P
eter, I had an amazing time tonight.” Jo clutched her clutch, tracing the raised
YSL
with her index finger.
“So did I, and I hate the ballet.”
Jo gave in to a grin, something she had been doing all night. Peter’s sense of humor held just the right amount of bite to be clever, but never cruel. He opened her car door, pulled out her chair, and actually listened when she soapboxed about foreign policy and human trafficking. He spoke the same languages she did. Belonged to the same clubs. Even drove the same freaking Land Rover. He was perfect for her. He made sense. He wanted her, and wasn’t afraid to show it.
“Would you like some coffee?” Jo thumbed at the door behind her. “Want to come in?”
“I’d like that very much.”
Peter’s eyes roamed down the gold shantung cocktail dress sheathing Jo’s curves from shoulder to knee, before making their way back up to her eyes.
Vera Wang, thank you vera much.
“Have I told you how absolutely beautiful you look in that dress?”
“Maybe four, five times, yes.” Jo loved that he didn’t flinch or even look embarrassed but shared a small smile with her. She pulled the key from her bag as she formulated her next words. “Peter, when I ask you in for coffee, it’s not a euphemism for anything else. It’s literally coffee.”
“I like my coffee literal. And I wouldn’t expect anything more.” He gave his own pause for effect. “Not on the first date, at least.”
Jo raised wide eyes but caught the little smirk giving him away. She slapped his arm with her clutch, laughing and turning to open the door.
“You had me going there for a minute,” she said, ushering him into the foyer.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His straight face just made her laugh more. “Now please point the way toward this literal coffee. It sounds delicious.”
“Jo, is that you?” her father called from the sitting room.
“Didn’t think Daddy would still be up.” She linked her elbow through Peter’s and pulled him with her. “Come see him.”
“Daddy, you remember Peter, he—”
Jo didn’t finish her sentence. She hadn’t expected to see Cam sitting across from her father, poised to steal his queen. Chess had always been their thing. You could never get Walsh to sit down long enough for a game of chess. Cam, though, despite the raw energy that snapped, crackled, and popped around him, especially when he was painting, could be downright restive. He and Daddy would play sometimes for hours. Maybe they were just getting started. She didn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.
“Sorry, Daddy. Didn’t realize you had someone with you.” She skidded her glance over Cam, making sure not to linger on the too-long hair tousled by his own fingers. A sure sign he and Daddy had been at it for a while. “Cam, welcome home. Shaundra thought you weren’t flying in until tomorrow.”
“She must have gotten the dates mixed up.” Cam’s eyes shifted between Jo and Peter. He bent his lips into a smile that would have fooled anyone else. Jo, though, knew every smile that had ever graced Cam’s face. This was his three-dollar-bill smile. He couldn’t pass it off on her as the real thing.
“Cam, this is Peter Halstead, director of our international adoption program.” Jo gestured between the two men. “Peter, Cam Mitchell. Cam’s like a…like a brother to me.”
Jo let the words settle in her mouth, weighing and testing them. As a woman who valued truth above all else, the lie felt foreign and heavy on her tongue. But this lie was a necessary evil. The sooner she accepted that Cam would never be more than a brother to her, the better. And why not start with Peter and the ballet.
“I’ve seen your work. It’s brilliant.” Peter walked deeper into the room, extending his hand to Cam. “We’re all excited you’ll have your exhibit at the Walsh House.”
Cam eyed Peter as if he were a nail and Cam the hammer. He and Walsh always played Big Bad Brother with the men she dated. She’d once fooled herself into believing it was more for Cam. Maybe jealousy, but he’d quickly disabused her of that notion by sleeping with some girl from her dorm. Cam glanced from Peter’s hand back to the affable expression on his even features before, a mere hairsbreadth shy of rudeness, he accepted and shook.
“Thank you.” Cam glanced at Jo again, his dark brows lifted in a question. “Adoption program? You didn’t tell me you were branching out into adoptions.”
“We haven’t really spoken much lately, though, have we?” Jo tapped her clutch against her hip, shaping her face into indifference and holding Cam’s stare.
“True.” Cam nodded before turning back to Daddy, who had snatched yet another pawn. “So how was the ballet?”
Peter answered before Jo could.
“It was as astoundingly boring as I had anticipated.” Peter dropped amused eyes to Jo’s face. “And I got exactly what I wanted. A night with this beautiful woman, which made it completely worth it.”
Jo had pulled her mouth into a hard line as soon as she saw Cam sitting with her father. She could feel her mouth relaxing. Feel it yielding to a smile. Feel all that was held tight loosening a little. She
needed
to fall for this guy. It was as obvious as the sun in the morning and the moon at night. And yet her body and everything inside her was tuned to the dark-haired man watching them when he wasn’t watching the board.
“You’re sweet, Peter.” She tugged his elbow, giving him a grin for free. “Next time we’ll do something you like.”
“I like spending time with you, so that’s a sure bet.” He ran a finger down her cheek and dropped a kiss on her hair, pulling her hand to his and linking their fingers. “You mind if I pass on that literal coffee? Just realized we have an
early
conference call with the folks in Kenya.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Jo said. “Forgot about that.”
“Taking over the world again, sweetheart?” Her father asked the question without lifting his eyes from the chessboard, but the fond smile on his face was for her. She walked over to perch on the arm of his leather chair and gave him a quick kiss on his cheek.
“You know once we have Haiti up and running, we want to start with Kenya.” She reached over her father and made a few deft moves, castling Cam’s king without glancing his way once. “We’ve got the first kids in Haiti waiting.”
Cam leaned back in the leather armchair, lacing his fingers over his chest, never looking up but considering his next move. She and Cam were the only ones who’d ever been able to match her father and Aunt Kris. She loved playing with him but wouldn’t be indulging that anytime soon. He made a brilliant maneuver, looking up at her with “your move” sketched between his raised brows. Tempting as it was to engage with him, she stood and walked away, ignoring the unspoken invitation.
“I’ll let you know how the Kenya call goes, Daddy,” she said over her shoulder, relooping her elbow through Peter’s. “The call is…what time again, Peter?”
“Seven o’clock.”
“Oh, you
do
need to get home.” She walked him back out of the study. “Night, gentlemen. I’m walking Peter out and then off to bed.”
* * *
“He’s like a brother to me.”
Exactly the words Cam needed Jo to believe, but they had filleted him when she’d made the comment to the Ken doll fingering her face moments before. All Cam’s bodily functions had ground to a halt, completely immobilized by the sight of someone touching Jo intimately. Peter Halstead touched Jo like it was just the beginning. Like him stroking her face was merely a prelude to everything else he wanted to do to her. He’d pulled her close. He’d kissed her hair. He’d been subtly possessive.
“Head not in the game anymore?”
Cam wrenched his eyes from the doorway Peter and Jo had just gone through, forcing his attention back to the board, where his bishop was now imperiled.
“How…When…?”
“While you were distracted by my daughter and her date,” said James Walsh, or Unc as Cam and Walsh had always called him.
Cam ignored that. He was
so
not having this conversation. He considered his vulnerable bishop.
“I can still salvage this.”
“Yes, if you move fast, but Peter seems pretty determined to get the girl.”
Cam abandoned his focus face and narrowed his eyes at Jo’s father, who was conspicuously concentrating on the board between them.
“I meant the game.”
“I told you at Christmas what you should do.”
“And I told you then you were an awful father for pawning your daughter off on someone like me.”
“I’m an excellent father with a proven track record of brilliance.” He shook his rook at Cam. “She’s dated worse.”
Cam didn’t have any response to that. He and Walsh had always guarded Jo like the family jewels. Not much trash had gotten past the front door, but once in a while, a prick or two had slipped in. Always quickly dealt with and dispatched.
“She deserves better than me.” Cam forced out the words he knew he needed to say. “She deserves someone like him.”
“You mean Peter?” Unc finally looked up from the board, his eyes, so uniquely silver like Jo’s, shrewd and knowing. “He’d be an excellent match for my daughter.”
Cam pressed his back teeth together, swallowed a snarl, and nodded.
“Too bad he’s not the one she wants.”
Cam rested his elbows on his knees and pushed his fingers through his hair. This dude…
“You saw what happened with Kerris. You know my history with women.” Cam opened and closed his fist. “Why, for the love of all that’s holy, would you keep encouraging me to pursue your daughter?”
“Because you’d never hurt her.”
“I bet Kerris thought I’d never hurt her, too.”
“I bet you thought Kerris would never hurt
you
.”
Touché to that. Cam
had
believed he and Kerris would be safe with each other. Two truly damaged, broken people who might not have the greatest love of all but would take care of each other. Maybe heal each other. But they’d emerged from that marriage with more scars than they had taken in.
“Things would be different with you and Jo. You wouldn’t hurt her. Not if you could help it.”
Unc’s voice was irrationally certain. Impossibly, mistakenly sure. That was the problem. Cam
couldn’t
help but hurt Jo. His control over everything seemed held together with Elmer’s glue and paper clips these days. Jo would be walking into a powder keg if she got involved with him. He couldn’t be that selfish. Not with Jo.
“Cam, what happened with Kerris was a comedy of errors, if you ask me. Jo has always been special to you. I thought this would have happened a long time ago.”
“What would have happened a long time ago?”
“That you’d stop fighting it.”
“I haven’t stopped…there’s nothing to fight.”
Unc used his eyes to connect the dots between Cam’s clenched fist on his knee and his granite-hard jaw.
“Sorry. I must have been mistaken.”
They both went silent when the front door opened and closed. Jo coming in off the porch. She’d been out there for a long time. Images of her outside dry humping Peter against a porch rail buzzed around Cam’s head like flies. He swatted at them, but they wouldn’t leave him alone.
Unc stood and stretched, the Harvard T-shirt he wore with his khakis straining over his still-firm torso.
“I think I’ll head on up.”
“And just check out of the game?”
“Oh,
I’m
checked out?” Unc leaned forward, moving a couple of pieces on the board. “Checkmate.”
“Wait. That’s impossible.”
“You should have seen that coming three moves ago. Don’t worry. I get it. You were…distracted.” He leaned back, peering into the hall. “Jo, glad you enjoyed your evening.”
Jo reappeared at the door, high heels hooked over her fingers.
“It was really nice.” She studied the shoes in her hand, a small smile playing around her full lips. “Peter’s really nice.”
“He’s a promising young man, that’s for sure.” Unc crossed the room, stopping in front of Jo and giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “We’re lucky to have him working with us.”
Jo nodded, meeting Cam’s eyes for a millisecond before looking up at her father.
“You headed to bed? You guys done already?”
“Young Cameron wasn’t very focused. I felt awful taking him down, but there was nothing to be done for it.”
Cam offered a disgruntled snort from the comfort of his armchair.
“Tomorrow’s another day,” Unc said, heading toward the staircase.
“I’m not coming back tomorrow, old man.”
“That’s what you said yesterday.” His voice drifted back to Cam, fainter now that he was halfway up the stairs.
Jo stood there for a moment, like a beam of sunlight in her gold dress, hair crowning her head in some elaborate arrangement, and diamond studs sparkling in her ears. Her expression searched for some missing piece of the puzzle.
“You were here yesterday? I thought you’d just gotten in from New York.”
Because he had wanted her to think that.
“Yeah. Like I said, Shaundra must have gotten the dates mixed up.”
“I didn’t see you here at the house.”
“You were at work.”
He didn’t add he’d been coming just about every day this week while she was at the office. Unc was conveniently “working from home.” Tonight revealed that he was probably onto Cam’s avoid-Jo-at-all-costs strategy.
Jo nodded, one hand gripping her shoes and the other alternating between toying with the pins holding her hair precariously high and twisting the earrings in her ear.
“Aren’t those the earrings Ms. Kris gave you for your seventeenth birthday?”
Jo’s face scrunched a little, her mouth making a small, plush O before snapping shut.
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I have a great memory.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” He didn’t leave space for her to ponder that admission or consider its implications. That maybe he remembered everything about her. “So you had a good time, huh?”
Jo caressed the gold leather of her shoe and trapped her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment before looking back at him.