Cam knew he was being an ass. It was like landing in Toronto had prompted him to immediately start living down to his reputation. It was a familiar groove to slip back into, and he simply couldn’t help himself. Jay didn’t know the man he had become, or had been trying to become. Nor did his mom. They didn’t know that three years of military service had given him some much needed perspective on his lot in life. That he’d drawn a line when he’d signed up for the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment, a reserve regiment of the Canadian Forces headquartered in Thunder Bay. On one side was his old life, on the other, the army. The army and Christie: those were the things that were supposed to have made him into a better man.
At least he hadn’t told Jay and Mom about his now-dead plan to go to university so he could become an officer. The discharge aside, what had he been thinking? He wasn’t post-secondary material.
Anyway, none of it mattered now. Meeting people’s expectations was easier than upending them. He’d spent most of his life doing that, and, perversely, he was good at it.
But, he reminded himself as he pulled the Corvette into a municipal parking garage, Jane didn’t have any expectations of him. Or she hadn’t until he’d started harassing her at the steakhouse. “So what’s your deal?” he asked, jogging around to her side of the car before she could get out and offering her a hand. ’Vettes were notoriously low, and it could be hard to hoist yourself out of them. “How come you’re free to babysit me on a Wednesday afternoon?”
She ignored his hand and levered herself out of the car. “I’m not babysitting you.”
He raised his eyebrows as he led her to the pay station and stuck his credit card in.
“I’m not really sure why you find it so incredible that your brother and future sister-in-law would send someone to greet you at the airport.”
Yeah, nice try. But he let it slide. “Why you, though? You don’t have to be at a job of some sort? You’re independently wealthy, what?”
She barked an incredulous laugh at that. “I’m about as far from independently wealthy as it’s possible to get.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, eyeing the fancy jeans. “You clean up too well.”
“Oh, I do okay now, but my dad died when I was a kid, and my mom didn’t really have any skills, so things were…tough for a while.”
“You’re a self-made woman.” He respected that.
“I guess I am.” The corners of her mouth turned up a bit. She liked that notion. “But still in touch enough with my roots to notice that you’re probably going to pay more to park that thing for a week than you did to rent it.” She cocked her head at the machine, which was printing a receipt that was, in fact, for a startlingly high amount of money.
He had plenty of money saved. While on his two tours he’d had no living expenses, so the vast majority of his pay had gone into the bank, and for the year in between them, he’d lived cheaply, socking away all his bartending tips and living in a room above the bar. He’d been saving for tuition. Now that that wasn’t the case, he had a comfortable cushion to rely on while he found his feet and figured out what the hell to do next. But he didn’t want to admit that Jane had been right about the car, so he pocketed the receipt and said, teasingly, “And how did you make your millions? Let me see. I bet you’re…an investment banker. Or maybe a teacher.” She was something rigid, he’d bet, something where she got to boss people around and adhere to rules.
“Actually, I’m a young-adult novelist.”
“Seriously?” That was the last thing he’d expected her to say. He held the exit door for her, and she preceded him onto a busy downtown sidewalk. “Would I know your books?”
She scoffed. “I doubt it.”
That stung, but he wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was only saying that he was too old to know her books. But it kind of felt like she was suggesting he was sub-literate. He wasn’t a scholar, sure, but he wanted to tell her that his Kindle was pretty much the only thing that had kept him sane—if he could call himself that—on his two tours. But that would make him sound a little too desperate for her approval. So he settled for, “Try me.”
“Well, I’ve been at it since university, so I have a bunch of books out. They’re part of a series called the Clouded Cave, and it’s turning out to be pretty popular. I’m writing book seven right now.” She was picking up speed, both with her feet and with her words, deftly dodging slower-moving pedestrians. “The series is about a girl named Stephanie who’s exploring a cave, and it turns out to be a gateway to another world. She takes some friends with her in subsequent books.”
“Like Narnia,” he said. “Actually, like a lot of books. Alice in Wonderland.”
She was looking at him oddly. “Yes. Portal fiction. There’s a reason it endures.”
“Portal fiction?”
“Kids cross over into another world through some kind of portal or door—the wardrobe, the looking glass. In mine, it’s a cave.”
“Right. So why does it endure?”
“These kinds of stories let kids be heroic. They let them practice skills they don’t get to use in our ordered, capitalist world—both the characters and, vicariously, the kids reading the books.”
What he said was, “Makes sense,” because her analysis struck him as spot-on. But what he thought was, “Whoa.” He’d known she was smart from the moment he met her, but wow. Also: This woman was creating an alternative world in which the rigid strictures of society didn’t apply? Apparently, Muddy Jane contained multitudes.
“Here we are,” she said, cutting off their little on-the-go literary chat, which was just as well because the idea of her being an author, much less one who wrote about magical portals to other lands, was weirding him out.
She led him through a grand entranceway into a marble lobby and marched up to a concierge desk. “I’m Jane Denning. Jay Smith’s fiancée Elise Maxwell was supposed to leave me a key.” It didn’t escape Cam’s notice that the key had been left in Jane’s name and not his.
“Yes, here it is, Ms. Denning,” said the suit-wearing concierge, who then escorted them to the elevators and hit the call button. When the elevator arrived, he held the door for them and reached inside and hit the button for the eighteenth floor.
Damn. He’d known Jay did all right, but he wasn’t prepared for how far a cry this was from their trailer in Thunder Bay. When Jane unlocked the door of unit 1803, he effected an air of casualness as they made their way into the suite. He wanted to walk around and look really hard at everything, to get a sense of the man his brother had become. Because Jay was so much older and had moved to Toronto to go to school when Cam was seven, Cam had always been fascinated by him. As a kid, it had been hero worship, but in later years he’d thought of his brother almost as a character in one of his favorite video games—familiar, compelling, but ultimately from another world.
He took in a fancy kitchen with a breakfast bar that opened on to a living room. But nothing reminded him of his brother. The last time he had visited Jay, when Cam was in high school, his brother’s apartment hadn’t looked much more mature than a dorm room—huge TV, sofa, gaming system, and not a lot else. But here, the walls were a pale gray-green and the room was full of fluffy furniture and brightly colored art.
He barked a laugh. “This does not look like the brother I used to know.”
“It’s Elise’s influence, probably,” Jane said as she went around opening windows. “Jay pretty much lives at her house these days, but she can’t see a room without spiffing it up.” She yanked open the door to the balcony. “It’s hot in here.”
“You should try Iraq,” he said before he could think better of it.
“Yeah…” She trailed off. “I guess I shouldn’t complain.”
He hadn’t meant to make her feel bad. He’d enjoyed rattling Jane Denning this afternoon, but he wasn’t out to make her feel genuinely bad. “Let’s see what my brother has to drink,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen. “Beer is definitely on my list.” He opened the massive stainless steel fridge. “Ah! Success!” Jay hadn’t gotten too big for his britches—no fancy microbrews here. He grabbed a couple of Labatts and made his way back to the living room, holding one out for Jane even as he took a pull of his.
“No, thanks.”
She was back to looking like the prim detention teacher.
“Suit yourself.” He grabbed the remote and flopped onto the fancy sofa. “Do you know any good bars around here?”
“We are not going to a bar.”
“No, we are not going to a bar. I am going to a bar. Later. Alone. For the purposes of (a) getting drunk, and (b) picking up a woman. Maybe two.” That last part was a lie, but he was on a roll with riling her, and he couldn’t seem to stop.
“I suppose that’s also on the list?”
“Hey,” he said, “I’m single, young, and back on Canadian soil.” He wasn’t going to apologize.
She said nothing, simply stood there staring at him. He turned on the TV. When, after he’d flipped channels for a minute or so she still didn’t move, merely kept standing there with her silent judgment, he said, “You’re dismissed, Jane.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your babysitting services are no longer needed. You can go back to your cloudless cave.”
“I’m not babysitting you,” she said.
“So you keep saying.”
And eff him if she didn’t then turn around, and without a word, walk out of the condo.
* * *
“You just left him?”
Jane had to hold the phone away from her ear to buffer Elise’s shrieking. It was hard to explain. What could she say? That Cameron was like a little brother who knew how to push all her buttons, but also not a little brother because many of those buttons, it turned out, were sexual? She settled for, “He was an ass.”
“I know he’s an ass. That’s the whole point.”
“How did the tea sets turn out?” Jane asked weakly. It was way too late to ask the real tea-set-related question, which was what the hell are they for?
There was a beat of silence. “The tea sets are fine.”
“Elise, I’m sorry, I—”
“I gave you one job.” Elise’s voice had grown small. “I asked you to do this one thing for me.”
“The wedding isn’t until a week from Saturday, and it’s not even in the city. What can Cameron possibly do on a random Wednesday night 125 miles and a week and a half away from your wedding that will have an impact on it?” She wasn’t sure why she was arguing, because Elise’s basic point was undeniable. Jane had fallen down on the job. But she felt compelled to try to talk some sense into her friend. “He’s out by himself and doesn’t know anyone who knows you.” Unless he accidentally picks up one of Elise’s friends as he crosses items off his stupid list. Elise and Jay had a lot of friends in the building and in the neighborhood. And what if one of those friends hooked up with him and then they met again at the wedding?
Or what if Cameron hooked up with one of Jay and Elise’s married friends who was cheating on her husband, and then they met again at the wedding and the husband tried to kick Cameron’s ass and there was a massive brawl?
And what if, in the course of said massive brawl, they knocked over some candles and burned the wedding down? After all, Cameron was an arsonist, wasn’t he?
Jane would be the first to admit that she had an overactive imagination. It was a job hazard. But crap. She believed in the butterfly effect—a seemingly small action could have huge consequences down the line. And she wasn’t convinced that Cameron was capable of “small actions.” So, yeah, the more she thought about it, the less she could blame Elise’s demands about babysitting Cameron on her bridezilla-itis.
Elise was unmoved by Jane’s logic. “Jay’s mom called. Jay told her Cameron had arrived safely but had to make bullshit excuses as to why he wasn’t answering his phone,” Elise said. “She hasn’t seen him for five months, and he can’t pick up the phone when she calls?”
His poor mother. “She must be so proud of him,” Jane said, noting that she’d said the same thing to Cameron. Why did she care so much whether Cameron’s mother was proud of him? “You know, being the war hero and all.”
“I’m not sure hero is the right word,” Elise said. “There’s something funny about his discharge. He won’t talk about it. But no one was expecting him back this early.”
“Dishonorable discharge?” Jane had no idea what a person had to do to be dishonorably discharged from the armed forces, but whatever it took, she wouldn’t put it past Cameron.
“Apparently we know that phrase from American movies. They call it ‘released from service’ here. And there are all kinds of degrees of that. But the point is Jay is pretty sure he left under shady circumstances. There was some kind of…proceeding overseas, and all of a sudden he’s back and he’s not in the army anymore.”
Jane thought of Cameron playing the war hero card with the poodle waitress at lunch. What a complete cad.
“Anyway,” Elise went on, “the point is, this guy is a wild card and—”
She stopped abruptly, as if censoring herself, but Jane heard what had gone unsaid. You let him get away.
“I’ll take care of it,” Jane said, getting out of bed where she’d been writing on her laptop—her poor, doomed book clearly wasn’t going to see any action until this wedding was over—and heading for her closet. She stripped off her pj bottoms and grabbed a drapey silk shirt—one of her “dressy” tees.
“How? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find that mofo and have him microchipped.”
“But how are you going to find him?” Elise wailed. “He could be anywhere.”
“Don’t worry about a thing, sweetie.” Jane slipped into a pair of hot pink flats. “I messed up, but I am on it now. On. It.”
Time to do a little rewriting of this whole Cameron story. Time to do a little rewriting of this whole Cameron character, in fact.
* * *
She found him four blocks from Jay’s building. After he wasn’t in the Fox and the Fiddle, the Raving Lunatic (though that would have been poetic justice), Bar Benjamin, or Zelda’s Big Gay Bar (she knew he wouldn’t be there, but she was nothing if not systematic, and since she’d decided to go into every bar she passed, she wasn’t going to skip it), she started to fear that he had gone downtown to an actual club. She wasn’t dressed for that, and she was too old for nightclubs. Hell, she’d been born too old for nightclubs. But bar number five, which, ironically, was called Bar Nine, was the jackpot. Or the booby prize, depending on your perspective.
He was sitting at the bar, leaning in toward a woman with long blond hair. Their heads nearly touched, like they were looking at something on the bar.
All right, children, Mary Poppins has arrived. Game on.
Except…She was unaccountably nervous. Clammy-hands, dry-mouth nervous. Which was stupid. She’d never gotten nervous when she’d been a teenager babysitting actual children. Maybe she needed a drink first. After her dad’s accident, she mostly avoided alcohol, but damned if this wedding wasn’t about to drive her to drink for the second time in two days. Though probably whatever she ordered here would be better than Earl Grey with whiskey.
She squeezed herself into a tiny corner table as far from the bar as it was possible to be and hid behind a menu—see, all those years of Nancy Drew came in handy sometimes. It wasn’t like Cameron and his prey were paying attention to anything outside their little circle of two, but it was better to be sure. She needed privacy to woman up for her mission. When a waiter arrived, she said, “I need a shot. Something strong but not disgusting. Basically, I don’t want my liquor to taste like liquor.”
“How about a B-52? It’s amaretto, Kahlua, and Cointreau.”
“Sold. Bring me a B-52.” She looked over to the bar. The blond was nuzzling Cameron’s neck. “Actually, make it two.”
* * *
The blond was reading Cam’s palm. No, Sherry was reading his palm. He kept having to reach for her name. It wasn’t sticking for some reason. He hadn’t had his palm read since he was in junior high and Mrs. Compton, one of their neighbors in the trailer park, bought a book and decided to try to make some cash on the side. He didn’t believe in it now, just like he hadn’t believed in it then, but he had believed in the unlimited stash of Oreos Mrs. Compton let him eat while she practiced on him.
He hadn’t tried to pick up a woman since before Christie. Between Alicia, his high school flame, and Christie, the only other girlfriend he’d ever had, there had been a period that Christie had jokingly called his “man-whore phase.” She hadn’t been wrong, and he was looking forward to a return to form—clearly, he wasn’t cut out for relationships.
But he was good at seduction. His current companion was all over him. He was gratified to know that even though he was out of practice, he still had the goods.
“Hmmm.” She kept leaning closer to better see the lines on his hand in the dim bar, and it had the effect of lining up her neck with his nose. She was wearing a lot of perfume, and it was really…perfumey perfume.
He wondered if there was any chance he could convince her to shower first. Or, hey, maybe shower during. But they’d have to go to her place because he obviously wasn’t taking her to Jay’s. He almost laughed, thinking about how well that would go over. He’d bolted on the big reunion, leaving Jay’s place before five, and had been ignoring his brother’s texts all evening. All of a sudden, as much as he’d wanted to see Jay, he just…couldn’t. He’d kept thinking about how Jane didn’t even know he existed. About how his brother hadn’t bothered to mention him once to his fiancée’s close friend. Not even a single, “Darn, my brother isn’t going to be able to make it back from Iraq for the wedding.”
So, yeah, it would have to be the blonde’s place.
Sherry’s place.
Someone edged into their space, and as he was about to tell the interloper to watch it, he heard a familiar voice.
“Cameron!”
“Jane?” What the hell?
Her eyes were suspiciously bright.
“Thought you could ditch me, did you?” she trilled in a voice he recognized as distinctly fake even though he’d only known her for nine hours. She turned to Sherry, who was watching them with wide eyes. Sherry snatched her hand from the bar, where it had been cradling Cam’s open palm. “Cameron,” Jane drawled, “aren’t you going to introduce me to your…new friend?”
Goddamn her. But what could he do? He was a jerk in some ways, but he was a jerk with good manners. His mother had drilled them into him, and for some reason, even though he’d disappointed her in every other way, the manners had stuck. “Jane, this is…” Shit. “Sherry!” He remembered just in time. “Sherry, Jane.”
“You know what?” Sherry said, flashing him an annoyed look, “I think I’m going to get going.”
He wanted to protest, to exhort her not to leave. But what would he say? That Jane was nothing to him? That, in fact, he’d only met her this morning? Such a protest would sound smarmy even to his own ears. Jane had made sure of it with her little performance, hadn’t she? So he smiled and bade Sherry a wistful good-bye.
Then he wiped the smile off his face and turned to Jane. “What the hell?”
“What the hell what?” she said, plopping onto the stool vacated by Sherry and flagging down the bartender. When the horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing hipster arrived, she said, “I’ll have a B-22. I’ve already had two, and they are delish!”
“You mean a B-52?” the bartender countered, settling his elbows on the bar in front of her and leaning in with a rakish smile that seemed to delight Jane. He, all pale and literary-looking, would be her type.
She did that nose-scrunching thing of hers, and Cam attempted not to find it cute. “Maybe? The Kahlua thing that is a shot of pure deliciousness?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hey, if I wanted a double, could I ask for a B-104? Ha!” She threw back her head and laughed at her own lame joke.
But the bartender did, too, the prick.
“Wait.” She scrunched again. “Is that math right?”
She was drunk. Or at least well on her way. He recognized the signs from his years behind the bar. “I think you’d better stick to the double-digits,” Cam said, not sure if he was talking to her or to the bartender.
She swiveled on her stool. “And what are you? My father? Oh, no, wait. My father is dead.”
“You just seem like maybe you should slow down.”
“I tell you what. Let’s start with a single, and we’ll take it from there,” said the bartender, assembling the layered shot. “See how the evening unfolds.” He winked.
“He’s actually right,” she said, stage-whispering to the bartender and cocking her head at Cam in a way that was the opposite of subtle. “I’m not usually much of a drinker.”
The bartender set the drink in front of her. “On the house.”
Cam rolled his eyes. Well, hell, if Jane could cock-block him, she was about to get a taste of her own medicine. He slung an arm around her shoulders. “I’m just looking out for you. Sweetie.” He let the last word unspool slowly, drawing out the endearment.
The bartender’s megawatt smile dimmed. Jane tried to shrug off Cam’s arm, but the drink-slinging poseur was gone. Mission accomplished.
Jane started to turn to him, her mouth open like she was about to let loose a torrent of words, but she stumbled in her seat a little. He tightened his arm around her to steady her and suppressed a grin. “So, not much of a drinker, eh?”
“I drink occasionally,” she said, turning thoughtful. Ah, it was so delightfully easy to redirect drunk people—at least a certain kind of non-belligerent drunk person. “I usually only drink with my girlfriends, though, and even then I only have one glass of wine.” She grinned. “Or one mug of spiked Earl Grey tea.”
“I know you’re going to have a hard time believing this,” he said, “but first-day-back-from-war aside, I’m usually with you on that.” He paused, not sure why he was compelled to say more. But she was drunk, and she was nearly finished with B-52 number three, so she probably wouldn’t even remember anything he said. “There was a lot of alcoholism in our neighborhood growing up. It wasn’t pretty.”
She whipped her head around and met his eyes for an instant before looking away again.
Ding, ding, ding.
Maybe they had something in common, after all. Cam had never met his father, but according to Jay, Angus MacKinnon had been prone to drunken rages, which is why his relationship with their mother had been so short-lived. She had kicked him out when she was still pregnant with Cam, in fact. And he was pretty sure Angus was partly responsible for making Jay so driven, for inspiring him to escape their shitty life. “I drank a lot when I was a teenager and into my early twenties,” he told Jane. Hell, there probably wasn’t a substance out there that he wouldn’t have gleefully ingested in the post-Alicia years.
“But you stopped?” she asked. “You just decided to stop and you…were able to?”
“Pretty much.” It was true. Part of his self-overhaul had been to cut way back on the booze, and even though the self-overhaul had failed, he was pretty sure he was going to keep cooling it on the booze. His years behind the bar cutting off mean drunks and consoling weepy drunks had pretty much sealed that deal. “When you see alcoholism in your family and your community…well, I didn’t like who I was becoming.”
“It’s not so much that I’m afraid I’ll turn into an alcoholic,” she said, but he noticed she hadn’t denied that there was alcoholism in her family. “It’s more that I’m…not into drawing attention to myself. I like things to be orderly.”
“You’re a control freak.” He wasn’t surprised.
“I like to think of life like writing a book,” she declared. “You can’t just sit down and ‘write a book.’” She made air quotes with her fingers. “You have to plan things. Be methodical. Disciplined. If you want things to happen a certain way—if you want people to behave a certain way—it requires specific behavior on your part. You know that saying? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? It’s true in books, and it’s true in life. You have to be careful.”
Well. That was quite the worldview. He wondered if Jane had been born so wound up or if something—or someone—had made her that way.
She waved at the bartender, and Cam sighed. She was now drunk enough that he could not in good conscience leave her alone. She had succeeded in ruining his plans for the evening, and there was nothing he could do about it short of leaving her in the clutches of Hipster Boy Bartender. And that was not happening.
She slid her empty shot glass toward the bartender. “May I please have another?”
“One more,” Cam said, and the bartender, apparently no longer interested in flirting now that he believed Jane was taken, nodded and set to work.
She pouted. “I thought we established that you’re not my father.”
“No. More like your babysitter. And not doing a very good job of it, either, because that fourth drink is going to put you over the edge.” If she really never had more than one drink, she probably had no idea how drunk she was. Those shots might taste like candy, but they were one hundred percent booze.
“Hey! I’m supposed to be babysitting you!”
“Busted!”
“What?” There was that damned nose scrunch again.
“You’ve only spent the entire day protesting that you’re not babysitting me, and—” Oh, shit, she was tipping toward him, as if in slow motion. He hopped off his stool, steadied her, and propped her up—the stools were backless—by leaning her back against his chest. She exhaled a sweet little sigh and burrowed back against him, as if his chest were a fluffy pillow. It put his nose level with her neck, and he gave her a sniff, purely for comparative purposes. There was none of Sherry’s heavy, musky scent. Just a clean, bright smell he was pretty sure was Eau du Ivory Soap. It was…surprisingly nice.
He shook himself out of his reverie. “Hey, so we should get you home. Let’s get a cab.”
She said nothing.
“Jane?” He twisted so he could see her face while still holding her up.
She was asleep.
He sighed. All right. He could always try again tomorrow night. Note to self: find a bar far, far away from Jay’s place.
Because come hell or high water, he was getting laid tomorrow night.