The Truth Within (Pelican Bay 3)

Which they should.

Cam was perfect and sweet and strong and brave and told the truth and saved lives and put everyone else before himself.

“Yeah, like that,” Nolan whispered.

“What?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. I was surprised when he turned me so I was looking in a small decorative mirror by the front door. I stared in disbelief at my reflection. I was smiling.

I was fucking smiling.

I almost didn’t recognize myself just from that fact alone. But not only was I smiling, there wasn’t a single bruise on my face. And I could see Nolan’s hand on my shoulder.

I was smiling and I was letting someone comfort me and I finally saw the real me who wasn’t trying to make up excuses in his head for the bruises or wonder why no one else saw them for what they were besides people like Cam and Dallas and Nolan… Dallas and Nolan who shouldn’t have given a shit that I had those bruises or even let me set foot onto their property or in their house in the first place.

And Cam… he’d cared from day one about those bruises, but not just on a professional level. I’d heard it in his voice the day we’d met and he’d seen the bruise on my neck. He’d said my name like it… like it meant something. I’d been Ford.

Not Ford Cornell, the bad seed’s brother.

Not Ford Cornell, the relative of the corrupt sheriff he’d replaced.

Just Ford.

I thought about the day he’d saved me from the basement… how he’d let me stay in the icy water so I could turn the water main off… because he’d known what it’d meant to me. I remembered how he’d held me in his car on the way to the hospital and comforted me, how he’d refused to let me go home so he could keep an eye on me that night. How he’d understood my need to go to the sanctuary and help Sawyer with the chores because I’d made that commitment to Dallas and Nolan and Maddox and Isaac… and to Sawyer himself. Even the night he’d been shot and he’d tried to push me away for good, the first thing he’d done after getting home had been to comfort me in his driveway when I’d thought I’d lost him.

That smile in the reflection was for Cam and the things I loved about Cam. Nolan was right… that list would pretty much be endless.

I wasn’t sure how long I stood there for before I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. I noticed that Nolan had left, presumably so I could just enjoy going through my list I’d aptly named Cam-isms, since I’d shifted to thinking about all the little mannerisms he had that made me smile inside when he did them.

Like how he put mayonnaise on the side of his plate every morning to dip his sausage or bacon or even his pancakes into. Or like how he opened doors for me now, even the car door if he could beat me to it. Or the little kisses he dropped on my shoulder when we weren’t doing anything more than making popcorn for the movie we were going to watch in his bedroom.

“You okay?” Sawyer asked as he paused at the bottom of the stairs. He’d been frowning at his phone the entire way down the steps so he hadn’t noticed me.

“Yeah, I’m good,” I said with a grin that I suddenly found hard to contain.

That seemed to make Sawyer smile.

Until his phone rang again. He looked down at it and his smile faded. I saw him finger his hair, specifically the blond roots that were quickly growing out. He silenced the phone instead of answering it, then tucked it into his pocket.

“You okay?” I asked as my smile slipped. “Do you have an emergency to go to?” Sawyer was one of the on-call wildlife vets for the state. It was how he and Dallas and Nolan had met. He’d been the one to treat Gentry, the bear, after my brother and his friends had attacked the animal.

The mere thought of my brother and the torment he’d inflicted on that bear made all the good stuff I’d been thinking about Cam slip to the back of my mind. I still felt an incredible amount of guilt for what Jimmy had done, but I knew in my heart I couldn’t have stopped it even if I’d been there. My thoughts abruptly shifted to the crime Jimmy had committed at his work. The money had been returned to the woman (of course, it’d been my money because Jimmy didn’t have any of his own) and Uncle Curtis had made the whole thing go away, but it’d still been a crime.

And I hadn’t told Cam about it.