Thankfully, Reece didn’t take offense, just made a beeline for the bar and a couple of glasses. “They are. But things in the architectural office of Jenkins and Sandler aren’t doing so hot.”
“What do you mean?” A totally different type of alarm coursed through him. If the business was in trouble, how was he going to support Camille and the baby? “Is something wrong with the firm?”
“Something is wrong with you, my friend.” Reece handed him a glass filled to the brim with two-hundred-dollar Scotch. “Now drink up and tell me what the hell happened between you and Camille.”
“How do you know anything happened between us?” Matt countered, even as he took a healthy sip of his drink.
Reece snorted. “You were an absolute disaster today—on all fronts. Even the interns noticed. So if it isn’t Camille, it had better be a terminal disease. Because nothing else gives you a pass for acting like a cross between the Grinch and Attila the Hun.”
“She moved out.”
“Whoa, seriously?” Reece straightened up, suddenly looking like he was taking this whole thing much more seriously. “She ran?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well then, what? Because I know you weren’t stupid enough to ask her to leave.”
Matt winced before he could stop himself and Reece’s eyes grew huge. “Are you shitting me? You kicked the mother of your child out of your house?”
“It’s not the way you’re making it sound.”
“Really?” Reece arranged himself on the sofa, took a healthy swallow of his own drink. “Well then, spill it. Because I have got to hear how it was.”
Matt spent the next few minutes pouring out the whole sordid story, and feeling worse for the retelling. Reece didn’t make things any better when he muttered, “You’re an asshole,” before Matt was even halfway done with his recitation.
When he finally did finish, Reece was quiet so long that Matt began to wonder if his friend had fallen asleep with his eyes open. But there was no such luck.
“You know I mean this in the best possible way, man, but you screwed up. Big-time. You need to fix this.”
“I need to fix it? She’s the one who ducks and runs at the first sign of trouble.”
“You told her to get out of your house after sleeping with her? And you thought she’d stick around? Knowing beforehand that the woman already has commitment issues?”
“Exactly. She’s the one with commitment issues. It never would have worked out between us. I was just trying to save things before they got bad between us.”
“And how’s that working out for you?”
Matt shook his head in disgust. “Are you here to talk me to death or are you going to pour me another drink?”
“Both.”
“Could we skip the first and keep the second coming?”
“Not on your life.” But Reece poured him a second Scotch. Though this one was quite a bit smaller than the first, Matt figured it was prudent not to complain.
“So, what makes you think things are going to go bad?” Reece demanded. “Besides your incredibly well-developed sixth sense, of course.”
“You’re being a real smart-ass tonight, you know that?”
“You know what they say, Better a smart-ass…”
“Than a dumb ass.” Matt finished the quote for him.
“Exactly. But seriously, why are you so sure things won’t work between you two?”
“Come on, Reece. You’ve met her. You even said it yourself. She’s got serious commitment issues.”
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting the most important question—Why does she have those issues?”
“Because she’s a flake? Because she’s an artist? Because she wants to see the whole damn world by the time she’s thirty-five? How the hell should I know why she’s so afraid to be in a relationship?”
“And it never occurred to you that that was where you should start?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, what’s her family like?”
“Both her parents are dead, and I get the impression they were never close. She left home at seventeen.”
“What about siblings?”
“She’s an only child.”
“Her best friend? What’s she like?”
“I don’t think she has one. Or at least she never mentions anyone.”
Even as he said the words, he was beginning to feel like a total idiot. Why hadn’t he seen this before? Why had he needed Reece to point it out to him?
“She doesn’t know what it means to have a relationship with another person. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”
Reece shrugged. “You would know that better than I do. But any woman who reaches the ripe old age of thirty-two without any entanglements—including close friends—must have a very good reason as to why that’s true. Look at me. Because of what my dad put me through growing up, I was so afraid of failure that I almost let Sarah slip right through my fingers.”
“That’s different.”
“Only because you know the circumstances. Might I suggest you find out Camille’s circumstances before you make any judgment calls?”
“So what—you’re saying I should have let things go on as they were for a while? Even after what she did to me?”
“What did she do to you, Matt? Besides walking out six months ago—per your original arrogance—what has she done that’s so bad?”
“She took off for New Orleans.”
“While you were halfway around the world. I’m not sure how that really affects you—especially since you left her first that time.”
“Hey. Whose side are you on?”
Reece poured him another couple of fingers of Scotch. “Yours. Which is why I can’t sit by and watch you screw this up for no reason.”
“I have a reason. She all but admitted she was going to walk out again.”
Reece paused right in the middle of his sanctimonious act. “She really said that?”
“Close enough. She said she wasn’t stuck, that she could walk out whenever she wanted.”
“But did she say she wanted to walk out?”
“Does it matter? If she hadn’t walked out today, she would have sometime soon. I’d have spent the next weeks, months—the rest of my life—waiting for the other shoe to drop. I can’t do that.”
“So instead, you’ll spend the rest of your life miserable and wanting to be with her? I’m not so sure that’s a better bet, man.”
Matt stood up abruptly, a little unsteady after three drinks, but still sober enough to see Camille’s face as she told him she loved him. She’d looked frightened, yes, and vaguely ill, as she said the words—so ill, in fact, that he’d been unable to take them seriously.
But what if Reece was right—what if she’d never had the chance to be close to someone before? What if she’d cut him off at the knees all those months ago as a defense mechanism?
The cynical side of his nature told him he was being an idiot, that he was searching for an excuse where there wasn’t any. But she’d looked so devastated when he’d told her he didn’t want to be with her. As if her entire world had just gotten blown to pieces.
Which was exactly how he felt, no matter how many times he told himself this was for the best.
“I need to see her.” He said the words quietly, then reached for the bottle of Scotch. If he was going to do this, he needed all the liquid courage he could get.
“That’s the spirit.” Reece yanked the bottle neatly out of his grasp. “I think you’ve had enough. No woman likes a stumbling-down drunk.”
“Right. Absolutely.” He was going to have to do this without the liquor, face rejection on his own.
Then an awful thought occurred to him, one so terrible that he actually had to sit down to keep his rubbery legs from going out from under him.
“What’s wrong?” Reece demanded.
“I have no idea where to find her.”
“Call her.”
He snorted. “You don’t know Camille. Hell will freeze over before she answers a call from me.”
“Well, then, call…”
It was then that he realized just how alone Camille was in the world. If she’d wanted to find him, she could check with his family, his job, his friends. For her, there was no one to ask. He was the only one she’d trusted enough to let him inside of her and he’d turned around and knocked her on her ass.
“How many hotels are there in Austin?” he asked Reece grimly.
“I think we’re about to find out.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TWO WEEKS LATER, MATT PACED nervously in front of Rick’s office as he waited for Camille. Between the two of them, he and Reece had called every hotel in Austin—at least twice—over the past thirteen days, but had never been able to find her. He’d been destroyed, on the brink of giving up, when he’d remembered about the ultrasound. Camille would be here, today, for her doctor’s appointment, and he wasn’t going to let her leave before he’d said his piece.
He’d tried calling her—four times a day. In his messages he’d apologized, begged for her to talk to him, even groveled, but she’d never called him back.Which is why there was a healthy dose of anger—and fear—simmering along with his desperation to see her. He knew, only too well, that if Camille decided to write him out of her life, there was very little he could do about it.
Please, God, don’t let her have given up on him completely.
Glancing at his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes, he saw the second hand had swept around the dial one more time. Her appointment was in ten minutes—if she didn’t get here soon, there’d be no time for them to talk before they went up to Rick’s office. And call him old-fashioned or superstitious or any of the other words, but he didn’t want to find out the sex of his baby while he was feuding with its mother. It seemed like a bad omen.
Not that there was anything logical about such a feeling, but somewhere in the past two weeks, logic and order had gone out the window. He was going with desperation now.
He was just about to give up, to head to Rick’s office and see if maybe she’d canceled, when he saw her hurrying across the parking lot. She was dressed in a long, violet maternity dress, one that hugged all of her new, mouthwatering curves, and his fingers literally itched to touch her.
Her wild hair was tumbling in its usual crazy curls down her back and huge gold hoops dangled from her ears. As she got closer, he realized her lips were slicked a sexy, powerful red and her cheeks were flushed a becoming rose. She looked healthy and happy and well-rested, as if she hadn’t suffered one moment from being away from him. His heart sunk as he realized he might really have blown it—she might have already moved on and he had only himself to blame.
CAMILLE’S HEART SKIPPED a beat as she saw Reece waiting at the door of Rick’s building. After all of the times he’d called her cell, she’d figured he would show up here and had dressed carefully for the meeting—she absolutely refused to let him see how badly he’d hurt her. Besides, confronting him here was better than doing it at his house, or at the apartment she’d moved into the week before. Neutral territory and all that, though she couldn’t help wishing for home-court advantage as she watched him watch her.
“Showtime,” she murmured to herself, then breezed up to the only man she’d ever loved.“Matt,” she said with a quick smile. “How are you?” She stood on her tiptoes to drop a kiss on his cheek—just to show him how little she was affected by him—and nearly blew the whole thing. He still smelled like the ocean, clean and fresh and so delicious that a part of her wanted to throw herself into his arms and say to hell with her pride. But he’d already rejected her once—in no uncertain terms—and she just didn’t have it in her to put herself out there again.
Not like that.
As she took a step back, got her first real look at him, she was shocked at how disheveled he was. His normally pristine appearance was definitely the worse for wear—his shirt was buttoned wrong, he’d forgotten his belt and his hair was sticking up in twenty different directions, as if he hadn’t been able to stop himself from trying to pull it out by the roots.
“Camille.” His voice was hoarse, and it shot sparks right through her.
“Come on, Matt. Let’s go inside.” She headed up to the door. “We’re going to be late.”
“I don’t care.”
She froze in her tracks, turned around to stare at him in confusion. Since when did Matt not care about a schedule? About an appointment? “Excuse me?”
“I need to talk to you, Camille.”
“Can’t it wait?” She really didn’t think she could take any more from him, and had no desire to see the doctor with her heart on her sleeve.
“No. It can’t wait. It’s been waiting for two damn weeks. How could you just disappear like that?”
“Matt.” She glanced around nervously. “People are starting to look.”
“Do you think I care? I called you fifty-two times and you didn’t answer one of my calls. How can a man say he’s sorry, that he’s made the biggest mistake of his life, if you won’t even pick up the damn phone?” he raged.
“What did you say?”
“I said I love you, Camille. I’ve loved you for six long months and I’m sorry that I hurt you before. I was scared, terrified that you would leave me again. That you would get tired of me in a few months or a few years, that you would take the baby and leave me. And then where would I be? If I love you this much now, how much worse off would I be a year from now? Two?”
Camille felt as if she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole for the second time in as many months. “You love me.”
“Of course I love you! Do you think I would have sent you away if I didn’t? That I would have made such a god-awful, abysmal mess of our whole relationship if I wasn’t scared stupid with it?”
Her heart trembled with the beginnings of joy. “You didn’t make the mess on your own, you know. I helped…a little.”
“Please, Camille, don’t leave me again.” His eyes burned almost black as he cupped her face in his big, warm hands. “Please don’t let me have messed this up beyond repair.”
“You really hurt me, Reece. But—”
“I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”
“Let me finish.” She laid a hand on his chest, felt the steady beat of his heart beneath her palm and knew she’d found a steadfast man. Which was a good thing, because if there was one thing she had learned recently, it was that, all appearances to the contrary, she was a steadfast woman.
“But I hurt you, too,” she continued. “And I’m sorry about that. More sorry than I can ever say.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just want—”
“Of course it matters. If I hadn’t been so stubborn to begin with, we wouldn’t have ended up in this predicament. But I want you to know that I came home from New Orleans with the understanding that you were it for me. I didn’t know if we could make it work, if I could trust you—or myself—enough to stick around, but I knew I’d never feel about another man the way I feel about you.
“I’ve spent the past two weeks doing nothing but thinking about all the ways I’ve screwed this up, all the ways I’d pushed you away, and hurt you, because I couldn’t trust that you would actually want me. That you could love me, when no one ever has before. But those are my insecurities, not yours. My faults, not yours.” She reached for his hand, placed it on the growing curve of her stomach. “I want to marry you, Matt. I want to have your baby and build a life with you, starting right here, right now.”
The color drained from his face and for a moment she was afraid she had made a terrible mistake. But then a smile split his face, so big and beautiful that she couldn’t mistake it for anything else.
“Are you asking me to marry you, Camille?”
“Well, I figure it’s my turn. You came here and groveled, told me you loved me when you expected me to shrug you off. It’s only fair that I do this.”
>
He cocked a disbelieving brow. “Well, aren’t you a romantic?”
“This is me—you had to know I’d screw it up.” She laughed, then laid a trembling hand over his.
“I love you, Matt Jenkins, and I want to spend the rest of my life showing you how much. Please, marry me, build a family with me. And, from time to time, when life gets to be too much, run away with me to someplace fabulous. Can you do that for me?”
Tears filled his eyes as he pulled her into his arms. “It would be my very great honor to marry you, Camille Arraby. I want nothing more than to make a life with you, and our child. And there’re a million places I still want to see in this world—I’d like nothing more than to see them with you.”
As he leaned down and took her mouth with his own, Camille knew this wasn’t the end of life as she knew it. It was only the beginning. A beautiful, amazing, wonderful beginning.
And when, minutes later, she and Matt watched their son twist and squirm his way across the ultrasound screen, Camille realized that she couldn’t wait for the next chapter in their grand adventure to start. Reaching over, she squeezed Matt’s hand, and as he smiled at her, she understood that he felt exactly the same way.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6068-3BEGINNING WITH THEIR BABY
Copyright © 2010 by Tracy L. Deebs-Elkenaney.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.