Guns and Roses (61 page)

“Fine. I’ll try on the stupid dresses.” It was going to
suck
.

~*~

Several hours, a lot of frayed nerves, one terrified shop-owner later…

“No. No no no no no. Absolutely
not
.”

“But it’s
beee yoooouuuu tiful
,” Ce Ce pled, her big chocolate eyes swimming in tears as she looked at the confection that was wearing Bobbie Faye.

“I liked the one with the corset,” Nina offered.

“The one that pushed my boobs up to my ears?” Bobbie Faye asked. “The
see-through
corset?”

“What? It had pearls in all the important places. It fit you like a glove.”

“I am not walking down the aisle looking like Hookers R Us dressed me.”

“Damn,” a man’s voice said from the doorway to the dressing area, “can we re-vote on that?”

Bobbie Faye whipped around at Cam’s voice and had to step a little farther into the display room—the insane “viewing” area with a bazillion mirrors and a freaking
platform
that they kept making her stand up on after trying on every dress like some idiot Barbie doll—in order to gape at him, because what in the
hell
was
he
doing here?

He stood there, leaning against the door, all six-foot-four of him, lanky lean, dark hair, clean-shaven, all cop, all gorgeous. Her best-friend-former-lover-onetime-enemy-now-maybe-friend-and-wanted-to-be-more-again ex. He took one look at her in the giant frou frou antebellum froth she was wearing—the one with a skirt so big, they’d have to cut a hole in the church to lower her into it, because she’d never fit through the doors—and then he burst out laughing.

“Gee, Cam, thank you. And just what in the hell are you doing here?”

Nina suddenly looked innocent, which likely meant the world was ending. Bobbie Faye turned to her. “What did you do?” Then, understanding… “You
called
him?”

She stepped past the platform, grabbed Nina and hauled her into the dressing room while an assistant scampered out. It wasn’t easy to fit into the dressing room with a hooped skirt and a metric buttload of petticoats
and
Nina, but by God, she was going to get some answers.

“Have you lost your mind?” she asked her best friend.

“Really?
Me?
Hello, pot.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t invite
your
ex to… what? Humiliate me?”

“I can hear you,” Cam said from the outer room.

“Shut up,” she and Nina said in tandem. Bobbie Faye continued, “Why in the hell did you call
him
? I haven’t made anyone cry in the last hour! No hostages taken! I can’t help it if the microwave in her break room exploded—”

“You
shot
it, B.”

“Only
after
it exploded and I really
needed
that hot fudge brownie and it was the last one, so that was
totally
not my fault and it’s not a case for the idiot police—”

“Can still hear you,” Cam reiterated, a tad closer to the dressing room.

“—and just because the owner didn’t like me threatening her to make her stay a few minutes late, it’s not like she’s not going to make a sale, and—”

“It’s two a.m., B.”

She stopped abruptly, scrutinizing Nina’s
yes, you’ve run rampant over the crazy line
expression. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just past dark.”

“Two-seventeen, to be exact,” Nina said, referencing her phone.

“You’re nuts. No one would stay that late for a customer. This is some sort of trick.”

“You waved a gun at her!”

“Just
once
. I didn’t shoot that annoying assistant, which, frankly, showed a
lot
of self-control. I want brownie points for that.” She paused in her rant and caught Nina’s raised brow and… oh, holy shit,
sympathetic
expression. Wow, she was in a world of trouble if Nina had foregone the sarcasm for sympathy. “Is it really that late?” Nina nodded and Bobbie Faye had an odd, out-of-body feeling. Trevor had to be freaking out. And geezus, if he was freaking out, he probably had the entire building surrounded by SWAT. “Ohmygod, Trevor—”

“Knows you lost your mind somewhere back about the fortieth dress. He’s been informed. You’re stalling.”

“I am
not
. I’m
trying
. I can’t help it if—”

“B, if this is trying, then I’m Tinkerbelle.”

Cam opened the dressing room door, his arms braced on the top cross bar. “I’ve gotta agree with Nina. It’s pretty obvious.”

“What? Get out of here!”

Instead, Nina made her getaway with a feeble, “I need a drink,” and escaped beneath Cam’s arms, leaving Bobbie Faye trapped in a freaking hooped skirt. She tried to press the front down so it covered the ridiculous ruffled petticoat that went with the stupid thing and as soon as the front was shoved down, the side popped up and smacked her on the ear.

“We have to talk,” Cam said, holding a straight face as she tried to beat down the hoops. They sprang back and smacked her in the nose and she didn’t know if she should be grateful he didn’t even change expressions or smack him for being so used to her being a klutz. She opted for annoyed, instead, because the cop stare he assumed was his infamous
you’re going to listen, whether you like it or not
gaze, and she fumed. “And waving guns around inside bridal shops is a distinctive
no no
, of which, I am pretty damned certain, you are aware.”

“I have a concealed carry,” she snapped back. As he narrowed his eyes in a challenge, she stared at the silver butterfly pattern of the wallpaper, fascinating stuff, and hedged, “Almost.”

He cleared his throat and she could
feel
that stupid cop stare.

“Fine. It got revoked, but I’m getting it back. Eventually, when they quit being snits about it. It is totally not my fault the Governor keeps putting me on the Homeland Security Terrorist Watch list
just
because I made him cry.”

“Three times. In public. And that third time, he wet his pants.”

She paused for a moment, smiling at the memory. “That one was kinda worth it. Besides, this isn’t your jurisdiction, anyway.”

“It is when it’s
you
. I’m on the Governor’s speed dial, now. Fancy that.”

“Okay, fine.” She threw her hands up. “No more waving guns. I’ll go home peacefully. I’ll pick something out another day.”

“You’re stalling, Bobbie Faye, and I think I know why.”

She froze there a moment, the tension hanging between them, fear creeping up her throat, pressing down into her chest. She felt heavier than the world, just then. He was going to say it was because of him—that there were still feelings between them, and she just couldn’t
take
that right now. She was exhausted and cranky and hormonal and she didn’t want to keep hurting him and feeling like shit about it and she put her hand up to stop him. “No—God, Cam, please. Not now.”

He chuckled, low, sad. “No, Bobbie Faye, it’s not because of me. I know you’re happy with Trevor.”

She stopped breathing a second. Stared. He had said it with a perfectly straight face. Without rancor or irony. Without mockage. “Are you dying?” she asked him, and he shook his head, though he wasn’t entirely convincing that she was on the wrong track. “Am
I
dying?” she asked.

“Exaggerate much?”

“Well, you actually said Trevor’s name without, you know, looking as if you’d like to shoot something. Either I’m dying or the world is ending.” She looked down at the hoops. “Or hell just froze over.”

Cam closed his eyes a moment, opened them again and she could see the earnestness layered over the sorrow. “As much as it pains me to say it—I like the guy. He wasn’t my first choice—” he admitted, shrugging ruefully. “But even
I
can’t help but see that the two of you are right for each other.”

If you gathered up all of the shock in the whole world and piled it into that dressing room, it wouldn’t cover an inch of what Bobbie Faye felt. Her head was going to spin clean off her shoulders, and she was wedged into the dressing room, hoops up around her ears, and no place to pass out. She had to look away from him to keep from crying.

“I’m going to be okay, Ba—” He stopped himself and grimaced. “Bobbie Faye. You’re not my baby, and I’m going to be okay with that.” When she looked back at him, she could see the pain there, but she could also see he was telling the truth. “I didn’t think so, at first. But you said, once, after you’d been able to break up with me—or let me break up with you,” he said, stopping her interruption, “that we were able to stay apart because a life without each other was
possible
. I didn’t understand that then, but I do now. I’m not ready to date yet, but I can see it, down the line. Someone calm, docile, easily biddable,” he added with a wink, just to make her grin.

She put her face in her hands to keep the tears at bay. The pain and pressure that had been in her heart, for God knows how long, started easing off, and she hadn’t realized how much she needed this from him. Cam had always been such a huge part of her life.

“So, you’re stalling,” he said again, “and I know it’s not because of me, and it certainly isn’t because of cold feet in marrying Trevor.” She looked up fast and shook her head to assure him that wasn’t it. “Which made me realize what it was.”

“I’m not stalling,” she said again, but even she didn’t believe her anymore. She had been stalling this too-real wedding in a very real church.
Why?
It wasn’t about Cam—as much as it might’ve hurt him, she had been completely certain he’d eventually get past it. She knew him well enough to know that, knew what they’d had—special as it was—wasn’t good for either of them, wasn’t what he ultimately wanted or needed, and he hadn’t been fully
in love
with her. Oh, he loved her. Sure. But he constantly wanted to change nearly everything about her to keep from being upset with her all of the damned time. That wasn’t real, when you got right down to it.

“You
are
stalling,” he said gently, because he knew her well enough to know even she could see it now. “Because it breaks your heart to have to walk down that aisle alone, without your father to give you away.”

Her voice felt knife-edged, and serrated as she sliced out, “I don’t want Old Man Landry within a thousand yards of that church.” He’d ignored her when she and her siblings had lived in abject poverty. He’d only recently recognized her as his daughter and barely tolerated a truce with her, now.

“I know. And I wouldn’t let him. He isn’t the right person to walk you down the aisle.” He paused a moment as she looked at him. “I am.”

She had to put a hand against the dressing room wall to hold herself up. Her legs had just sent a memo:
quitting now
. “Are you crazy?”

“Probably. But think about it, Bobbie Faye. You should be walked down the aisle by someone who loves you dearly, by someone you mean the world to. You should be given away—symbolically—to the man you love by someone who knows how special you are. I think, if you’d let me, it’d be a great honor to walk you down the aisle. Would you?”

He meant it. In that expression, she could see it in his eyes and in his heart.

And she did what any self-respecting, tough-as-nails woman would do. She burst into tears. Not dainty little oh-look-the-bride-is-sniffling tears; no, these were big, honking sobs, the kind that scare small children and animals and turned her nose red. The kind she’d maybe only cried once or twice in her life.

“Aw, damn,” Cam muttered, gathering her forward into a hug, and the back of the hoop, now having a smidgeon of room, promptly popped up and smacked her in the back of the head. Which only made her cry harder, snotting on his shirt only as a girlfriend or an ex could do—thoroughly—as he said, “I’m sorry. If you don’t like that idea, we don’t have to do it.”

“Sundance?” Trevor’s voice asked, quietly, from the door to the dressing area.

She leapt back. Trevor stood in the doorway, his arms folded, his biceps bulging beneath the black t-shirt that strained across his chest. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and that stubble, paired with the bohemian wavy hair—long, curly, nearly past his collar—and abetted by the cold glare in his startling blue eyes, gave him the look of a man who had killed, and could do so again. The keen intelligence in his eyes said it could just as easily be Cam who was next and that he knew many ways to hide the body.