he’d pulled off something so incredibly sweet. For her.
Cam smiled, his dimple deepening with a hint of insecurity, but he didn’t hesitate. He reached for her hand and slowly drew her toward him as the music surrounded them.
For a moment, he swayed gently with her, holding her as carefully as if she were fine china. Then he lifted her hand, leading her into a spin, and she laughed before he caught her in his arms again.
The clean, fresh smell of rain filled the barn. With the sound of the raindrops on the roof, the music and the lights, she felt like they were the only two people in the world.
It was sweet. He was sweet. She smiled up at him and the tenderness she saw in his eyes almost undid her. She’d been so independent her whole life, so driven, that people just expected her to not need anything. But Cam didn’t see that hard outer shell she showed to the world—he saw her.
And it was such a relief not to have to hide. She closed her eyes, laying her head on his chest as he spun them around the room. He hummed a little and she could feel the deep timbre of his voice rumble in his chest.
“Sometimes I catch a glimpse of you walking through the house with one of the girls and I wonder who you are for a minute.” He murmured in her ear, tucking her hand between them. “And when I remember, I’m blown away that you’re my wife.”
Releasing her hands, he cupped her face in his palms and brushed the gentlest kiss she could imagine across her lips. One shaky breath in and he closed his eyes, exploring the contours of her face, the curve of her neck, with his strong, clever fingers.
He cinched his arm around her waist and pulled her closer, deepening the kiss.
She wanted to melt into him, to lose all the worry, all the heartache and stress, to forget about everything except for Cam. It would be so easy—so easy to forget it wasn’t really real.
He broke the kiss. “Jules, I...I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
Jules opened her eyes, her thoughts scrambling as fear rushed in.
She took a step back, panic rising in her chest as she silently berated herself for letting it go this far. Turning away from him, she ran for the door, stopping only to tip her shoes off.
In her mind was a constant running refrain: What have I done?
“Jules!” He closed the distance between them as she threw a frantic glance out at the pouring rain. “Jules, wait. Please.”
He was a famous author. A world traveler. He was known for staying only a few months in one place before going on to the next adventure. Just how reckless had she been?
When she’d asked him to marry her, her only worry had been for the girls’ little hearts.
She hadn’t even spared a thought for her own.
Chapter Ten
“Jules...wait. Please.” Cam held out his hands. “Please.”
From the barn door, Jules looked back at him, but her muscles were tensed, ready to run.
He walked slowly toward her, despite the very real fear that she would turn away from him. He could see the panic in her eyes. In a way, he even understood it.
“Cam, I don’t— I’m— I don’t even—” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and opened them again, still not reaching for his hand. “We can talk. We can’t touch. I can’t think when you’re touching me.”
He nearly smiled, but thought better of it. “There’s a spot in the loft where you can look out over the pond. Can we just go sit?”
“Yes.”
At the top of the stairs was the caretaker’s apartment Cam had made into his office. He opened the door and let Jules go in ahead of him. She circled the studio apartment, something he did often himself as he was puzzling out a difficult scene. She trailed her finger down the granite countertop in the tiny kitchen where he kept his coffeepot. “This is a great office.”
“It is.” He pulled open a set of double doors and she followed him out onto a small balcony. Though the downpour had slowed, raindrops still tapped haphazardly on the metal roof. Two chairs were tucked into the small space. He held one for her and then took the other.
Even in the relative darkness, it was possible to see the property stretched out before them, small glimmers and sparks on the pond from the lights of the house, and beyond the pasture, the darker gray green of the woods. It was beautiful and peaceful here, despite the woman beside him who had the ability to destroy his calm in about two seconds flat.
In fact, if he was being honest with himself, she’d flattened him with his first glimpse of her and he’d been trying to find his footing ever since. Which brought him, he guessed, to this conversation in which he had to lay bare all of his miserable past—because while he might know who he was kissing, she most certainly did not.
He’d hoped he would have a few more weeks before he had to have this conversation with Jules. Or, if he was brutally honest, maybe he’d hoped to never have it. But she needed to know—he wasn’t the gallant Uncle Cam here to save the girls.
Far from it.
Cam stared at a flicker of light in the distance. “I have a story to tell you.”
�
�I hope you’re as good with telling a story as you are writing them.”
He glanced at her in surprise. “You’ve read one of my books?”
Her skin was dewy from the humidity, her hair curling in ringlets around her face, light from the open doorway glimmering in the golden strands. Faint pink stained her cheeks. “I haven’t had time to read all of them, but I read the one set in Romania.”
He was flattered and touched, and somehow, the fact that she’d read one of his books made this conversation even harder. “This isn’t a story about an adventure. Although I guess maybe you could consider it a prequel.”
He had a vivid imagination, a great skill for a writer, not so great when you had the kind of toxic memories he carried. As he wondered where to start with Jules, he could feel the hot, close walls of that little house where he’d lived with his mother and stepfather and Glory, smell the sour, fetid scent of the ever-present empty bottles.
“I wanted to play football.” It was as good a place to start as any. He narrowed his eyes against the wave of longing that rushed over him. He could taste the bitterness he’d felt in those days, scraping a life from the ruin of his family.
It was then he’d learned to leave that squalid little house behind and pretend to be someone else, someone better, someone who fitted in. “I tried out for the team, but I needed money for cleats. You know, opportunities are supposed to be equal for kids in school, but they’re not. Kids who don’t have money don’t get to play sports.”
She frowned and he wondered what she was thinking. He wanted to ask her, but if he did, he wasn’t sure he could come back to the rest of it. He took a deep breath and barreled on.
“I’d been saving up but I still needed ten bucks. When I left for school that morning, my stepfather was passed out on the couch. Beside him, on the scratched-up end table, was some wadded-up cash. I didn’t even think, Jules. I grabbed the cash, took it in my room and hid it in the mayonnaise jar with the rest of the money I’d been saving.”
His gaze was on the pond, but instead he was seeing the jar with all the money he’d saved, the desperate hope he’d felt that maybe he’d finally get something he wanted. “When I got home from school, he was sitting on the couch, the jar open in front of him on the coffee table. He wanted me to admit that I’d stolen from him.”
She sucked in a small, quick breath.
“I thought about lying, but I didn’t. I just shrugged, like yeah, whatever. So he backhanded me and called me a worthless—well, let’s just say he called me a derogatory name no kid should ever hear.” Cam had felt searing anger when he’d heard the word, but he hadn’t felt shame until he looked to his mother to defend him and she turned away. His lip twitched, his eyes closing against the memory, fingers going to the scar. “He laid open the skin on my cheekbone, but that’s not what hurt the worst. I wanted my mom to stop him, to stand up for me, but he kicked me out, and she didn’t say a word.”
“Cam.” Jules reached for his hand and her touch was enough to break the grip of the past, but it couldn’t erase the hollowness he felt. He opened his eyes.
“So, the thing is, Jules, you’re right to be afraid of me. You’re right to want to run. It’s a total fluke I ended up with the career I have now. I’ve done some terrible things to survive.” Things that made him break out in a sick, cold sweat when he thought about them.
“Those things weren’t your fault, Cam. You were just a kid.”
“You don’t know, Jules. You don’t even know the half of it.” He interrupted her because she just didn’t get it. There were more things, worse things...
“Where did you go when you left Red Hill Springs?”
“I hitched a ride out of town. It took some time but I ended up in New York, in Brooklyn, where I met Ya-ya. She’s the one who taught me how to make pad thai. She gave me a Bible and a job, in that order.” He smiled, the pungent, competing aromas of lemongrass, kaffir lime and coriander in his memory now, powerful because to him they smelled like survival.
Like hope.
“She was a lifeline. I was so angry and so focused on my own pain I couldn’t see anyone else. She bought my first plane ticket and sent me to visit her family in Thailand. And...I learned the world didn’t revolve around me. After that I was hooked. I would work, earn enough money to go somewhere for a few months, work some more, go somewhere else. I honestly never thought I’d come back to Red Hill Springs.”
“I can’t imagine how hard it was even to cross the city limits.”
She had no idea how much he’d wanted to turn around and go the other way, get on a plane, go back to Morocco and put this place as far out of his mind as he could.
But Emma and Eleanor needed him. And, it turned out, he needed them.
“I’ve been a lot of things to a lot of people,” he said slowly. “But I’ve never had a home. When I walked into this house for the first time, I wanted it, but I didn’t just want the house. I wanted a life. A home. I wanted a family. Kids cartwheeling on the lawn and fishing in the pond. I’m not proud, Jules, but somewhere inside I guess I felt like if I had all the things I dreamed about my whole childhood that I’d know I really made it out of there.”
He paused. “And suddenly, even though I knew I didn’t deserve it, there was a way for me to have it all.”
And he’d tried to make it work, tried to make that enough. But he was falling for her and she deserved so much better than the kid even a mother couldn’t love.
Jules was trembling. “So you took the deal.”
“I took the deal.”
* * *
Jules looked over at Cam’s stoic face. He’d finished baring his past to her, and now he looked like he could’ve been carved out of stone. He deserved so much better than he’d gotten from his parents. And so much better than a sham of a marriage that only looked like a dream coming true.
He deserved the real thing. And the saddest part of all was he didn’t even know it. “Oh, Cam. You are worthy of so much more than this.”
Her heart felt like it might shatter into a million pieces and she was so mad at herself. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known that going on a date with him and dancing and kissing were a bad idea. She just hadn’t known how bad an idea they were.
She also hadn’t known he’d had a plan from the beginning and was, for lack of a better metaphor, checking the boxes, creating a family for himself. But she’d known it wasn’t real, so if all of this was painful...well, it wasn’t as painful as what Cam had endured, and it was her own stinking fault.
With the slowing of the rain came a drop in the temperature. Jules shivered.
He moved immediately, holding out his hand to help her to her feet. “Come on, it’s getting cold out here. Let’s go back to the house.”
She put her hand in his, but when he pulled her to her feet, he didn’t let go. He drew her into his office and dragged a cashmere throw from the couch, wrapping it around her shoulders. She sighed and clasped the soft fabric closer. He was still taking care of her.
A huge part of her wanted to take him in her arms and tell him it was all going to be okay, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have the right, because they weren’t a couple and he didn’t love her. He hadn’t even pretended to love her. He loved the idea of her—that was totally different.
“What you did tonight was lovely. No one’s ever done anything like that for me before...but it can’t happen again.”
He looked shattered and she had to remind herself that she couldn’t go to him. She couldn’t remind him that he was important to her. “So here’s the deal. We got married for the girls and we’ll stay married for the girls, but we’re not a couple. We have to agree...no more quiet talks. No more dates. No more kissing.” She paused. “Especially no more kissing.”
“Agreed.” As her teeth threatened to chatter, he tugged the throw closer around her. “We’re not a cou
ple.”
There was so much more she wanted to say, but she needed some distance from him. She needed to think through the crazy gamut of emotions she’d run tonight. She needed to step back, have a plan. She sighed wearily. “We need to get back.”
He went down the stairs first, steadying her as she stepped onto the floor of the barn, and turning off the lights and music as they left. She didn’t bother with her shoes. The heels would’ve sunk into the rain-softened lawn, anyway. When they reached the house, she said, “I’ll take Amelia home. I just want to change clothes.”
From upstairs in the bedroom, Jules could hear the murmur of Cam’s deep voice and Amelia’s quicker, bouncier reply. Jules threw on a sweatshirt and yoga pants, grabbed her tennis shoes and stopped just outside the door to the kitchen to slide them on.
“So, your dad mentioned that he moved back to town a couple of years ago. Where’d you guys move from?”
Jules went still, her hand creeping up to cover her mouth. He didn’t know.
“I’d actually never met my dad when I moved here. My mom dropped me off on my grandma’s doorstep with a backpack and a note. How about you?”
There was a moment of silence where Jules could imagine Cam trying to catch up with this turn in the conversation. She heard one of the kitchen chairs pull out and, when she peeked around the corner, she saw Amelia sitting at the table, chin in hand.
“I got kicked out by my mom and stepdad when I was fifteen. Never met my dad at all, so you’ve got me beat there.” Cam went to the pantry, got a package of cookies and tossed them on the table before dropping into the chair across from her. “So, you lived with your mom. Never met your dad. Got dropped off at...Bertie’s house with a note. That sum it up?”
“Don’t forget the backpack of clothes I’d outgrown two years before,” she said matter-of-factly. “My dad handled it pretty good. I kind of hated him, though.”
“Really?” Cam took a cookie and shoved the package toward her. “Oreo?”
Amelia took one of the cookies and pulled the two chocolate sides apart, licking the frosting. “Yeah, but then we moved to the farm and Dad and Claire got married and I have, you know, a real family and food and stuff now.”
The Marriage Bargain Page 9
