A Sweetheart For The Single Dad (The Camdens Of Colorado Book 8) (17 page)

Her brothers had insisted she do something to stop Huffman Consulting through Sawyer.

Do I tell them now or later? Lindie had asked herself.

Then she’d decided to let them know that there was nothing she could do. That Sawyer had given her his final decision on Saturday night and would not take them on as a client or stop his efforts against them.

From there word had traveled within the family and by the time she’d walked into GiGi’s house for Sunday dinner everyone knew. And everyone wanted to talk to her about it. To make sure she’d pointed out this or told Sawyer that. To suggest other tactics that might be taken.

And while it was clear that Sawyer was who they were upset with, while no one was angry with her, it still weighed heavily on her that the family fixer had failed to fix the family’s biggest problem.

It was enough to make her feel terrible on its own. She had always viewed problems from all angles until she could find a solution. Or hammered at them until she could break the problem down into manageable pieces.

But this time? There was no solution and the problem couldn’t be managed.

And to top it off, she’d literally been in bed with the man who was responsible for her failure and for their current and future business problems.

That knowledge brought with it an unbearable guilt and an even more overwhelming sense of disloyalty than she’d had before. It also made her worry about what reaction she might face if anyone ever found out just how far things had gone between her and Sawyer personally. Would they think she’d crossed over to his side and actually done something against them all?

It was just awful. And everything put together led her to feel as if she had no choice but to never see Sawyer again—let alone sleep with him again.

The thought of never seeing him again—or sleeping with him again—had bottomed out her mood completely and turned a day that had begun great into a mess.

She was definitely glad it was over.

Although she still felt completely rotten about everything.

Maybe some sleep would help. She didn’t know
how
it would help, but she did know that she was exhausted and overstressed and she just wanted to climb into her bed, pull the covers over her head and stay there for at least the next twelve hours.

But that wasn’t going to happen because when she turned onto her street she saw Sawyer’s SUV parked in front of her house. With him sitting behind the wheel waiting for her.

How was it possible to feel so good and so bad at once?

Take away everything else, everyone else, and Sawyer was exactly who she wanted to have waiting for her to get home. He was who a part of her had been secretly longing for since the minute he’d left this morning. He was who her body ached to be up against again.

So seeing him there waiting for her was good.

But recalling where the rest of this day had gone, how disappointed her family was that she hadn’t succeeded in getting him to work for them or in no longer opposing them, how embarrassing it was that she was the only one of them so far not to have found a way to make amends, and having to face the fact that she really did think she had to tell Sawyer they couldn’t go on seeing each other was bad.

All bad.

All very, very bad.

She pulled into her driveway and turned off the engine, getting out of her car as Sawyer got out of his.

He looked so much cheerier and more energized than she felt. And so great even in just jeans and a heather-gray T-shirt.

She wanted to walk right into his arms, to lay her head to that powerful chest and let him be the wall that blocked out the rest of the world.

But all she did was smile faintly and say, “Hi, stranger,” as they met at the bottom of the three steps leading to her front door.

He glanced up and down her street. “Is the coast clear?”

“It had better be since you’re here,” she answered as she unlocked her door and led him inside.

Her dogs greeted them both enthusiastically. When they’d calmed down and allowed Lindie and Sawyer farther into the entryway, Sawyer said, “Rough day or did I just not let you sleep enough last night?”

Apparently he’d heard the weariness in her voice.

“Rough day,” she answered.

She slipped her purse off her shoulder and set it on the table beside the door, putting her hands in the pockets of her tan jumpsuit to keep from reaching for him.

“I hope yours was better,” she said, motioning for them to go the living room and trying not to think about their last time on that couch.

“Well, I wasn’t the best dad I’ve ever been today,” he confessed. “I think I sort of shortchanged Sam because it was you I really wanted to be with.”

“Poor Sam.”

“I don’t think he noticed. To distract him, I went a little overboard and bought him some robot-thing he’s been asking for. After that he really didn’t
want
me to bother him so he could play with it. It was mostly just that I felt like I wasn’t being the best dad...” He shrugged. “But because it was you who was on my mind, it led me to some revelations as I drove back here after dropping him off, and I wanted to talk to you about them.”

“Wow, revelations,” she repeated, knowing—because it felt so wonderful, so right—that she shouldn’t let him take her hand when he did.

“One thing I wanted to tell you that
isn’t
a revelation is that because of what you did getting Harm on your dental insurance he’s decided to give his practice six more months to pick up rather than look for a buyer now.”

“Because he’s hoping to get a better price for it later or because if business picks up he won’t move Sam to Vermont?”

“That was unclear,” Sawyer admitted. “But for now I’ll just hope if business picks up they’ll stay. Regardless, I’ll be glad for another six months with my kid close by.”

“It’s not a lot but I guess it’s something,” she said, thinking that it was such a small win it didn’t really count.

“It’s something I appreciate,” he said, squeezing her hand.

“And then the revelation you had was that my ideas might be better than you thought and you decided to take on Camden Inc. as a client, after all?” she said, pretending hope she didn’t feel.

“That conversation is over, remember?” he reminded gently. “No, what came as a revelation was that taking things a step at a time is not going to do it for me because I want to have a whole lot more of you than that.”

He went on then to tell her what he’d thought about as he’d driven from Wheatley. About what he believed he’d found in her. About what an incredible person he thought she was and how much he cared about her. About how much he wanted her in his life, how much he wanted a future, a family, with her. And about how he didn’t want to have to hide any of what they had together from anyone. That he would rather face whatever consequences came than be without her or keep anything a secret.

He told her about how he thought it might take some time, but that he was sure his family would come to forget who she was and warm up to her.

About how he was willing to weather any fallout from his clients or in his business.

About how anything was worth being with her.

“No, I won’t go to work for your family and I won’t stop doing the job I do,” he concluded. “But vegetarians marry into meat-eating families, and democrats marry into republican families, and sinners marry saints...”

Marry? He was talking about marrying her?

He took a breath as the wheels of her mind spun, then he squeezed her hand again and continued.

“What I’m hoping,” he said, drawing her out of her thoughts, “is that we might all be able to separate business from family. That even if Huffman Consulting is still butting heads with Camden Incorporated in the field, outside of that I can just be ‘Lindie’s Sawyer’ to your family. And I promise you that I will do everything I can to be my most charming, winning, ingratiating self to fit in, to make them all like me and forget what I do for a living.”

Tears clogged her throat and stung her eyes and she wanted to ask him if he really was proposing.

But it didn’t matter if he was.

Yes, she wanted this man. But at what cost?

In the past she’d been willing to go to any lengths for the men she’d cared about and even now her mind was swimming with ideas of how to diplomatically inject Sawyer into her family. Of how to view Huffman Consulting’s work as clues to how Camdens could do better. Of how to point out anything and everything he might have in common with each and every separate sibling and cousin and even with their fiancés or spouses so he might be able to fit in. How to bridge the enormous gap that separated her family and this man. How to fix it all.

But every time she’d gone to great lengths to make things work out with a man, she’d ended up hurt herself and having to regroup and start all over again. With Jason using her to get the career he’d wanted. With Ryan taking money from her. With Ray whom she’d finessed into coming out of the closet. And with Brad whom she’d counseled back into the arms of his ex-wife.

And while she’d been hurt to varying degrees each time, with Sawyer everything was on so much grander a scale.

Since getting mugged she’d been trying to temper the part of her that was driven to fix things. Granted she hadn’t been too successful when it came to the community center but taking emotional hits from four men and then a physical beating on a Denver street had left her knowing without a doubt that she had to be more cautious in following her instincts to fix things.

And this time following her instincts—following her heart—involved all of her family and the business that generations before them had built, the business that sustained each and every one of them.

This time following her heart could jeopardize her relationship with the grandmother who had raised her, with her brothers and sisters, with cousins who were as close to her as brothers and sisters.

To her, whatever Sawyer was asking of her, whether it was marriage or not, would
create
a problem. A lot of really big problems. Problems that could ultimately alienate her from everyone she held most dear.

Then what?

Would she leave behind her family? The business that she was a part of, that was her legacy and provided her livelihood?

Would she leave behind everything and everyone she’d ever counted on? Everything she valued? Everything that she’d strived to be a value to?

Could she live with being the cause of such a rift in her family, in Camden Incorporated?

She’d already suffered enough of a sense of disloyalty as she’d gotten closer and closer to Sawyer. How much worse would it be if she was the source of a break in the family?

Then there was the other part of this. She’d always known that she didn’t want a man who already had a child or children with someone else.

He’d already said that he’d shortchanged Sam today. If they did get married, if they had kids of their own, wouldn’t that be the same song played again and again? Only sometimes it would be their kids shortchanged and sometimes it would be Sam.

That wasn’t something Sawyer even knew was important to her, though. It wasn’t something she’d told him about. So it wasn’t what she said now. Instead she opted for only addressing the issue he knew about.

“What if nothing either of us does makes any difference and you butting heads with us means that my family never sees you as just
my
Sawyer?”
Oh, but how much I wish you could be
my
Sawyer...
“If you’re always just the enemy, I could lose my family.”

“Or, if they absolutely can’t accept me as part of that family, we could just lead our lives separate from them. You work with all your cousins and brothers and sisters so you see them anyway. For family things, holidays...if you needed to be with them, I’d just stay home.”

“Oh, I hate that kind of thing,” she said. “And not only wouldn’t I get to have you with me but then everyone would wonder if I was telling you things I shouldn’t. You would wonder if I was telling
them
things you told
me
. I’d be caught in the middle and eventually they might not even want me at work!”

“We’re not spies working counterintelligence, Lindie. I mount
public
campaigns, remember? And we talked about this. It could even be of benefit for me to tell you what problems I see coming and for you to head them off. I’ve been doing some of that about Idaho. In a way we’d be working together. Just not in the way you all want.”

Apparently it wasn’t helping in Idaho, but still, maybe he had a point. Maybe she could make her family see it.

At least that was what the problem solver in her thought.

But even as she entertained a small—
very
small—glimmer of hope on that front, there was still the issue of Sam. Nothing could be changed about that and even though it was going to come as news to Sawyer she saw that she was going to have to tell him about it now.

“And you have Sam,” she said in what was little more than a whisper.

Sawyer’s handsome face pulled into a frown. “Sam? You don’t like Sam?”

“I do. But...” She hesitated, wishing she felt differently. But she didn’t. So she very carefully told him how she did feel, about how adamant she was about not tying her own future to a man who already had a child or children with someone else.

“And you didn’t tell me this?” he asked when she finished explaining.

She knew what button she’d just pushed. Too many women before her had left him in the dark about problems or concerns until they had become major issues that ripped them apart. And while she didn’t want to be another woman who misled or disillusioned him, she could tell that’s what he was thinking she was.

“It wasn’t a part of this before,” she said in her own defense. “This was about me trying to make amends for my uncle stealing my aunt from your dad by hurting your dad’s construction company. It was about me trying to do that in a way that was to our mutual business advantage. It wasn’t supposed to be personal. It wasn’t supposed to be about dating and finding someone to have a future with.”