When She Falls Page 4

  “Are you still that afraid to love me?” he said.

  The silence drew long and thin between them, but her gaze did not waver from his. He thought if he made any move toward her in that moment, she would be lost to him forever. He didn’t know why he thought that, but there was something in the way she stood, her arms now wrapped around her waist, her fingers biting at her elbows, her mouth so firm, so unforgiving.

  He shook his head and straightened. “I’ll do it.”

  Cam looked over at his wife. Her arms hung by her sides now, fists clenched, back straight. There was something in her eyes, a cunning that matched the firm set of her lips, and he knew the fire within her had burned hot enough to make her agree to anything.

  “You don’t want to agree to my counteroffer,” he said.

  “True, but I want to prove my father wrong even more.”

  And there it was. The thing that drove Lydia Baxter’s madness.

  “Have you ever just tried talking to the man?” Cam asked, but Lydia only blinked at him. “Never mind.” He waved off his words.

  “This whole thing should only take a month. Six weeks at best. If something comes up that I am not comfortable with, you will not proceed. Got it?”

  “How would that work?” he asked.

  “I would start by saying whatever it was made me uncomfortable, and you would explain why it was important to continue with,” she said, and Cam laughed.

  “Have you ever tried talking to you about something?”

  Lydia only blinked.

  “Once you get it in your head that whatever is being discussed may be forbidden by dear ol’ Daddy, you stop talking about it. In fact, you won’t talk anymore in general. Do you know how many conversations I had with myself in those four months we were together because you wouldn’t talk to me?”

  Lydia shook her head, but he saw the way her jaw went up.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, “I don’t act like that.” And then— “Ever,” she added.

  Cam only watched her. He did not speak as her shoulders stiffened in the silence. He waited and watched and waited.

  Until she mumbled, “And if everything weren’t such a joke to you, maybe it would be easier to have a conversation with you.”

  Again, Cam did not respond. He dropped his head, feeling the tension of the day’s travel pool along the back of his neck. He reached up a hand, massaged the muscles there.

  “Cam,” Lydia said, the sound so soft.

  “One month,” he finally said, his tone harder than he would have liked.

  “One month,” she said.

  He had the balls to stick out his hand then as if to shake on the agreement and took a small amount of pleasure in watching her back up ever so slightly.

  “I’m your husband for this charade we’re playing, and I’m your husband in this house, when we’re out, when we’re alone, and when we’re attacked by aliens. For one month. Do we have an agreement?”

  Lydia looked at his hand like it might give her the plague, but she stuck out her own.

  “We do,” she said.

  He grabbed her hand, and because he was feeling rather annoyed with the entire long day that he’d been through, he tugged her until she fell against him. He captured her mouth in a searing kiss so quick she didn’t have time to push him away.

  “I think I’m going to like this arrangement.” He let her go.

  He had nearly made it to the foyer when he heard her screech.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m getting my luggage,” he called back scooping up the bag he had left in the front hall. He turned and wiggled his eyebrows at her when her head popped into the hallway. “I have to get my toothbrush out of it, so I can put it next to yours on the bathroom sink.”

  Lydia frowned.

  “So where is it that I’ll be staying?” he asked, and for a moment, he remembered a time long ago when they had stood in similar positions.

  A very intoxicated Lydia Baxter, standing prim and proper in the middle of the hallway. A naive and restless Cam McCray standing opposite, hoping she would lead him upstairs to her bedroom. It had been so long ago, and yet here they stood in the exact same position.

  “It’s upstairs,” she said. “Same room at the back of the house.”

  He waited, and she moved in front of him, rounding the landing to the stairs. She took the steps quickly disappearing around the corner at the top. She had turned on a lamp by the time he reached the bedroom. She stepped to the side to let him through the door, and he prepared himself for seeing her great king-sized sleigh bed again. The bed where they had first made love. It was nearly the same. She had a new duvet on it and new pillows. He remembered only because the previous ones had been brown and yellow in color, and he had called it the biological function bed. He set his suitcases down.

  “Would you feel better if we put a board down the middle of it, so you won’t even know that I’m there?”

  Lydia cast him a sidelong glance before moving to the other side of the bed.

  “I’ve had the bathroom remodeled.” She leaned through a door on the opposite wall and flicked a light switch. He could make out subway tile and a porcelain pedestal sink. She moved to another door.

  “I will make room for your clothes in the closet,” she said and disappeared through the door.

  Cam bent and picked up one of his bags, tossing it on the bed, before turning to the set of drawers pushed along one wall. He pulled open the top drawer, knowing full well that it was likely Lydia’s lingerie drawer. At least, it had been the last time he had lived here.

  He was not disappointed. Frilly strips of lace and silk puddled in the small compartment, and having little respect when it came to riffling through his wife’s unmentionables, he pawed through the contents until a flash of red met his eye.

  “So tell me, lady wife, because I don’t seem to recall this particular garment the last time I was here,” he called, lifting the piece of red silk between two fingers.

  He heard Lydia in the closet, heard her muffled footsteps on the floorboards as she came into the main part of the bedroom. He turned to give her a proper view of the red baby doll nightie he held in his hand.

  “Seeing as how your husband was on the other side of an ocean, why exactly did you purchase this lovely thing?”

  Lydia went back into the closet and shut the door behind her.

  Cam smiled and began to unpack.

  Three

  It must all be some kind of trick. It had been too easy. Much too easy. She reached her arm over her head as instructed by the overly sedate woman on her tablet. The yoga video was one of a series that she cycled through during the week, and this morning she was on sun postures as she hovered on her yoga mat in the middle of the front sitting room. Morning light tripped through the window, illuminating the small space with late summer sunshine. The traffic was already busy on the street outside, and the sounds of a city waking for the day drifted through the townhouse.

  It had been two days since Cam had agreed to help her. Two days that he had been living under her roof. She wanted to say it was like he had never left, but that would have been a lie. It may have been that he had never left, but if he hadn’t, somehow he had gotten hold of a giant megaphone that blasted his presence through her very core.

  He was everywhere.

  He dripped water out of the shower and into the bedroom. When he washed his hands, he dried them on the thighs of his pants instead of using a real towel, and then anything he touched after that got wet. When he watched TV, he zoned out. She could have danced naked in front of him, and he wouldn’t have noticed. She had given him a laundry tub, a beautiful linen basket with the word laundry embroidered across the front of it in a deep turquoise that matched the throw pillows on the bed, but instead of putting his dirty clothes inside of it, he tossed them on top until it smashed the poor basket into oblivion. He was just such a boy.

  She brought her toes to the front of th
e mat, bent her knees, and rose to chair pose.

  Cam had been the only man she had ever lived with, and her small smattering of boyfriends had been too carefully selected to allow for laundry tub smashing. She wondered for a moment if all men were like this, and if they were, she already felt exhausted at the prospect of having to live with one. But if she had ever contemplated doing so in her adult life, wouldn’t she have done something about her marriage? After all, it kind of prevented her from marrying anyone else if she ever found the right man, and it had been five years since she had kicked Cam out.

  She shook her head as she straightened, stretched her arms in the air, and circled them around to give a final namaste. She cut off the overly sedate woman on her tablet as she gave instructions for following the session with meditation and reached across the space to grab up her smartphone from where she had tossed it on the love seat. She had almost hit the button for Emily’s number when she stopped, her finger hovering over the screen.

  The sounds of traffic came through the large, front bay window, and the tick of the clock above the mantle echoed into the silence. Cam had not been awake when she slipped from the bed earlier to put on her yoga clothes and come downstairs. She pressed the button to dial Emily and held her phone to her ear. Her friend answered on the second ring.

  “I’m getting a lot of early morning phone calls from you people lately,” Emily said by way of greeting.

  Lydia frowned. “Who is you people?”

  “Shannon and you.” Emily’s yawn traveled through the phone at the end of her friend’s words followed by the sound of a kettle going off. “What problem can I solve for you, my dear?”

  Lydia pictured her petite friend standing in the kitchen of her small cape in Rhode Island. Of the three of them, Emily was the one who had changed the least since that first semester at the Franconia Notch School for Girls, and she smiled at the thought.

  “What do you know about boys?” Lydia asked, keeping her voice as low as possible.

  She heard the sound of metal crashing against metal and assumed Emily had put the kettle down abruptly.

  “Lydia,” Emily said after a long pause. “Are we going to have a birds and the bees discussion? Because I don’t even have those with my own students.”

  Lydia frowned again. “No, it’s not like that. It’s…”

  How did she ask her friend this? How did she put into words what had been bothering her?

  Why was it so hard to live with men?

  If she asked that question, Emily was sure to know something was up, and she had told neither Shannon nor Emily about her predicament with the Hatfields. Normally, her friends would have been the first people she’d call, but when she’d realized the answer to her problem, she knew she had to keep it a secret. After all, it was Emily and Shannon who had called her an idiot five years ago when she had kicked Cam McCray out of her life.

  “Is it difficult to live with someone?” she finally asked.

  Emily made a shuffling noise on the other end of the phone. “Why are you asking, Lydia Baxter? Are you looking to play house with someone?”

  Lydia sat down on the love seat and stared out the bay window. “I thought we stopped playing house after kindergarten.”

  “Darling, you never stop playing house,” Emily said. “The house just gets bigger, and there’s always a repair bill to pay.”

  Lydia thought about that for a moment. “You mean living with someone is like playing childhood games?”

  Lydia heard the sound of pottery clinking on the other end of the phone, and she thought Emily had gotten a mug for the tea she was likely making.

  “Have you wondered why it is that we teach kids these games?” Emily asked. “Some are for fun, yes, but others are to teach a lesson.”

  More clinking of pottery.

  “So yes, Lydia, living with someone is like taking all those games you learned in school, playing house, sharing your toys, not pulling someone’s hair, and applying them in a potentially catastrophic situation.”

  “What do you mean catastrophic?” Lydia asked.

  There was silence on the other end before Emily said, “What is more catastrophic than losing the person you love because you can’t stand the way he leaves the toilet seat up?”

  Lydia sat, letting the sounds of the room flow over her until she became aware of another sound, that of footsteps on the floor above her head.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said much too quickly, and then more calmly, “Thanks, Emily. I think I see what you mean.”

  “Good, because I’ll be testing you on it later.”

  Lydia smiled and said goodbye to her friend just as the footsteps moved to the stairs. She tossed the phone on the love seat and bent to retrieve the yoga mat when Cam came into view. Her heart stopped in her chest at the sight of him. He wore a ratty T-shirt and a pair of shorts, beat up sneakers and a ball cap over his too long hair. He was rumpled and sleepy, and it made her want to reach for the chocolate syrup and a spoon.

  “Talking about me to the fearsome threesome already?” His mouth quirked into a smile.

  Lydia frowned at him as she rolled up her mat. “Only Emily, and I didn’t mention you by name.”

  “Pity,” he said as he reached the landing. “I’m going for a run. When do you head into the shop?”

  It was a Saturday morning, and she tended to get into the shop early because Saturdays were the boutique’s busy days. It seemed when it came to getting all of one’s bridesmaids together, Saturdays were the best bets for most people, which meant a very long day for Lydia and her staff.

  “I usually head out of here around seven thirty.” She watched Cam as he moved into the front sitting room.

  She thought he’d stop at some point, but he kept coming toward her until he leaned in, his lips meeting hers. She was startled enough to kiss him back at first, before bringing up her hands and gently pushing at the too firm muscles of his arms.

  “You need to stop doing that,” she muttered when he leaned away.

  He smirked at her and shook his head.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “It’s part of the agreement.”

  She wanted to punch the smirk off of his face but settled for showing him the door. Literally. She gestured at the door.

  “Weren’t you leaving for a run or something?” she asked, looking down at his shoes.

  Cam only smiled and headed in the direction she pointed. “Have a bonnie day at the shop, love.” He wiggled his eyebrows and left.

  Lydia stashed her mat in the storage space built into the ottoman she had selected to go with the love seat. It’s rich cream and brown tones gave the clean lines of the love seat a perfect boost, and she paused to admire her decision as she usually did.

  She grabbed her phone as she made her way upstairs for a shower. Again, as usual, she put her smartphone into its dock and went to select her favorite morning playlist before she hesitated, looking around the bedroom. Cam had once again smashed the poor laundry tub with his clothes from the day before, but other than that the room was largely untouched.

  And she was alone.

  She listened for several more seconds before pushing the button to play music through the speakers attached to the dock.

  Aretha Franklin burst through the air, singing about respect and asking someone to give it to her. Lydia let the sound wash over her before ripping her tank over her head and joining in the song with Aretha. She went into the bathroom, opened the glass door to the shower to turn on the warm water, and shed the rest of her clothes. By the time she was shampooing, the playlist had reached Melissa Etheridge, and Lydia sang along with her, too, belting at the top of her lungs that she was the only one.

  And just as she hit her peak, she heard the all too familiar chuckle of Cam McCray. Lydia shot out from under the spray of the shower, her hands instinctively going to cover her breasts, as she turned and stared out the glass door of the shower at her husband, lounging in the doorway, laughing heartily at
her.

  “Asshole!” she yelled over the sound of the water and Melissa Etheridge.

  “Potty mouth!” Cam yelled back. “And what are you trying to hide?” He gestured toward her attempt to cover herself. “I’ve already seen it, lady wife.”

  Cam shook his head and continued to laugh as she struggled to come up with something else to yell at him for.

  “Forgot my phone,” he finally called to her when she came up with nothing, and then he turned away, shaking his head and laughing as she quietly seethed under the shower spray.

  “I really don’t understand it, Cameron.”

  Cam stood in Lydia’s den, looking out the tall windows along the back of the townhouse that overlooked the shared courtyard of the homes on this block. The courtyard was meticulously maintained. He could have deduced this by the landscape and flowers, but in truth, he had been watching a team of gardeners for a little over an hour. At any moment, he expected someone to whip out a cotton swab and start going into the curly-qs of the ironwork.

  “I don’t understand it at times either, Mum,” Cam said.

  A lot of noise came through the line, and he could picture his mother bustling through the Tuscan villa, leather sandals slapping on tile, the Corgis nipping along at her feet hoping she’d drop them a treat.

  “The woman has been nothing but heartache for you, son,” his mother went on. “I don’t know why you would go on with it. When something is so good about hurting you, you need to let it go, Cam.”

  There was an explosion of barking, and his mum yelled, “Mr. Hinckles, get off of your sister! I don’t care if you’re feeling amorous. Your sister doesna like it!”

  Cam smiled, seeing in his mind his mother pointing her arthritic finger at the dog. He had only called her to check in, but as it usually was with his mother, she had known when something was up. In this case, it was the same time at which he had phoned. He hadn’t compensated for the time difference between London and Boston, and his mother was aware of that when his call came later than normal. She had answered with a brusque, “What is it you’ve done now?” followed with a long litany of explanations. Cam had no reason to keep his current to do with his estranged wife a secret from his mum. After all, Lydia was his wife. He wasn’t sure if there were anything about it that really begged discretion.