Let Me Love You Again (An Echoes of the Heart Novel Book 2) (34 page)

Selena couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she move?

“Trust me, Selena.” Oliver laid his phone on the coffee table. He held out his hand for hers. “Let’s start dealing with the complications and the confusion and figure out today and tomorrow and next week—together. This is it for us. This is our chance. Are we in, or are we out?”

Oliver answered Selena’s phone. The tight-ass slime on the other end began talking immediately in his slick, Upper East Side accent.

“This is ridiculous, Selena,” Parker said. “
You’re
being ridiculous. My tactics are unseemly, I know. But
you
know I’m not going to stop. Come back and talk with me like an adult instead of running away. You’ll be free of that Podunk place and your mother for good. You don’t need anyone else’s help for you and Camille but mine. If you’d just—”

“Neither of them are coming back to New York.” Oliver kept his tone reasonable. He wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the guy. “Selena doesn’t need your money, your two-timing, or your help for her child. She has friends here, real family. And she’s the best mother I know. There’s no way you’re going to convince her to come back. Give it a rest, man. It’s over.”

Selena nodded—at what Oliver had said, or to whatever she and Brad were discussing on Oliver’s phone.

“Tonight?” she asked both him and Brad. “At the hospital, you two will come over after the Whip closes?”

Oliver nodded in agreement.

He’d cover the house and the kids for Travis until then, so his brother could check in on Joe or whatever else he needed to do. Travis wouldn’t mind stepping back in for a while tonight, once he heard what it was for.

“I want to speak with my wife,” the slimeball insisted.

“Ex-wife.”

“Not yet.”

“Soon.” Oliver bit out. “Very soon.”

Selena flinched at his fraying control. He took her hand.

“You can speak with her lawyer from now on,” he said more calmly. “You’re done manipulating Selena with money and everything you think she should still want with you. Leave her alone.”

“Her lawyer?” Parker scoffed. “Clearly you don’t know my wife or the position she’s put herself in.
Her
lawyer is one of a fleet that I keep on retainer. I talk to the man every day. Now put Selena on the phone.”

Oliver gently squeezed her fingers. “Her lawyer is my lawyer now. Let yours know to expect our filing to turn over all records pertaining to the divorce.”

“And just who the hell are you?”

“I’m Camille’s father.” And the satisfaction of saying it out loud, whether it was true or not, felt right.

“Okay,” Selena said to Brad. “We’ll see you tonight.”

She finished her call and slipped to her feet, wrapped in her mother’s quilt. She grabbed her clothes and walked silently down the hall, presumably to her room.

“
I’m
the only father that little girl has ever known,” Parker growled. “I wanted to adopt her.”

“Before or after you decided to bang everything that moves
all over Manhattan, and who the hell knows where else? Selena and Camille are out of your life. Get used to it. And tell your lawyers to strap themselves in. Mine are about to make sure Selena is compensated for the years she spent trying to make a marriage to someone like you work. She won’t be asking for child support. She won’t need it. But don’t think that means you’re off the hook for the way you stomped all over her heart. Stop harassing her. End this, man. You’re just embarrassing yourself.”

Oliver thumbed the call closed, Parker still fuming on the other end.

Selena had returned, fully dressed in jeans and a loose sweatshirt, her face looking freshly washed. She’d heard the last of what he’d said to her husband.

“You won’t have to deal with him again,” Oliver promised.

“Because you’re going to take care of it?” She passed him his phone and held her hand out for hers. “Another project for you to add to your list?”

“Because you’re going to take care of it by allowing me to help.” He pocketed his phone. “We’re not kids any longer, Selena. You’re clearly capable of managing your life and your choices. You were when we were teenagers, too. You’ve always been smart enough to take a friend’s offer of support, if it will get an asshole like Parker permanently out of your daughter’s life.”

“A friend?”

“That’s what you said. Friends at least? I’ll give you my lawyer’s number. What you do with it is up to you. Or you can trust me to contact the firm on your behalf.”

“As my daughter’s father?” Selena’s voice broke. She pressed her fingers to her lips. She swallowed before continuing. “Why did you tell Parker that?”

“Because I want to be.” More than Oliver could have believed. “And even if she’s Brad’s, I still want to be in her life, helping you both any way I can. Trust me on that, if nothing else.”

Selena folded the quilt she’d returned with and laid it on the arm of the couch. She was so close. Her beauty, her heart, her capacity to keep loving fiercely, the way she loved Camille unconditionally, no matter how hard life knocked her around.

And Oliver wanted it all.

“I should give Travis a break,” he said.

“Yeah. I . . . I need to get back to Camille.”

She reached for Oliver first—thank God. It had been killing him, wondering if she ever would again. He held her, her head pressed to his heart.

“Thank you,” she said. “For making being done with Parker possible. I can’t imagine how much it’s going to cost. The hospital and now your lawyer.”

Oliver massaged her nape. Her hair curled madly, silky soft through his fingers. “The money isn’t important. You’ll be free. That’s what matters.
You
matter to me.”

“You matter to me, too.” She pushed away to stand on her own.

But did he matter enough? Would she give him a chance to make sense of all the things he still had to? She reached for the purse she’d set on the coffee table and scooped up her keys.

“We’re on with Brad and Dru?” he asked.

“Brad said they’d swing by the hospital after ten or so, meet us at Camille’s room if that works for you.”

“I’ll be there.”

Facing the rest of the day without Selena would be excruciating. But he was going to move his truck next door and out of her car’s way. This time he wouldn’t push her for more than she was ready to handle.

“Thanks again for what you did this morning for Marsha and Joe. You and Belinda standing up for them with Family Services could make all the difference in Teddy’s placement.”

“Your parents and their kids are lucky to have you back.”

He inhaled. “I’m the lucky one.”

His family had welcomed him home, no matter how much he’d put them through. And Selena had loved Oliver just now, like she never wanted to let him go. That’s what he’d hold on to until tonight.

Things were still in chaos. But there had to be a path to making all of it work—for his family and Selena and Camille and himself. He’d come up with the right solution for everyone. He was certain of it.

As long as Selena found her way to trusting her heart.

And trusting him, one more time.

Chapter Twenty-One

Camille wanted to go home.

She wanted her Mommy.

She wanted to go back to when she’d been at the Dixons’ with her mom and Oliver and Grammy. And she wanted not to have asked what she had. And she really, really wanted not to have gotten sick. She’d snuck just one cracker when she’d been helping with Teddy. She’d been hungry after playing outside, and she’d thought it was okay this time. It was Mrs. Dixon’s house, and Mrs. Dixon’s cookies were okay.

She liked helping with Teddy. She did not like having allergies. Or being in trouble. She shouldn’t be in trouble because she’d wanted to know the truth about if she had another family. But she was. She just knew she was. Look at everything she’d made go wrong, because she’d gone over to the Dixons’ house. Now she might not ever be able to help with Teddy again before she and Mommy moved.

Grammy walked into Camille’s hospital room and smiled, not as if she was mad at all.

“How are we doing in here?” She kissed Camille’s cheek. She
smoothed where a needle was still stuck in Camille’s hand, attached to a tube that had a bag at the other end, hanging beside her bed. “Does it still sting?”

“A little.”

Camille had woken up a few times before. Sometimes her Mommy had been there. Sometimes Grammy. But this was the first time Camille had felt like she was getting better, the way everyone kept saying she was—even though people had kept telling her to rest.

“Can we go home now?” she asked.

“Tomorrow, honey. But once your Mommy and I get you home, I’m going to pamper you with the biggest bubble bath I can make.”

Camille liked bubbles. Grammy liked them, too, though Mommy hadn’t believed it until Grammy had shown Mommy and Camille the bottles of bubble bath she kept in her bathroom. Bubbles always cheered Grammy up, she’d said, and made her feel special. She’d shared every kind of bubbles she had with Camille, and she’d even bought Camille a special bottle all her own—a Hello Kitty bottle, and the bubbles smelled like flowers.

If Grammy was going to make Camille a special bubble bath when they got home, Camille couldn’t be in too much trouble for asking Oliver what she had.

“I didn’t water my flowers this morning,” she said.

The ones right under her window that needed water every day. Except today, she’d played out back all morning instead, and her flowers had to be really thirsty.

“Please,” she begged. “I want to water them. I won’t do anything else. I’ll stay in bed. But I want to go home.”

“I’ll take care of your forget-me-nots in a little bit.” Grammy smiled. “Once your mommy’s back and I can slip out.”

“Am I in a lot of trouble?” Camille asked. Then before Grammy could answer, she said, “I didn’t mean to eat Teddy’s crackers, it just happened. He handed me one, and I was hungry and . . . I won’t go over to the Dixons’ again, if Mommy’s mad and doesn’t want me to. But why doesn’t she want them to be my family? What’s so bad about them? Or about Oliver being my . . .”

Camille didn’t say
daddy
.

She tried again, but she couldn’t.

Grammy sat on the bed next to her. She pulled up the tulip quilt she’d wrapped Camille in before she and Mommy had brought Camille to the hospital. Camille had taken it outside to play that morning. Grammy had brought it back after they left the Dixons. Camille looked at her favorite quilt now, and it made her sad instead of happy.

“Your mom’s got a lot to think about,” her grammy said.

Grammy sounded sad, too, no matter how glad she said she was that Camille was okay. Something must be really wrong.

“Your mommy doesn’t think the Dixons and Oliver are bad,” Grammy insisted. “And you’re not in trouble.”

“Going next door by myself was wrong.” Camille’s stomach felt gross again. “And I shouldn’t have snuck up front last night and listened to you and Mommy talk. But . . .”

“You wanted to know.” Grammy rubbed her arm. “There’s so much that you need to know. And you have every right to want to.”

“I like the Dixons. They’re fun. And they’re so big, and they’d want me, Oliver said. And I want Oliver, if he’s my . . .”