Chapter 21
The smell of flowers fills her nostrils. She steps inside, rolling her suitcase into the empty space next to the door. Besides a thin path inside, her apartment is full of flowers. Vases full of bouquets sit across her small kitchen island, covering her entertainment center and coffee table and littering the floor. The flowers are every shape, color, and size imaginable.
Now, she can truly pick out her favorite flower.
Camille smiles through tears.
Hearing steps behind her, she turns. “You can…” she stops, seeing that it isn’t the florist but a man in nice clothes stopping at her open door with a bouquet of roses covering his face. He lowered it slowly. “Mr. Bloom,” Camille swallowed.
“Ms. Lee,” he says, dipping his chin. He stops just inside the doorway.
She opens her mouth to ask how all the flowers got in here, but she knows how. “Evelyn.” Of course, it was Evelyn who gave Wade a spare key. That’s why she wanted her to call as soon as she arrived home.
“I told Evelyn what I wanted to do after I explained what Sadie did.”
“What Sadie did…”Camille trails off.
“Buck came and got me after you left. He showed Mom, Nancy, and I the conversation between you and Sadie.”
“Our conversation…”she mutters, still not following.
“On the security system.”
“Wow,”she gasps, taking the roses from him, “you people really do have cameras everywhere.”She turns to the tiny path into the living room. “So, what do you have to say for yourself?”
At the sound of him walking in behind her, Camille abruptly cut her eyes over her shoulder at him.
“You stay right where you’re at,”she says, enjoying the hurt in his eyes. “Not until you explain yourself.”Camille goes over to an orchid sitting on her entertainment center. Moving it closer to the other flowers blocking her television, she sets the roses down beside it.
“There isn’t much to say except that I went on one really bad date,”Wade explains, awkwardly standing at her door. “As much as I’d like to blame Sadie for trying to ruin our relationship, I would bet it was Victoria feeding her all that BS.”
Camille crosses her arms, hiding how much she enjoys the aromas from the flowers around her. “Women tend to tell their loved ones when someone takes advantage of them, even if it was a one-night stand.”
“You don’t understand,”Wade says, stepping closer. He stops when Camille frowns at him. “There was no one-night stand. We didn’t even kiss. Victoria and I went out to eat, had a decent time, and then she lost it on me hours later. You read the texts.”
“And the pregnancy?”
His chin wrinkles as he presses his lips together, looking her face over. “I can’t speak to whether she’s pregnant or not, but,”his eyes meet hers, “there is no way that I’m the father. I told her sister as much after I heard what she told you.”
Camille can’t help herself. “How did she take it?”she asks, imagining a very stuck-up Sadie having to swallow her pride at learning that it was all a lie.
“It was no surprise that Victoria and Sadie are related; I can tell you that much. I tried to show her the texts between her sister and me, but she refused. Any ignorance on her part at this point is voluntary. It all started coming together after that. Those were the calls I kept having to deal with all weekend.”
“It was Victoria calling you?”
“Not her, but I told her about a couple of our manufacturers near New York during our date. It was the reason I was in the city at the time. I started having issues with one of those facilities about a week after that. While you and I were flying to Sacramento, I got an email from my team about my assistant calling and canceling our latest order. The thing was, he hadn’t canceled anything, and once we got in touch with the manufacturer, the person who called them was a woman.”
“You think it was Victoria,”Camille finishes. It certainly wouldn’t be the craziest thing she had done.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Let me ask you this,”Camille evens her gaze. “Were you talking about me in your room when we got back to your mom’s this morning?”
“No,”he says without hesitation, “I was dealing with the backlash of the production halt. We had already agreed to have the product delivered to our distributing facilities no later than Tuesday, but with nothing being done, we were in danger of losing not just the money we had invested but also not delivering as promised, which could have cost us those accounts, and opened us up to possible lawsuits.”
Camille nods. “And you’re not already manufacturing the Oxygen Recycler?”
Wade’s brow pinches together. “Why would we do that? The two of you haven’t even signed.”His mouth suddenly gapes open as he connects the dots. “That’s why you were so mad. You thought I was talking about your invention.”
“Yeah,”she admits, her voice crescendoing, “Sadie told me you slept with her sister after taking her out on a date. And that when you found out she was pregnant, you didn’t care. Then, I walk into you, bragging about what I assumed was my invention being “a done deal.”
“Wow,”Wade hesitates. “No wonder you didn’t want me at the hospital.”
“Yeah,”she nods, her heart pounding just thinking about it. “I was mad enough that Integrity Heights has a follow-up meeting with the Flexinburg Group, and I can’t stand those people.”
She forces herself to take a deep breath. The smell of flowers and the beautiful man who filled her apartment with them caused the last remnants of her anger to fall away.
“Thank you for getting that specialist for Evelyn.”Camille thinks it over a second and then adds, “And thanks for not being the type of guy Sadie made you out to be.”
Wade doesn’t wait for permission. He closes the space between them, reaching out for her hands. She lets him take her hands in his, raising them to his chest.
“Meeting you has been…”he clenches his mouth shut, the muscles in his jaw flexing. He searches Camille”s eyes. When he speaks again, his voice is low. “It’s not that I need you or want you. When I look at you… no one else exists. It’s been like that since the day we met. You fill my thoughts and dreams, and every time I’m around you, you do something new that makes me fall even further for you.”Looking down at their hands, he slowly starts to shake his head. “I don’t want to lose what we could potentially have over something like this, but I can understand how this must make you feel, and if what I’m saying or what happened with Sadie is too much for you at the very least, I hope we can still be friends.”
Camille watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows. He’s still gazing into her eyes. She can’t help it. She breaks out into a low giggle. Before she knows it, both of them are laughing hard enough to drop hands.
“I hope we can still be friends,”she repeats through her laughter, causing Wade to laugh even harder.
“I…I didn’t know what else to say,”he fights to catch his breath.
“Saying ‘let’s be friends’is the kiss of death,”Camille giggles, “That is exactly what I told the last guy I dated, knowing that we would never hear from me again. It should only be used as a verbal pat on the back to someone you hope to never see again.”
Wade raises his palms at her. “Agreed. It felt stupid when I heard it come out of my mouth.”
Camille shakes her head, grinning ear to ear. She isn’t going to let up on him that easy, not after the day she’s had. “Do you fill-up the apartments of every woman you just want to be friends with?”
He looks around at the ridiculous amount of flowers surrounding them. “To be fair, two dozen roses are much cheaper here than in L.A.”
Camille’s chest falls at the reminder of New York and the woman who managed to ruin their weekend without being there, a weekend that would have been one of the most amazing weekends of Camille’s life.
“How do I know that she won’t keep interfering?”
“Ican’tmake any promises, but I can tell you that it is about to get a lot harder for her, especially now that my mom knows there’s a good chance she’s behind the manufacturing hold-up. I’m taking out a restraining order, and the company is drawing up a cease and desist order. If we can prove that she was the one who pretended to be my assistant, she may be facing more serious charges. At this point, she better hope that she is pregnant because that’s the only way my mother’s going to take it easy on her.”
Camille bites the inside of her cheek, fighting not to feel sorry for herself despite it all. “What about your brother and Sadie?”
“He left with her, but Mom made sure he knew why you left, why I followed you, and why everyone was so mad at her. He wasn’t happy to hear how she treated you. I doubt they’re together for much longer.”
“And what about my meeting tomorrow? How would you feel about me if we decided to go with the Flexinburg Group?”Camille asks, biting her lower lip.
Wade swallows, lifting his chin to gaze into the living room. “I can deal with that,”he admits, looking back down at her. The side of his mouth curls into his one-sided grin. “But you can tell my mother.”
“I’ll just tell Delilah,”Camille jokes, grinning out the side of her mouth, mirroring him, “let her be the bearer of bad news.”
Wade chuckles. “There you go.”
He leans his head down slowly enough that she could easily pull back, but she doesn’t. She rises up on her toes. His lips meet hers. It’s a gentle, sweet kiss. Camille smiles as he wraps his arms around her. Having his arms around her was such a new sensation that she hadn’t realized that she missed it until now.
So many thoughts bounced around in her head as she held onto the man she thought she lost or never had to begin with. Sadie’s manipulations, Victoria’s lies, Wade and his mother’s kindness, a weekend she would never forget. There was so much to take in, but the thoughts of what she had done to herself over the course of the weekend made her hold on tighter to Wade. Camille had been her own worst enemy in all of it. She took her deepest fears of not being business-savvy, skinny, or pretty enough and made herself believe it. Camille had arrived home thinking of herself as a failure, a joke. Of all the lies from this past weekend, her lies to herself were the most damaging, leaving one was one glaringly obvious truth.
The things we tell ourselves matter.
Starting today, the negative self-hate was no longer allowed. Camille would advocate for herself internally as much, if not more than she advocated for herself externally.
“Thank you,” Wade whispered in her ear, pulling back from her grasp to look her in the eye. “Thank you for giving me a chance to explain.”
“It’s hard to say no to a guy who filled my apartment with my favorite flowers.”
He perks up, stepping back to look over the array of flowers. “Which ones are your favorite?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off him, wanting to see his reaction. “All of them.”
His grin reaches both corners of his mouth, turning into a broad smile. Light wrinkles touch the corners of his eyes. “You aren’t going to take it easy on me, are you?”
“Now, where would the fun be in that?”
The end
The things we tell ourselves matter.
Be kind to yourself.
Love yourself.
You are worth it.