Rebecca straightened, and Lydia finally saw the lovely young man that her husband had so accurately described. He was too much color where Rebecca was not enough. His hair was unkempt, and his coke bottle glasses were smudged. He did not look anything like Rebecca Hatfield’s fiancé should look. And at once, a tickle of apprehension appeared, a tickle so small she carelessly batted it away.
Rebecca gestured vaguely behind her.
“This is Eric,” she said, her voice that of a great dame of the black and white screen after thirty years of unfiltered cigarettes, unnatural in its dense huskiness to her willowy frame.
Eric, as it must have been, straightened next and quickly stuck out a hand between the both of them, making it awkward to decide whose hand he was trying to shake.
“Eric Flickinger. Great to meet you.”
His enthusiasm was palatable, and true to his nature, Cam stuck out his hand for a hearty shake of the proffered one. Lydia swallowed discreetly.
“This is my husband, Cam McCray,” she said and didn’t bother to notice how easily she called this man her husband.
Cam finished shaking Eric’s hand, but Lydia saw the broad smile didn’t leave his face. It was like two kindred spirits meeting across a far distance. Or in this case, two chums meeting in a bar. Lydia didn’t like to think about what Cam McCray was like in a bar.
“I hope you are enjoying the evening. This is such an honorable charity.”
“Charity?” Eric pushed his glasses up his nose. “You didn’t tell me this was a charity thing.”
This was directed at Rebecca, but she was looking off into the distance, her stature so poised and elegant, Lydia wanted to touch her to see if she were real.
“It’s a dinner of some sort for a program for refugees. It’s like curing cancer,” Cam said.
“Ah, hey, you’re a Scotch!”
Cam laughed, and Lydia blinked despite her best efforts to not do so. Cam slapped Eric heartily on the shoulder and continued to laugh obnoxiously. Lydia knew there was a joke on, but she couldn’t tell if Cam knew.
“Not quite, but I bet you could use one, laddie,” Cam said between laughs.
Rebecca looked between the two laughing men and simply drifted away. Lydia watched her go, like an ethereal fairy of Irish lore. A wisp carried away by the wind. It was a full ten seconds before Eric realized that his fiancée had just left him.
“Oh, hey, yeah, sorry. Rebecca!” he called, tripping after her. Literally, he tripped on the shoe strings of his…were those orange high tops?
Lydia reached up to her throat, but there wasn’t a necklace there to toy with. She turned the motion into a casual flick as if brushing lint from her collar. The tickle of apprehension that had been such an innocent tickle was no longer so meek and mild. It was a fury in her a stomach, a full blown, hormonal rage to rival the worst of her periods.
“Did you notice what I noticed?” Cam asked.
Lydia was not looking at him. She was looking at the table that Rebecca Hatfield and her fiancé had so recently vacated. It somehow did not look any emptier than when they had occupied it.
When she didn’t answer, Cam put his hand on her shoulder. She would have jumped if she had had the emotional capacity to do so, but right then, her emotions were busy. She looked up at him, not wanting to see what kind of expression was on his face. She knew whatever it was it would somehow displease her. Why such a notion should sink in at that moment, she didn’t know. And worse, she didn’t know where it had come from. But for some horrible reason, she suddenly thought that she never really gave Cam a chance to just…be himself.
Just as she never gave herself the same chance.
And now, he was anything but what she had expected. His face was only slightly cautious if not completely neutral. It in no way suggested irritation, and that somehow bothered her. But his words bothered her more.
“Those two don’t look like the happy bride and groom,” he said, pausing to scan the room around them. “They didn’t look like they’re about to be wed at all.”
Five
Lydia set her wrap down on the table as she came into the townhouse.
The last of her energy poured out of her, and as she stepped out of her heels right there in the foyer, she imagined her very spirit running out of the tips of her toes, seeping across the hardwood floors like rivulets of rainwater.
She moved toward the kitchen, toward a glass of wine and a minute of quiet solitude in her kitchen. Cam followed her as she knew he would, but for once, his constant attention didn’t chafe. She removed her earrings as she went, set them on the stone countertop of the island as she walked into the kitchen. She slipped her hair from its chignon, let the pins drop to the cold stone of the counters along with the earrings. She opened the fridge and reached for the bottle of chardonnay.
Cam was already behind her, reaching for wine glasses. Had she been fully aware, she may have thought it odd that Cam was drinking chardonnay as well. But her mind, well, it had melted the moment Rebecca Hatfield had drifted away from the man of her dreams.
Eric Flickinger.
Yeah.
Lydia had no idea whose dream he had sprung up from, but right then, Lydia would not have cared if he went back to the dream he had come from and sent someone better in his place. Someone Rebecca Hatfield actually seemed interested in marrying.
Cam took the bottle of wine from her, pulled the stopper from it and filled one of the two glasses he held. He handed her the glass and filled the other one before returning the bottle to the fridge.
Lydia made it all the way to the study before taking a sip. It was a gulp when she did, but at least she was marginally proud of having some kind of control. She curled her legs beneath her as she sat in the worn leather chair in front of the dormant fireplace. She steadied the wine glass with both hands and stared at nothing.
“Would you like a fire?”
It was the first thing either of them had said since leaving Farmicelli’s, and the sudden noise startled her. She managed a nod before returning to her blank stare. But movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.
Cam took off his tuxedo jacket, laid it along the back of the other chair. Lydia sat, transfixed. The muscles of his back shimmered beneath the white starch of his shirt, and his shoulders looked impossibly broad. His dark, thick hair curled just enough over his collar, and when he rolled his sleeves up the muscles of his forearms rippled a little too invitingly.
She had quite simply married a gorgeous man. Irrationally, of course, but still, she’d married him.
And she was still married to him.
“Cam?” she finally asked.
He knelt in front of the fireplace, carefully stacking kindling to let the air circulate to catch the fire.
“Mmm?” he said, stacking more wood onto the grate, and suddenly, Lydia was too shy to say more of what she thought she’d been about to say.
She thought she was going to ask him why.
Why had he married her?
When she had been only twenty-five years old? He only a few years older. They had only known each other for a period of months. Just months. It was not some torrid, epic love affair either. They met in a bar. On a pub crawl. That was not the stuff of romantic legends.
But what if it was their legend?
“How are you able to stay away from London for this long?”
Where that question came from she did not know, but he turned to look at her.
“I beg pardon?” he asked.
The way his body was turned to her, the soft light of the lamp she had turned on when she’d come into the room struck his face in angles. His rough cheekbones and square jaw sent a shiver through her she had not felt in years. Or maybe ever.
She wrapped her hands around her wine glass even tighter, feeling a revelation coming on that she did not want. It was something that happened as one aged, she was coming to find out, and she was not liking what she was learning about herself.
He shrugged and moved back to the fire. “I’m not usually in the office anyway. Someone has to go out and make the big deals.”
Lydia opened her mouth to ask another question but stopped. “So does that mean you’re never home?”
“Home is a flat the size of my shoe in Whitechapel.”
Lydia unconsciously wrinkled her nose. “Whitechapel? Surely you can afford some place nicer.”
He struck a match, the flame lighting his face from the other side, and her stomach rippled again. The fire caught as soon as Cam touched the match to the paper.
He shrugged again and stood. “Why bother having something beautiful if you never use it?”
The next shiver that passed through her involved her whole body, and Lydia did not care for it. Did not care for the silent accusation nor the look of pure desire he was giving her.
She cleared her throat. “Are you a good businessman?”
She moved back around to the first topic she meant to speak about, and her tongue grew thick.
“I like to think so,” he said, followed by the goofy grin she had fallen in love with so many years ago.
“Good enough to get the Hatfield account if there is no wedding?”
Verbalizing her fear did nothing to make her feel better. If anything, it made her wineglass rattle more in her hand.
Cam must have noticed because he calmly reached down and took her nearly empty glass from her. He walked over to her desk where he had apparently set a wine bottle. She had thought he had returned it to the fridge, but she may not have been paying attention entirely. It was unlike her, but she had had a jolting night.
Cam refilled her glass, peeking over his shoulder at her with a wicked grin. “Probably.”
Lydia thought of the bed that waited silently directly above her head. So far she had not even noticed her husband on the other side of it. But she began to doubt that tonight was going to be as dull.
“All right, Casanova, what would you do?”
Cam laughed, handing her her glass before taking the seat across from hers.
The scene was so domestic Lydia wanted to fucking puke. Well, perhaps puking was not her style, but something equally as distasteful.
Is this what their nights would have been like if she had squashed her insecurities? What was it that Cam had said at Farmicelli’s?
The standards she thought she needed to live up to. What if she had ignored them?
There was nothing wrong with Cam McCray.
The wild young man had turned into a rather normal thirty something businessman from London. Yes, his clothes were always wrinkled, and he always wiped his wet hands on his pants. But the bigger things were all…well, perfect.
Lydia did not like where this line of pondering was going and quickly pulled herself up short.
“Well?” she prompted Cam from his reverie.
“You need to go along with it.”
“Go along with what?”
“It.” Cam gestured with his wine glass, the liquid sloshing inside it. “The whole charade or not charade if that’s what it is.”
Lydia gulped at the word charade and took a quick sip of wine to cover her reaction. “Charade?” she asked.
Cam shrugged, leaning back in his chair as if settling in for the night. Lydia would have been scared over how at ease he looked sitting in her chair, in her study, in her house, if she weren’t so keen on hearing what he had to say.
“If it’s a charade, you pretend like it isn’t. If it’s not a charade, you pretend like everything is fine. You get the family to buy in to what you’re preaching, and then Rebecca will have to go along with it. At least until the deposit is non-refundable, and the gowns are non-returnable. Are gowns non-returnable once they’re purchased?”
“Of course,” Lydia answered without thinking. “What do you mean buy into what I’m preaching? What is it I’m preaching?”
Cam sat up ever so slightly. Not enough to think he was straightening. It was just enough to sense he was excited about what he had to say.
“That it’s really a wedding that’s to be had.”
He spoke with such fervor, Lydia jumped.
“What?”
“A wedding, Lydia! Even if you doubt Rebecca wants to get married, pretend like she does, and everyone will get so caught up in the frou la la and frippery of it, like you women always do, you’ll have the sale in no time.”
Lydia’s eyelid twitched.
“I did not get caught up in all the frippery.”
She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, but she could not pull them back. Like a bell rung, she summoned whatever it was that was coming to eat her.
But Cam only laughed. “Are you playing some kind of joke on me or do you live in an alternate world where you didn’t have every wedding gown designer taking you to lunch for a span of three weeks straight?”
Lydia blinked at the memory.
When she had told her mother that she was getting married, she had not expected the reaction she had received. She expected yelling, objection, cajoling and outright bribery to get her to stop. She had not expected that kind of behavior to come only from her father while her mother launched a stealth campaign to see her daughter married in the latest fashion by the newest, hottest designer as a means to get a fabulous sample for the shop. It would have seemed disrespectful and rather rude if Lydia were not so blinded by the fact that she was getting married. To someone she had just met. In a bar. On a pub crawl.
“We’re not talking about our wedding,” she said.
“Yes, we are.”
Lydia had been about to change the subject but stopped. “No, we’re not.”
“Yes, we are. You brought it up.”
“I did not.” Her voice squeaked at the end of not, and she realized they were arguing like hormonal teenagers.
“Did not,” she said quickly before moving on. “But what if Rebecca Hatfield really doesn’t want to be married to this Eric guy?”
Cam shrugged his casual shrug. “That’s her problem. Or rather her father’s wallet’s problem if they get as far as putting down all the deposits, booking the church and sending the invites. I know our wedding wasn’t that grand, but I know they’re expensive.”
“Our wedding was beautiful! Don’t degrade it!” Lydia bit her lip, not meaning for the outburst to have actually come out.
Cam laughed. “See, you are talking about our wedding.”
A laugh bubbled inside her. Cam’s words were not accusatory. They were prodding but gentle. He was trying to get her to make fun of herself. It was something he had done when they were together the first time. Only then she had found it annoying and harsh and had added it to the list of things that were wrong about him. She hadn’t thought to turn it around to see what was wrong about her.
“All right, I did that. But I’m not talking about it any more. We are talking about Rebecca Hatfield.”
“Lydia,” Cam’s tone had gone suddenly serious, and she didn’t like where it was going. “Do you want to be doing this? Running the shop?”
An automatic Of course! tried to escape her lips, but something made her stop. For some awful reason she wanted to tell Cam the honest truth. The bone deep, down to her toenail polish truth. It made her stockings chafe.
“Yes,” she said, “The easy answer is yes. Do you need more detail than that?”
“If you’re willing to give it.”
Lydia remembered the first time she had looked into Cam’ eyes. She had felt then what she felt now. An immense sense of falling. But while falling, knowing that she was going to land somewhere safe.
“It’s one day. Just one day of these women’s lives, and they are entrusting it to me. They only have one chance to feel like the princess they’ve always dreamed of being. I get to give them that
chance. I get to make it happen for them.”
Cam looked as if he were going to say something, but she saw the pause, saw the twitch of his cheek as if he were deciding something. She could almost see the mental shake of his head, and he said something that she knew was entirely different from what he had meant to say.
“All right, so you get to be the dream weaver. Then what?”
Lydia shook her head. “Then what what?”
“What’s in it for you?”
Again there was an automatic answer. The need to prove herself to her powerful, domineering world class entrepreneur father. But once proven, what did she have? She had something that was even more invaluable to her.
“I get to do something I love.”
She felt naked. Utterly exposed to his swamping gaze, and she was fucking terrified. Her mind raced through all the things Cam would do with this knowledge. He could taunt her, tease her, belittle her dreams. She played dress up with a bunch of day dreamers thinking they could be something else for a few hours one day in their entire life. She had told Cam everything in that one sentence while he had told her…nothing.
But Cam just nodded. Once. “Well, that’s pretty darn good, I guess.”
He half stood before crouching in front of the fire. He poked at it with one of the logs he had set aside before tossing the log into the burning heap. The flames rose up, and warmth rushed over her cheeks. She clenched her hands tighter around her wine glass, knowing she could not blame her trembles on being cold.
“So you win the treasured Hatfield account, and all’s well. You make Daddy a whole lot of money—”
“Me. I make me a whole lot of money,” she interrupted.
Cam looked at her from his perch before the fire. “You?”
Lydia nodded. “I made Father sign over the boutique to me. It’s mine. Literally. Not just as a hobby like he always thought of it when my mother was there. It’s my business.”
A smile spread across Cam’ face, and the trembling in her hands grew worse. “Is that right?” His smile was so broad, she wanted to smile in return. “Do you feel scared out of your mind with worry that it will fail?”
When She Falls Page 7
