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Camryn blinked, wondering if she’d heard correctly. Her mom had only ever criticized Blane, from the first moment she’d brought him home.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d spoken to him, that he’d said that?”
Not that it would’ve changed anything back then. She’d been so young, so idealistic, and she’d had so much anger against theguy who’d captured her heart before breaking it. Hearing he’d left for her own good would’ve merely acerbated her fury at being ditched.
Her mother frowned and her lips puckered in the disapproving ‘prune face’ Camryn remembered from the rare detention note she’d brought home.
“Because I’d already blurted out the truth about the money in that awful argument and you wouldn’t have believed anything else I had to say.” Her mom’s lips compressed further. “I made so many mistakes. I should’ve told you the truth a long time ago.”
Camryn smiled, raised her tea cup, and gently clinked it with her mom’s. “Here’s to burying the past, digging up the future, living in the here and now.”
At the tinkle of fine china touching, she knew that’s exactly what she had to do. Tell Blane the truth, no matter how much her heart ached with the enormity of it.
Chapter Nineteen
Blane strode along the riverbank, whistling an old pop song and scanning the dappled shadows for Cam.
While the Rainbow Creek Motel lacked ambience, it had functional rooms, which had enabled the two of them to lose themselves in each others’ arms all night.
It had been incredible, as if stepping back in time to where they’d first met had helped them reconnect on a deeper level.
“Hey, you.”
Her soft voice startled him as she popped out from behind a towering eucalyptus, her French braid unravelling, her olive top blending with the bush surrounds.
“Hey, yourself.” He raised a hand to trace the contours of her beautiful face, savoring her soft skin, her almost imperceptible sigh.
“You were exceptionally mysterious about having me meet you down here, but now that we’re here…” The tranquillity of the sluggish river bubbling over flat-bed rocks, the buzz of lazy dragonflies, and the far-off caw of a magpie, beckoned like a peaceful oasis. “I think you’re a genius. It’s very secluded, perfect for—”
“Ssh.”
She planted a swift, scorching kiss on his lips, the kind of kiss to give a guy ideas about what he’d like to do with his wife in this isolated bushland.
However, before he could deepen the kiss she broke away, her mouth twisting in a grimace, the devastation in her eyes scaring the hell out of him.
“What’s wrong?”
He reached for her but she held up her hands to ward him off, as a strange sense of foreboding stole through him.
She hadn’t asked him down here to indulge in a bit of afternoon delight. Far from it, if her rigid back, clenched fists, and clamped lips were any indication.
Tugging on the end of her plait, she reluctantly raised her eyes to meet his, wide and beseeching and clouded with agony.
“I need to make you understand,” she said, her voice soft and tremulous.
“Understand what?”
“Why I’m doing this. Why we can’t be together. Why—”
“Hold on a minute and back up. What do you mean, we can’t be together?”
He couldn’t comprehend it let alone believe it. One moment she’d been organizing a realtor to rent out her newly-renovated apartment and they were planning to move into the house at Barwon Heads in a few weeks, the next she was ending it?
“I can’t give you what you want,” she blurted, her anguish audible. “I’ve seen the way you are with your nieces and nephews. I know how much you want kids no matter how much you say I’ll be enough for you. And after that night in the hospital with Jemma, I know I can’t go through any more procedures. I’m sick of hospitals. I’ve been through too much already and I can’t face any more…”
Her words petered out as she sank onto a nearby log, dropping her head in her hands.
Fear gripped him. He couldn’t lose her. Not again. “We don’t have to go down that route. We can adopt. We can—”
