Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

He thought about that. Yesterday, Ginny had followed him to Iowa, and again Judah had heard Katie’s voice in his head, urging him to be a decent person. Telling him to apologize. He’d told Ginny the unvarnished truth, and she’d collapsed in a puddle of tears. But after he rubbed her back and apologized all over again and tried to cheer her up, she came around. And now when he thought of Ginny, that tug in his gut was missing. That heavy guilt. Vanished.

Katie had a point. Cheap or not, there was something magical about it.

He stopped at the base of Ben’s driveway. The siding on the modest ranch home was new since he’d last seen it, the trim a green that matched Ben’s aura.

It was time to make the only apology that counted.

He’d been circling this town, circling this decision since the first message arrived and he began to understand that by speaking of Ben in the interview—by remembering him out loud, acknowledging a sliver of their former happiness—he’d set something profound in motion. The taunts came, each one a spear of anxiety and a provocation to take the matter into his own hands, to act before he was acted upon.

And he had acted, in a cowardly, passive sort of way. He’d planned what Katie called his “nostalgia tour.” He’d put her and Sean to work.

Seeing Ben hadn’t told Judah whether or not Ben wanted him dead, but it told him he still felt something powerful for Ben. Guilt and attraction, affection that hadn’t died in a decade and a half. It had convinced him that he needed this reckoning to come, in whatever form it took. He needed the halves of his life to fuse back together.

The car with Sean and the Palmerston guards pulled into the drive beside them. Sean got out. They’d agreed that only Sean and Katie would go inside with him, and that Sean would carry a weapon. Judah didn’t like the idea, but Katie had told him he needed to compromise, so he accepted it.

“I really don’t think he’s going to try to kill me,” he said. “But I’m a little worried about you guys. I’m not sure how he feels about uninvited guests.”

“Why would he kill me?” Katie asked. “I’m nice.”

“You?”

“I’m so nice. You think I’d be here with you if I weren’t nice?”

He looked at her sidelong. She was smiling. “No.”

“All right then. Did you change your mind?”

He thought about what it would be like inside the house. Having to say out loud, This is what I did to you. This is what you meant to me. I’m sorry.

He could do it, but he’d rather not do it alone.

Soon, he would give her up. Give her back to her life, to Owens and Ohio and whatever the future had in store for her. Soon.

“No, I didn’t change my mind.”

“Then let’s do this.” She hooked her hand through his elbow, grabbed Sean’s hand, and began walking them up the driveway.

Whatever happened next, it would be what was supposed to happen.

Judah rang the bell.

Ben opened the door. He wore a gray sweater over a white dress shirt, jeans, and the crooked smile Judah had seen when he closed his eyes every night for the last fifteen years.

“Ben,” Judah said. He pulled off his gloves and offered one icy hand.

“Judah.” Ben shook it. “You’re cold.”

“We walked.”

“It’s minus fifteen with the wind chill. Too cold to walk.” He looked behind Judah to where Katie and Sean stood a few feet back. “You brought … Kate, is it?”

“Katie. Yes. Nice to see you again,” she said. “And this is Sean, my … This is Sean.”

Turning sideways, Ben held the door open with one straight arm and gestured them inside. “Come on in.”

Judah left his coat and shoes in the front hall and floated into the Abramses’ great room. It was the same house, of course, but better in every way than it had been before. Brighter. Cleaner. More tasteful. It had become an extension of Ben.

“I like what you’ve done with the place.”