Wild in the Field (2 page)

He scraped a hand through his hair, wishing he'd asked Violet a dozen more questions…yet knowing he couldn't. Just because he'd always had a private hard case for Camille didn't mean he had any right to know—or right to interfere either. Further, his skill and effectiveness with women was measured by his ex-wife—who'd effectively ripped him off for everything but the kitchen sink…and his sons.

God knew, his sons were full time—sometimes a full-time nightmare and sometimes a full-time job. But either way, he had no time to dwell on the worrisome picture Violet had painted in his mind. Camille couldn't be his problem. It was just upsetting, that was all. To picture anyone as joyful and full of spirit as Cam, brought down by so much tragedy so young. Camille always had a heart bigger than Vermont, more love than an ocean, more laughter than could fill a whole sky.

It made him sick to think about her hurting.

“Pssst. Dad.” The daredevil hanging over the second story railing was, of course, risking life and limb. “Ms. Campbell—is she gone? Is it safe to come down?”

“Yeah, she's gone.”

In another moment, his son's spitting image hung over the railing, too. “Are you sick or something? What's the matter with you, Dad? You're not yelling at us.”

“I will,” Pete promised them absently, but when he
didn't immediately come through with a good, solid respectable bellow, the boys seemed to panic.

“We're not cleaning,” Sean announced.

“Yeah, we're going on strike,” Simon said. “Gramps is going on strike with us. So it's three against one.”

Maybe he'd failed a wife, but he'd never fail his boys. Since they were expecting him to scream and yell, he forced his mind off Camille and thumped up the stairs to deliver the lecture they wanted.

W
hen Camille heard the knock on the door, her heart slammed in instant panic—but that was just a stupid, knee-jerk response from the attack. She'd been home and forcefully installed in the cottage by Violet for three weeks now. She was safe. She
knew
she was safe. But somehow, even all these months after the attack, sudden noises and shadows still made her stomach jump clear to her throat.

Someone knocked on the door again—which she purposefully ignored. She just as easily ignored the pounding after that. But then came her sister's insistent voice calling, “Yoo-hoo! Camille? CAMILLE?”

Camille didn't budge from old, horsehair rocker in the far corner of the living room, but hearing Vi whining her name reminded her of how much she'd always disliked it. Mom had named all three daughters after flowers, so she could have gotten Violet or Daisy, but
no, she had to get Camille. Practically by definition people seemed to assume that a Camille was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, sultry romantic. The dark hair and dark eyes were true, but the rest of the image was completely off.

These last months, she'd turned mean. Not just a little mean, but horned-toad mean. Porcupine-mean. Curmudgeon-rude and didn't-give-a-damn-about-anyone mean.

“All right, Cam, honey.” When no one answered, Violet's voice turned so patient that Camille wanted to open the door just to smack her one. “I'll leave lunch on the table at noon, but I want you up at the house for dinner. You don't have to talk. You don't have to do anything. But unless you're up there at six—and I actually see you eat something—I'm calling Mom and Daisy both.”

Camille's eyes creaked open in the dim room. Something stirred in her stomach. A touch of an ordinary emotion…like worry. Not that she gave a hoot—about anything or anyone. But the threat of having both her mother and oldest sister sicced on her made Cam break out in a cold sweat. The Campbell women, allied together, could probably make a
stone
sweat. She just wasn't up to battling with them.

With a resigned sigh, she pushed herself out of the old, horsehair rocker to search for a drink.

Rain drooled down the dirty windows, making it hard to see without a light, but she didn't turn one on. The past weeks had passed in a blur. She remembered Violet barging into the apartment in Boston, finding her curled up in bed, shaking her, scolding her, packing her up. She remembered driving to Vermont in a blizzard. She remembered refusing to live in the warm,
sturdy farmhouse where they'd grown up, fighting with Violet over whether the old cottage on the place was even livable.

It wasn't. But then Camille wasn't livable either, so the place had worked for her fine.

She stumbled around now, stalking around suitcases and boxes. She hadn't unpacked anything from Boston. No reason to. She didn't want anything. But eventually she located the flat briefcase on the scarred oak bureau. She clicked the locks, pulled it open. Once upon a time, the briefcase had been filled with colorful files and advertising projects and marketing studies. Now it held a complete array of airline-sized liquor bottles.

Quite a few were missing, although not as many as she'd planned. She hadn't given up her goal of becoming an alcoholic, but the ambition was a lot tougher to realize than she ever expected. Frowning, she filched and fingered through the collection. Crème de cocoa was out of the question—she was never trying that ghastly stuff again. Ditto for the vodka. And the scotch. And the gin.

Squinting, she discovered a bitsy bottle of Kahlúa. She wrestled with the lid, finally successfully unscrewed it, guzzled in a gulp, swallowed, and then opened her mouth to let out the fumes.

Holy moly. Her eyes teared and her throat surely scarred over from the burn.

As hard as she was trying to destroy her life with liquor, it just wasn't working well. She set down the mini-bottle—she was going to finish it!—she only needed to take a few minutes to renew her determination.

She sank down in the creaky rocker again, closing
her eyes. Maybe the drinking wasn't going so well, but other things were.

Several weeks ago, she'd mistakenly believed that she wanted to die. Since then, she'd realized that one part of her was alive—totally alive, consumingly alive.

The rage.

All around her was the evidence. Violet had tried to give her a phone, but she'd trashed it. The cottage behind the barns had been built for a great grandmother who'd wanted to live independently, so there was no totally destroying the charm. There was just a front room, bedroom and kitchen, but the casement windows bowed, and the bedroom had a slanted ceiling, and the living room had a huge limestone fireplace with a sit-down hearth. She hadn't fixed any of it. Hadn't looked at any of it either. She'd been sleeping on a hard mattress with a bald pillow and no bedding. Cobwebs filled the corners; the floors hadn't been swept, and the cupboards were empty.

She couldn't remember the last time she brushed her hair or changed clothes.

Eventually this had to stop. She realized that in an intellectual way, but emotionally, there only seemed one thing inside of her. All she wanted was to sit all day and seep with the rage, steep with it, sleep with it. Fester it. Ache with it. My God. It had been bad enough to lose Robert. Bad enough to wake up in a hospital bed with a face so battered she couldn't recognize herself, bruises and breaks that made her cry to touch, lips too swollen to talk…and that was before she'd been told Robert was dead.

Initially, the grief had ripped through her like a cyclone that wouldn't quit. It just wrenched and tore and never let up. But then came the trial. She'd been so
positive that the trial would at least bring her the relief and satisfaction of justice. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the dark street, heard her laughing with Robert, complaining about walking in high heels from the party on the balmy fall night, and then there they were. The bastards, the drug-high bastards. There was no
reason
for them to start punching her, playing her, scaring her. They'd have given them all their money in a blink. But it wasn't money they wanted. Robert—he'd tried to protect her, tried to get in front of her. That's why they were meaner to him. Why he ended up dead.

All three of them had looked clean-cut and young in court—because they were. They had cried their eyes out, which had impressed the judge, too. They'd come from good families, had no records, weren't even drug users—they just made one mistake, thought they'd experiment one time, and foolishly bought some mixed cocktail that caused psychotic behavior. It was a tragic accident, their attorney claimed. The boys weren't hardened criminals, nothing like that. And the judge had given them the most lenient sentences possible.

That's when the rage was born. Camille remembered the day in court, feeling the slow, huge, hot well of disbelief. A few years in jail and they'd be out. Easy for them. They hadn't lost their soul mate. They hadn't lost anything but a few years, where she'd lost everything. Her life had been completely, irreversibly, hopelessly destroyed.

She stared blankly at the cracks in the stucco ceiling, hearing the drizzle of rain. Inside of her there was nothing but a hollow howl. It wasn't getting any better. She couldn't seem to think past the red-sick haze of rage. She'd tried curling up for days. She'd tried not eating.
She'd tried hurling things and breaking things. She'd tried silence. She'd tried—and was still trying—drinking.

No matter what she tried, though, she couldn't seem to make it pass. She couldn't go under, around, through it. The rage was just there.

At some point, she got up and finished the shot of Kahlúa.

And at some point after that, she jerked out of the rocker and chased fast for the bathroom. The Kahlúa was as worthless as all the other darn liquors. It refused to stay down.

By the time she finished hurling, she was extra mean. She stood in the bathroom doorway, sweat beading on her brow, weakness aching in every muscle in her damn body. She wasn't sure she was strong enough to lift a dust ball. Her throat felt as it had been knifed open and her stomach as if she'd swallowed hot steel wool.

With her luck, she was going to end up the first wanna-be alcoholic in history with an allergy to alcohol. Either that, or Kahlúa had joined the long list of liquors her body seemed to reject.

Thinking that possibly she could nap—and maybe even sleep this time—she turned toward the bedroom…just as she heard another knock on the door.

“Aw, come on, Violet. I'll come up to the house for dinner. But right now, just leave me alone.”

“It's not Violet. It's me. Your neighbor. Pete MacDougal.”

A charge volted through her pulse as if she'd touched a volatile electric cord. Pete didn't have to identify himself for her to recognize his voice. There was a time that voice would have comforted her. Pete's
clipped tenor was part of her childhood, as familiar as the rail fence and the tree house in the big maple and the toboggan hill between the MacDougals and Campbells.

She'd never played with Pete because he was older, Violet's age. But she'd toddled after him for years with puppy eyes. When he was around, he'd lift her over the fence so she wouldn't have to walk around, and he'd pulled her sled back up the hill, and he'd let her invade the sacred tree house when all the other kids said she was still a baby.

Pete was not just her childhood hero; he'd been an extra zesty spice to her blood because the four year age difference made him forbidden. Further, he was ultracool, with his biker shoulders and thick dark hair and smoky eyes. He was the oldest of three brothers, where she was the youngest of three sisters, which she'd always felt gave them a key connection. What that connection was, she'd never pinned down exactly. She'd just wanted to have something in common with Pete MacDougal. Coming from three-children families and living in Vermont had seemed enough to be critical bonding factors when she was a kid.

Those memories were all sweet and a little embarrassing and definitely fun—but not now. Right
now
, she didn't want to see anyone she'd once cared about, and Pete's voice, specifically, hurt like a sting. He had one of those full-of-life, uniquely male voices—full of sex and testosterone and energy and virility.

It wasn't Robert's voice. In fact, it was nothing at all like Robert's sweet voice. But that bolt of vibrant masculine tenor reminded her of everything she'd lost. And because she felt stung, she stung back.

“Go the hell away.”

He knocked again, as if he hadn't heard her. “Could you just open the door for a minute?”

“NO.”

He knocked again.

What did it take? A sledgehammer? “Damn it, Pete. I don't want visitors. I don't need sympathy. I don't want help. I don't want to talk to anyone. I just want to be left alone. GO AWAY.”

When he knocked the fourth time, she yanked open the door from sheer exasperation. If the only way to get rid of him was to punch him in the nose, then she was about to slug him good—and never mind that he was almost a foot taller than her.

Instantly she noticed that foot-taller. Noticed his black-and-white wool shirt, his oak height, the hint of wet mahogany in his damp hair, that his good-looking sharp-boned face still had smoky, sexy eyes. She also noticed that he wedged a size-thirteen boot in the door before she could slam it on him again.

In that same blast of a second, he looked her over, too—but he didn't make out as if he noticed that she was in days-old clothes, her hair unkempt, her face paler than a mime's. He didn't make out as if he noticed anything personal about her at all. He just said, “I have to tell you something about your sister.”

“So tell me and get out.”

“Hey, I'm trying.” He didn't force his way in, just kept that big boot wedged in the doorway. He leaned his shoulder in the jamb, which insured he had a view of the inside. But if he saw the piles of boxes and packing debris in the dreary light, he made no comment. “It's Violet. I don't know what on earth's wrong with your sister. But something sure is.”

“I've seen her very day. She's perfectly fine.”

“Ditsy as always,” Pete concurred. “But after she came home after the divorce, she started playing in the greenhouse. By last spring, she'd added another greenhouse and opened her herb business. Then last spring, she laid off Filbert Green—you know, the man your dad hired after he retired, to take care of the land—”

“What's any of this to you, Pete?” Rain hissed in the yard, splashed off the eaves. The chill was starting to seep in the cottage, but he didn't seem to care. He seemed intent on just blocking her doorway for an indefinite period of time.

“It's nothing to me. But it is to you. Have you looked around the farm since you got home?”

“No. Why would I? I've got nothing to do with the farm. Violet can do whatever she wants to.” The darn man never moved his eyes, never showed the slightest reaction, but she kept having the sense he was taking in everything about her.

“Camille—you remember how your mother always grew a patch of lavender? You Campbell women always loved the stuff—”

“For heaven's sake, Pete. Get to the point.”

“Your sister's been breeding all kinds of lavender.”

“So what?”

He sighed, rubbed his chin. “You want me to get to the point, but it isn't that easy. She's gone hog-wild in the greenhouses. Take a look out your window, walk around, you'll see. She has to have better than twenty acres of lavender planted.”

“That's ridiculous,” Camille announced.

He didn't argue with her. He just said, “I think the Herb Haven store is doing okay for her. Pulls in more kooks and New Agers than I can believe. But even if she didn't have her hands full with the retail and the
greenhouses, Violet doesn't know about land, never did, never cared. And that's fine, but it's one thing to let a field go wild, and another to let twenty acres of lavender get out of control—and I'm talking completely out of control. She's in trouble, Camille.”