Tempting the New Boss(59)
“Then he shouldn’t have been flying our daughter around in the middle of a goddamn storm. And he sat down to breakfast with us.” He slung the carry-on over his shoulder. “Talking about sperm donors, for heaven sake, and taking a little accident like it was the end of the world. And what was that stuff about one room when you were checking in?” he asked Camilla, as if he been holding the question in and Mason’s behavior at breakfast pried it loose. “If he was trying to pull some stunt on you when you’d just been through such a harrowing experience, I swear—”
“Daddy, I told you that was nothing,” she assured him, a hand to his arm. “A mistake. Now I’m sorry about breakfast. He’s not used to family, and he isn’t the most outgoing guy to begin with.”
“Seems like a kook,” her father muttered as her mother came out of the bathroom with a plastic bag of toiletries and put them in the outside pocket of the carry-on bag. “I have half a mind to buy our own tickets home. Not go in his fancy jet.”
“Daddy, please. Don’t go to that trouble. I don’t want to be responsible for that expense.” On their retirement stipend, they couldn’t afford such an out-of-the-blue cost.
“We wanted to see you, honey,” he insisted. “God, when I think—”
“Yes, we did, Jack, and Mr. Talbot’s office was extremely considerate to have flown us here,” her mother insisted, linking arms with him. “I’m not going to make some fool gesture by not accepting their graciousness on the way home.”
“You call that gracious?” he asked, with a roll of his eyes.
“Not everyone is comfortable with people who are different, Jack,” her mother said quietly. “You know that.”
“Maybe, but I don’t have to like it.”
“I don’t know if that’s what it was,” Camilla said in a small voice.
They waited, expecting her to say something else, arms linked, and when she didn’t, whatever her face said, her mother went back over to her. “Now listen to me, honey, do you think you could take a few days to recover? I know it was your first day, but—”
“Some first day! She ought to sue the guy.”
“Dad.”
Her father relented. “Your mother’s right. Why don’t you come back with us? Clear your mind. Just for a few days.”
“I do want to come home. Maybe for longer than a few days if I can swing it. If that’s okay with you.”
Her parents traded looks. “Of course,” they said at the same time.
She had just realized that was what she wanted to do, for now, while she tried to straighten out a life that had become suddenly too messy. “But I can’t come with you right now. I have to tie things up here. I’ll let you know, okay?”
They went into the hall where Brandy waited with Joey, small overnight bags in their hands. Camilla gave her brother a big hug. Then her sister.
“You okay?” Brandy asked.
“I guess.” Her parents stood over to the side with Joey, and she whispered, “I don’t know, Brandy. Dad and Mom hate him.”
“Dad is just suspicious because of the room thing, and you know how protective they are of Joey. I’m sure your, er, boss or guy or whatever didn’t mean anything. I don’t know. I’ve given you my best advice. I guess you can poll the others now.”
She laughed. “I’m not so sure that’d be a good idea.”
“It’ll work out. It always does.”
“Does it?” She felt unaccountably sad at her family’s departure, at the decisions she had to make about her own situation.
“Yes.”
“You all go down to the van,” her mother told the others. “I want a minute alone with Cammy.”
Camilla shot an accusatory look at Brandy who shrugged and mimed a zipper against her lips. “Not me,” she mouthed.
After the elevator closed, her mother snapped her fingers. “Oh shoot. Your father had the key. We can’t go back inside the room. Well, never mind. Come here.”
She led Camilla into an alcove with an ice machine and said, “I want you to promise me you won’t do anything rash.”
Camilla kicked a stray piece of ice into the corner. “Why would you say that?”
“Because when people are in extreme situations of stress, life and death situations, it takes some time to get perspective when they come out of it.”
“Mom—”
“Just listen to me, Cammy. I know you and the other girls think I’m too old to remember what it was like to be young and foolish, but sadly for you, you’re going to find out you’re never too old for that.”