Buch lesen: «A Camden's Baby Secret»

Chapter One

Maybe I shouldn’t have come today, Livi Camden thought as she leaned against the wall in one of the downstairs bathrooms of her grandmother’s house.

For over a week now she’d been having slight waves of nausea—mostly in the mornings. But on this warm, sunshine-filled Sunday afternoon—the second week of October—it became much worse than a slight wave the minute she’d come in and cooking smells had greeted her.

The bathroom had a window to the backyard and she opened it so she could breathe in the outside air.

Better...

The wave began to pass.

That was good. She hated feeling nauseous and she also didn’t want to have to go home. She loved Sunday dinner at her grandmother’s house with all her family—even if she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to eat much today.

Family had been everything to her since she’d lost her parents as a child and, along with her siblings and cousins, had become the responsibility of her grandmother. It was her family that kept Livi going when loss struck four years ago with Patrick’s death.

Plus, GiGi had called and said she wanted a few minutes alone with her today, and whatever request her grandmother made of her, Livi did her best to fulfill—especially if it meant helping with the family project of making amends to those wronged by the Camdens in the past.

The discovery of her great-grandfather H. J. Camden’s journals had confirmed all the ugly talk that had haunted the family for decades. It was rumored that the Camdens had regularly practiced underhanded and deceitful tactics to build their highly profitable empire of superstores.

The current Camdens were determined to do whatever they could to make up for the past. Quietly, so as not to invite false claims on them, they were finding ways to help or compensate those who had genuinely been harmed.

It was a cause Livi believed in and she was ready, willing and able to do her part.

Actually, she hoped that was why her grandmother wanted to talk to her.

Maybe doing something good and positive for someone else might make her feel better about herself these days. And it might also give her something to think about other than the biggest mistake she’d ever made in her life, for which she couldn’t seem to stop chastising herself.

Another wave of nausea hit her and again she took some deep breaths of cool backyard air, trying to relax. She was sure that stress over her horrible choice two months ago was causing the nausea.

“Hey, Liv, are you okay? You’ve been in there a long time.”

It was her sister Lindie’s voice coming from the other side of the door.

“I’m good. I’ll be right out,” she answered, glancing at herself in the mirror.

Her color was fine—her usually fair skin wasn’t sallow, the blue eyes that people called “those Camden blue eyes” were clear and not dull the way they got when she was genuinely under the weather. She looked tired, but not ill.

So it probably was stress, she told herself. That’s all. She was upset about what she’d done and that was making her stomach upset. When she calmed down and managed to put Hawaii behind her, her stomach would settle.

Leaving the bathroom, she tried not to breathe in too deeply the cooking smells as she went to the kitchen. But even shallow breaths caused the queasiness again. So she opened the door to the patio, angling a shoulder through the gap so she was once again breathing outdoor air without being completely outside.

Her sister and her cousin Jani were in the kitchen, gathering dishes, napkins and silverware. They both paused to watch her.

“Are you still sick with that weird flu?” Lindie asked her.

A touch of the flu—that was the excuse she’d given the first few days that she’d been late getting to work while she’d waited out the nausea at home.

“It can’t be the flu—that doesn’t last as long as this has,” Jani contributed.

The downside of being so close to her family—they sometimes knew too much.

“Okay, so it’s not the flu,” Lindie said. “But what is it? You’ve been all wound up ever since you got back from Hawaii.”

“Travel can make a mess of my stomach,” Livi hedged.

“But you’ve been back for weeks—plenty of time for your stomach to readjust.”

“Her wedding anniversary was while she was there,” Lindie pointed out to their cousin, as if she’d just hit on a clue. Then to Livi she said, “Was it bad this year? Did it set off something and put you back in a funk, stressing you out?”

Oh, the anniversary set off something, all right, Livi thought. But she couldn’t say that.

“My anniversary is never a good day.” And this year her response had been completely over-the-top and stupid. But again, she couldn’t tell anyone, so instead she said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been a little tense since then. And that always gets to my stomach. I’m sure it’ll pass, the way it always does,” she added with confidence.

But those smells were getting to her again, so she opened the door a little farther and moved a few more inches over the threshold.

Her left hand hung on to the edge of the door. Her left ringless hand.

And just the way Lindie had before Livi went into the bathroom, Jani noticed.

“Am I seeing what I’m seeing?” she exclaimed. “You took off your wedding rings? That’s probably it!”

“Oh, sure, I should have thought of that,” Lindie concurred.

“Did you decide in Hawaii?” Jani asked. “That’s a big deal, taking off your rings. No wonder you’re all tied up in knots! Was it the anniversary that finally got you there? That had to be agonizing for you. And now you’ve done it... But that’s good,” her cousin added quickly. “That’s great! Of course, it couldn’t have been easy for you, and it’s bothering you and causing the tummy trouble. But don’t put them back on! This is the first step for you to really heal.”

Livi felt like such a fraud. Along with the intermittent nausea, for some reason her fingers had swollen and she couldn’t get her rings on. She had every intention of wearing them again when the swelling went down.

But since this assumption provided such a ready excuse to appease her sister and cousin, she let them think what they wanted.

Which might not have been the best course, because then Lindie said, “Maybe when she feels better we can even get her to go on a date.”

“No,” Livi interjected firmly, thinking that she couldn’t let this go too far.

“You need to, Livi,” her cousin added. “Usually people have their first love, get their heart broken—”

“Or break someone else’s heart,” Lindie interjected.

“Then do a lot of testing the waters with other people before they find Mr. Right,” Jani finished. “But you—”

“Married my first love.”

“And missed getting the experience of casual dating. And now you’re just stuck in this limbo—Patrick is gone and you don’t know how to do what the rest of us learned a long time ago. You need to get comfortable with the whole dating thing. Then maybe you’ll be able to—”

Don’t say move on again! Livi wanted to shout.

Instead she said, for what felt like the millionth time, “Patrick wasn’t just my first love, he was also my only love, and you guys need to accept that. I have.”

“People can have more than one love in a lifetime, Livi,” Lindie persisted. “Look at GiGi—she has Jonah now.”

“And I’m happy for her,” Livi said. “But Patrick was it for me.”

“So maybe you won’t find another love-of-your-life,” Jani reasoned. “Maybe you’ll just find a close second. But that’s still something. Don’t you want companionship at least? Someone to have dinner with? Someone to go to the movies with? Someone to—”

“Have sex with?” Lindie said bluntly.

Oh, that made her really queasy!

“No,” Livi said forcefully, meaning it. And unwilling to tell either her sister or her cousin just how clearly she now knew it was a mistake to veer off the course she’d set for herself since Patrick.

“I’m fine,” she went on. “Honestly. I’m happy. I’m content. Sure, I wish things had turned out differently and Patrick and I had gotten to grow old together. But that wasn’t in the cards and I’ve accepted it.”

“What about kids?” Jani asked, resting a hand on her pregnant belly, round and solid now that she was entering her third trimester.

Livi shook her head. “I get to have all the fun with my nieces and nephews—more of them coming all the time these days—and none of the work. I’ll spoil every one of them and be their favorite aunt and they’ll like me better than their mean parents who have to discipline them. Then, when I’m old and gray in the nursing home, they’ll all come to visit me just the way they do you guys.”

Jani rolled her eyes. “It won’t be the same.”

“It’ll be close enough.”

“Close enough to what?” Georgianna Camden—the matriarch of the Camden family—asked as she came into the kitchen.

“Livi thinks that being an aunt is better than having kids of her own,” Lindie answered.

The seventy-five-year-old grandmother they all called GiGi raised her chin in understanding but didn’t comment.

“She took off her wedding rings, though,” Jani said, her tone full of optimism.

“Oh, honey, I know how hard that is,” GiGi commiserated. “Good for you!”

“Her stomach is bothering her because of it,” Lindie explained.

“Well, sure. I’ll make you dry toast for dinner—that always helps. But still, good for you,” the elderly woman repeated like a cheering squad.

Livi was feeling guiltier by the minute. When this whole queasiness-swollen-fingers thing passed and she put her rings back on, she knew everyone would worry about her all over again.

But there was no way she could explain what was really going on. The true reason for her queasiness—the fact that she was so upset over what had happened in Hawaii—had to be her secret.

So she changed the subject and said to her grandmother, “I could use something to take my mind off everything, GiGi. I was hoping you wanted to talk to me today to tell me you have one of our projects for me.”

“As a matter of fact, that is why I wanted to talk to you,” she said, her tone more solemn. “Why don’t we go sit outside and talk?”

Thinking that that was a fabulous idea, Livi wasted no time slipping out onto the back patio. Luckily, the beautiful Indian summer that Denver was enjoying made the weather warm yet.

Livi went as far from the house as she could to escape the cooking odors, and sat on the brick bench seat beside the outdoor kitchen they used for barbecues.

GiGi followed her, pulling one of the chairs away from a glass table nearby to sit and face her.

“This one makes me sick,” her grandmother announced as a prelude. She then told the story of the Camden sons and Randall Walcott, who had been Howard and Mitchum Camden’s best friend and so close to the entire family that GiGi herself—Howard and Mitchum’s mother—had known him well.

As Livi listened her stomach finally did settle, allowing her to concentrate on what GiGi was telling her.

“Which brings us to today,” GiGi said, when she’d given her the background. “I only read about what your grandfather and H.J. and my sons did a few weeks ago. I’ve been looking into it ever since to see how we could make some kind of restitution—I thought it would be to Randall’s daughter. She and her husband and little girl live in Northbridge...”

“So you called Seth,” Livi guessed. It was a reasonable conclusion given that her cousin and his family lived in the small Montana town on the family ranch, overseeing the Camden agriculture interests.

“I did,” GiGi confirmed. “And he told me that two months ago, Randall’s daughter and her husband were killed in a car accident. Thankfully, their little girl, Greta, wasn’t with them.”

“How old is she?” Livi’s voice was full of the sympathy she felt, because she could identify with the childhood loss of parents.

“She’s only nine.”

“And does she have a GiGi?” Livi asked. It was her grandmother who had been the salvation of her and her siblings and cousins when their parents and grandfather had all died in that plane crash. If anyone had to suffer through what they all had, the best thing that could happen to them was to have a grandmother like they had.

“She only has the Tellers—the grandparents on the husband’s side. But Seth said that Maeve Teller has health issues of some kind and apparently neither Maeve or her husband, John, are in a position to raise the little girl. There’s some situation with a family friend who was granted guardianship of her in the parents’ will. A single man—”

“They left a little girl with a single man? How is he handling that? Does Seth know him?”

“Seth wasn’t able to get a name, though he heard that there’s something about him that doesn’t sit well with folks around there for some reason. But the parents must have trusted whoever this man is or they wouldn’t have left him their child.”

Livi hoped that was true.

“At any rate,” GiGi went on, “I don’t know what the financial situation is. The Tellers only have a small farm and Seth says it isn’t doing well, so he doubts there’s much money there, especially if Maeve has medical bills. And regardless, the little girl can’t be inheriting anything like what she would have if we’d treated her grandfather fairly.”

“That’s the ugly truth,” Livi agreed.

“So what I want you to do is go to Northbridge and make sure this child has the care she needs now and anything she might need in the future. Let’s make sure that whoever this family friend is wants her...”

“Hopefully, finding himself guardian of a nine-year-old girl didn’t come as an unpleasant surprise,” Livi muttered.

“Hopefully,” GiGi agreed. “But let’s make sure that he’s capable of taking care of her, that he’ll give her a good home. And maybe we can set up a trust fund for her, money for her college, whatever it takes to make sure she has the kind of life she would have had if...” GiGi’s voice trailed off as if she was too disgusted, too disappointed, too ashamed of what her own husband and sons had done to repeat it.

“So I’ll sort of be her GiGi,” Livi said affectionately, not wanting her grandmother to go on feeling bad.

She was pleased when GiGi smiled in response. “Not necessarily a GiGi, but maybe the little girl could use a sort of big sister or a mentor—a woman in her life, too, even if everything is going well with the guardian. Or maybe she won’t need anything but to be provided for financially. However, we won’t know that until you check things out.”

Livi nodded.

“Are you well enough?” the gray-haired woman asked.

“I’m fine. I feel better when I have a lot to do and don’t think about...things. Like I said, I need a distraction.”

“If you get tempted to put the rings back on, maybe consider wearing them on your right hand. I still do that sometimes.”

“I know,” Livi said, fighting another surge of guilt at what she’d allowed her family to believe.

Once more wanting to skirt around it, she went back to what they’d been talking about. “I have some things I have to take care of this week that can’t be put off. How about I go to Northbridge next Saturday and look up Greta and her grandparents and this guardian on Sunday?”

“The sooner the better, but I suppose another week won’t make any difference,” GiGi said. Then she stood. “Now let’s go get you some dry toast for that stomach of yours.”

Livi dreaded going back into the house and the smells that brought on the queasiness, so she said, “I’ll be right there. I just want to sit here a minute.”

And think about how nice it would be if her stomach stayed as settled as it was right then.

If her fingers returned to their normal size.

And if her period would start this month even though it never had last month.

Because if only it would, then she really could forget all about Hawaii.

And the man who had—for just one night—made her forget too many other things...