A Sweetheart For The Single Dad (The Camdens Of Colorado Book 8) (12 page)

“Advice he gave as much for his own sake, I’m assuming.”

Sawyer laughed. “He was pretty disgusted, yes.”

“But you took his advice.”

“Well, initially I did what any teenage boy would do. I rolled my eyes at him and said thinking about my mom when I liked a girl was gross. But after another couple of crash-and-burns with girls in college, I kind of did start watching what went on with my parents. And what I saw was that my mom is
not
a drama queen. She’s an easygoing person. It takes a lot to ruffle her. She doesn’t make a big deal out of things that aren’t a big deal. But, also, when it comes to my mom and dad’s relationship, my mom is pretty accepting of anything my dad wants to do. He wants to plant a garden, she says plant a garden. He wants to take up hiking, they take up hiking. He likes to watch Westerns, she watches Westerns.”

“Your dad calls the shots,” Lindie summarized.

“Not really, no. When my mom wants something, she lets him know. If she doesn’t, she says that, too. She isn’t a doormat or a pushover, she’s just...agreeable, I guess. Not demanding. Certainly not someone looking to pick a fight or to make trouble. And not hard to please.”

“So that’s what you switched to looking for?”

“Right.”

“But...?” Lindie said what seemed implied.

“But I guess I read women wrong because my string of not-drama-queens hasn’t been any more successful. In fact, it’s kind of led me to even bigger disasters than house-egging and toilet-papering.”

Lindie sipped her brandy. “How long is the string of not-drama-queens?” Not that it was any of her business or something that mattered, but she still had to ask.

“It stretches back to college. That was my first really serious relationship. I met Cynthia at a Christmas party sophomore year and we were together until just before graduation. I wanted to make concrete plans for the future I’d been talking about for a while. The future I thought we both wanted.”

“But she didn’t.”

“And hadn’t. We’d never wanted the same things. She just hadn’t let me in on her actual plans. She said she’d been playing along because it had made me happy, but when it actually came down to it, she wasn’t staying in Colorado, she was going back to Georgia.”

“And you really didn’t have any idea?”

“In retrospect I could see that she hadn’t said any real yes to anything, but I took the lack of a no and her listening and putting in a suggestion here and there, to be a yes. Stupidly, I guess. But if my dad wanted burgers and fries and my mom didn’t, she said she didn’t—right up front, loud and clear. If she went along with it, it meant she was okay with burgers and fries. My dad didn’t need to question it, he could just feel sure she was on board.”

“That seems reasonable,” Lindie conceded. “But Cynthia—”

“Graduated, went back to Georgia and I started my master’s degree feeling disillusioned.”

“And brokenhearted?”

He would admit to that only by raising his glass as if in toast before he sipped the brandy again and shook his head. “Then there was Melanie who I married two years after college.”

“How long were you married?”

“Three years. Just long enough for me to start talking about having kids and to have her shock me by telling me she wasn’t going to do that. That was a lot like Cynthia. I’d said I wanted kids even before we got married and Melanie hadn’t said she
didn’t
want them so I just assumed she...”

“Did,” Lindie finished for him.

“But she didn’t. And once that conversation started, out came everything she was unhappy about. All news to me because she hadn’t said anything. I’d apparently misinterpreted her not complaining about the house we lived in and my travel for work and a dozen other things as happiness and contentment with our life together.”

“When the truth was?”

“She’d been waiting for me to figure out that she didn’t like any of those things. Or much of our life together. But I don’t know how I was supposed to catch on to that without a clue from her, because, believe me, I’ve rehashed it and rehashed it, and she seemed okay with everything. She did agree to marriage counseling where she admitted that she hadn’t been open about what she wanted. The therapist pointed out that I shouldn’t have been expected to just know. But once she did start saying what she wanted...” He shrugged sadly. “We both realized that we did
not
want the same things and divorce was the best option for us both.”

“So she wasn’t really agreeable,” Lindie said softly. “She was just pretending to be and waiting for you to read her mind.”

“That was the gist of it. She said if I
really
cared for her and was in tune with her the way a husband should be, I would have been able to tell she was unhappy.” He sighed, his frustration evident.

“Another broken heart?”

“And some plain old anger thrown in,” he confided. In a sadder tone he added, “At least we
didn’t
have kids who had to suffer through a divorce.”

“And then there was Sam’s mom.”

“Candy. We lived together for a year. Long enough for me to see both sides of the Candy coin. Side one is that she appears to be agreeable, like my mom, but that’s because she can’t say no. She’ll let herself be taken advantage of by her friends, her family, at work. Whether she likes it or not. And if she doesn’t like it, she kind of holds a grudge that can come out later. But she
still
won’t say no.”

“And the other side of the Candy coin?”

“She will go to any lengths to avoid a conflict or a confrontation.”

“Is that part of why she can’t say no? Not just because she’s a people-pleaser, but also to keep from refusing someone something and having them get mad at her?”

“Bingo!” he confirmed.

“So you’re worrying that she won’t say no to Vermont, even though she doesn’t actually want to go, because she won’t face down her husband about moving.”

“I am.”

“But she has a fight on her hands whichever way she goes because if she agrees to Vermont, she has a custody battle with you waiting in the wings,” Lindie pointed out.

Sawyer sighed again. “I did that on purpose, thinking that the prospect of a court battle would be scarier to her than just telling her husband she doesn’t want to move. If she’s going to have a fight either way, why not pick the lesser battle? I come up on the short end of that one, though, because she keeps just stepping into the shadows and having Harm deal with me, which means he’s fighting that battle, she isn’t.”

Again Lindie felt so bad for him. Commiserating, she said, “I know sometimes people hide who they really are or what they really want at first because they want you...or something from you.”

“You’ve had experience with that?”

She shrugged as if it wasn’t a big deal.

Since she didn’t offer more, he let it go. “All I know,” he said, “is that my mom never makes trouble for my dad and yet he can always trust and believe her. But when it’s come to the women I’ve thought were agreeable? I haven’t been able to find anyone who can live up to that standard.”

Something occurred to Lindie then and she asked, “Is that why you were worried that if I’d have taken the Murphy girls home with me from the hospital that I might have regretted it and resented them? Why you said you were trying to make sure people don’t agree to things they don’t really want to agree to?”

“Taking home four kids is a big deal. I didn’t want you to wake up the next morning and want to hit me over the head for letting you do it when you were under the influence of drugs.”

“Oh-ho, girls have you running scared,” she cajoled.

He laughed genuinely again. “A little bit,” he said in a way that made her not believe him.

Or maybe it was because he wasn’t looking at her with any kind of fear in his blue eyes. Appreciation, admiration, sensuality, maybe. But not fear.

“So tell me,” he said, setting his brandy snifter on the coffee table and settling his arm across the top of the sofa cushions, his hand close enough to catch a strand of her hair to fiddle with. “What have I missed that you really want or hate and aren’t saying? Did you really want to eat vegetarian tonight and only ordered the steak because I did?”

Lindie laughed. “I grew up in a house with ten kids. Speaking up is not my problem. If it was, I’d have been lost in the shuffle.”

“That seems true enough.”

“So if those three women had said, ‘Hey, blockhead, I hate it when you do that’ or ‘This is what I want,’ would you have tried to do better or tried to give them what they wanted?” she asked.

“Sure, I would have. Like I said, my mom is agreeable not a pushover or a doormat.”

“So you just need to find a way to tell the difference between somebody who’s what you’re looking for and somebody who’s just faking it,” Lindie summed up.

“You want to come to the rescue and fix that, too, don’t you? First you’ll get me a custody lawyer or send business to Harm, now you’re trying to figure out how to help me read women. You really do have a problem,” he teased.

“You remember me telling you about my rescuing problem, so you
do
listen,” she said as if solving a part of the puzzle.

Another laugh from him. This one sort of intimate. “I do. But I’m not sure there
is
a fix for the problem I have picking women. After having it happen a third time with Candy I’ve just been pretty much laying low. But now here I am, sitting with someone I definitely shouldn’t be canoodling with—”

“
Canoodling?
I’m not exactly sure what that is,” she said with a laugh as she set her snifter on the coffee table, too.

That move pulled her hair out of his grasp but his hand was still right next to her when she sat back again. He used it to sweep her hair from the front of her shoulder to the back, brushing her shoulder in the process. His touch sent tiny tingles through her but she tried to ignore them.

“Yeah, I’m not sure what canoodling is, either,” he said, his voice lower than it had been before. “But it sounded better than ‘fraternizing with the enemy.’”

“I’m
still
the enemy?” she asked.

“That does get more and more confusing,” he said, his voice slightly lower.

“Okay, I guess I like ‘canoodling’ better than ‘fraternizing with the enemy.’ I’m considering it headway,” she concluded, her own voice a little softer all of a sudden. “On the other hand,” she mused, “I have spoken up about what I want from you.”

“I’m not taking Camden Inc. on as a client,” he managed to say in such a dark-velvet tone that it was actually sexy.

“But here’s your chance to prove you can come through when a woman tells you what she wants...”

“Ohhh,” he groaned. “You get points for persistence.” His smile said that was all she was getting when it came to that. Then his gaze dropped to her mouth and in more of that sexy tone he said, “But believe me when I tell you that I can come through.”

And to show her, he leaned in to kiss her.

She kissed him back. A sweet kiss that was over only a moment later when she said, “Are you just shutting me up?”

“I’m coming through,” he countered.

“Kissing is not what I spoke up for.”

“It wasn’t?” he joked, feigning shock. “I guess I really am flawed because I could have sworn it was.”

“In your dreams?” she suggested.

“Oh, yeah. Definitely there,” he said, coming in for a second kiss. Only this one was less sweet and chaste. This one had some heat and enough staying power to last quite a bit longer before it ended.

Somewhere during that kiss his hand had come up to caress her face and he left it there even when the kiss ended. He looked into her eyes for a moment before he said, “There isn’t a
no
I’m missing here, is there?”

Lindie knew there should have been. She told herself to give him one.

But she liked kissing him so much that she’d craved it the entire week that he’d been gone. When all she’d wanted was to see him and have him kiss her again.

Now that he was right there, ready to kiss her again, his hand brushing her face in feathery strokes, she couldn’t say no to herself. Instead she tilted her chin up and kissed
him
this time.

And he wasn’t saying no, either, because the arm from the back of the couch came around her to pull her closer while his other hand cradled her head.

His lips parted over hers and hers parted in response.

Even though she’d relived Sunday night’s kisses a million times in her mind the real thing was even better than she’d recalled. No, she hadn’t been imagining it. He was really, really good at it. And, oh, boy, did she adore the way he kissed.

So much that everything else wafted away and kissing was all there was. His mouth on hers. His tongue coming to meet hers, to toy with hers in the most divine and sensual of games.

Hands and arms moved. His went around her, those big hands splayed to her back, bracing her, massaging her, turning her muscles to mush. Hers went around him so she could fill her palms with that broad expanse of back and let her fingers delve in, so her breasts could press against his chest and be tantalized by the sensation of soft against hard.

And the kissing...

Mouths opened wider and played with more abandon. Tongues became familiar and even friendlier, and Lindie lost track of how much time was passing, just wanting more and more of what just got better and better—

Until he put an end to it.

It almost seemed as if he felt just shy of losing control because he let out a stunned sort of laugh before he pulled her close, her cheek against his chest, and said, “Okay, I think we need some air.”

Speak for yourself.

That was what went through her mind but she didn’t say it because she knew he was right. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d made out like that but she did know that since becoming an adult, those kinds of kisses usually led to a bedroom.

And that was not where this could go, she told herself.

Though the kiss had stopped, neither of them seemed ready to let the intimacy end. Instead they stayed the way they were for quite a while, wrapped in each other’s arms, her head nestled to him, his cheek to the top of it while he held her tight enough for their bodies to melt into one another.