“Probably not,” he said. “Probably just you.” He tried to hand her the spoon. “Want a bite?”
Chapter Three
Cam knew he was being an ass. It was like landing in Toronto had prompted him to immediately start living down to his reputation. It was a familiar groove to slip back into, and he simply couldn’t help himself. Jay didn’t know the man he had become, or had been trying to become. Nor did his mom. They didn’t know that three years of military service had given him some much needed perspective on his lot in life. That he’d drawn a line when he’d signed up for the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment, a reserve regiment of the Canadian Forces headquartered in Thunder Bay. On one side was his old life, on the other, the army. The army and Christie: those were the things that were supposed to have made him into a better man.
At least he hadn’t told Jay and Mom about his now-dead plan to go to university so he could become an officer. The discharge aside, what had he been thinking? He wasn’t post-secondary material.
Anyway, none of it mattered now. Meeting people’s expectations was easier than upending them. He’d spent most of his life doing that, and, perversely, he was good at it.
But, he reminded himself as he pulled the Corvette into a municipal parking garage, Jane didn’t have any expectations of him. Or she hadn’t until he’d started harassing her at the steakhouse. “So what’s your deal?” he asked, jogging around to her side of the car before she could get out and offering her a hand. ’Vettes were notoriously low, and it could be hard to hoist yourself out of them. “How come you’re free to babysit me on a Wednesday afternoon?”
She ignored his hand and levered herself out of the car. “I’m not babysitting you.”
He raised his eyebrows as he led her to the pay station and stuck his credit card in.
“I’m not really sure why you find it so incredible that your brother and future sister-in-law would send someone to greet you at the airport.”
Yeah, nice try. But he let it slide. “Why you, though? You don’t have to be at a job of some sort? You’re independently wealthy, what?”
She barked an incredulous laugh at that. “I’m about as far from independently wealthy as it’s possible to get.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, eyeing the fancy jeans. “You clean up too well.”
“Oh, I do okay now, but my dad died when I was a kid, and my mom didn’t really have any skills, so things were…tough for a while.”
“You’re a self-made woman.” He respected that.
“I guess I am.” The corners of her mouth turned up a bit. She liked that notion. “But still in touch enough with my roots to notice that you’re probably going to pay more to park that thing for a week than you did to rent it.” She cocked her head at the machine, which was printing a receipt that was, in fact, for a startlingly high amount of money.
He had plenty of money saved. While on his two tours he’d had no living expenses, so the vast majority of his pay had gone into the bank, and for the year in between them, he’d lived cheaply, socking away all his bartending tips and living in a room above the bar. He’d been saving for tuition. Now that that wasn’t the case, he had a comfortable cushion to rely on while he found his feet and figured out what the hell to do next. But he didn’t want to admit that Jane had been right about the car, so he pocketed the receipt and said, teasingly, “And how did you make your millions? Let me see. I bet you’re…an investment banker. Or maybe a teacher.” She was something rigid, he’d bet, something where she got to boss people around and adhere to rules.
“Actually, I’m a young-adult novelist.”
“Seriously?” That was the last thing he’d expected her to say. He held the exit door for her, and she preceded him onto a busy downtown sidewalk. “Would I know your books?”
She scoffed. “I doubt it.”
That stung, but he wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was only saying that he was too old to know her books. But it kind of felt like she was suggesting he was sub-literate. He wasn’t a scholar, sure, but he wanted to tell her that his Kindle was pretty much the only thing that had kept him sane—if he could call himself that—on his two tours. But that would make him sound a little too desperate for her approval. So he settled for, “Try me.”
“Well, I’ve been at it since university, so I have a bunch of books out. They’re part of a series called the Clouded Cave, and it’s turning out to be pretty popular. I’m writing book seven right now.” She was picking up speed, both with her feet and with her words, deftly dodging slower-moving pedestrians. “The series is about a girl named Stephanie who’s exploring a cave, and it turns out to be a gateway to another world. She takes some friends with her in subsequent books.”
“Like Narnia,” he said. “Actually, like a lot of books. Alice in Wonderland.”
She was looking at him oddly. “Yes. Portal fiction. There’s a reason it endures.”
“Portal fiction?”
“Kids cross over into another world through some kind of portal or door—the wardrobe, the looking glass. In mine, it’s a cave.”
“Right. So why does it endure?”
“These kinds of stories let kids be heroic. They let them practice skills they don’t get to use in our ordered, capitalist world—both the characters and, vicariously, the kids reading the books.”
What he said was, “Makes sense,” because her analysis struck him as spot-on. But what he thought was, “Whoa.” He’d known she was smart from the moment he met her, but wow. Also: This woman was creating an alternative world in which the rigid strictures of society didn’t apply? Apparently, Muddy Jane contained multitudes.
“Here we are,” she said, cutting off their little on-the-go literary chat, which was just as well because the idea of her being an author, much less one who wrote about magical portals to other lands, was weirding him out.
She led him through a grand entranceway into a marble lobby and marched up to a concierge desk. “I’m Jane Denning. Jay Smith’s fiancée Elise Maxwell was supposed to leave me a key.” It didn’t escape Cam’s notice that the key had been left in Jane’s name and not his.
“Yes, here it is, Ms. Denning,” said the suit-wearing concierge, who then escorted them to the elevators and hit the call button. When the elevator arrived, he held the door for them and reached inside and hit the button for the eighteenth floor.
Damn. He’d known Jay did all right, but he wasn’t prepared for how far a cry this was from their trailer in Thunder Bay. When Jane unlocked the door of unit 1803, he effected an air of casualness as they made their way into the suite. He wanted to walk around and look really hard at everything, to get a sense of the man his brother had become. Because Jay was so much older and had moved to Toronto to go to school when Cam was seven, Cam had always been fascinated by him. As a kid, it had been hero worship, but in later years he’d thought of his brother almost as a character in one of his favorite video games—familiar, compelling, but ultimately from another world.
He took in a fancy kitchen with a breakfast bar that opened on to a living room. But nothing reminded him of his brother. The last time he had visited Jay, when Cam was in high school, his brother’s apartment hadn’t looked much more mature than a dorm room—huge TV, sofa, gaming system, and not a lot else. But here, the walls were a pale gray-green and the room was full of fluffy furniture and brightly colored art.
He barked a laugh. “This does not look like the brother I used to know.”
“It’s Elise’s influence, probably,” Jane said as she went around opening windows. “Jay pretty much lives at her house these days, but she can’t see a room without spiffing it up.” She yanked open the door to the balcony. “It’s hot in here.”
“You should try Iraq,” he said before he could think better of it.
“Yeah…” She trailed off. “I guess I shouldn’t complain.”
He hadn’t meant to make her feel bad. He’d enjoyed rattling Jane Denning this afternoon, but he wasn’t out to make her feel genuinely bad. “Let’s see what my brother has to drink,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen. “Beer is definitely on my list.” He opened the massive stainless steel fridge. “Ah! Success!” Jay hadn’t gotten too big for his britches—no fancy microbrews here. He grabbed a couple of Labatts and made his way back to the living room, holding one out for Jane even as he took a pull of his.
“No, thanks.”
She was back to looking like the prim detention teacher.
“Suit yourself.” He grabbed the remote and flopped onto the fancy sofa. “Do you know any good bars around here?”
“We are not going to a bar.”
“No, we are not going to a bar. I am going to a bar. Later. Alone. For the purposes of (a) getting drunk, and (b) picking up a woman. Maybe two.” That last part was a lie, but he was on a roll with riling her, and he couldn’t seem to stop.