THIRTY-TWO
It’s late—or early. I don’t know which. I’m snug in bed in the circle of Cam’s arms, tracing my fingers over all the tattoos on his chest because I want to remember every detail about him after he’s gone.
I’ll need something to sustain me through the next fifty celibate years.
“I never asked you why you and Kellen switched apartments,” I murmur. My limbs are heavy, and I’m sore in various places, thanks to Cam’s remarkable stamina. We’ve had sex three times in the last two hours—twice in bed and once in the shower.
Cam trails his fingers up my spine and presses a kiss to my temple. “My coach thought a change of scenery would do me good.”
I tilt my head and gaze up at him, smiling. “And did it?”
The smile he returns is soft and sweet. “Aye.” He pauses for a moment, his smile fading. “And no.”
I know what he means. We both hear the clock ticking down to zero in the background.
“What did you need a change of scenery for?”
After another pause, Cam sighs heavily. “My life had become . . . unmanageable.”
The pregnant underage girl Michael mentioned immediately comes to mind. I’m loath to bring it up and ruin an otherwise beautiful moment, but if I’ve got only a few days to find out everything I can about Cameron McGregor, I’m doing it. “That teenager, you mean.”
“Aye. Among other things. I was drinkin’ way too much. Lashin’ out at everyone. I’ve never been great at dealin’ constructively with my anger, even after years of therapy.”
“You were in therapy? For years?”
“I worked on my head as hard as I worked on my body. Can’t say the effect was as successful, but yeah. Therapy. Seein’ how badly my mum was mind fucked by life, I’ve always been into self-improvement. I also read a lot. Everything, really, biographies to history to politics. I didn’t go to college—gettin’ through secondary school with a learnin’ disability was tough enough—but I do love to read.”
He’s all that he is, and he loves books. Why, universe? Why give me this with someone who has a life on the other side of the world? I snuggle closer to him, breathing in his wonderful, warm scent, swallowing around the lump in my throat. “You don’t seem particularly angry to me, prancer.”
He chuckles and nuzzles his nose into my hair. “Beauty tames the savage beast, I suppose.”
My heart glows at hearing him call me Beauty, but I hate the thought of him being unhappy. My maternal instinct wants to hug him close to my chest and fight off the wolves for him, but another instinct tells me that his wolves are all on the inside, not out.
“Awkward segue alert.”
His chest shakes with suppressed laughter. “Okay. Go.”
“The lawsuit you’re in, the one I overheard you talking with someone on the phone about. Is it related to the pregnant teenager?”
He nods. “She’s suin’ me for paternity.”
When I gasp, he’s quick to add, “I’m not the father, lass. I might not be a pillar of morality, but I know enough to steer clear of adolescents.”
“I know. I believed you before when you told me it wasn’t true. How old is she?”
“Sixteen.”
“Oh my God! She’s a child!”
His voice turns dry. “You wouldn’t say that if you saw her picture. Or got a look inside her mind. She’s a cunning little thing. Wants attention, knows how to get it.”
“I think you’d better just tell me the story, because I’m cooking up some really scary scenarios in my mind right now, Cam.”
He absentmindedly combs his fingers through my hair as he speaks. “The story, to put it in a nutshell, is that I’m a target. A big dumb bulls-eye. I’ve done myself no favors with the way I act—drunk and disorderly, my ‘dating’ history, so to speak. My barrister thinks it’s a miracle I haven’t seen more of these kinds of accusations.” His laugh is chillingly dark. “Lucky me.”
I wait, holding my breath, until he continues.
“I had a party at my house. I was always havin’ parties. Havin’ people around makes me feel better. Less . . . antsy. My house was always filled with people. Friends—if you could call them that—teammates, strangers, whoever.”
I think of the strip poker party he had the first night we met, the anonymous girl he picked up in a bar, and shudder to think what would’ve happened if I lived on a different floor and we’d never met. He might have some random woman accusing him of fathering her unborn child here, too.
Maybe truthfully this time.
“One night over the summer, this guy brings his sister. She looks twenty, at least. Full makeup, high heels, the works. The party gets wild. By three a.m., I’m passed out on the lawn in the backyard. When I wake up in the mornin’, the place is a wreck and everyone’s gone except this girl, who I find cryin’ in my kitchen, lookin’ a mess. I ask her what’s wrong, she says her brother left and she has no way home. So, idiot me, I offer to drive her. And that’s it. That’s all I did: drove her home. The next week I got a visit from the police, who wanted to discuss how I’d like to plead to sexual coercion under the Sexual Offences Act.”
I’m queasy. Maybe hearing this story wasn’t such a good idea after all. “So she claimed the two of you had sex?”
“Aye. I was drunk, but I bloody well wasn’t drunk enough to forget that. I never saw her after she first came in. So my legal team interviews everyone from the party, and it turns out no one can corroborate her bein’ near me at any time. Because there was no physical evidence, either, and she had no witnesses to back up her story, the charges weren’t filed. But by then the news had picked up the story. I was called everything from a child molester to a rapist.”
He pauses to draw a breath. The tension in his body radiates off him in waves. “That kind of stink doesn’t wash off.”
“Oh, Cam. That’s awful.”
“That’s not even the worst part. Two months later, she finds out she’s pregnant and files a paternity suit against me.”
“But all it would take would be a DNA test to prove you’re not the father!”
“Aye. Which she won’t submit to, claiming it can hurt the unborn child. So I’m stuck waitin’ until she gives birth so we can get the bloody test done and prove I’m innocent. In the meantime, she’s all over the news, cryin’ about how I took advantage of her.”
I’m furious on his behalf. “But that’s not fair! She’s lying!”
He sounds weary when he replies. “That’s the price I have to pay for refusin’ to settle the suit. Her barristers offered me a deal to keep her quiet, but I refused because that’s blackmail. It’ll all come out in the wash once the baby’s born, but until then, it’s a circus with me in the center ring.”
“But can’t you countersue her for defamation of character?”
He says gently, “If anyone’s to blame for my character assassination, lass, it’s me. And she’s a child who’s obviously messed up in the head. What good would it do in the end?”
This is all very depressing. “I wish there was something I could do to help. I hate that you’re going through this.”
He turns his face to my hair, inhaling deeply. “You’ve already helped, lass. You have no idea how much.”
His voice is husky with emotion, deep and raw, and it brings the hot prick of tears to the back of my eyes. We lie quietly for a few moments, just breathing, until he starts to speak again.
“This is gonna sound so fucking weird.”
“I’m already worried.”
He draws a breath, then blurts, “You remind me of my mother.”
“Speaking of awkward segues! I’ll just be here trying not to be icked out by that, thanks. You couldn’t wait to lay that gem on me until we weren’t naked in bed?”
He chuckles. “I know. Sorry. What I mean is . . .” He struggles for a moment to find the right words. “How you’re a natural caretaker. How you know how to make people feel good about themselves without tryin’. How you’re always honest.” His voice drops. “How you feel like home.”
I close my eyes and breathe deeply in and out, which doesn’t help my voice breaking when I say, “You’re killing me here, prancer.”
He pulls me tighter against him, hugging me hard with those muscle-bound arms. “Are we gonna talk about the elephant in the room?”
I know what he means, but I make a joke to avoid it, because if nothing else, I’m an expert at avoiding tough conversations and uncomfortable emotional moments with bad humor. “Do you have a name for that thing? Because I’ve secretly been calling it Godzilla.”
“I’m not talkin’ about my dick, lass, and you know it.”
I scrunch down a few inches, hiding my face in his pecs. “Have I ever mentioned that you have beautiful breasts? Because you do. Man breasts are highly underrated.”
Cam’s deep sigh stirs my hair. “I have to go back to Scotland on the third.”
He lets it hang there, a loaded gun pointed at our fledgling relationship, just trying out its shaky newborn legs. When I don’t say anything, he adds, “Trainin’ for the new season starts on the sixth or I’d stay longer—”
“No,” I interrupt, my voice muffled against his skin. “You can’t stay. You have to go back to your life.”
And I have to figure out mine. What’s left of it. I wonder whether a job at McDonald’s or Starbucks would be better suited to my skill set?
His voice thick, Cam says, “Come with me.”
My heart starts to pound frantically, leaving me breathless. I momentarily lose the power of speech, which is a good thing because my mental state at the moment could best be described as “standing out on a ledge.”
“I’ll buy you a ticket, one with an open-ended return date so you can stay as long as you want. Take some vacation time, see if you like Scotland . . . why’re you shakin’ your head?”
“You know it’s impossible,” I whisper, hating how weepy I sound. These kinds of moments call for the type of frontier-woman fortitude I don’t have. I’m pretty sure I’ll be wiping my snot from his chest any minute.
“Lass—”
“I’m thirty-six, Cam. You’re twenty-nine. I’ve got neuroses older than you. You’re a glamorous, famous person whose house is always filled with people and parties, and I’m a homebody who only socializes with my cat. You’ll end up resenting me. I’ll end up homesick, feeling like a burden. We both have pretty significant problems we have to fix in our lives, and using each other as crutches isn’t going to do anything but create more messes.”
After a long, tense moment, Cam says, “Wow. That was bloody depressin’. Try again. And this time keep it short and just say yes.”
I groan and roll over onto my other side. If I thought that would work as a final punctuation on the conversation, Cam puts that idea to rest immediately by winding his arm around my waist and dragging me backward against him.
He puts his lips against my ear and speaks softly and slowly, like you would to a scared wild animal. Or someone really stupid.
“Number one, I don’t give a fuck about our age difference. Neither should you. Number two, my house is always filled with people because I’m lonely, not because I love parties. Two B, my life isn’t glamorous. Before I met you, it was a car goin’ a hundred kilometers an hour straight toward a cliff. Number three, the only thing I’ll ever resent about you is your relentless commitment to put yourself down. I don’t have an answer to the possibility that you might get homesick, but I bloody sure would do my best to make sure you feel as at home in my home as you do here. And number fucking four, whatever problems we have in our lives would be made significantly better by bein’ with the only person either one of us can trust.
“You’re not a crutch to me, Joellen. You’re a gift. If you don’t want to come to Scotland because you just don’t want to be with me, have the balls to say it, but don’t feed me any more excuses. And stop applyin’ your worst-case-scenario thinkin’ to this thing between us—keep that negative bullshit in check.”
There’s a long, terrible silence in which I stare out the window at the flurries of snow and try my damnedest to keep myself together even though he just completely broke me apart.
Normally this is where I’d burst into tears and hurry home to stress eat. No—that’s incorrect. Normally there’s no universe where a smokin’ hot pink-bathrobe-wearing famous athlete just screwed me silly and invited me to come live with him in Europe, but apparently this is my new normal, so I’m just going to have to suck it up and deal with it the best way I know how.
“I bet you probably only have, like, vanilla ice cream at your house, though.”
Cam starts to laugh, softly at first, but then he gives over to it and collapses against the bed, shaking the mattress and both of us as the gales overtake him.
“Sheesh, prancer. You’re crap with staying mad at someone, you know that?”
“No, lass.” He drags me on top of him—manhandling me in that wonderful way he has that makes me feel tiny and feminine and grateful for his dedication to growing his muscles so large—and gazes up at me, smiling. “You’re just too weird and wonderful to stay mad at for long.”
He kisses me, his hands in my hair and a smile on his mouth. He tucks me in under his arm, and I listen to his breathing grow deeper and more even until I know he’s asleep.
I lie next to him and breathe him in one last time, telling myself it’s for the best if I slip out before he wakes so we can avoid the inevitable morning-after awkwardness.
Then I gather my dress and shoes from the floor and tiptoe out, closing the door softly behind me.