Fire Raiser (14 page)

“I’m sorry, too,” she offered. “I was wrong. Forgive me?”

“Always.”

She hugged him tight, mourning the loss of the boy and the teenager and the young man—and wondered if this was how it would feel when Kirby and Bella grew up for real and for good.

As they neared the house again, music came pouring out the open windows. Holly couldn’t keep herself from humming along.

We long for true love—well, we’ve found it: it’s just one belief away—

Cam smiled and nudged her with a shoulder. “I’ve been meaning to ask—who programmed the music tonight? It’s been wall-to-wall Hollywood Cowboys. Raitt, Ronstadt, Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Warren Zevon—Buffalo Springfield, for Chrissakes, as if they didn’t break up about a hundred years ago—”

“Don’t forget Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther. The whole roster of the Avocado Mafia. Not my doing, but I’m not gonna complain, either. I love this stuff. I thought you did, too.”

“Like we ever had a choice? Lulah corrupted us during our formative years.”

“I’d say we got lucky,” she said as they continued up the verandah steps and back into the ballroom arm-in-arm.

“Lucky that I know the words to every song Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young ever recorded? Individually
and
collectively, I might add.”

“I have one word for you, dear heart:
disco
.”

“You have a point,” he conceded. “Without a solid grounding in the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and the ’70s California Angst Brigade, we would’ve been at the mercy of some very scary people.”

“And you might have become the quintessential Gay Cliché,” she agreed. “C’mon, cousin—buy a girl a drink.”

“How many have you had?” he asked warily.

“Not nearly as many as I’m going to.”

Not that she really wanted another vodka. Jamey Stirling was over by the bar, and she wanted to conduct a little experiment. It wasn’t meddling, she told herself with firm self-righteousness. After all, she hadn’t made any promises.

As she and Cam approached, Jamey turned abruptly, as if someone had called out his name. Holly wasn’t surprised in the least when gray eyes and blue eyes met, skidded shyly away, then locked with an almost audible click. She hid a smile and ordered her own drink. Cam was in no condition to remember what vodka was, let alone how to ask Laura to pour one. Holly was familiar with the sensation tickling at her mind, the feeling she’d first had about five minutes after Alec and Nicky had made their snowy entrance to Woodhush all those years ago. It was the same as the instantaneous recognition when she’d seen Susannah Wingfield and Elias Bradshaw together for the first time. And now here it was with Cam and Jamey. It didn’t surprise her at all. This was it: the real, the one, the only.

Cam and Jamey were staring at each other. No move forward, no smile or nod of greeting, nothing. Just staring. Holly found this annoying and ridiculous. Jackson Browne was in the middle of a song now, and she tried to keep her expression from registering the sudden fiendish glee that fizzed as if the vodka had been champagne. She elbowed her cousin ungently. He reacted not at all. Suddenly glad Evan had insisted on the stilettos, she brought one heel down on Cam’s instep. Not very hard. But it got his attention.

“What the—? Dammit, what’d you do that for? That hurt!”

She smiled sweetly.

He squinted down at her, gaze dark now with suspicion. “Holly?”

She sang: “ ‘Well, I may not have the answer, but I believe I got a plan—’ ”

He actually shrank back. All six feet one-and-a-half inches of him. “I thought you were gonna leave this alone—”

“Oh, I think we both know that’s not true.” Her fingers went around his bicep like a steel vise. “C’mon, Peaches.”

“How did this become my life?” he moaned.

“Shut up.” Holly urged him forward. Jamey was still staring. Nobody else was, and she counted on generations of strict Virginia manners to keep it that way as she sang softly, “ ‘Honey, let me introduce you to my redheaded friend.’ ”

“It’s ‘redneck,’ ” he hissed, “and what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Like the song says, I’m going to introduce him to my redheaded friend.”

“ ‘Redneck’!” he corrected more forcefully.

“You want to say that a little louder in this part of the country?”

“Holly, please—I’m begging you. Why can’t you just let it alone?”

She turned and looked him straight in the eyes, all laughter gone. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen,” she told him flatly, “you wouldn’t let it alone, either. You
couldn’t
.” She gave him an ungentle push toward Jamey.

And then, just as Cam was about to approach—helplessly, Holly thought, as if something elemental like gravity or particle physics pulled them toward each other—Shawntel sidled up to Jamey. Predatory, intent, obviously not going to take
no
for an answer, she slid her fingers across Jamey’s forearm, curling her nails into his sleeve.

Holly glanced frantically over at Cam. No spell or inherent gift needed to read that suddenly vulnerable face; she knew exactly what he was thinking. The hand clawing into Jamey’s black leather jacket was female, and therefore socially acceptable. Cam smiled just a little and faded effortlessly into the crowd.

She turned back to Jamey. The girl didn’t exist for him. The blank astonishment of a few moments before had smoothed into the professional veneer of the accomplished practitioner of courtroom law—which was, after all, a performance art. But as Cam started toward him, Jamey’s eyes had suddenly ignited and a smile quivered at the corners of his mouth in a look that said no one else in the world existed for him. As Cam slipped away, Jamey’s face became for just one unguarded instant a dozen years older, a hundred years sadder.

Holly knocked back a gulp of vodka and gritted her teeth. Men were idiots. It was part of their preposterous code that a warrior was said to have died a valiant death when all his wounds were in the front. As though dead could get any deader if your heart got carved out of your ribcage while you were watching it happen.

“Okay, that’s it,” she muttered. A few long strides caught her up to Cam. She tapped his shoulder and when he turned she grabbed his right hand, planted his left at her waist, and said, “Shut up, we’re dancing.”

Just like that, and they were doing a strange, eccentric ’50s sort of be-bop, with a lot of tricky steps and circling under raised arms and a dip or two into the bargain, while Glen Frey sang about heartaches tonight.

“Goddammit, Holly—”

“Smile,” she hissed, and maneuvered them by brute force closer to where Jamey stood, still helplessly staring.

“You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’, as my daddy used to say,” Cam retorted, and swung her under his arm, then back, purposely making her dizzy. He pulled her in for a quick whirl across the floor, making her do it backward and too fast, his eyes saying he was hoping she’d stumble. “What’ll it take to get you to stop?”

“You’ve got nothing I want, Peaches, so don’t even bother. And you’ve got nothing that can scare me, either.” She made him duck beneath their upraised arms, dragging him back against her with a steely grip. His back slammed against her front as she went on, “You got nothin’, boy,” hissed over his shoulder. “You want to go on having nothin’ for the rest of your life?” She unspun him like a spool of thread, and they were connected only by grasping fingers.

All at once she lost him, his hand pried out of her grip by a larger, stronger hand. Evan took over the dance, pulling Holly tight against him. “Leave him alone, lady love,” he warned.

She caught a glimpse of Cam then. Scrawled all over his expressive face was the fact that he’d decided that Evan Lachlan was only slightly less worship-worthy than God.

Male bonding: the refuge of idiots.

Nine

AS HE WATCHED CAM smile ruefully and fade into the crowd, Jamey thought of several drastic things to do. He did none of them. For himself, he didn’t care: anybody in PoCo who didn’t know he was gay either hadn’t met him or was completely clueless. He didn’t announce it and he didn’t deny it. But everything Cam had always said about not wanting his life to be about his sexual orientation twisted bitterly through his mind. It wasn’t nice to out someone who didn’t want to be outed.

So he smiled at Shawntel and the two friends who’d joined her, and kept on with his story about finding his house. “And so Shawntel is driving me around to properties I might be interested in, and I’m thinking how beautiful it is here, how green and peaceful. Then she says, ‘There’s one place I really want to show you, but the owners are out of town and they prefer it if they’re at home when I bring somebody over. We can do a quick drive-by—’ And she stops, because I’ve got this look on my face like she’s out of her mind. Then it hits me, and I explain to her that here, ‘drive by’ means ‘drive by and take a look,’ but where I’ve been living it means ‘drive by and open fire.’ ”

The women laughed. Jamey, judging that he had expended enough charm, gently disengaged Shawntel’s fingernails from his sleeve, hoped she hadn’t put divots in his leather jacket, and pleaded the necessity of finding their host.

What he did instead was go in search of Cam Griffen.

Who proved maddeningly elusive. By his third circuit of the ballroom, Jamey was beginning to worry that he’d simply left the premises when, for the first time in more than twelve years, he heard the gentle voice that had lost most of its native Virginia drawl.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . .”

Jamey turned quickly. “I always saw you as more of a William Powell type, not Bogie. It’s the dimples. How are you, Cam?”

“Unemployed.” He took a short swallow of his drink. “So how do you like the old homestead? Holly says you’ve been to visit quite a lot out at Woodhush.”

“Are we really going to do this?” Jamey asked. “Hi, how’re you doin’, nice to see you, been quite a while?”

“How about, What the hell are you doing here?”

“I got tired of the city, and especially of prosecuting city crimes. Gang violence, murders, witnesses who either get amnesia or get dead—I seem to have run out of youthful zeal. And this job opened up, so . . .”

He’d forgotten that Cam’s eyes were that particular shade of blue. He’d recognized a resemblance in Holly’s eyes, but hers were sharper, more intense. Though the rest of his face was wary, even suspicious—resentment in the line of his mouth, nervousness in the flush of his cheeks—Cam’s eyes were still and always would be soft, translucent, the hint of turquoise in their depths accented by heavy brown lashes.

“So Acting D.A. of Pocahontas County was a career move?”

Jamey shook himself from contemplation of the tiny creases twelve years had etched at the corners of those eyes. “More of a keep-myself-sane move, actually.” Then he smiled—and smiled wider as Cam actually gulped. “Why, did you think I moved here because of you?”

The careless shrug took visible effort. “If seeing me again was the goal, you’d’ve had better luck in Eastern Europe.”

“How do you fit that ego into your pants in the morning?” He grinned as Cam blushed. “I told you—I wanted country simplicity and a great place to live that I didn’t have to sell the left lobe of my liver to afford.” He paused, honesty compelling him to admit, “And I figured that since your extended family pretty much runs the place, I’d see you sooner or later.”

“You were looking for me just now.” It wasn’t quite a challenge.

“I surely was. Why’d you sneak up on me like that?”

“I thought I should get it over with.” Another restless shrug. “Holly won’t give me any peace, otherwise.”

“I like her. And Evan. Their little boy reminds me a bit of you.”

“Me?” Cam was overdoing the innocent-and-indifferent act, and obviously knew it. But he couldn’t stop, any more than Jamey could stop looking at him—just looking at him, after all these years. “Oh, you mean we both act like we’re two years old, except he’s the only one with a legitimate excuse?”

“No. What I mean is that he gets the same expression on his face that you used to when we’d go to a concert. Evan had some Mozart on the CD a few weeks ago during dinner, and Kirby got that same look—like here was this wonderful new thing in his life, and he was ready to yell ‘Cool!’ at the top of his lungs.”

“I never looked like that.”

“Yeah, you did.” Jamey decided it was time to throttle it back a little, and so asked, “So whose laws are you going to help write next?”

Cam was evidently just as glad to talk about anything other than how well Jamey knew him. “They want me to go to Iraq.”

“God Almighty!” Jamey exclaimed, earning himself curious glances from a few people standing nearby. He inclined his head toward the verandah doors and after a moment’s hesitation Cam nodded acquiescence. Nonchalance was turning out to be hopeless for both of them tonight, Jamey reflected as he turned and nearly bumped into one of the waiters; Cam, sidestepping, knocked an elbow into the grand piano. The smack of bone on wood made Jamey wince in sympathy, but Cam seemed more bewildered than bruised. The look he gave the piano, and the almost involuntary way his fingers reached to touch it, confused Jamey—but he forgot his lawyerly training and didn’t follow up with a question, because Cam’s other hand came to rest for a moment at the small of his back. To feel this man’s touch after twelve years was marvel enough; that Cam had touched him of his own free will stunned him.

They found a pair of wicker chairs and sat, and Jamey cleared his throat. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make a big deal of it, I only thought—I mean, I—” He stopped, sighed, and finished helplessly, “Just please tell me you’re not going.”

Cam grinned mirthlessly. “At times I’m crazy, and at other times I’m stupid, but I’d have to be both simultaneously to sign that contract. It’s a nongovernmental organization that teaches developing countries how to do democracy, and they like my record—despite their neo-conservative leanings and my being the proverbial card-carrying member of the ACLU. But there’s no way I’m going over there. What the Iraqi people have been through makes me sick—what we’ve done to them is horrifying—but George Bush broke it, and I’ll be damned if I’ll help George Bush fix it.” He finished off his drink and set the glass down. Not looking at Jamey, he went on, “It breaks my heart to see pictures of Iraqis holding up their index fingers with the ink-stains, to show they voted. So proud, so hopeful—makes me want to strangle the people in this country who don’t bother to vote, who ask what difference can it possibly make—”

“Florida 2000,” Jamey said. “Ohio 2004.”

“Oh, that wasn’t so much the voting as the counting. But we’ve been at this for over two hundred years, and we
still
get into trouble. Those people with ink on their fingers, do they have any idea how demanding democracy is? That even though voting is absolutely necessary, it’s so much more than having the vote?”

As Jamey listened, all the old fascination with this man’s mind reasserted itself, all the powerful attraction of intellect to intellect. Yet it was more, now: in law school, they’d discussed ideas, abstracts, issues. This was life experience—Cam’s in helping to create laws, Jamey’s in applying them to society’s benefit.

“Democracy requires certain things,” Cam was saying. “One of them is the civic will to encourage debate among differing points of view. Colonial America was ethnically and religiously pretty homogeneous—they could establish principles of free speech and press and religion without having to worry about anything too extreme.” He reached for his glass, saw that it was empty, and let his hand fall to his thigh. “With new immigration, those principles were tested and strained, but never abandoned.”

“The testing only defined those freedoms more vividly—strengthened them,” Jamey agreed.

“Right, exactly. And along the way people figured out how vital they are to a democracy. Where there is no tolerance, there’s no debate—and without debate there can be no finding a compromise. A law’s not a very good one unless it makes all sides at least a little unhappy.” He smiled for an instant, then shook his head.

“I suppose you just have to keep referencing Churchill,” Jamey mused. “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms of government.”

“When you’ve got a society full of people intent on killing each other for ethnic or religious reasons, none of ’em will stay in the same room long enough for the word ‘compromise’ to be spoken, let alone understood as being necessary to democracy. It’s not enough just to get exactly what
you
want out of a particular piece of legislation—it has to screw the other guy as well. Tolerance is a null concept.”

Jamey nodded. “ ‘I’m right and you’re wrong and here’s why’ is very American. ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, and you’re going to die for it’ is not.”

“And that’s why I’m not going to Iraq, no matter how much money that NGO offers me or how guilty they try to make me feel.”

“You relentlessly beautiful man.” Jamey didn’t realize he’d said the words out loud until Cam flinched. “I know you don’t understand. You never did. It isn’t enough, with the eyes—no, it has to be everything about you, from the way you look to the way you think and feel—your mind, your heart—like I said, relentless.” He sat forward in his chair and Cam leaned further back into his—oddly graceful, oddly precise, like a dance move previously choreographed. “You have absolutely no right to still be this beautiful,” Jamey accused gently.

Half-strangled, Cam managed, “Me?”

“I wanted you the minute I saw you. Covered in paint, filthy dirty, wearing the rattiest t-shirt on the planet—you don’t know what it took for me not to jump your bones right there and then. By the time I got you talking, and I found out the rest of it—how your head works, what you think, your music, the kind of man you are—it’s twelve years later and you’re even more
you
, and while I’m gratified that my instincts were so perfect, I’m very much afraid you’ve done it to me again, Cam.”

“It
is
twelve years later,” he rasped. “Don’t do this, Jamey. You have no idea who I am now, you don’t know the first thing about—”

“So tell me what you think I need to know. Tell me what you think has changed about you. Tell me—” He stopped for a moment as caution and impatience danced their accustomed fandango between his ears, then shrugged and said, “Tell me none of it matters. Tell me you still want me.”

“How the hell do you
do
this to me?”

“You mean I still can?”

“Want you? Just
looking
at you hurts.”

“It doesn’t have to.” He got to his feet and started for the steps leading down to the side lawns. He knew Cam was watching him, and he knew Cam would follow him. A voice inside berated him for attempting to use sexual attraction to bypass potential problems—but whoever owned that voice had never been presented with the opportunity to kiss Cam Griffen.

“This is crazy,” Cam Griffen complained behind him. “Do you really want to talk about all this now?”

Jamey smiled to himself. “Why not?”

“Well, just an observation, but we’re both sober.”

“Says you.”

When they were in the shadows of a white pergola all entwined with flowering wisteria, and before Cam could start objecting yet again, Jamey took full advantage of the opportunity.

HOLLY KNEW she was being manipulated. Judging by the glint in his hazel-green eyes, Evan knew that she knew it—and did it anyway. As they danced, and the Avocado Mafia songs followed one after the other, her annoyance at Cam and Jamey was supplanted by succeeding levels of attraction.

First came Sentimentality. She loved the way Evan looked, the way he held her, the laughter in his dragon’s eyes, the smile curving the corners of his mouth. Lover, husband, father of her children—the one and only.

Next up was what she called Romance A—subtitled
Find Us A Staircase and Do Your Rhett Butler Impersonation.

Romance B was
Forget the Staircase
.

She was currently at the fourth level, otherwise known as
Forget the Romance. Fuck Me. Now.

Bonnie Raitt seemed to agree:
Gonna get a little risky, baby—honey, that’s my favorite part. . . .

Holly grinned and maneuvered Evan to the foyer doors. On the way, they passed the
hors d’oeuvres
table and she snagged a handful of M&M’s. Evan’s eyes practically fell out of his head.

“Aren’t we a little old for this?” he muttered as she coaxed him through the lobby toward the lighted overhead sign that said LADIES.

“Lover man, you’re not anywhere
near
your ‘best by’ date.”

Nobody was in the bathroom washing her hands or touching up her lipstick. Holly gave Evan a push toward the sink counter and flipped the toggle that locked the door. When she turned to face him, she laughed.

“You’re amazing, you know that?” she asked. “You’re blushing
and
you’re hard. I didn’t think any man had that much blood.”

“When did I agree to explore your kinky side without a road map?”

“When you married me,” she replied, and sauntered toward him, popping the M&M’s into her mouth one by one.

Twelve minutes later, she reflected that by all the laws of physics, she should have fallen over into an undignified, half-dressed, insensate heap. Evidently there was some Law of Evan Liam Lachlan that at the moment superseded all others. Either that, or her tangled panty hose made any movement impossible.

“You’re a lunatic,” he muttered into the hollow of her shoulder, catching his breath. “That thing with the M&M’s—”

“You like?”

“I’m just tryin’ to figure out a way to reciprocate.”

Her panty hose were a lost cause. When she stripped them off to stuff into the trash, he groaned.

“Now I gotta think of you all night like that!”

“Good,” she said sweetly, refastening the straps of her shoes.