Chapter 11 #2
She walked up the way, then leaned for quite some time against a dusty Range Rover she didn’t recognize. She made it to the steps, then had to rest against the wood a bit more. When she thought she could manage it, she lifted her hand and knocked.
The door opened suddenly and she pitched forward. Strong arms caught her and put her back on her feet. She peered up at Zachary Smith, Elizabeth’s youngest brother.
“You’ve grown,” she managed.
“You’re loopy,” he said with a smile. He shut the door behind her, then put his arm around her shoulders. “Sunny, you should have called. I would have come and gotten you.”
“I didn’t know you were home. Is that your car out front?”
“Nah, too pricey for me,” Zachary said with a smile. “It belongs to some guy Jamie’s doing business with. And that, it happens, is the reason I’m home. Jamie and this very rich new friend of his are thinking about putting up a leisure centre in the village and they want me to design it.”
“Nice,” Sunny wheezed. “Yoga classes for me to teach?”
“Yeah,” Zachary said with a grin. “Let’s put Tavish Fergusson out of business.”
Tavish Fergusson. She hadn’t thought about him in a month. Or the village, for that matter. She had been, for all intents and purposes, on another planet. Somehow, though, life had continued on in the world she’d left behind.
It was very strange.
“Sunny?”
“Sure,” she said quickly. “Whatever you said.” She put her arm around his waist. “Help me find a chair, Zach. I don’t feel very good all of a sudden.”
“You should have called,” he chided again.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“I’ll have Jamie get you one. You call me the next time you need to go anywhere.”
She nodded and closed her eyes briefly. “All right, I will. Thank you.”
He helped her down into a chair, then left her in peace.
She leaned her head against the chair’s back and closed her eyes.
Tears leaked out from under her eyelids and she didn’t have the energy to wipe them away.
What did it matter, anyway? Her heart was shattered and she looked like hell.
Maybe it would come to the point where people would just leave her alone to crawl into her bed, curl up in the fetal position, and cry herself to death.
She knew it wasn’t doing her any good to continue to speculate about Cameron’s fate, but she couldn’t help herself. She had come to the conclusion, in those moments when she could actually think clearly, that Giric had killed him.
If only she’d known that’s how it would have finished, she would have pulled him into the house with her faster, or put herself between him and his cousin, or told him to ride harder or leave sooner.
Any one thing might have meant the difference between his being dead and his being with her. Just one thing . . .
“Sunny?”
She opened her eyes and found Zachary standing in front of her with a glass.
“Juice?” he offered.
She accepted it, drank some, then handed it back to him. “Thanks,” she said hoarsely.
“I’m always happy to be of service to a beautiful woman.”
“Nice line.”
“In your case it isn’t a line, but I’m practicing anyway. You never know when I’ll answer a knock at the door and find a beautiful woman there waiting just for me.”
Well, she knew what that felt like, but she couldn’t say as much. Just the thought of it was about to kill her.
“Oh, here they come,” Zachary said. “Want to meet the other half of the money? Once he sees you, he’ll be begging to give us more so we can build that yoga studio.”
Sunny would have snorted, but that would have taken energy she didn’t have. She let Zachary pull her to her feet and lead her across the great hall. She heard Jamie coming down the stairs as she neared them. He was speaking animatedly, so she knew the deal must be a good one.
A man was following him down. She first saw polished black shoes, then dark trouser pants, then a matching suit coat that stretched over shoulders that had surely been made just for a girl to put her head on and be at peace.
He was wearing a discreet burgundy tie in a plaid pattern that reminded her a bit of Cameron’s plaids that were folded under her pillow.
Then she saw his face.
“Sunny,” Zachary exclaimed.
Sunny realized belatedly that she had shoved him so hard that he’d gone sprawling.
Her glass shattered against the stone of Jamie’s great hall floor, but she didn’t care.
All she could do was look up at the man who had finished coming down the stairs and was standing five feet away from her. She could hardly believe her eyes.
It was Cameron.
“Sunshine,” Jamie said, sounding pleased. He crossed the pair of steps toward her, then offered her his arm.
With a cry of relief, she ignored Jamie and threw herself into Cameron’s arms. He was alive. She couldn’t believe it, but the proof of it was standing right in front . . . of . . . her . . .
Stiff with surprise.
Sunny pulled back and looked up at him.
He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before.
“Sunshine,” Jamie said in consternation. “Sunny?”
Sunny looked up into Cameron’s beautiful, beloved face and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t glad to see her. She couldn’t understand why his arms weren’t coming around her and crushing her to him.
Why the hell was he in a suit?
She wanted to say his name, but she found that her mouth wouldn’t form words. It wouldn’t have done her any good if she’d been able to, since she didn’t have any breath for speaking them. She put her hands on his face and looked up into his vivid blue eyes.
Eyes that were wide with surprise, but not recognition.
“Sunshine?”
Jamie’s voice pulled her back to herself. She realized quite suddenly and with a sickening feeling that Cameron wasn’t as happy to see her as she was him.
She released him abruptly and stumbled backward.
She backed into Jamie and felt his hands on her shoulders.
She shook her head, because she just couldn’t believe what was happening to her.
She shook her head again, but it didn’t change anything.
She took another step backward, but Jamie was in her way.
“Let me introduce Robert Cameron,” he said, his voice rumbling in his chest and rattling her back. “I rang him last week to see if he would be interested in putting his tuppence together with mine to build something in the village.”
“Robert Cameron,” Sunny echoed. She looked at Cameron and felt tears begin to stream down her cheeks. It was him. It had to be him. He looked older, somehow. More polished. Cleaner. But she would have known him anywhere.
“Actually, ’tis Lord Robert, if we’re to be perfectly correct,” Jamie continued. “He’s laird of the clan Cameron. You’ve no doubt seen his hall up the way.” He paused. “Perhaps you’ve seen him before.”
Sunny was afraid to open her mouth for fear of what would come out. Perhaps she’d seen him before? She shook her head again, but it only made her dizzy.
“She’s had a bit of a concussion,” Jamie announced to no one in particular.
Sunny looked at Cameron to find him watching her with a guardedly pleasant expression—and no sign at all of recognizing her.
Why not?
She thought, quite seriously, that her heart would break, slice its way out of her chest as it did so, and shatter into innumerable pieces right there on the floor in front of them all.
“Mac? Mac, where are you?”
Sunny looked up the stairs and saw a woman gliding down them. She was absolutely gorgeous, dressed like a model, with all the grace and poise of a prima ballerina.
“Mac,” she said, slipping her hand possessively into the crook of Cameron’s arm, “you rushed off without me, darling.”
“This is Lord Robert’s fiancée, Penelope Ainsworth,” Jamie said.
Sunny looked from Penelope to Cameron and back to Penelope. His fiancée? She wanted to tell Jamie that he was mistaken, that Cameron didn’t have a blonde fiancée, he had her, but the words wouldn’t come out. All she could do was stand there and gape.
Penelope looked down her nose. “Oh, I believe we’ve met before, haven’t we, dear? You ran into me in the village last month. You’d had a bit too much to drink that evening, hadn’t you?”
Sunny blinked, then felt her mouth fall open even farther. It was that rude Englishwoman who had plowed into her and then stepped on her hand. But that would mean that the man who had picked up both her and her purse had been . . .
Cameron.
She put her hands to her head because it hurt so badly, she thought she might throw up.
“This is my sister-in-law, Sunshine Phillips,” Jamie said stiffly, “and she doesn’t touch liquor.”
“Are you sure about that?” Penelope Ainsworth asked doubtfully. “Perhaps she has habits you aren’t familiar with.”
Jamie made a noise of displeasure that sounded a bit like a growl. Sunny would have wondered why he seemed to be so bent on defending her, but she was distracted by the sight of Cameron extending his hand to her. She took it without thinking.
The jolt that went though her almost knocked her flat.
She looked up at him quickly to see if he felt it as well. He was pulling his hand away and frowning thoughtfully at it, as if it had done something he didn’t quite approve of.
“A pleasure, Miss Phillips,” he said, turning that frown on her.
Yet still he gave absolutely no sign of having recognized her.
She felt the room begin to spin in earnest. She was falling and couldn’t do anything to stop it. She would break open the freshly healed wound and bleed all over Jamie’s floor. She supposed that might be an improvement over the events of the past five minutes.
Cameron didn’t know her.
It was worse than having him dead.
She fell into the blackness in front of her without fighting it.