TWENTY-SIX
I’m deep into an internet search of how to play squash when Cam bursts through the front door with a big bouquet of sunflowers wrapped in cellophane and tissue paper. He sees me at the coffee table on my laptop and grins.
“You’re lookin’ me up again, aren’t you, lass? Tch. It’s becomin’ an obsession!”
“Get over yourself, prancer. There’s a whole big world out there that doesn’t involve you. I’m trying to find out how to play squash. Who’re the flowers for?”
He looks left, right, then behind him. “Is there someone else who lives in this apartment?”
Surprised and touched, I stand. “They’re for me? Really?”
He shakes his head and sighs dramatically. “Christ on a crutch, Miss Snufflebottom, you’re hopeless. Take the bloody things before I smack you upside the head with ’em.”
I cross to him and take the huge bouquet from his arms. “These are my favorite.” Smiling, I touch the bright-yellow petals. “They always remind me of home. My mom got them fresh from the farmers market every Friday when I was growing up.”
“I know.”
I look at him, furrowing my brow. “Have you been going through my trash or something?”
He smiles. “Mrs. Dinwiddle enjoys a good gossip.”
I laugh. “True. But . . .”
He sees my confusion and takes pity on me. “It’s our last supper, lass. The occasion seemed to call for flowers.”
“That sounds uncomfortably biblical, but thanks.” I examine his face, fresh shaven and shining. “I see you discovered you own a razor.”
He runs a hand over his jaw. “Aye. I was startin’ to appear a bit cavemannish.” His gaze drops to mine. “You fancy the proper pretty boy look, so I thought it bein’ a special night and all, I’d make an effort.”
“Scruff suits you better,” I say without thinking. “You’re way too manly to be overgroomed. All your rough edges are much more . . .”
Cam is grinning at me like a cat that just scarfed up a nice fat canary.
I huff out an aggravated breath. “Oh, shut up, prancer,” I mutter, and retreat into the kitchen to find a vase.
“No, I don’t think I will, lassie,” Cam drawls, following me. “At least not until you tell me how that sentence ends.” He sits at the kitchen table, threads his fingers behind his head, and beams at me.
“It ends with me jabbing a sharp object into your eye.” I bang around in the pantry and the cupboards under the sink until I find a vase tall enough to fit the sunflowers, then busy myself with arranging them, all the while acutely aware of Cam’s shit-eating grin aimed in my direction.
“Hot? Sexy? Devastating?” he muses aloud, clearly enjoying my embarrassment. “Hmm. She’s mute on the subject. I must be g’tting close.”
“You’re getting close to serious bodily injury. Be quiet.”
His laugh is delighted. I glance over at him and am struck by how different he looks now than he did in all those pictures I saw of him on the internet. He looks happy and at ease, like he doesn’t have a care in the world. Like he belongs right there in that chair at my kitchen table.
“How come you never smile in photographs?”
His laugh dies, his smile fades, and his eyes take on a strange hardness. I sense I’ve stepped into a minefield, but I’m already here. Might as well jump right in.
“I mean, I see you smiling and laughing all the time, like you are right now, but in pictures you always look kind of . . . miserable.”
Silent, Cam looks at me for what feels like a long time. Then he says, “You can’t really be that naïve.”
His gruff tone surprises me, as do his words. “What do you mean?”
“I mean spend a little time thinkin’ about what you just asked me, woman, and you’ll find your goddamn answer.”
I refuse to be intimidated by him, and send the same fuming stare he’s sending me right back at him. “Why are you mad at me? You said I could ask you anything!”
Our gazes clash like swords, but he’s hurt my feelings, so I won’t be the first to look away. I haven’t done anything but ask an innocent question. It’s not my fault his moods change faster than the weather.
“Ah, lassie.” He scrubs his hands over his face. His low chuckle sounds impossibly sad. “You’ll be the death of me.”
“Yeah, maybe, if you keep acting like a dick. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got pruning shears in my hand.”
He starts to laugh, low at first, building on that sad chuckle, but then he’s into full-blown guffaws, his head thrown back, one fist pounding the table.
“You’re so friggin’ weird,” I grumble, and continue arranging the sunflowers.
“And you can’t see past the end of your nose, but here we are anyway.”
“You and your ambiguous statements are gonna be the death of me, prancer. Speaking of bad vision, I have a question.”
When I turn, I find him smiling. “Of course you do.”
“Do you think I should ditch the glasses?”
“For what, a monocle?”
“Yes, a monocle,” I say sarcastically. “They’re so in style. Can you be serious for a second? This is important.”
He arranges his face into a semblance of sternness. “Aye. This is me bein’ serious. You can tell by my forbidding brow.”
When I just stare at him with a sour look, his fake serious expression is killed by another dazzling smile.
“Okay, okay. Don’t put a hex on me. The question is if I think you should ditch your glasses?”
“That is the question.”
He cocks his head, purses his lips, and takes so long examining my face I begin to blush.
“Take a picture, prancer, it’ll last longer,” I mutter, embarrassed.
“I’m tryin’ to decide how to phrase somethin’ so it won’t offend your missish nerves.”
“Missish? Is that even a word?”
Cam looks smug. “Oh, the fancy editor lady hasn’t heard of it?”
When I continue to glare at him, he relents. “It means demure. Squeamish. Prudish.”
“You’re calling me a prude?”
Mischief glints in his eyes. “No man who’s ever kissed you would call you a prude, darlin’. What I’m sayin’ is that you’re highly sensitive about your looks. One misplaced word and you’ll be locked in your room makin’ a list of all the ways you think you’re ugly.”
I have to take a moment to absorb that.
The first sentence might’ve been an incredible compliment, or he could’ve meant there are far worse adjectives than prude that men who’ve kissed me would use to describe me. Like ghastly or sickening, for example.
Then there’s his observation that I’m sensitive about my looks. Though I probably wouldn’t lock myself in my room to make a list of all the ways I’m ugly, I can easily see myself doing it at the kitchen table. In fact, I’m sure there’s a piece of paper somewhere in my apartment titled Things to Improve On that itemizes “cankles” and “weird moles” among my shortcomings.
Which means Cameron McGregor has my number. If I’m being honest with myself, he has from the start.
“Don’t break your brain overanalyzin’ that, Joellen,” says Cam drily.
“I can’t help it. My brain is set to think things to death.”
He quirks his lips. “You don’t say?”
I close my eyes, sigh, and hear him chuckle.
“All right. Here’s what I think about you ditchin’ your glasses.”
I open my eyes and wait for him to continue, chewing my thumbnail in nervousness.
“I don’t think you should do it.”
Am I relieved? Or disappointed? Annoyed? Lord, the man twists me up like a pretzel. “I have contact lenses, but I never wear them because they make my eyes red.”
“Thank you for sharin’,” he drawls. “Ask me why I don’t think you should get rid of your glasses.”
“Why don’t you think I should get rid of my glasses?”
“Because they make you look smart, and sexy, and like you don’t give a fuck, which is also sexy.”
“Oh.” I can’t think of anything else to say. He called me sexy again. This is becoming a thing.
“I wasn’t finished.”
That sounds fairly ominous, so I start to chew my thumbnail with renewed vigor.
“The main reason I don’t think you should get rid of them is because you prefer them. If you didn’t, you’d wear your contacts or get laser surgery. But you like your glasses, so that’s what you should wear.”
“But . . . don’t most guys think they’re dorky?”
“The number of fucks you should give about what men think of how you look is zero, lass. Every choice you make about your appearance should be about what makes you feel good, not what makes some random lad—or your mother—think you’re cute. Don’t set aside your preferences for anyone.”
He’s deadly serious, all traces of teasing gone. I’m not sure how to respond to this sudden change of mood, but he’s not finished talking.
“And another thing. Learn to stop saying ‘Sorry,’ and say ‘Don’t interrupt me.’ Learn to say ‘No’ and ‘None of your business.’ Learn to be unapologetic for who you are and what you like and the opinions you hold. I know you think that if other people considered you beautiful, all your problems would be solved, but you’d just have different problems. And they’d all still revolve around the fact that deep down, you don’t think you’re good enough. That’s a lie you learned, and you can unlearn it, but it has to start with you. You have to decide to accept yourself. It’s cliché, but you really do have to love yourself before you can love anyone else.”
He pauses to inhale a slow breath, his eyes burning. When he speaks again, his voice is low.
“My mother was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, but she killed herself over a man who wasn’t even worthy to breathe the same air she did. Total fucking waste. All because she didn’t think she was good enough. A lie life pounded into her that she never unlearned.”
“You’re talking about Sir Gladstone?”
Now his tone turns brutally bitter. “Aye. That worthless piece of shit. Thought he could run roughshod over anyone because he was rich. He treated his house staff like slaves, allowing them no voices or power, giving them no appreciation. Unless you were pretty, and then you got the kind of attention a broken soul can confuse with love. He used her for years, until a younger housemaid came along. Then he acted like he never knew my mother. She was replaced, just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “I saw the whole thing comin’, but she’d never hear a word spoken against him. She thought because he came into her room a few nights a week and let me play rugby with his spoiled fucking children, that meant he loved her. But he didn’t. And when she found out, it killed her. She went up to the roof and threw herself off without even tellin’ me good-bye.”
My face is crumpling. I can feel it, along with my heart thumping and my throat squeezing shut. “Oh, Cam. I’m so sorry.”
He looks away, drags a hand through his hair, exhales a hard breath. “Aye. Me too.”
He looks so wrecked, so sad and lonely, that I abandon the sunflowers and go to him. “Stand up,” I demand, tugging on his sleeve. “I’m giving you a hug.”
He stands, and I go up on tiptoe, throw my arms around his shoulders, and hide my face in his neck. He winds his arms around my back and straightens, so my feet dangle above the floor.
I resist the impulse to make a crack about how strong he is to lift my weight, and just breathe into his neck with my eyes closed, feeling his heart thumping against my chest and his arms like a vise around me.
“Promise me something,” he whispers into my hair.
“What?”
“No matter what happens with Michael, we’ll still be friends.”
“I thought you didn’t want to be friends.”
His sigh is a big gust of air. “God, you’re an idiot.”
“That’s probably not something you should say to someone with low self-esteem,” I tease.
He rests his temple against mine and sighs again, but this time it sounds impossibly sad. “Aye, but you know I say it with love, lass. Always with love.”
My face is starting to crumple again. I nod, unable to speak.
We stand there like that until Mr. Bingley decides it’s getting weird and starts batting at my dangling feet. Cam gently sets me down, and we spend the rest of the evening pretending the hug didn’t happen, eating dinner and talking and dancing around the word love that lingers like a ghost in the air.