that Violet had ever kissed him. Men like Cameron McKinnon didn’t kiss girls like her. She was too girl-next-door. He dated women who looked as if they had just stepped out of a photo shoot. Glamorous, sophisticated types who could hold their own in any company without breaking out in hives in case someone spoke to them.
Cam’s gaze briefly went to her bare left hand where she was cradling her coffee before coming back to hers in a keenly focused look that made something deep in her belly unfurl like a flower opening its petals to the sun.
‘So, how are things with you, Violet?’
‘Erm...okay.’ At least she wasn’t breaking out into hives, but the blush she could feel crawling over her cheeks was almost as bad. Was he thinking—like the rest of her family—Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride?
‘Only okay?’ His look had a serious note to it, a combination of concern and concentration, as if she were the only person he wanted to talk to right then. It was one of the things Violet liked about him—one of the many things. He wasn’t so full of himself that he couldn’t spare the time to listen. She often wondered if he’d been around to talk to after that wretched party, during her first and only year at university, her life might not have turned out the way it had.
Violet stretched her mouth into her standard everything-is-cool-with-me smile. ‘I’m fine. Just busy with work and Christmas shopping and stuff. Like you, I have a lot of people to buy for now with all my nephews and nieces. Did you know Lily and Cooper are expecting? Mum and Dad are planning the usual big Christmas at Drummond Brae. Has Mum invited you? She said she was going to. The doctors think it will be Grandad’s last Christmas so we’re all making an effort to be there for him.’
Cam’s mouth took on a rueful slant. ‘My father’s decided to upstage Christmas with his wedding on Christmas Eve.’
‘Where’s it being held?’
‘Here in London.’
‘Maybe you could fly up afterwards,’ Violet said. ‘Or have you got other commitments?’ Other commitments such as a girlfriend. Surely he would have one. Men like Cam wouldn’t go long between lovers. He was too handsome, too rich, too intelligent, too sexy. Too everything. Cam had never broadcast his relationships with women the way her brother Fraser had before he’d fallen madly in love with Zoe. Cam was intensely private about his private life. So private it made Violet wonder if he had a secret lover stashed away somewhere, someone he kept out of the glaring spotlight that his work as an internationally acclaimed naval architect attracted.
‘I’ll see,’ he said. ‘Mum will expect a visit, especially now that her third husband Hugh’s left her.’
Violet frowned. ‘Oh, no. I’m sorry to hear that. Is she terribly upset?’
Cam gave her a speaking look. ‘Not particularly. He drank. A lot.’
‘Oh...’
Cam’s family history was nothing short of a saga. Not that he’d ever said much about it to her, but Fraser had filled in the gaps. His parents went through a bitter divorce when he was six and promptly remarried and set up new families, collecting other biological children and stepchildren along the way. Cam was jostled between the various households until he was sent to boarding school when he was eight. Violet could picture him as a little boy—studious, quietly observing on the sidelines, not making a fuss and avoiding one where it was made. He was still like that. When he came to visit her family for weddings, christenings or other gatherings he was always on the fringe, standing back with a drink in his hand he rarely touched, quietly measuring the scene with his navy-blue gaze.
The waitress came over to take Cam’s order with a smile that went beyond I’m your server, can I help you? to Do you want my number?
Violet tried to ignore the little dart of jealousy that spiked her in the gut. It was none of her business who he flirted with. Why should she care if he picked up a date from her favourite café? Even if she had been coming here for years and no one had asked for her number.
Cam looked across the table at her. ‘Would you like another coffee?’
Violet put her hand over the top of her latte glass. ‘No, I’m good.’
‘Just a long black, thanks,’ Cam said to the waitress with a brief but polite smile.
Violet waited until the girl had left before she spoke. ‘Cra—ack.’
His brow furrowed. ‘Pardon?’
She gave him a teasing smile. ‘Didn’t you hear that girl’s heart breaking?’
He looked puzzled for a moment, and then faintly annoyed. ‘She’s not my type.’
‘Describe your type.’ Why had she asked that?
The bridge between Cam’s ink-black eyebrows was still pleated in three tight vertical lines. ‘I’ve been too busy for any type just lately.’ His phone, which was sitting on the table, beeped with a message and he glanced at it before turning off the screen, his lips pressing so firmly his mouth turned bone-white.
‘What’s wrong?’
He forcibly relaxed his features. ‘Nothing.’
The phone beeped again and his mouth flattened once more. He clicked the mute button and slipped the phone into his jacket pocket as the waitress set his coffee down on the table between them. ‘So, how’s work?’
Violet glanced at the invitation peeping out of the pages of her book. Was it her imagination or was it flashing like a beacon? She surreptitiously pushed it back out of sight. ‘Fine...’
Cam followed the line of her gaze. ‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing... Just an invitation.’
‘To?’
Violet was sure her cheeks were as the red as the baubles on the invitation. ‘The office Christmas party.’
‘You going?’
She couldn’t meet his gaze and looked at the sugar bowl instead. Who knew there were so many different artificial sweeteners these days? Amazing. ‘I kind of have to... It’s expected in the interests of office harmony.’
‘You don’t sound too keen.’
Violet lifted one of her shoulders in a shrug. ‘Yeah, well, I’m not really a party girl.’ Not any more. Her first and only attempt at partying had ended in a blurry haze of regret and self-recrimination. An event she was still, all these years on, trying to put behind her with varying degrees of success.
But secret shame cast a long shadow.
‘It’s a pretty big affair, isn’t it?’ Cam said. ‘No expense spared and so on, I take it?’
Violet rolled her eyes. ‘Ironic when you consider it’s a firm of bean counters.’
‘Pretty successful bean counters,’ Cam said. ‘Well done you for nailing a job there.’
Violet didn’t like to admit how far from her dream job it actually was. After quitting her university
