Home to Laura

chapter TWO



“HOLD ON A SEC.”

Laura Cameron held the phone against her chest and leaned her forehead on her hand, needing a minute, just one blessed second, to figure out how to prevent the tornado that was barreling down on her.

She and Vin had been circling around the same old argument for twenty minutes and they still weren’t any closer to solving it than when they’d started. After Laura had lost their baby, Vin had left Accord to “clear” his head in Las Vegas. She’d been devastated by her miscarriage. He’d been relieved. He’d said he needed time away.

She put the receiver to her ear again. “Vin, I know you don’t want children yet, but—”

“I’m not coming back, Laura.”

He’d said it so quietly she wasn’t sure what she’d heard. “Pardon?”

“I’m not coming back.”

Her breath hitched in her throat, her shock too great, too large, to have a voice. Nothing coherent, nothing but denial, the one word no, formed inside of her.

“We want different things,” he said. “You want babies right away. I want to wait.”

“Of course I want babies right away. We’ve been engaged for five years. I’m thirty-five and running out of time.” Vin could afford to wait. She couldn’t.

“We’re not getting married, Laura. Sorry.”

“But...” She didn’t know what to say, how to change his mind.

Pain burned in her chest. It was over? That was it? After five years she was losing her fiancé and the beginning of a family and all it merited was a simple sorry? Her world was falling apart and all she got was one lousy, measly sorry?

“There are no buts, Laura. You shoulda seen it coming.”

Yes, part of her had seen it coming, but the larger part had resisted.

“I gotta go. You okay?”

She couldn’t respond, had nothing inside of her at the moment for the man who was walking away from her.

For a long time after disconnecting, she sat with her head in her hands, rocking, until she realized she was grieving more for the baby she’d lost in her miscarriage than for Vin. What really saddened her most about losing him was that she would miss him more for the chance at a family she’d have with him rather than for him. How sad was that? How screwed up?

She doubled forward holding her stomach. She wanted her unborn baby back. At least then she would still have a chance at children. But no. She wanted a family.

Sick with herself, with botched opportunities and lost chances, with hope shattered, she ran downstairs to the one thing that worked in her life—her bakery café.

In the kitchen, she swiped a hand across her stomach, across her empty womb. I miss you. There had been butterfly kisses of movement, things that Vin had never felt, tiny filaments that had never bound him to the baby as they had for Laura.

She breathed deeply, calling on reserves that were depleting too quickly, and pulled herself together. At least she still had her baking and her business, her driving passion.

The café was full so she put on her game face, but smiling hurt. Her empty body hurt. The memory of the flutters of an “almost” little being ached.

She stepped up to the counter so she wouldn’t wrap her arms across her belly and cry. She was stronger than that.

A lineup eight- or nine-deep awaited service. Good. This she could do, even if she couldn’t hold on to a fiancé or an unborn babe. This she could do, and do well.

* * *

HUNGER GNAWED A hole in Nick’s belly. Or maybe it was in his psyche. Standing in the town he’d grown up in, he couldn’t tell the difference.

He and Emily stood on Main Street in Accord in front of a bakery, with his stomach grumbling as it had done too often in his growing-up years in Accord.

As a boy, he used to stare at baked goods in this very window while his mouth watered and his belly grumbled. He’d been too poor to walk into the place all those years ago, let alone be able to purchase anything.

He wasn’t poor now. He could buy this place ten times over without feeling a strain.

So was his hunger a Pavlovian response to returning to Accord? Hell, all he knew was that, despite his wealth, here he stood feeling small again.

When he used to leave fingerprints on the glass, Mr. Foster would come running out to shoo him along. From a block away, he’d watch the old guy spray the window with glass cleaner. A second later, no trace of Nick would remain.

Wasn’t that a disturbingly apt metaphor for how Nick had felt growing up in this town? Invisible?

“Dad, can we go in?” Emily looked up at him, clearly puzzled by his hesitation.

He wanted to walk into the place as if he owned it, but he knew who really did own it these days, and he knew she wouldn’t be glad to see him. Laura Cameron was the first woman to come between him and his brother Gabe, long before Callie had.

“I’m hungry,” Emily said.

He opened the door and let her step inside then followed into warm cinnamon-and-vanilla-scented air that wrapped seductive arms around him, luring him in with the promise of home, but it was something he’d never smelled in his house growing up.

Mom had worked two jobs while Gabe had learned to cook the basics to keep his brothers fed.

Nick was perfectly happy with his life in Seattle. True, he didn’t see enough of Emily. Her childhood had slipped away like windblown clouds, but he was changing that, starting here, starting now. So he didn’t need the homey-ness of the scent of baked goods to make him feel homesick. Because he wasn’t.

“Wow,” Emily breathed. “This place is great, Dad.”

“Wow is right.”

Inside, the shop looked like no ordinary bakery, splashed as the walls were with red and yellow. Dominating the far wall, dots of orange popped from spring greens in an unframed oversize print of Klimt’s Field of Poppies.

Laura had transformed the plain old bakery into a harvest of the bold and the sensual, a feast for all of the senses.

He nudged Emily gently. “Go figure out what you want.”

She ran to the display cases.

Amid the hum of conversation, music danced from speakers somewhere in the ceiling, Imelda May performing a Les Paul classic with her sexy kitty, kitty, kitty chorus accompanied by Jeff Beck’s insanely difficult guitar riffs.

The bakery cum coffee shop was an original. He knew there was nothing like it in Seattle. He looked through the closing door at Main Street, to make sure he was still in small-town Accord. He turned back to the inside of the bakery. Alice through the Looking Glass.

Laura had turned the original bakery into a small café, had squeezed tables and chairs into every available spot and had covered them with brightly colored tablecloths. All seats were taken. There was a sizable lineup at the counter. Popular place. A going concern. As a businessman he could appreciate her success.

Just to the left of the door, she had hung a bulletin board with notices and business cards stuck all over it. One of the pamphlets read Keep Our Youth Here. Ha! Good luck with that one. You had to offer them something worth staying for. He’d never found anything to keep him here. Why would today’s youth stay?

He’d offered to pay tuition for any kid completing high school and willing to study Hospitality or Culinary Arts then guarantee two years working in his resort.

So far, he’d had a lot of interest.

It wasn’t charity, but a keen move calculated to get the town on his side in convincing his older brother Gabe to sell his portion of the land. Once Gabe had capitulated, middle brother Tyler had soon followed.

Another notice asked for volunteers to coach a basketball league. God, he used to love basketball. He’d played in high school. It had gotten him through his adolescent years sane, in one piece. He touched the phone number at the bottom of the page. He hadn’t played since then.

He should have taught Emily how. She had those long coltish legs. He stifled a sigh. He’d missed so much.

Impatient with himself, he took his place in line. Regrets were a waste of time and energy.

A table cleared against the wall. “Emily, do you know what you want?”

“Yeah, Dad, one of our sandwiches and a brownie.”

“Go grab that table and I’ll bring everything over.”

The music changed to Texas country rock. Steve Earle. “Copperhead Road.” Where were the vapid pop songs that flooded radio stations these days, or the rap, or the country music he’d expected in rural Colorado?

He glanced up toward the chalkboard that listed drinks and baked goods, but a flash of rich chestnut hair caught his eye and quickened his pulse.

Laura.

In the past thirteen years, he’d seen her only once in the high school auditorium, when he’d come in January to give his sales talk to the people of Accord. The second he’d gone up onstage, she’d run from the room so he’d seen her only from a distance. He hadn’t been close enough to get the full impact of her beauty and her personality. He was now. There was no other woman on earth like her.

Even Callie paled by comparison.

Crap. It all came crashing back. He was fifteen years old again, his heart was pounding like a snare drum, his hands were sweaty, and he’d just figured out he was in love with an older girl and wanted to rip his brother’s arms off because he was holding her and kissing her on the veranda as if he had a right to. Well...he did. She’d been Gabe’s girlfriend and later his fiancée.

Nothing was simple here in Accord.

Half earth mother and half seductress, Laura stood in the doorway from the back of the shop, even more tempting than she’d been in high school. She’d grown up beautifully. Maturity added fullness to her figure and depth to that intriguing face. Her body had developed curves only hinted at all those years ago.

Lush didn’t begin to describe her.

Small pale freckles dotted the perfect white skin of her cheeks. Her crocheted top slipped from one shoulder, revealing a lavender bra strap.

The woman breathed sensuality as effortlessly as she’d slipped on those clothes.

He’d slept with her only one night, when he was nineteen, and it hadn’t been nearly enough.

The young girl working at the counter deferred to Laura with a question about cinnamon buns. Laura laughed—God, still so husky—and said to the crowd in the lineup, “You people are insatiable. I’ll make a larger batch next time.”

The decor and music made perfect sense. She’d always been original, unpredictable and deep.

The music changed again. Keith Jarrett’s jazz piano floated through the bakery along with his signature grunts and moans. Describing Laura’s taste as eclectic would be an understatement.

She hadn’t seen him yet so he looked his fill, that hunger inside of him morphing into something that lunch wouldn’t satisfy, into something as strong as a kick to his solar plexus. Where before he’d stepped into the bakery he’d been hungry, now he was ravenous.

* * *

“CHARLIE, WHAT CAN I get for you today?” Laura asked, shocked that her voice sounded normal.

“Coffee and two chocolate éclairs.”

She’d never noticed before how deep Charlie’s voice was. She knew he was reliable, supported himself and his mother with construction work. Came in here like clockwork every day.

In her vulnerable state, she found herself looking at him differently, as a potential father, as though she could just ask, “Hey, you want to have a baby with me?” and poof! she would be pregnant. No strings attached.

Stupid, foolish thought. She didn’t want single motherhood. She wanted strings attached, heavenly binding forever strings. She wanted her life tied up with a man’s, not because she felt incomplete without one—lord, no, she was independent—but because she loved families. Babies did well in families.

Even so, she couldn’t stop herself from seeing the men she knew in a new way.

When Geoff stepped forward and ordered his usual, two bran muffins and a caramel latte, she watched him from the corner of her eye.

She hadn’t noticed before today that he wasn’t half bad-looking. She packaged his coffee and muffins and took his money.

Geoff had to be in his mid-fifties. He was a nice guy, but she couldn’t imagine sleeping with him, the age difference too broad for her. That she’d considered it even for a split second spoke of her desperation.

Sheila McCabe and her daughter were next in line.

After Sheila placed her order, Laura asked Tilly to fill it then took a serving paper and picked up a tiny cookie perfectly shaped like a duck. She stepped around the counter and crouched to address little Shawna.

“Do you remember how much you liked these cookies last year?”

When she saw the yellow icing and orange beak and two dark dots for eyes, Shawna’s own eyes grew big and round. “They were good.”

“This is a spring present from me to you.”

Impulsively, Shawna threw her four-year-old arms around Laura’s neck. Oh heaven. Laura squeezed her right back. Oh, the urge to just have a baby somehow, anyhow, overwhelmed her, warred with her beliefs, had her considering calling adoption agencies.

When she stood up, she said, “You enjoy that, sweetie pie,” and waved off Sheila’s thanks. She kept that batch of cookies on the side to hand out to children.

Last in the lineup, a man checked out the goodies left in the glass cabinets while she wrapped the duck cookies so they wouldn’t go stale.

Her stomach grumbled. She hadn’t gotten around to eating lunch.

With a quick glance at the stranger’s clothes, she noticed he was overdressed for Accord. They didn’t get a lot of suits here. Ranchers, yes. Plenty of cowboy hats, sure. But business suits? On a Saturday? Not so much.

“Can I help you?” she asked while she wiped the counter.

“I’ll have a coffee and two turkeys on rye with avocado. I also want a hot chocolate and two brownies.”

He pulled a couple of twenties out of his wallet and handed them to her. He held himself unnaturally still and it gave her pause. She glanced up...and her heart stopped.

Pain took her breath away.

Nick Jordan stood on the other side of the counter. Clean-cut. Rich. Gorgeous in his refined way. Not in the way of the men she usually went for, like his rugged brother Gabe. But then, Nick had ruined her chances with Gabe, hadn’t he? Before that, her life had been right on track.

This man had upset her plan, had stolen her dream. She’d had it all worked out—marriage to Gabe, then a pair of children, then starting a bakery when they were old enough to go to school.

After the heartbreak of losing Gabe, throughout her twenties, she hadn’t worried, but no man had tempted her until Vin and he wasn’t ready to settle down. So...here she was, with minutes turning into days and weeks into years. And years into frustration and loss. And still no family.

Nick watched her steadily. He’d changed from the young man who had seduced her. Gone was the cockiness, replaced by a quiet confidence. He watched her with those dark coffee-colored, almost-black eyes that were the Jordan trademark.

Nick’s, though, were set in a more streamlined face than either Gabe’s or Tyler’s, his high cheekbones strong, his jaw fine-boned. In Laura’s opinion, he was the best-looking of those three handsome boys.

To her disgrace, her heart rate stuttered. She still found him attractive and that was awful. The man was a snake. Lower than a snake.

The breath he’d just robbed her of returned.

“You have a lot of nerve.” Her hard tone could cut glass. “What are you doing in my shop?”

A ruddy blush rose into his cheeks and, for a moment, his gaze shot away from hers. As it should have. He deserved to be ashamed of himself after what he’d done.

She couldn’t serve him, couldn’t stand there and make small talk with the man who had robbed her of her chance at marriage and children with Gabe.

“Go to hell.”

She turned and ran from the room, not caring that she rushed, not giving a rat’s ass that, heaven forbid, he should think she was running from him. She was. She hurt. And she was afraid. Not of him, but of herself and her reaction to him. It had been a long, long time since a man had her sweating, had her wanting to lose control, had her wanting reason to take a backseat to passion.

No, she ordered herself. None of this again.

In the kitchen, she leaned her hands on the counter, straight-armed and rigid so she wouldn’t fall apart, and closed her eyes. She hurt.

* * *

NICK HEARD WHISPERS spin around the café.

Who’s that? What’s happening? What’s up? Isn’t that Nick Jordan? Curiosity flashed through the room like sheet lightning.

Did Laura know she’d yelled in her anger?

He felt all eyes on him.

Not so invisible now, are you, Jordan? his psyche mocked. You should have checked whether she was in here before entering.

He was a thirty-two-year-old multimillionaire, a successful businessman who didn’t let others run roughshod over him. He controlled people. He controlled his emotions. Laura Cameron shouldn’t be able to turn him back into that callow teenager he’d been around her, but he felt like that boy, sick in love with his older brother’s fiancée. He’d kept his secret deeply hidden, until that one night.

She’d been three years older than him. To a nineteen-year-old boy/man, that was a lifetime. In his fevered nighttime sweats, his dreams had been deeply erotic. Then, that one night, she’d been even better in reality.

They needed to talk.

He flew around the end of the counter and into the back.

“Hey,” he heard the girl named Tilly call.

Stalking into an industrial kitchen, he pulled up short.

What he saw on Laura’s face stunned him. Grief. Misery. He had expected anger, but not pain, or whatever it was that made her look as if she wanted to crawl into a dark place and curl into a ball.

Why would seeing him affect her so much? That one night had been thirteen years ago. She was a successful businesswoman. So what was her problem?

He had to have it out with her, whatever it was. He couldn’t leave it alone, had to give it the perspective of time passed so it wouldn’t eat into his stomach any more than it just had.

“Laura,” he said, quietly.

Her eyes flew open.

Emotions flitted across her features like fireflies—anger, loss, regret and grief. For the briefest moment, the woman he’d always thought of as invulnerable looked lost.

“What’s wrong?”

Her face turned red.

“What’s wrong?” After her yelling out front, her voice was now too quiet. “You have to ask? After what you did?”

They had never talked about it.

“I know what I did, Laura, but that was only one night thirteen years ago.” Then why do you still feel it as though it happened last night? As though your marriage and daughter and career never took place?

“I know it was only one night.”

“I didn’t exactly seduce you.”

Her cheeks flamed. “You—”

Nick felt someone approach behind him.

“I’m sorry, Laura,” she said. “He ran in here before I could stop him.”

“It’s okay, Tilly. Go finish with the customers.”

Tilly’s footsteps whispered away.

He stepped closer to Laura. She’d opened an old wound and he wanted to heal it, to finish with it here and now, and euthanize like a rabid dog the insanity he hadn’t realized until this moment still foamed inside of him. “You were as hot for me as I was for you.”

Her expression took on some of the guilt with which he lashed himself. “Yes,” she conceded. “I was. I turned out to be a willing partner. I hadn’t planned that night, though. You had.”

“True.” While she might have given in to temptation in the spur of the moment, she hadn’t had the ulterior motive he’d had when he’d returned to town with the aim of sleeping with her.

He’d wanted to destroy his brother, to shame and embarrass Gabe the way he’d shamed Nick in front of the man he’d wanted to work for. Nick had left college with Marsha. They had gone to Seattle to meet her father. Nick wanted to marry Marsha and work for Mort.

“You arranged for Gabe to find us,” Laura said.

“Yes. What difference did it make?”

“I was engaged to him. I was going to marry him.”

“Did you honestly think you could still do that after we’d slept together?”

“No. I was guilty of infidelity. I wouldn’t have made Gabe try to live with that.” She huffed out a breath loaded with anger. “I would have softened the blow, though, and found a better way to tell him than to have him walk in on us.”

She pressed a hand against her mouth. “It must have been awful for him.”

“I wanted him to find us.”

“I eventually figured that out. Why?”

“I’d left college and run off with a girl. I wanted to marry her. Gabe caught up to us and dragged me back to college. He shamed me in front of her and her father.” He still remembered how deeply his embarrassment had run, how humiliated he’d felt, and how afraid he’d been that Gabe had ruined his chances with both Marsha and Mort permanently.

“So? He’d worked for five years to save enough money for you to go. You should have been grateful. You should have been down on your knees kissing his feet.” She leaned forward, speaking with a feverish intensity. “You and Tyler would have been the first in the family to attend college. All thanks to Gabe.”

“So? It wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t the way I wanted to start my career. The girl’s father was a big deal in development. He had a lot of money. I wanted him for a father-in-law. I knew I could learn more from him firsthand than I would ever learn in school.”

“So, why didn’t you just run away again? Why come back to Accord to seduce me?” He would have objected, but she rushed on. “Yes, you did seduce me, even if you didn’t find it hard to do. I would have let my attraction to you slide. I would have had a good life with Gabe.”

“I saved you from a mediocre future.”

“Not true. Gabe is a good man.”

“You couldn’t have loved him too much if you were tempted by me so easily. Marriage to Gabe would have been too tame for you. I rescued you.”

“Don’t,” she bit out. “It wasn’t a charitable act. What you did had nothing to do with me and everything to do with hurting Gabe as much as you could.”

“Yes.” He’d wanted to hurt Gabe, the meddling bastard, but seducing Laura had been magnificent. Yeah, it had everything to do with hurting his brother, but so much to do with Laura, too. Lovely, breathtaking Laura.

“You were a selfish bastard concerned only with your own revenge.”

“I was only nineteen. I regret it now.”

At his even tone, her eyes narrowed. “What are you? A robot? Don’t you have feelings?”

Too many at the moment. “I don’t see the value in indulging them.”

They stared at each other, apparently at an impasse.

“I have to go,” he said. “My daughter is waiting for her lunch.”

Something changed in Laura, as though a whirlwind fanned a flame higher. A blush flared on her cheeks.

“You have a daughter?” she asked, her voice quiet again, but pulsing with anger.

He cocked his head. “Why does that make you angry?”

“You have no idea what you took from me, do you?” Laura asked. “How unfair it is that you have a child while I don’t? You stole my chance at a family.”

Ah. He understood. “You didn’t want Gabe as much as you wanted children. Gabe was a means to an end.”

“I loved him. He was a good man. He would have made a brilliant father.”

For the briefest moment, he thought she might cry. Over ancient history?

“You owe me so much.”

“Were there no other men in this town who would marry you and give you babies?” Were they blind?

She shook her head, once, quickly. There were things going on here that he didn’t understand, that she didn’t want to share with him. He didn’t blame her. They were strangers.

The longer she stared at him, the more he got the impression of something forming inside of her, something calculating and sly, of that wind fanning a twister.

“You owe me,” she said again, with conviction this time.

Her smile worried him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You owe me a baby.”