mother smiled. “Which is exactly what I said to him. But then I made the mistake of noting that he’s also several years older than Harry, which he interpreted as a challenge.”
“Because it drives him crazy the way Harry flirts with you.”
“Harry’s been widowed for nearly ten years, he’s lonely, and he flirts with every woman who crosses his path.” She finished scooping chili into a bowl. “Do you want some?”
“Oh. No, thanks. I had a couple of slices of pizza earlier.”
She carried her bowl to the table and sat down. “Is everything okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Because you’re a lot later than usual getting home and you seem a little distracted.”
“Busy day at the office.” He helped himself to a bottle of beer from the fridge and sat down with her.
He’d moved in with them when he’d returned to Pinehurst because it was convenient and gave him the opportunity to look for a place of his own. What had surprised him was how much he’d enjoyed spending time with them. After living so far away for so many years, it was nice to reconnect again, and to realize that he actually liked his parents.
“That’s why Elijah needed to hire you,” she said. “So what was different about today?”
He took a long swallow from the bottle. “I saw Ashley.”
She paused, her spoon halfway to her lips. “Ashley Roarke?”
He nodded.
“How did that go?”
He thought about their kiss—the soft responsiveness of her lips, the yielding warmth of her body—and her abrupt and complete withdrawal from him. “Better—and worse—than I expected.”
“I’m … sorry?”
He smiled. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected that she’d be happy about my decision to come back to Pinehurst now.”
“I would think, if her feelings for you are well and truly gone, she wouldn’t have much of an opinion one way or the other.”
He mulled that over for a minute. “The implication being that if she cares, she must still have feelings for me?”
“Twelve years is a long time, and you were both so young when you went away. And yet—” she smiled “—a woman never forgets her first love.”
“Spoken like a woman with fond memories,” he noted.
“I fell in love when I was fifteen—much to the chagrin of both my parents and his. He was nearly twenty, already in college, and our families were united only in their desire to keep us apart.”
“What happened?”
Her eyes sparkled. “I married him.”
“Grandma and Grandpa disapproved of Dad?” He couldn’t believe it. His father was the epitome of responsibility and respectability—certainly not the usual type that parents warned their daughters about.
“I was fifteen,” she said again. “I don’t think they would have approved of anyone I brought home at that age. And he was so … sexy. He worked in construction in the summer to earn money for college and he had all these rippling muscles and—”
“Please.” Cam held up a hand, urging her to spare him the details.
“If I hadn’t been attracted to your father, you wouldn’t be here,” she pointed out.
“Still, there are some things a kid doesn’t need to know.”
“Well, my point,” she said, “is that parents always want what they think is best for their kids, even when it conflicts with what their kids want. That’s why your dad encouraged you to go away to school, to put some distance between you and Ashley before you got too deeply involved.”
“He knew how I felt about her.”
She nodded. “And he was afraid that you’d give up your dreams to stay in Pinehurst with her.”
“Why did he think that?” he asked curiously. “Was there something he felt he’d missed out on by getting married so young?”
His mother was silent for a long minute before she said, “He wasn’t thinking about his own dreams, but mine.”
It had never occurred to him that his mom might have sacrificed her own plans to be a wife and a mother, because she’d always seemed so settled and content in those roles. “What was your dream?” he asked her now.
“After I met your dad, I only wanted to be with him.”
But he recognized the evasion, and his curiosity was piqued. “Before you met Dad?” he prompted.
“I was going to be a doctor,” she finally admitted.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. He couldn’t believe that he’d never known his mother had once envisioned having the same career that he’d chosen for himself.
“A doctor,” he echoed.
She nodded. “In fact, I’d just been accepted to medical school when I found out I was pregnant.”
He set his now empty bottle down. “You gave up your dream because of me?”
But she shook her head vehemently. “No. By the time I got pregnant, my dream had changed. Finding out that I was going to have a baby was the most incredible moment of my life. I had no qualms about giving up medical school for motherhood.
“But when you first expressed an interest in becoming a doctor, your father was adamant that nothing would cause you to make the sacrifice he believed I’d made. But what he didn’t think about—what neither of us really considered—was what would make you happy.”
“You shouldn’t worry about that anymore,” he assured her. “I am happy.”
“A parent always worries. Especially when her kids grow up and move away.”
He knew she wasn’t just thinking of him, but of his younger sister, Sherry, who was now married and living in Florida.
“Well, I have no doubt that you would have been a great doctor,” he said. “But you made the right career choice, because you are definitely the world’s greatest mom.”
She smiled through the sheen of tears in her eyes. “And when a mother’s grown son says something like that, she knows she’s done her job well.”
When Ashley returned to the doctor’s office for her follow-up appointment, she was prepared to see Cam. Not just to see him, but to prove that she was completely unaffected by him, that the scorching kiss they’d shared in her kitchen meant nothing to her. Less than nothing, in fact.
When the door opened, however,
