Cam winced. “Yeah?”
Norah shoved back her irritation. “Peyton Consolidated is a big mover and shaker in urban redevelopment circles. I went to Denver to convince the CEO that rural tourism would be an excellent means of diversifying his investments and that he should start in Wishful.”
“Wait a minute. You turned this guy’s fantastic job offer down and then went to ask him to invest in something else?”
She nodded.
“Did he bite?”
Norah couldn’t help but be a little bit smug. “He loved the idea so much, we both went up to Balenmore, Colorado to meet with their tourism coordinator to get an inside look at how they made rural tourism work for them and generate ideas on how we could do the same here.”
“So…this whole time you’ve been gone, you’ve still been working on a plan to save Wishful?”
“Between meetings with my attorney, yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“I couldn’t tell you before I got back because you weren’t talking to me. And when I came to tell you today you didn’t want to hear my pretty speech, remember?”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I was afraid if I talked to you, it’d give you the chance to break things off. Then when you didn’t contradict me and I came home and found all your stuff gone, I was sure of it.”
“You pissed me off. It really hurt me that you could believe I’d walk away from you so easily.”
“It hurt me to think it. I was angry and exhausted when I came after you. And then to hear that…it was like Melody all over again, and I guess it just triggered me.”
“Wait, what?” She thought back to what the family had told her. “Aunt Liz said you went up to surprise her and came back in just over twenty four hours, broken up.”
“Yeah. We’d made arrangements to meet on campus. I got there early, in time to hear her talking with a friend, saying she knew she was never going to pry me out of my hick town and she had to find some way to tell me she was never coming back to it. That it was a conversation long overdue but she wasn’t a monster who could do that while my mother was on her death bed.”
“Okay, leaving aside the fact that you have a serious problem with eavesdropping, Miranda was right. She was a bitch.”
Cam didn’t disagree. “I turned right back around and headed home. Called her from the road to say Mom was having a relapse and that I didn’t think it was going to work out between us.”
“You let her off the hook.”
“Should’ve done it two years earlier. I knew when she headed off to George Mason that it wouldn’t work. I just couldn’t deal with the confrontation then.”
“So this afternoon you were trying to let me off the hook and avoid that confrontation?”
“Something like that. If I wasn’t what you wanted, I wasn’t going to beg and I didn’t want to stand in the way of what you did.”
It was, in a way, noble and self sacrificing. And completely misguided.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I love you, and I don’t want to be the one to put you in a cage.”
“Cam.” She cupped his cheek and waited for her throat to unlock. “What we have between us isn’t a cage. I’m sorry I went off half-cocked without talking to you. I was panicked and angry, and I didn’t think about bringing you into it because you weren’t a part of that life. That wasn’t meant as a reflection of how I feel about you or us. I could’ve cleared that up while I was gone, but I didn’t want the first time I told you to be in a voicemail. The fact is, I’m stupidly, deliriously, completely in love with you. And I can prove it.”
“You already proved it. You’re here.” He brushed her lips with one of those gossamer, tender kisses that made her feel cherished.
She still had to tell him about the land, but as he pulled her closer, she decided it could wait. “Does this mean we’re done fighting?”
“God, I hope so.”
“Good, because I’m really ready to make up.” Bracing her hands on his shoulders, she leapt, wrapping her legs around his waist and fusing her mouth to his.
Cam took about a nanosecond to get on board with that plan. With a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, he hitched her higher. In a dozen strides, he was kicking the bedroom door shut. They fell to the bed, gasping, grasping, rolling, desperate to get to skin.