The Next Right Thing (Harlequin Superromance) (5 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

A
LITTLE
AFTER
SEVEN
that night, Cammie walked into her uncle Frankie’s ranch-style house, ablaze with lights because he never wanted her to come home to a dark house. When she’d first moved in, she’d told him he didn’t need to crank up his electrical bill on her behalf, but he was adamant that a little extra for electricity was a small price for her well-being.

“Besides,” he’d said, “you never knew what you were coming home to as a kid. With me, lights on, no surprises.”

He rarely minced words.

After leaving the casino several hours ago, she’d headed to her community-service gig at Dignity House, a residential treatment center for troubled teenage girls on the outskirts of southeast Las Vegas. Located in a former boardinghouse, the center accommodated a dozen or so girls, ages thirteen to seventeen, most of whom were court ordered to be there. All of the girls attended counseling and in-house lifestyle courses as well as going on field trips to Hoover Dam and Red Rock Canyon. Some of the girls took academic courses within the facility while others attended the local public school.

On her community-service days, Cammie changed into jeans, T-shirt and sneakers before leaving the casino. Because Mojave Desert winds could turn chilly this time of year, today she’d also worn her powder-blue hoodie with
Denver Nuggets
in big yellow letters across the front. She dug the Nuggets, but they were on such a losing streak, she felt like less of a sports fan and more of a cheerleader for the underdog. She was starting to think her team was a bunch of brawny bridesmaids who’d never make it to the altar of the NBA finals.

After toeing off her sneakers in the living room, she headed into the kitchen with its lingering scents of bread, tomato sauce and garlic, and tossed her purse onto the dining room table next to a handwritten note.

Food’s in fridge. Eat!

He’d signed it with a big
XO.

Some things never changed. Uncle Frankie had been there for her when she was growing up in Denver, and he was here for her now in Vegas. At six foot, her uncle had that swarthy-brawny-Italian thing going for him, although his love of food was evident in his paunch. As he liked to say, he’d never met a pasta he didn’t like.

He’d also never met a glass of Chianti he didn’t like. Bottles from his favorite vineyard filled the wine rack underneath framed photos on the wall of the pope and Frank Sinatra. Cammie was an occasional drinker. Sometimes she joined him with a glass or two at dinner, and sometimes, like now, she needed a couple of belts all by herself. Not that Chianti could erase her memory. It wouldn’t be that easy.

She selected a bottle, half read its label, her mind elsewhere. After Mr. Cool’s surprise visit today, she’d managed to get through the rest of the afternoon at the Cave, had even made some okay tips. She’d managed her duties at Dignity House, too, which mostly involved ensuring the teens finished their chores and did their homework. Cammie, still reeling from her encounter with Marc, had thought she was keeping it together until a fourteen-year-old named Takira commented that she looked “tink.” When Cammie had asked what that meant, another girl had translated that it meant
awful
—as in feeling bad kind of awful.

Everybody seemed to have a line on her emotions today. First Val with the
glum.
Then Takira with the
tink.
They were right. Cammie could add a few more, like
rejected, angry
and, as much as she didn’t want to admit it to anyone else,
contrite.

And
smitten.

Oh, yeah, still head-over-heels gaga over a guy who had no idea. Totally oblivious.
Clueless.
She snorted a laugh. Even when she used that term today, he’d thought
clueless
referred to something else. If there was a superclueless, that was Marc.

And to think she had the brilliant idea that running away to another state would fix that. Hell, she coulda stayed in Colorado and not put herself through all these changes!

But she had. Turned her life inside out only to be starting over from scratch, same throbbing heart on her sleeve.

She slipped the bottle into the rack, wanting something stronger than a glass of vino.

A few minutes later, she poured some vodka into a blender jar filled with ice cubes, a drizzle of limencello and a hearty squeeze of a lime. A few whirring, grinding moments later,
voilà,
a pitcher of... She took a sip, wincing as she puckered her lips.

“Too much lime,” she rasped, heading for a cabinet. She retrieved a bag of granulated sugar, added three hefty spoonfuls to the concoction and punched the pulse button again. She took another sip and smiled.

“When life hands you limes, make spiked limeade, baby.”

Picking up the blender jar, she crossed through the living room, opened the sliding glass doors and stepped onto the covered backyard patio. Quiet. Except for the distant barking of a neighbor’s dog.

Hard to believe the flashy, boisterous strip was only a few miles away.

Looking over the brick wall at the settling dusk, she drank directly from the blender jar. The burn felt good, centering, as it glided down her throat. The first star twinkled to life in the northwest sky. Farther in that direction lay the mysterious Area 51 and a long, lonely stretch of road called the Extraterrestrial Highway. Her uncle said people were always calling into local radio stations, claiming strange aircraft were spotted in the skies over that highway, but he thought it was more likely people, after a few too many drinks, were imagining stars and clouds to be spacecraft.

She took another sip, wondering if she could ever get that tipsy. Nah. Even in a dead sleep, she’d never dreamed of things like aliens and space travel. Growing up, her mom had loved watching
Star Trek,
which Cammie had thought was ludicrous. She’d once watched the movie
ET
with a friend, who cried at the ending. Cammie thought it was a cute flick, but totally unbelievable.

More stars twinkled on the horizon over the outlying Extraterrestrial Highway. Huh. Okay, what if those stars morphed into some kind of cool-looking space-travel vessel that zapped over here, right in Uncle Frankie’s backyard, and alien beings, who miraculously spoke English, convinced her to travel to some distant galaxy...?

Marc would probably show up there, too, wondering why she hadn’t answered her phone.

Clouds drifted in front of the moon, shading the twilight a deeper blue.

She took another sip—less burn, more buzz—and contemplated the hazy, silver-edged clouds. Wherever she was in this world, even if she were magically whisked away to another star system, Marc could convince her to return for one person.

His dad.

Harlan Hamilton, whom
The Denver Post
had tagged “the roar of the Rockies” for his booming voice and gutsy legal maneuvers, was a Colorado legend infamous for defending some of the state’s most notorious, high-profile criminal cases.

His personality was as big as, if not bigger than, his courtroom antics. Part bulldog, part raconteur, he had a reputation for intimidating people one second, charming them the next. Wife number three, furious upon learning he had a girlfriend on the side—later to become wife number four—had called him “beyond a reasonable lout”—a moniker that became yet another news headline.

Who knew what demons drove the elder Hamilton to cross the line and steal money from clients? Some guessed past debts, others claimed his tyrannical ego, while others pitied him, surmising his downfall was an act of self-destruction because even he didn’t believe he was as great as the legend.

Cammie hadn’t known what to believe when Marc first asked her to visit his father in prison and start compiling a witness list for the next parole hearing. She’d been nervous, curious and intrigued. Harlan had once thrown a chair at opposing counsel, sued a reporter who had dared to ask the wrong question and called a judge he deemed backward-thinking a “troglodyte.” People either detested him or loved him. And loved him plenty of women had, although with his shiny egg-shaped head and bulbous nose, he hardly looked like a chick magnet.

But the blustery luminary had been nothing like the man she’d met. Frail, circumspect and soft-spoken, Harlan had been like a smoky trace of his former fiery personality.

As she took another long sip, breezes ruffled her hair, and she thought how she’d grown to like and respect him. At their prison meetings, they’d started out discussing potential witnesses in detail. After a few visits, they’d wrap up their meetings with some quiet conversation about their lives. He’d told her how his parents, Scottish immigrants, had come to America to find a better life. She told him about her Italian grandparents who had done the same. He’d confided that although his father had loved this country and made a success of his life, he was often absent, which made his mother very unhappy. Cammie shared that her father split before she was born, and that her mother had never recovered from that abandonment. Or maybe she was fundamentally an insecure person. Whatever the reason, her mom had teetered through life like a lost soul.

Harlan had listened carefully, then surmised that Cammie’s mother must have also been a person capable of great love and compassion. When Cammie asked how he knew, he responded that he saw those same qualities in her daughter.

She’d never said goodbye to Harlan. Maybe some people lived their lives with no regrets, but Cammie had a bunch of them. Not saying goodbye to that gentle man was one. Although she still had time to see him again and tell him how much he meant to her, she couldn’t deal with his son.
Wouldn’t
deal with him. Refused to let him stomp all over her heart.

Clouds scurried past the face of the moon.

As the shadows lifted, she heard several phantomlike warbles, each ending on a rising note. The never-ending questions of burrowing owls, or what her uncle like to call “billy owls,” that inhabited this region.

She sauntered over to a chaise, liking the warm, oozy effects of her drink, and sat. Cradling the cool jar between her hands, her thoughts shifted from the elder Hamilton to his son. Should she have told Marc the truth about why she couldn’t work for him?

An owl’s ghostly chirrup sounded like
Any why not?

“How would I have said it?” she asked softly, thinking it over.
Sorry, dude, but my Nevada license was suspended last month.
No, a casual, it’s-not-a-big-deal admission wasn’t her style, not over an issue this important to her career, her life.

As she drank, another trilling question.

The query nagged her into admitting that maybe she should have simply come clean with Marc, had the guts to explain her license was suspended. Of course, that lovely little confession couldn’t have been left at that. He would have wanted to know the reason behind the suspension, which would have opened up a can of worms about her role in the messy tagged-truck incident.

More chatter from the owls.

She held up her hand, as though that would stop the night critters from bombarding her with questions.

But she hadn’t had enough to drink to believe her imaginary furry friends were actually asking the hard questions.

Truth was, she felt ruffled and anxious over Marc learning the truth about the suspension.
He would’ve assumed I’d once again boldly gone where no P.I. should tread, that I’d trespassed into the effing gray area, and I’d get a lecture about how my concepts of the law aren’t necessarily the law itself and blah, blah, blah and so forth and so on
....

The irony was that if Marc had paid attention to the information she’d gathered, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Okay, he hadn’t exactly
asked
her to investigate Gwen, who was acting as his bookkeeper, but it was as obvious as Johnny Depp’s Van Dyke beard that the woman was up to no good, as in fooling around with somebody other than Marc. Problem was, Cammie had gone a teensy bit overboard into what Marc referred to as “the gray area.” With the help of a P.I. pal back East, she’d gotten her hands on Gwen’s cell-phone records. Illegal? Yes. But very useful. From the number of phone calls to a certain private number, it was obvious that Gwen had a lover and was cheating on Marc.

Unfortunately, Marc didn’t want to hear that evidence. When she’d tried to tell him what she’d found, he’d interrupted her to ask how she’d found out. As soon as she mentioned the phone records, he’d gone ballistic. Instead of being angry at Gwen, he’d jumped on Cammie.

She still remembered the anger in his eyes when he’d told her that he wouldn’t tolerate illegal procedures. And she might have said something about not being able to tolerate an idiot as a boss. The rest of their argument escalated. He put her on probation. She snapped back with a variation of
You can’t put me on probation because I quit.
And so forth and so on...

She made a rolling motion with her hand as she took another sip. Hearing the low-pitched grind of the garage door opening, she got up with some effort and walked toward the sliding glass door.

Stepping into the living room, she heard another ghostly warble behind her back.

She shut the door a little too hard, cutting off the rest of the question.

“Where’s my li’l
figlia?
”

Frankie’s voice boomed through the house. Didn’t matter if her uncle was on a football field or in a church, his volume control was permanently stuck on High.

“Here, Uncle Frankie,” she said, sauntering into the kitchen.

He gestured to the pitcher. “What’s this?”

She set it on the counter. “Spiked limeade.”

“Drinking straight from the jar?”

“It’s called
cowboying it.
” A term she typically used for hours-long surveillances when you’re cutting the niceties and making do with whatever you have on hand. At the moment, swigging spiked limeade straight from the blender jar fit that category perfectly.