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After setting down Kungfu, she slid off her backpack and waited for whatever he seemed determined to say. She stood in the foyer, hardwood creaking softly under her feet as she shifted her weight. Cal stalked deeper into the house, but then, as if noticing she didn’t follow him, he closed the distance between them again. Stopping only a few feet from her in the foyer.
“First of all, I made a snap judgment of you this morning, and I’m sorry for that.” His opening surprised her, but there was no denying that he was serious about the words. His green eyes were clear, his gaze direct.
Josie didn’t know what to make of it, but he definitely had her attention.
“I should have told you the truth. I knew your career was important to you—that your image was important to you—and I’ve put both at risk.” The fault was hers. She’d been scared to show him her past, and it had hurt him.
She would always regret that.
“But I could have at least listened to you this morning. Learned the whole story.” He seemed frustrated as he swiped a hand through his dark hair and paced away from her again. “Instead, I shut down, rooted in my own thinking.”
“Because you had every reason to be angry with me,” she assured him, hating that she’d brought the dark cloud of her problems to cast shadows over the life he’d built.
“That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have heard you out. My whole life, I’ve gravitated to baseball because it was always so much more comprehensible than my real life.” He wandered into the parlor where the walls were lined with old family photos and framed news articles about Ramsey successes. He stopped in front of a headline about Wes getting drafted. “There are clearly defined metrics, so you know how you’re doing. Success is weighed by your stats, not the fickle affections of a parent who pushed me with one hand and undermined me with the other.”
The muscle in his jaw flexed as he moved on to straighten a photo of Nate with a championship team.
She followed him into the parlor, saying nothing since she wasn’t sure where all this was headed. But she listened, because she was curious about what was going on in his head even if there was no room for her in his heart or his life.
“But maybe I got a little too comfortable with letting baseball be the model for my life. I sure haven’t been a presence in my family for a long time, and there’s no excuse for me not knowing about Gramp’s accident.” He shook his head and moved away from the old photos, walking across the bright braided rug toward her again. “I’ve been seeing the world in black and white, simplifying everything down to quantifiable terms, even though that doesn’t work for every situation in life.”
“Like mine?”
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud. But the words echoed in her ears, magnified in her mind because it felt so significant to think maybe Cal understood a little bit.
“Exactly.” He stopped near her, all that strength and male vitality close enough to touch. “I judged you too quickly, based on too little information, because I was worried about my own career. My own image.”
The hurt in his eyes, his disappointment in himself, was easy to see before he hung his head.
“I’ve tried hard to be a different man than my father,” he continued, his voice deeper now, hinting at the raw emotions behind the words. “But today I behaved the way he would—more concerned for myself than other people around me. Someone I care about.”
The last part caught her off guard.
Her heartbeat stuttered.
Cal had said he was wrong. Had he changed his mind about her? About them? She had warned herself not to let her guard down, but the possibility of salvaging their fledging relationship tugged at her heart.
“I don’t want to misunderstand.” She felt shaky, her hand reaching for the back of the sofa to steady her. “What are you saying, Cal?”
“I’m saying that I was wrong to judge you and I’m more sorry than you can imagine.” He took her hand lightly in his, stroking his thumb along the backs of her knuckles. “I hope you can forgive me, Josie, but if you can’t I understand. Either way, please know that my mother may never forgive me for firing you, so it would mean a lot to me if you’d stay on as caretaker until she gets back.”
“You told your mother about my…circumstances?” Anxiety sent a nervous tremble through her. She owed Hailey Decker an apology, regretted taking advantage of such a kind woman.
Josie tugged her hand away from Cal’s, even though his touch had been the nicest thing to happen to her since their argument earlier. She didn’t deserve it.
“She already knew,” Cal informed her, surprising her. “Apparently she’s friends with one of the women in your building—”
“Mrs. Gonzalez.” The pieces fell into place for her as soon as Cal started. “She’s the one who urged me to answer your mother’s ad in the first place. First, she showed me the ad online, then she gave me the bus fare money to get here since I was flat broke.”
She couldn’t believe the kindness of both women. Rita Gonzalez, for doing all she could to help Josie extricate herself from her job, and Hailey Decker for taking a chance on Josie based on a friend’s word. Josie might have an extremely difficult relationship with her mother, but she didn’t lack for wonderful mother figures with those kinds of women in her corner. Their efforts to help her touched her more than she could say. But the guilt lingered, because she really wished she’d been honest with Cal’s mother from the start.
She needed to start trusting in people again, start trusting in her own self-worth too, so she didn’t land in the messes she had in the past.
“I hate that you felt like you didn’t have any options, that you couldn’t just quit your job with your mother and find work that would make you happy somewhere else.” Cal’s touch returned, and he brushed a caress along her arm. “But selfishly, I’m glad that it brought you here. And I still really wish you’d stay and finish out the job here.”
This time, she allowed herself to feel the draw of his hand on her. Letting it persuade her. But she wanted so much more than just the security of this job.
She wanted Cal.
