Christmas at the Riverview Inn

“You should go,” she said. Please go. “Before Alice comes looking for you. I’ll clean this up.”

“You sure?” he asked, looking down at the hair in the sink.

“Totally.”

She grinned the wide plastic grin her face had grown used to and silently begged him to go, so she could take a deep breath and shake out her hands and remember she wasn’t a girl suffering from the most painful case of unrequited love of all time.

But then, suddenly, he grabbed her hand, the one not holding the clippers, and instinctively her hand grabbed back and it seemed—for a moment—that they were holding on to each other. Him in the hallway, her in the tiled bathroom. Both of them in the now and in the past.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

“It’s good to see you, too.”

They were speaking in understatements to somehow make this all seem normal. Or simple. When it was anything but. At least on her end.

Though, maybe it was simple on his end. Maybe he ran into old girlfriends all the time and buried his hands in their hair and pulled, just enough to make them…wet.

She couldn’t find the plastic smile so she didn’t even look at him.

He squeezed her hand and then walked away.

When she couldn’t hear him in the hallway or the dining room she collapsed against the sink.

Hearing his side of the story rearranged things in her head. Alleviated some guilt. Changed the position of the blame and responsibility and left it without any place to go. It didn’t take away the pain.

It didn’t change that he’d left without a word.

It didn’t change that part of her remained caught in that night, in those years with him. Measuring every man against the memory of him. Measuring every man against the way her body had lit up for him.

It was why she hadn’t moved on.

It was why she was a twenty-three-year-old virgin.

It was embarrassing. Infuriating. It wasn’t his fault that she was frozen. But it wasn’t not his fault, either. And after that night part of her…shrank. Her confidence, maybe. Her fierceness when it came to her place in this family. She’d taken all that fierceness and put it in her work while her private self stayed small. Withered almost.

It all shuffled in her brain. Some things making more sense. Some things making less.

She understood why he left. Cameron would have been horrified. Embarrassed. He would have felt that he’d betrayed the family.

But it didn’t explain the rest of it. Those unreturned calls. Those unread messages. Dozens of them. Hundreds.

She stood staring at a Christmas wreath on a store’s door in Greenwich Village. It was one of the green ones, made entirely out of plants. And without thinking twice she called him. His number, six months later, still on her favorites list.

“This is Cameron,” his message said. “I probably won’t listen to this but go ahead and give it a shot. If you really need me, text.”

The sound of his voice put a lump in her throat. And she’d tried texting. She’d tried a bajillion texts.

“Cameron,” she said after the beep. “It’s…well, it’s me. Josie. It’s Christmas. Though, you probably know that. I just…” She looked at that wreath, the pine needles and the sage. Someone bumped into her. Slush covered the toes of her boots.

“Move on,” someone yelled at her and she laughed. Exactly. Move on.

“Wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. I hope you’re well. Call…you know…if you want to.”

He’d never called and she wished she could say that was the last time she’d called him. He hadn’t returned one of her texts and now he stood there and had the gall to tell her he had felt what she had felt.

Bullshit.

She was stunned to feel…anger. Real anger. It exploded in her. Out of the boxes where she’d put it. Where she’d hidden it.

Leaving the clippers and the hair, she went to get some answers.

10

CAMERON

His hand burned. He flexed it, spreading the fingers wide, and then clenched it into a fist. He could feel every strand of her hair that he’d touched.

What was that? he wondered.

Well, he knew what that was. That thing between them that made her breath break and her eyes dilate. That made his blood burn. It was what had always been between them. And what a goddamn kick in the nuts that he’d never felt that same burn with any other woman. That same chemistry.

In Thailand he’d met Paanit, a chef who worked out of a beach cave, and Paanit served him spicy Khao soi and grilled meat from a smoky fire with an oily, bright-green condiment he’d never had before. It was so delicious, the perfect combination of sweet and salt and heat with bright herbaceous tones, that it had blown his mind. Paanit, the bastard, wouldn’t tell him what was in it and Cameron had spent years trying to recreate the taste.