Wild in the Moonlight

Eleven

Cameron watched his daughter’s Jeep bounce out of his driveway. It had rained the last five days in September. His gravel driveway could have been renamed Mud Puddle Avenue. He waved another goodbye to Miranda and Kate.

The two girls were ecstatic he’d quit Jeunnesse and come home from France for good. They’d both asked about living with him-which could happen, if their mother agreed. He wasn’t that sure what the girls really wanted or needed yet, but in the meantime he was less than two hours from their home. They could visit him anytime they wanted, especially now that Miranda had a driver’s license.

When the car rounded the curve out of sight, he stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and aimed for the old shake-shingled cottage. The surrounding woods were starting to change color, picking up tips of gold and vermilion and bronze. The brook, at the back of the property, glistened in the sunlight. He took in a long clean breath, wanting to feel like he belonged here.

He didn’t.

He wanted to. He’d loved the place when he bought it, even though at the time it was only to have a house close to his daughters for their visits here. And he’d quit Jeunnesse once he’d finished Violet’s business and knew she was going to be set up any way she wanted to be in the future. At that point, though, he knew he no longer wanted to continue with that job. The work had been good to him and for him, but was nothing remotely what he wanted in his life anymore.

He’d thought-perhaps crazily-that he could recapture the feeling he had with Violet. He wanted that feeling of belonging. Of roots. He wanted a red barn and a stone fence. Rocks. Insane neighbors. A place private enough to make wild love in the moonlight with his one and only lover.

He stomped up the porch steps and pushed open the door, thinking darkly that he wanted a woman who cried at the drop of a hat, who made strange and wonderful food, who took in no end of cats and neighbors, who wore Victorian lace and neon-orange underpants.

Nothing but lonely silence greeted him in the house.

It was funny, but coming home, he’d made all kinds of foolish assumptions. For sure, he hadn’t blindly assumed that Violet was ready to talk about wild, crazy things like marriage. But it was going to be so much easier to see her now, easier to talk, easier to be together. He’d planned to try a relentless romantic assault by courting her in all the old-fashioned ways.

It had never once occurred to him that she wouldn’t answer his notes or phone calls.

In the brick kitchen he poured the last mug of coffee from this morning’s pot. The brew was now thicker than mud, not that he cared.

One of the girls had left a pink sock, and a couple of teen girl magazines zooed up the pristine neatness of the place, but otherwise there was nothing inside but wood and a stone fireplace and big leather furniture and silence.

It was tough, accepting that he’d misunderstood everything that mattered. He’d thought he was ready to settle down. He’d thought he was ready to finally belong. He’d thought he’d finally come to terms with his father’s legacy of fearing a place could own him instead of the other way around. Instead, he’d discovered that his lack of interest in a home had nothing to do with his father.

All this time, it had simply been about finding a woman he wanted to belong with.

He got it now. He got it all. Except, he couldn’t seem to believe that he’d come this far, hurt this much, finally found himself-and found her-and then had to accept that he’d lost her.

The phone rang, a shock of sound that made him whip around and spill a few coffee drops from his mug. He grabbed the receiver and tucked it under his ear.

“Cameron Lachlan?”

He heard the woman’s scream, and immediately recognized the voice as Daisy Campbell, Violet’s oldest sister. He’d always liked her. She was breathtaking, an exotic beauty, fiercely independent, her own woman. She’d been living with some artist in the south of France, which was how she’d been in his “Jeunnesse neighborhood” these last years. But the thing was, they’d always gotten along well, so it was nearly impossible to connect the cool-eyed beauty with the woman yelling at him across the ocean.

“Lachlan, did I or did I not tell you that I’d kill you if you broke my sister’s heart?!”

“What?”

“I told you she was vulnerable. I told you to be good to her or to leave her alone. I thought you were a decent guy!”

“Um, I could have sworn I was, too-”

“Well, I’m leaving Provence for good and coming back across the Atlantic. And the very minute I get home, I’m going to kill you. I’m not sure how yet. I’ve never killed anything before. But where I grew up, buster, a man didn’t get a woman pregnant and then take off.”

“What?” This time he’d been lifting the mug to his mouth. Only, he dropped it. Sludgy hot coffee spattered all over the place. The ceramic mug broke in a half dozen pieces. “What did you say?’

“Give me a break, Lachlan! I don’t care whether she told you or not. If you weren’t going to use some protection, you knew perfectly well you were taking a risk. You know damn well how babies are made!”

“But not for your sister.” He couldn’t seem to catch his breath, couldn’t seem to think.

“What’s that supposed to mean, not for my sister?”

He opened his mouth to answer but then couldn’t. In a flash he realized that Violet had never told her family about the infertility, how her ex-husband had treated her, none of it. She loved her sisters, talked about them all the time. So it must have hurt more than she could bear to even try to share it.

Except with him.

She’d cared enough to share it with him. The thought registered, but it was pretty hard to concentrate. Daisy was still winding up, and beauty or no beauty, she could yell like a drill sergeant. “Don’t even try playing any stupid games with me, Lachlan. I’ve heard every excuse a man can make up for irresponsibility. I can smell them. I told you my sister was vulnerable. All I asked was that you be decent to her, be nice, be fair. If you two ended up in the sack…all right, I admit I thought you’d like each other. I even admit I thought an affair was a good idea for our Vi. But to get her pregnant, you scoundrel, you creep, you turkey, you unfeeling, revolting, irresponsible… Cameron, why the hell aren’t you answering me?”

“Daisy, do me a favor and don’t tell your sister that you called me.”

For the first time since the phone call started, Daisy stopped frothing fire and brimstone. Confusion silenced her-although not for long. “Do you a favor? Do you a favor? Did you want me to do you that favor before or after I murder you?!”

He didn’t mean to hang up on her. He just forgot she was there. Violet? Pregnant with his child? And once those wheels started spinning, they seemed to pick up speed nonstop.

He was in upstate New York, not Vermont. He had fresh food in the fridge, a coffeepot on, a load of clothes heaped in the washer, bills waiting to be paid on the counter, a dentist appointment two days from now. He couldn’t just take off.

Fifteen minutes later he started the car.

If everything went perfectly-no pit or food stops, no construction zones-he could make the trip in four hours.

Naturally he ran into three construction zones and one minor accident. He combined a pit stop with a run on fast food and strong coffee. Even this early in fall, the sun dropped fast. By the time he crossed the border into Vermont, dusk had fallen. Blustery clouds stole the last of daylight, and then there was only that quiet blacktop and him.

He remembered the rolling hills. The stone fences. The white steepled churches in White Hills. The pretty red barns and winding roads. Every familiar sight heightened both his anticipation and his fear.

He pulled into her yard after nine, not realizing until then how long his heart had been pounding, or that the burger he’d wolfed down was still sitting in his stomach like a clunky ball. Yellow lights glowed in her windows. A cornstalk scarecrow sat at the bottom of her porch steps, keeping two of the cats company. A pair of giant pumpkins, still uncarved, framed her door. Pruning shears sat on the porch swing, not put away.

He vaulted the steps of the porch, hiked toward the door and then abruptly stopped. Faster than lightning, he tucked, buttoned, straightened. Then he realized that, hell, he hadn’t brushed his hair since he could even remember. And he should have shaved. Still…he’d come this far, and God knew Violet had seen him in worse shape than in an old black sweater and cords. So he knocked.

Nothing. No answer.

He knocked again, louder this time.

Still, there was no response. So he poked his head in. Smells immediately swarmed his senses-apples and cinnamons and cloves. A bowl of mums nested on the hearth. A copper pot held long, tall grasses and reeds. Lavender-naturally-hung upside down from the kitchen beams. Two cats spotted him, remembered him for the sucker he was and leaped down from the rockers to get petted.

Still, there was no sight of Violet, only the sound of her. She was singing from somewhere upstairs, assuming one could call the sounds emanating from her throat “singing.” Her sister Daisy could scream like a shrew, where Vi’s singing voice, he thought tenderly, resembled steel scratching steel-at a high pitch.

“Violet?” He had to let her know he was there, didn’t want to scare her. “Vi?”

The caterwauling stopped. A hesitant voice called down, “Cameron?” But then followed through with a swift, “Don’t answer that. Obviously you can’t be Cameron.”

Oh, God. It was like coming home. Only his ditsy Violet could make irrational comments like that, and maybe he was crazy, maybe he was risking his heart and his life, but he took the stairs three at a time and galloped down the hall. He wouldn’t have known positively where that ghastly operatic voice had been coming from, if there hadn’t been puffs of fragrant steam dancing out the open door of the master bath.

He leaned both arms against the doorjamb, trying to catch his breath. Yet almost immediately he realized that he would likely never catch his breath because his heart had completely stopped.

She was in the bathtub. No longer singing the blues, just sunken in the warm water to the tips of her nipples, her long hair twisted and clipped out of the way. Two cats sat on the porcelain rim, balanced precariously but acting the part of sentinels. The bathwater wasn’t sudsy. In fact, he could see clearly to her pale white skin under the surface, the long slim legs, the white curve of her hip, the plump breasts. And the tummy.

His gaze fell on her tummy and his heart stopped all over again.

“Hi,” she said, as if she regularly greeted strange men in her bathtub. Now, though, he knew her well. Doing the unpredictable, the ditsy, the flaky, was how she’d learned to protect herself-especially from men wanting to look too closely. He wasn’t fooled anymore. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice and see the gamut of emotions in her eyes. Pain. Longing. Love.

How could he have missed that the love was there?

“Smells great in here,” he murmured.

“It should. It’s my personal recipe for a bath to take away your cares, no matter how heavy your heart is. It’s got a little lavender, a little marjoram, a little peppermint and some secret ingredients I’ll never tell anyone.” She looked at him with those clear, soft, vulnerable eyes and then took a breath.

“Except you, Cam. I’ll tell you. I mix a little lily of the valley and jasmine in there. That’s my secret.”

“Aha,” he said. And heeled off his right shoe. Then his left. His black sweater peeled off by a miracle. It had to be a miracle, because he was too fumble-fingered to do it himself. “I like the tummy.”

She glanced down. “I’ve really been on a milkshake binge.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason for the tummy.”

“No?” She sucked in a breath when he peeled off his cords and shorts. “Um, Cameron. You’re going to smell like flowers if you come in here.”

“I’d care about that if I were a sissy. But I happen to be a tough guy. A tough guy always does what a tough guy has to do.” The cats scattered when he stepped in. The water whooshed up to the top of the tub and splashed over. She didn’t notice or look. She only looked at him, pulled her knees up.

“You couldn’t get a bath closer to home?”

“Well, that’s the problem, chére. It took me this long, not to take a bath, but to realize that this is home.”

Total silence fell for a moment. He sank in, knee to knee, eye to eye, and reached out a hand. She folded her fingers with his. “I didn’t think you wanted a home, Cameron Lachlan.”

“I don’t know if I ever told you about my dad. I loved him. He wasn’t a bad guy, nothing like that. But he built his whole life around possessions. Things owned him instead of the other way around. He was never home for us. He never had time for us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry. I just needed you to understand how I turned into a vagabond. I just never wanted that to happen to me. I wanted people to matter, not things. I wanted the freedom to love people, not things.” He laved her feet, since they were easy to reach. And her knees. He got her knees really, really clean. “And then I met you. And lost you. And realized I was doing exactly what he did wrong. Putting a barrier between myself and who I wanted to spend time with, who I wanted to love. Who I needed in my life.”

He moved up from the knees, to those long, silky white thighs. Her phone rang. It seemed a measure of how well he knew her, and them, that neither even blinked or made any effort to answer it. Phones were always going to ring in this house. They’d wait.

“I quit Jeunnesse. Came back to my place in New York, saw my girls. But the whole time I kept thinking about making a whole different kind of life. I’ve got the money to buy the land, put in a big five-hundred acres of lavender. It’d be adventurous, challenging. Hard work, but still a lot of free traveling time in the winter. Time to be impulsive any way a couple might want to be. Of course, we have to find a house-sitter for the cats. And obviously it’s not your usual life-it’d only work for people who really liked the land, got a charge out of getting their hands dirty-”

“So…you came back for the land, did you?”

“Nope.” He could see that haunted look leaving her eyes. And she wasn’t backing away from him. But she didn’t move toward him.

“You always sounded so positive, Cam. That you didn’t want to settle down.”

“I don’t want to settle down. I want to live with you and be your lover. Forever. I don’t want to settle for anything. I want to create exactly the life that works for us. I was going to say for the two of us-but maybe for the three or four or five of us, if for any reason the family somehow grew.”

Again she went still, seemed to even stop breathing. “Daisy called you, didn’t she?”

He didn’t directly answer that, because this wasn’t about her sister or anything her sister had said to him. It was about the two of them. And to make sure he had her attention, he took her warm, slippery hands in his. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for a woman to marry a guy who has nearly grown children…at least until you’ve met the children. I’m totally positive you’d get on with them like a house afire, but they are teenagers, which means they stay up nights trying to think up new ways to make adults’ lives difficult. For myself, though, I’ve always liked kids. Nice kids, wild kids, difficult kids, doesn’t matter to me. I’d love more.”

“Lachlan, that isn’t at all what you said before.”

“I know, I know. I wasn’t exactly lying before. But I was trying to make sure you know I loved you for you. That you were what mattered to me, not whether you could have kids or not. I love you first. I want you first.”

Tears started to well up in her soft eyes, so he started talking faster.

“Violet, you’re probably ten times more woman than I can handle, but I’d like to try. But I want you to absolutely know that my loving you has nothing to do with kids. If you want some, we can adopt or foster, or try working with those skinny tubes…hell, maybe we can just take in more cats. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just care that we work together to find choices that are right for us.”

She took a long, shaky breath. “It’s possible that this tummy isn’t caused by too many milkshakes.”

“I thought the skinny tubes were pretty much a for-sure problem.”

“So did I. Every doctor I went to told me my chances of conception were minuscule.” Her fingertips caressed his. Her gaze seemed to caress his face at the same time. “You must have awfully determined little seeds in there, Lachlan.”

“I prefer to think of them as skillful. And smart enough to go after what they want.” He wanted to draw her into his arms, right there, right then. They had a lifetime to finish all this talking business, and the old-fashioned tub was big, but not necessarily big enough for the rest of the night he had planned. Yet he had to say gently, “You should have told me you were pregnant, chére.”

“I wanted to and I would have. But I had to think about how, Cam. I never wanted you to feel trapped. Nothing works when a person feels trapped. And I love you. Of everyone in the universe, Cameron Lachlan, I so want you to be happy. I want you to have what you need in your life.”

There, now. He drew her on top of him. Warm water sloshed on the floor, but still he finally had her, breast to breast, tummy to tummy. Heart to heart. “That’s easy, then, because what I need is you. In my life, all my life.”

“That’s a two-way street. I love you so much. And I want you in my life, all my life,” she whispered, and blessed him with an eyes-closed, drowning-defying, promise-invoking kiss. When they came up for air, his eyes were moist and hers were dry.

It was going to be a hell of a thing, if she turned him into an emotional kind of guy. Chemists were supposed to be rational, calm, cold types, but somehow Cameron didn’t think that was going to work. Not anymore.

He’d always tried to be careful, not to let anything own him. Yet Violet owned his heart-and it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Of course, that was just today.

They had a lifetime to explore all they could be together.