Norah left Molly’s primed to knock Cam down a few pegs and make him listen, whether he wanted to or not. So the fact that he wasn’t home put a real crimp in her plans. Since she’d rashly left her key after packing her stuff, there was no waiting inside. Damn it.
So she sat in her car. Courtesy of the fact that half her stuff was in the back, she had plenty of clothes to layer for warmth. The temper helped. Her phone kept blowing up with calls and texts from the Campbell clan. She hadn’t listened to the voicemails and hadn’t answered the texts. Given that the theme of most had been Are you okay? Norah figured that despite Molly’s promise of secrecy, someone else had blabbed something. Maybe Liam had spoken to Mitch. She wasn’t talking to any of them until she’d talked to Cam himself and had the chance to pry his head out of his ass.
The bravado and the fury wore down considerably over the next two and a half hours. When her watch ticked over to nine and he still wasn’t home, she questioned whether he was coming at all. For all she knew, he could be drowning his idiocy in drink up at the Mudcat. When she confronted him, she wanted him sober.
Giving up for the night, she cranked the engine. On the second leg of her K-turn, headlights swept over her car. Cam’s truck. Nerves tangled in her belly at the sight of it. Had he been home before now? Seen her initial reaction? She parked her car again and got out, waiting as he did the same.
“Did you forget something?” Flat, expressionless tone. Oh yeah, he’d been home and he was pissed.
He’s worth the fight.
“Yes.”
Hush ran circles around her, and Norah paused to love on the dog.
“We can work out some kind of visitation for Hush while you’re here,” Cam said grudgingly.
How civilized of him. She didn’t wait for an invitation, just climbed the stairs. After a brief hesitation, Cam followed, unlocking the door. With a sarcastic wave, he gestured her inside. Norah stalked into the loft. Behind her, he shut the door and stood, limned in the lamplight, glowering.
“I came to tell you that this whole non-confrontational, learned helplessness bullshit is not going to work for me.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know you’ve had bad experiences with important people in the past just up and leaving you without you having a say, but you don’t come all the way after me in Chicago just to skulk away without a word.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
She stepped into his space, close enough to feel the heat of him. “Fight. With me. For me.” She laid a hand over his heart and found it pounding. “Because this is worth it. We’re worth it.”
“So…what? Some grand gesture from me is supposed to outweigh your dream job?” He spun away from her to pace. “How long would that last? How long until you start blaming me for what you gave up?”
She’d planted this idea in his head. When he’d ridden roughshod over her reasons for not being with him. And she’d believed it then. But that wasn’t who she was anymore. “That’s exactly what I was thinking after I saw you this afternoon. That I gave up my entire world for you.”
Back to her, Cam’s head drooped, his broad shoulders slumped.
“I’ve had a really good reminder the last two weeks, of exactly what that world is like. And you know what? My world sucked.” He straightened, turning as she continued. “Seventy hour work weeks. Colleagues who are convinced I got to the top on my knees or on my back rather than through my intellectual capabilities. Professional connections who are more than willing to believe the lies Philip has spread about me. A city where people I saw every single day of the last two years don’t even know who I am.”
He frowned, confused. Score one for her for throwing him off balance.
“I got headhunted by Peyton Consolidated before I ever left for Chicago. Before I knew Philip had started a personal vendetta against me. Gerald Peyton offered me everything I ever wanted professionally. And I turned him down cold.”
“What?”
“I told him what I’d been on my way to tell you. That I’m committed to staying here in Wishful, to building something on the foundation I started.”
He looked like she’d just told him the sky was green. “But the lawsuit—”
“The lawsuit didn’t change anything. It’s true he left the door open in case I changed my mind. That’s what I was talking to Cecily about when you overheard us.”
“You said you’d be a fool not to take the job. Under the circumstances, even I agree with you.”
With a bracing breath, she took the leap. “Then I’m a fool because I’m not going anywhere.” The bloom of terrified hope on his face had her stepping closer, cupping his cheek. “You said you’d always choose me because I was worth the risk. Did you think I wouldn’t do the same?”
He reached for her, hands curving around her hips even as he said, “But…you went to Denver.”
“How do you even know that? You didn’t take a single one of my calls.” She hung on lest he decide to break the tenuous connection between them.
“I tracked your phone.”
“Seriously? You’ve based your entire freak out on a snippet of eavesdropped conversation and the GPS location of my phone?”
Cam winced. “Yeah?”
Norah shoved back her irritation. “Peyton Consolidated is a big mover and shaker in urban redevelopment circles. I went to Denver to convince the CEO that rural tourism would be an excellent means of diversifying his investments and that he should start in Wishful.”
“Wait a minute. You turned this guy’s fantastic job offer down and then went to ask him to invest in something else?”
She nodded.
“Did he bite?”
Norah couldn’t help but be a little bit smug. “He loved the idea so much, we both went up to Balenmore, Colorado to meet with their tourism coordinator to get an inside look at how they made rural tourism work for them and generate ideas on how we could do the same here.”
“So…this whole time you’ve been gone, you’ve still been working on a plan to save Wishful?”
“Between meetings with my attorney, yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“I couldn’t tell you before I got back because you weren’t talking to me. And when I came to tell you today you didn’t want to hear my pretty speech, remember?”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was afraid if I talked to you, it’d give you the chance to break things off. Then when you didn’t contradict me and I came home and found all your stuff gone, I was sure of it.”
“You pissed me off. It really hurt me that you could believe I’d walk away from you so easily.”
“It hurt me to think it. I was angry and exhausted when I came after you. And then to hear that…it was like Melody all over again, and I guess it just triggered me.”
“Wait, what?” She thought back to what the family had told her. “Aunt Liz said you went up to surprise her and came back in just over twenty four hours, broken up.”
“Yeah. We’d made arrangements to meet on campus. I got there early, in time to hear her talking with a friend, saying she knew she was never going to pry me out of my hick town and she had to find some way to tell me she was never coming back to it. That it was a conversation long overdue but she wasn’t a monster who could do that while my mother was on her death bed.”
“Okay, leaving aside the fact that you have a serious problem with eavesdropping, Miranda was right. She was a bitch.”
Cam didn’t disagree. “I turned right back around and headed home. Called her from the road to say Mom was having a relapse and that I didn’t think it was going to work out between us.”
“You let her off the hook.”
“Should’ve done it two years earlier. I knew when she headed off to George Mason that it wouldn’t work. I just couldn’t deal with the confrontation then.”
“So this afternoon you were trying to let me off the hook and avoid that confrontation?”
“Something like that. If I wasn’t what you wanted, I wasn’t going to beg and I didn’t want to stand in the way of what you did.”
It was, in a way, noble and self sacrificing. And completely misguided.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I love you, and I don’t want to be the one to put you in a cage.”
“Cam.” She cupped his cheek and waited for her throat to unlock. “What we have between us isn’t a cage. I’m sorry I went off half-cocked without talking to you. I was panicked and angry, and I didn’t think about bringing you into it because you weren’t a part of that life. That wasn’t meant as a reflection of how I feel about you or us. I could’ve cleared that up while I was gone, but I didn’t want the first time I told you to be in a voicemail. The fact is, I’m stupidly, deliriously, completely in love with you. And I can prove it.”
“You already proved it. You’re here.” He brushed her lips with one of those gossamer, tender kisses that made her feel cherished.
She still had to tell him about the land, but as he pulled her closer, she decided it could wait. “Does this mean we’re done fighting?”
“God, I hope so.”
“Good, because I’m really ready to make up.” Bracing her hands on his shoulders, she leapt, wrapping her legs around his waist and fusing her mouth to his.
Cam took about a nanosecond to get on board with that plan. With a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, he hitched her higher. In a dozen strides, he was kicking the bedroom door shut. They fell to the bed, gasping, grasping, rolling, desperate to get to skin.
Norah tugged off his shirt and then her own, when it got caught around her shoulders. She took her mouth on a sprinting journey down his torso as she made quick work of his belt and jeans and found only him beneath.
“Behind on laundry,” he muttered, dragging her back to return the favor. Both brows winged up as he found her bare as well. “What’s your excuse?”
“Optimism. I was banking on fabulous make up sex.”
“You make optimism look really good.”
They dove at each other, gorging themselves on touch and taste in frantic, greedy bites, as if the speed and heat could eradicate the distance of the past weeks. Fevered, she scissored her legs around his and rolled until she straddled him. Capturing his hands, she curled her fingers through his, pressed them back against the bed and lowered herself, glorying as he filled her in one long stroke. She held at the edge for a long, humming beat, body gripping him, the last of the space between them gone.
At last. She was home.
Cam freed his hands, pulling her down to take her mouth in a kiss that left her branded. She began to move, driving him with a blistering pace that sent them both careening toward the peak. His tongue danced with hers, echoing the rhythm she set. She took him deeper with every rocking thrust, her muscles coiling, his breath straining as skin slid against slick skin, until she shattered, dragging him into the free fall with her.
Boneless and quivering, Norah lay draped over Cam, her face pressed into his throat. Her heart—or maybe it was his—she couldn’t tell—continued to gallop as little aftershocks trembled through them both.
Cam’s hand slid limply down her thigh. “That was…”
“Cathartic.”
“I was going to say mind blowing.”
“That too.” She folded her hands across his chest and propped her chin so she could see him. “I missed you. Not just this—although definitely this—but everything else. You’re the first person I think about in the morning, the one I dream about at night. You’re the one I want by my side, Cam. A partner in the truest sense of the word. I don’t ever want you to have reason to doubt that again.”
He stroked a knuckle across her cheek, a feather light touch that soothed, even as it aroused. “I’m not perfect. I’ve got issues, and I’ll do stupid things. But I learn from my mistakes. I won’t doubt you again.”
She kissed him, softly, sweetly and then grinned.
“What’re you smiling about?”
“I’m still wearing my socks.”
“How is that possible?”
“They weren’t all that important in the get naked portion of the program.”
He rolled her beneath him. “I take that as a personal challenge.” He pressed his hips forward to prove it.
“Then I suppose you’re honor bound to rectify the oversight.”
~*~
Cam shut the door to his truck and, for the first time in his life, stared at his grandmother’s house with trepidation. “I can’t believe you called a family summit this early in the day.”
“It’s the most expedient means of putting everybody at ease and catching them up on my situation. You weren’t the only one I didn’t talk to while I was away.” Norah linked her hand through his and dragged him up the walk. “Come on, I’m desperate for more coffee.”
So was he, but Cam would’ve preferred having that coffee at home. Or better yet, skipping the coffee all together and spending the day in bed, sleeping and making love as they’d done most of the night. But Norah had rousted him at 6:30, with little more than a shower and one measly travel mug of coffee to prepare him to face the entire family—all of whom had wanted to string him up the day before.
In accordance with custom, everybody was in the kitchen. And they all promptly stopped talking the moment he and Norah walked in. The weight of their stares hit him like a slap. Yep, they were still very much on Norah’s side, even without knowing the details.
Miranda, clearly at least two cups shy of functional, pinned them both with a furious glare. “You barely talk to me for two weeks, send one text to say you’re back in town, then you freaking disappear for the rest of the day, without answering anybody’s call or text. I took a double shift and spent half the night at the ER waiting for you to show up in an ambulance. And now you haul my ass out of bed after only an hour without an IV drip of coffee?”
Without batting an eye, Norah strode up to the lion and hugged her tight. “I’m sorry I worried you. I’m sorry I worried all of you. But I had to talk to Cam first.”
Miranda took her by the shoulders and gave her a hard once over. “Are you pregnant?”
Cam choked on the last of the coffee in his travel mug.
Norah’s face went slack with shock. “Oh my God. No. No.” She spread her hands in the universal sign for no good. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“Because you’re the most hyper-rational person I know and you’ve been behaving decidedly irrationally. Why else would you call us all together like this?”
“You are kinda glowing,” Reed added.
Norah’s face went beet red. “I have completely lost control of this situation.”
“Well that was your first mistake,” Grammy said. “Assuming you were in control to begin with.”
“Need I remind you that you’re the one who thought facing the Inquisition at this hour was a good idea,” Cam pointed out.
“It wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Aunt Liz offered.
Cam and Norah both stared at her.
“Well it wouldn’t! Neither of mine are in any hurry to make me a grandmother.”
“Neither are we,” Cam said.
Norah poured them both cups of coffee. “I’d rather marry him first, thanks.”
“How’s Saturday?”
The ripple of surprise swept through the room. Nobody knew which of them to look at. Cam kept his gaze fixed on Norah. She rolled her eyes at him, vexed. “Even if you were serious, you’re busy Saturday.”
Oh, I am serious. But he let it pass because this wasn’t the time or place for asking her. Instead he dimpled at her. “That wasn’t a no.”
She just arched a brow.
“Okay, I’ll play. What am I doing on Saturday?”
She handed him coffee. “Formalizing your design for a park at Hope Springs and meeting with the new owner.”
Cam felt the balance of power in the room shift. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Even if the referendum fails, GrandGoods can’t touch Hope Springs. It’s permanently out of their reach and will be donated to the city.”
“How?”
“Because I bought it.” And she just sipped her coffee, calm as could be, as if she hadn’t just rocked his world.
“You did what?” Mitch asked.
“I bought the entire parcel of land out from under GrandGoods with cash. Tucker handled the closing. It’s why I saw him first when I got back yesterday. I had to sign the paperwork. And before you get angry with him for not telling you, I had him sworn to secrecy because it was supposed to be a surprise. And he’s acting as my attorney, so that trumps whatever unspoken bro pact thing you think you have with him.”
Cam’s brain was still stuck at the beginning. “You bought Hope Springs.”
“All 254.5 acres.”
“But that had to cost—” Uncle Pete began.
“Yeah, a lot.” Norah winced a bit at that. “I liquidated every asset I had. It’s why I flipped out when I found out what Philip had done. Given I’m two steps away from being broke, my reputation and employability are kind of an issue.”
“Jesus,” Cam said. “Why would you do that? Risk that? Have you lost your mind?”
“Nope. Just my heart.”
Cam took her coffee away, set it aside with his own. “Norah.”
She sighed and linked her fingers with his. “I’ve never owned anything. Nothing that actually mattered, nothing that meant any kind of roots or permanence. I believe in what we’re trying to accomplish here, and I’m not afraid to put my money where my mouth is. I promised I’d save your world, Campbell, and this was my best shot.”
He slid his hand up to cup her nape and pressed his brow to hers. “You humble me.”
“You should’ve heard the original speech I had planned.” She tipped her mouth up to kiss him briefly, before slipping away to reclaim her coffee and address the rest of the family. “And this concludes the warm and fuzzy good news portion of this morning’s meeting. Please collect your caffeine and breakfast pastry of choice and make your way to the kitchen table. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.”
Cam watched the mask slide into place, the smooth, calm exterior over the spine of steel. “It’s like watching a Transformer when you do that. Why are you armoring up?”
“Because it’s how I survived the last two weeks.”
That ominous remark left him with a whole helluva lot of foreboding about whatever was coming next. What had he left her to handle alone?
He sat to her left, Miranda to her right, and the rest of them spread out around the big farmhouse table with considerably less commentary than was usual at a Campbell gathering.
She picked up a croissant. “I want to apologize for how I left, without talking to anybody.”
“Emergency protocols apply,” Miranda said. “We get that.”
“It was still rude. I’m not…good with family. Not your kind of family, where check-ins don’t require some kind of performance benchmark. And I’m not good with disasters. Or, to be accurate, I’m fantastic with other people’s disasters. I don’t have a lot experience with any of my own. So when this one hit, I didn’t necessarily handle it the best way possible.” This last she addressed to Cam, eyes full of the apology she’d already made.
He rubbed at her shoulders. “I didn’t win any awards for how I handled it either. Water under the bridge.”
“I’d thought that once I got up there, I’d be in a position to spin some damage control. My old intern got me copies of all the outgoing emails from Philip, so I knew some of what was out there. It’s…ugly.” Something flickered over her face, before the mask reasserted itself. “Apart from the allegations of professional misconduct, there were a number of more…personal accusations. Between the emails and the affidavits from some of my former coworkers, it was evidence enough for my attorney to file a lawsuit for defamation.”
“I’m sensing a gigantic ‘but’ in everything you’re not saying,” Mitch said.
She glanced up at him before returning to shredding the croissant in her hands, “But that’s about all I can do. I can’t stop what Philip started. I can’t undo the damage. Even if I win—and that’s an enormous if according to my attorney, because it’s a whole lot of he said, she said—there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. My professional reputation is completely trashed. Most of my contacts wouldn’t return my calls, and those who did don’t want to earn Philip’s ire by taking my side. He has a helluva lot more social capital to burn than I do and no compunction about using it to knock me to rock bottom as payback for all the existing clients they lost when he fired me and the new ones who won’t go near the firm since I left.”
Alone. She’d been dealing with all of this completely alone because he’d been too full of his own imagined hurts to be what she needed. Guilt coated Cam’s throat, all but choking him.
If not for him and his cause, his town, she wouldn’t even be in this mess. “This is my fault.”
Her eyes flashed hot. “Don’t be absurd.”
“If I hadn’t—”
She cut him off. “No. Don’t you dare. I stayed of my own free will. I chose you, and I have no regrets.”
How could she not have regrets? “But you lost everything you worked for.”
“And gained everything that matters. My pride will heal, and I’ll figure out some means of earning a living—preferably sooner rather than later because my attorney isn’t cheap—but I’m not giving you up. Period. End of story.”
“Have you told your parents yet?” Uncle Pete asked.
Norah shifted her attention to him and Aunt Liz. “I just told the only ones who matter. Hell will freeze over before I give my father that kind of weapon.”
Knowing what Joseph Burke had said to her regarding what she’d unknowingly been involved with in Morton, Cam could only imagine how he’d twist this to try and bend her. For all the good he focused on doing in the world, how could he not see the damage he did to his own daughter with his expectations?
“What about Peyton?” Cam asked.
“Peyton?” Sandra asked.
Norah ignored that. “What about him?”
“Is the job offer still on the table after all this?”
“We haven’t talked about it since I approached him as an investor.”
“An investor for what?” Uncle Jimmy asked.
“Ask,” Cam said, “and if it is, then take the job.”
The burst of temper was immediate. “If you think I’m just going to walk away from—”
“I’ll go with you.”
It was Norah’s turn to stare. “You hate the city.”
“I love you more.” And God, if he could do nothing else for her, he could do this.
“This is all very romantic and sweet, but anybody want to clue us in on what the hell you’re talking about?” asked Miranda.
Cam jumped in before Norah could minimize it. “She has a job offer from a billion dollar corporation in Denver to come run their marketing department, and she turned it down for me.”
“Whoa,” Mitch said.
“And I don’t intend to reverse that decision. Do you think I don’t know what leaving here would mean for you? I’m not dragging you to the other side of the country away from your family.”
“Norah, be sensible.”
“I am being sensible. You’re being impulsive. I appreciate the motivation behind it, but that’s not the answer. We’ve established the economic climate here is crap. The turn around the last couple of months is a start, but only a start. It’s no state in which to sell a business. And at that point, you have no control over what a new owner of the nursery would do. There’s no guarantee that they’d go to the effort to hire on people like Dewey May to keep him and his family afloat. No guarantee someone wouldn’t just come in and turn the nursery into something else entirely. No guarantee that whoever took over for you as City Councilman wouldn’t work to overturn everything we’ve done here. And every bit of that would eat at you, worse than it already does. That powerlessness of not knowing, or worse, knowing and not being able to do a damned thing about it from more than a thousand miles away, would make you miserable. You need to be here. So do I. I’ll find another way. It’s what I do, remember?”
Frustration simmered at a low boil. Her logic, as always, was undeniable. But there had to be some way he could help fix this. She’d done so much for him, given up so much, and what had he done for her? Chased down some lousy public records?
“How can I make this better for you? I need to do something.”
“Help me finish what we started. We’re getting this referendum and we’re going to bury GrandGoods. And then we’re going to turn this town around. And when all of it is over, and no more disasters are hanging around on the horizon, I’m going to fall apart in an absolutely spectacular fashion and count on you to pick up the pieces.” She said it in the same calm, matter-of-fact tone she tended to use when reciting business statistics or weather reports.
He wouldn’t have been surprised to see it penciled in on her calendar. Have breakdown. 8 AM to 5 PM. Schedule massage for tomorrow.
“In the meantime, I need to work like I need to breathe, so you’ll take me back to get my car and let me take over the loft with a quantity of bulletin boards and office supplies that will make it look like Office Depot dropped a tactical nuke on the place.”
A hint of a smile tugged at his lips. “Okay.”
“What can we do to help?” His mother, as calm and focused as Norah herself.
“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. How long would it take you to set up a town meeting?”