there is.” He turned his heavylidded gaze on her. “Look closely, now. Can’t you see them?”
Turning to lean on the railing, she looked out across the lake to the stand of pines and cottonwoods shivering in the breeze. It was so good to be here in the night with Cam, almost as though a missing part of her was back in place, where it should be.
“See who?”
“Us.” He moved closer and spoke very near her ear. “Cam and Di. The boy and girl we used to be. The ghosts are out there.”
She could feel his warm breath on her skin. It made her pulse beat just a little faster and she was enjoying it, for now.
It had been so long.
She’d tried asking about him over the years, first in the village, then at the Van Kirk mansion when she’d been there in connection to her job, and the response she had was minimal. She’d told herself that it looked like he was gone for good, that he’d had some sort of rift with his family that couldn’t be repaired—that he was never coming back. She’d tried to convince herself to forget about him. But his influence on her was embedded in her soul. She couldn’t shake him loose, no matter what.
And at the same time, she’d always known that she could never really have him. But that was a tragic fact of life, something she’d accepted as a given.
She turned and looked at him. “I don’t see anything,” she told him, determined to be the realist to his crazy dreamer. “There’s nobody out there.”
“Sure there is.” He frowned as though it was a puzzle that needed solving. “Maybe you should have some of this,” he said, brandishing the bottle and looked at her hopefully. “Your vision might get better.”
She shook her head, rolling her eyes as she did so. He looked at the bottle, drained it, then frowned, silently reproaching himself. She had a right to hate drinking. She’d certainly suffered enough from the stuff.
“Okay. I’ll get rid of it.” Easy enough for him to say. The bottle was empty now.
“Wait!” She stopped him from sending it sailing out into the water, snatching it from his hand. “Don’t litter in my lake. I’ll put it in the trash can.”
He blinked at her but didn’t protest, leaning back on the railing with his elbows and watching her with the trace of a smile on his handsome face. She tossed the bottle and turned back to him. Her heart lurched at the picture he made in the moonlight, part the man he was now, part the memory of the boy. There had been a time when she would have done anything for him. And now? Hopefully she knew better now.
Looking out across the water again, she pretended to squint and peer into the moonlight. “Wait a minute,” she said, looking hard. “I think I see them now. Two crazy kids stomping around in the mud.”
“That’s them,” he said approvingly, then looked down at her. “Or more accurately, that’s us.”
Us. Yes, they had spent time together on that side of the lake. How could she forget? Some of the best moments of her life had been spent there.
Cam was always fighting with his grandfather in those days. After a particularly bad argument, she would often find him down at the far side of Apache Lake, fishing for rainbow trout. She would sit and watch and he would tell her stories about the valley’s history or his sister’s latest exploit or…sometimes, what he wanted to do with his life. His dreams involved big things far away from gold country. Whenever he talked about them, she felt a sense of sad emptiness inside. She knew she would never be a part of that world.
He always used catch and release, and she would watch regretfully as he threw the shiny, silvery fish back in and they watched it swim away. He didn’t realize that she could have used it for dinner. More often than not, the refrigerator at her house was bare and her father was off somewhere burning through the money that should have gone to food, pouring it down his throat in the form of bargain wine. But she never said a word to Cam. She was too embarrassed to let him know her dinner would be a cheap candy bar that night.
Such things were not a problem any longer. She had a nice little business that kept her comfortable, if not exactly rolling in wealth. These days she was more likely to try to cut down on calories than to need to scrounge for protein.
Times had changed. She’d traded a rough childhood for an adulthood that was a lot nicer. She’d been a damaged person then. She was okay now.
Her hands tightened on the railing and she bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling. Who was she trying to kid? A woman who was content with her life didn’t take the steps to change things that she had recently done.
He hadn’t noticed yet. She resisted the urge to pull her robe more carefully over her slightly rounded belly. He was going to have to know the truth some time and it might as well be now.
Well, maybe not now. But very soon.
“Remember the night before I left?” he was saying, his voice low and slightly hoarse. “Remember…?”
He let his voice trail off and she closed her eyes. She remembered all right. She would never forget. It was the one and only time he’d ever kissed her. It wasn’t much of a kiss—not at all the kind of kiss she’d yearned for. His lips had barely touched hers. But she still considered it the best kiss she’d ever had.
She felt him touching her hair and she sighed. If she turned to look at him, would he kiss her again? She tried it, moving slowly, opening her eyes to look up into his face. For just a moment, she thought he might do it. But then a look of regret came into his eyes and he turned from her, moving restlessly.
Her heart sank, but she scolded herself at the same time. What was she thinking? A romance with Cam was not in the cards—never had been.
“So where have you been all this time?” she probed to get her mind on other things.
He shrugged. “Pretty much everywhere. Served a few years in the Navy. Worked on an oilrig in the Gulf. Spent some time as a bodyguard in Thailand. The usual stuff.”
She nodded. This was definitely not the sort of thing his mother would have bragged about. If he’d been at law school on law review, spent time working as an aide to the governor, or made a pile of money on Wall Street, she would have made sure the local paper covered it in minute detail. Cam had always had a tendency to turn away from the upper class path to respect and follow his own route to…what? That had often been a bone of contention between him and his family.
But who was she to complain? It was exactly that inclination that had led him to be her protector for those early years. Their friendship had started when she was in Middle School. Her father was the town drunk and that meant she was the object of vile names and other indignities that adolescent boys seemed compelled to visit upon those weaker than themselves. Cam was a couple of years older. He saw immediately what was going on in her life and he stepped in to make it stop.
That first time had been like magic. She’d gone for a swim at the park pool. None of her friends had shown up and suddenly, she’d been surrounded by a group of boys who had begun to taunt her, circling and snapping at her like a pack of wolves. She knew she could hold her own against one boy, or even two or three, but there were too many this time and she panicked. She tried to run, which only egged them on, and just when she thought she was going to be taken down like a frightened deer, Cam
