He wanted to know Cameron as a lover

The realization surprised Paul.

“I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again.”

Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. Then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.

He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.

She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”

Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him, because of her.

Dear Reader,

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley, in the hope of pleasing Mr. Darcy, speculates that balls would be better if there were more conversation and less dancing. But then the events wouldn’t be balls, would they?

In Love Potion #2, Cameron McAllister faces a similar paradox. Paul Cureux—and all men—would be much more understandable if they behaved more like women. More understandable but not nearly so much like men.

It’s confusing to discover that what aggravates also attracts. Any woman who has had to persuade a man to seek medical attention for an obviously dislocated finger—or shoulder or knee—gets a fascinating picture of one way in which men and women differ. And then there’s that other thing—that women typically talk about their feelings and men often do not.

Cameron perceives Paul as a Peter Pan figure who will never commit. She wants him to open up, to share his deepest emotions—or so she thinks. Only when unexpected challenges force her to rely upon him does she realize why he’s the man she can’t stop thinking about.

Can best friends maintain enough mystery in their relationship to keep them interested and attracted over the long run? Maybe only if they are different enough.

Wishing you happy reading and all good things always.

Sincerely,

Margot Early

Love Potion #2
Margot Early

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margot Early has written stories since she was twelve years old. She has sold over three million books with Harlequin Books; her work has been translated into nine languages and sold in sixteen countries. Ms. Early lives high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains with two German shepherds and several other pets, including snakes and tarantulas. She has studied herbalism and martial arts, and she enjoys the outdoors, spinning dog hair and dancing with Caldera, a tribal belly dance troupe. You can find her on Facebook.

For Chris

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Chris Chambers, for reading the manuscript and sharing birth knowledge and valuable life experience, and to Keiran Woodhouse and the other members of Rhesus, for their CD which became a sort of soundtrack for the writing of this book.

All technical errors in this fictional work are mine.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PROLOGUE

All Saints’ Day

Seven years past

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Cameron McAllister had woken up happy. She’d woken up with Paul Cureux, her best friend from high school in Logan, West Virginia. Now, they were both students in their last year at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. The night before had been the best Halloween of her life, partying with her three best buddies, all guys. Her costume was Love; she’d worn a toga-like garment made of an ivory bedsheet—and lots of glitter. She and Paul had ended up kissing, and it was as if she’d swallowed her breath, all the breath she would ever breathe, then exhaled, and then she was screaming down a roller-coaster hill, and then they were in bed, making love, and it was great. It was exciting. It made her wonder all the things she didn’t know about Paul.

It had happened at exactly the right time, and now, the morning after, she was happy. Things might have become romantic between her and another friend, the Adonis-like Sean Devlin. But Sean didn’t intrigue her as Paul did—especially now.

Now, the morning after, she was happy.

Paul woke up and blinked at her, his curly dark hair mussed, and he smiled, and it was a boyish smile, straight white teeth. His brown eyes, strangely innocent; his lips full and sweetly curved; his nose classically shaped, the most perfect she’d ever seen—it was a young and beautiful face but also a comfortably familiar face.

Cameron had been in love. And off and on for the past two years, she’d considered trying to fall in love with her friend, Sean Devlin, who studied drama and wrote poetry and whose cheekbones could hew wood. There had been that one time, when she lost her virginity, but the chemistry just wasn’t there—not on her side, anyhow.

On the other hand, last night… It had been so perfect. And Paul was her best friend. Surely, this was love.

PAUL CUREUX peered down at his dark blue sheets. They were now sprinkled with gold glitter, as though he’d been visited by a fairy.

But it wasn’t a fairy beside him. It was Cameron McAllister, the unofficial Hottest Body of their year at Logan High School. His surfing buddy through their years at college, whom he’d decided, maybe unwisely, to sleep with.

It wasn’t that Paul was averse to sex or to casual sex. It was just that he’d had one, perfectly good, version of a relationship with Cameron. Now, she would want him to tell her he loved her. She would want dates, presents, girlfriend things. Being from Logan, she might even want him to marry her. All these ideas gave Paul a sense of time closing in, of the necessity of “settling down,” of graduation’s too-fast approach. Everything was going too fast.

He drew his eyes from Cameron’s high, perfect breasts. Yes, she was hot, but this was going to ruin everything. He grinned at her, knelt up in bed to peer out the window, and said, “Yes!” turning the focus at once to the waves and hoping she would follow his lead.

Cameron sat up, looking sleepy, and glanced out the window, too. She seemed dazed.

Paul said, “This was great. Really great.” He made himself meet her brown eyes. “But I think it could wreck our friendship. I think we shouldn’t do it again.”

He could detect little change in her expression. Not even stiffening in her body. She jumped down from the high loft bed, raised above his stereo and drawers. “Sure,” she said. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

Paul said, “Yeah. Of course.” He watched her open his drawer, rooting for things that would be much too big for her.

She did not look at him.

He said, “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” she repeated.

He knew very definitely that she wasn’t, that he’d been a clod, that he couldn’t undo any of it, that he had wrecked things. Tendrils of adulthood and commitment inched toward him, crept around him, and he, too, jumped down from bed, effectively casting them off.

CHAPTER ONE

Logan, West Virginia

The present

CAMERON MCALLISTER sat at a small damp table in The Last Resort, the downstairs lounge of a Stratton Street hotel, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation. She listened without much interest to Paul Cureux’s final set and tried to look like his girlfriend. She felt desperately sad, helplessly jealous and reckless.

Her first reckless act of the evening had been to attend a family birthday dinner, where the man she most desired had shown up as her cousin’s date. And obviously mad about said cousin. Thus Cameron’s desperate sadness and helpless jealousy.

The second reckless act had been to pour the contents of an innocent-looking vial into her wine glass and drink it. This was supposed to help her get over the man in question.

Her third reckless act had come with Paul’s phone call, his insistence that one of his most infatuated fans was at his gig and not getting the message that he had a girlfriend.

This was hardly surprising; Paul didn’t have a girlfriend. Paul had Cameron. Cameron, who was, she supposed, his best female friend and had been since they were thirteen. Cameron, who was willing to assume the public-only role of his girlfriend. The system worked well enough. The reasons she took part—at parties, gigs and such—were myriad and not something she ever fully examined. Paul’s reasons? Well, she wasn’t wholly sure about that, either, except that he didn’t want a girlfriend and her presence prevented his ever finding one. Though he occasionally slipped away for the night with the kind of woman he believed least likely to ever trouble him again—almost always at out-of-town gigs.

Paul was the son of a midwife who brewed love potions for the occasional desperate petitioner. Love potions that he, at least, believed worked. And his sister, Bridget, claimed to have the same powers as his mother, though the little vial Cameron had bought from her (and dumped in her wine) was not a love potion. Paul held up his sister and mother as examples of the inherent untrustworthiness of the female sex. Because women were like this, he said, half-facetiously, he would never marry.

Nonsense, in Cameron’s opinion. Paul would never marry because he was Peter Pan. He had told her many times that he didn’t want so much as a houseplant; the responsibility of marriage and children was not for him.

Oh, if only Bridget’s concoction to “restore emotional equilibrium” would actually work. Cameron believed in the love potions, believed them to work. But this was a different kind of potion. One that was supposed to help her get over Graham Corbett. And that was absolutely necessary.

Cameron’s cousin Mary Anne was beautiful, talented and her best friend. Local radio host Graham Corbett was the only man who had interested Cameron in at least three years. But Graham was smitten with Mary Anne, the attraction was mutual, and Cameron just wanted to be home with her dogs and a romance novel so she could start getting over it. If anything, anything, could distract her from the burning jealousy she felt…

Cameron was rarely jealous. She made a habit of contentment. Someone had once told her that grateful people are happy people, and she counted her blessings daily. Decent looks, good health, two dogs she loved, her job as director of the Logan County Women’s Resource Center, and so much more….

The girl sitting across from her said over the music, “So…where did you two meet?”

You two. She meant Cameron and Paul, the supposed couple. The groupie was very pretty. Her name was…Ginny? Jenny? No, Genie. Or Jeannie. She was blonde, with fairy-perfect skin, taller than Cameron and skinny like a model, with high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Paul had said this groupie was “clingy,” but why should that bother Paul? What was wrong with having a gorgeous woman infatuated with you?

And there was nothing to stop women from becoming infatuated with Paul. He had a fine tenor voice and made audiences laugh by spontaneously creating songs on the spot on whatever subject they requested.

Now, Paul gazed at Cameron as he sang an original love song called “Years Ago.”

“We’ve known each other forever,” Cameron replied, trying for patience. This woman should give up on Paul. She said, “Look, if you really knew him, you wouldn’t want him.”

Cameron was again being reckless—not to mention sounding unlike a girlfriend—but someone should say something to this delusional young woman. And Cameron thought most women received too little good advice when it came to men.

“You want him,” Ginny-Genie pointed out.

Not really.

Cameron looked at Paul, his dark hark hair waving appealingly, just messy enough, just long enough and no longer. Cameron cut his hair; she did this because he asked her to, claiming that he worried about his mother and sister using pieces of his hair for witchcraft. Because he didn’t simply go to the barber, Cameron suspected he liked her to cut his hair. He was classically handsome, his eyes perpetually alight with mischief. He was tall, lean and broad-shouldered, nothing bulky about him. He looked like a construction worker in a television ad. Or the Marlboro Man. Or an Olympian god.

In actual fact, he was a zookeeper and moonlighting folk singer who lived a self-serving existence and believed lasting marriage did not exist. Cameron had no desire to marry him, so this didn’t matter.

“Look,” she said to Ginny, shouting too loudly over the song Paul was pretending to sing to her, “you’re very pretty, and you seem intelligent.” This might be stretching it, but undoubtedly Ginny-Genie’s low self-esteem was part of the reason the girl considered Paul satisfactory. No harm in a little confidence-building. “There are good men out there who would give their eyeteeth to have a girl like you, to marry her. Men who are okay with commitment.”

Ginny-Genie sipped her own margarita, and there actually did seem to be a look of intelligence—or at least calculation—in her aquamarine eyes.

Knowing she’d said too much, Cameron became intent on watching Paul tune his guitar. His hands were big, long-fingered, work-roughened. He had a bandage wrapped awkwardly around one thumb where he’d sliced it open erecting the new monkey enclosure at the zoo. He’d really needed stitches but had insisted he didn’t and was now, Cameron saw with much satisfaction and little pity, paying the price.

As her eyes again skimmed the lounge, she saw a big, tall man enter the bar with Jonathan Hale, the manager of the local radio station. Cameron squinted through the darkness, and the big man seemed to gaze curiously at her. Hazel eyes, she saw, and those cheekbones. That full mouth.

She smiled, and he broke free from Jonathan, crossed the lounge to her table. Cameron stood up to greet her first lover, who had only grown more fantastic-looking with age. Sean Devlin.

“Cameron?” he said.

“Hi, Sean. What brings you to Logan?”

“Actually, I’m living here. I’m the new drama teacher at the high school.”

Yes, the old one had died suddenly three weeks earlier.

He looked down at Ginny-Genie, and Cameron introduced her, as well, not feeling possessive.

But he seemed interested in her and asked for her phone number, which she gave him before remembering that she was supposed to be acting like Paul’s girlfriend.

At the end of the song, Paul asked for requests, said he hadn’t made up a song yet that night. Now standing beside Sean, the groupie raised her hand.

She was the only one.

Paul lifted his eyebrows.

“Commitment,” she said.

“YOU DO NOT BELIEVE one single thing you said in that song,” Cameron chided Paul on the way home, remembering the song he’d created on the spot to satisfy the groupie.

“I beg to differ. I believe commitment is a beautiful thing, and I said that. And you almost blew our cover flirting with your old flame.”

“He was never a flame. We were first and foremost friends—not unlike you and I.” And she’d made love with each of them once. But there was a certain spice and bittersweet pain to the memory of the long-ago Halloween night she’d spent with Paul. With Sean—nothing, really, though he had been her first. “Anyway,” she told Paul, “you believe commitment is a beautiful thing for everyone else.”

“May I beg to point out that I do have commitment in my life? I’m committed to my job and to my music. I’m just not committed to a house on Stratton Street, a wife and three kids and a golden retriever.”

He pulled up outside the cabin where she lived. Two dogs got up from the porch. Wolfie was feral and didn’t let anyone, even Cameron, touch him, but he sometimes walked in and out of her house and had been known to steal her stuffed animals and bury them in the yard. Mariah was Wolfie’s daughter and was as well-trained as was possible under the corrupting influence of her father, who really did look like a wolf, a black wolf with gray under his muzzle. An old guy who, after being attacked by coyotes, had been darted, castrated and stitched up by the zoo veterinarian, then released to Cameron’s backyard. After that, Wolfie had decided he sort of trusted Cameron.

“Whatever,” Cameron muttered, pushing open the passenger door of Paul’s pickup truck, an old Toyota 4Runner with camper shell. “Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door and trod up her flagstone path, a rustic path interspersed with dirt and growing things, wilted away this time of year.

A moment later, another door slammed. Cameron glanced back. She was greeting Mariah, petting her affectionate dog, while Wolfie kept his distance, still managing to look envious, yearning yet unwilling to be touched. She said, “Hi, Wolfie,” then noticed Paul coming toward her in the moonlight.

Oh.

He was coming in.

She moved toward the door. “Want some tea?”

“No grass clippings.”

“I can’t believe your own mother is an herbalist and you talk about nettles that way.”

“It’s because she’s an herbalist. As a child, I decided that in my adult life I’d never drink anything that tasted like lawn shavings.”

“You have no adult life.”

He ignored the jibe. They were walking through the dark hallway and had almost reached the kitchen when he said, “You look like you’ve lost your best friend, and there’s definitely no need. Sean Devlin has arrived, looking romantic, to sweep you off your feet. I remember him as one of the sharper crayons in the box, so your children won’t be cretins.”

“I will never have children,” Cameron told him sharply, “unless I adopt.”

“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten your morbid fear of pregnancy and birth.” Cameron had witnessed her older sister, Beatrice, in what she described as “extreme suffering, life-threatening suffering, the screaming-for-hours kind of suffering.” Cameron was convinced that no child could pass through her small hips. Paul kept to the original subject. “What’s making you so miserable tonight?”

“Never mind. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

“Let me guess—you have lost your best friend. You’ve lost Mary Anne to Graham Corbett.”

“Very funny.” She took two mugs out of the cabinet, checked that there was water in the kettle and switched on the burner.

“It’s inevitable that your cousin will marry someone.”

Cameron’s throat knotted. Her eyes felt hot. She wasn’t upset because everything was going to change with Mary Anne, that her being married would change everything. That wasn’t it at all. Anyhow, Mary Anne and Graham weren’t actually engaged.

Not yet.

“You okay?”

The question was far from Paul’s usual joking tone.

It increased the swelling in her throat. She nodded, jaw taut.

From her Salvation Army kitchen table, where he’d pulled out a chair, Paul watched her back. His tomboy friend with her two long golden-brown braids was dressed up, for her, wearing high clogs and some kind of longish, lacy tunic-top over her jeans. She’d been at a family dinner when he’d called her and begged her to come to The Last Resort.

He’d used the groupie as an excuse, but that wasn’t it. He’d known something was up with Cameron, something that had to do with Mary Anne. He also knew that Cameron, for reasons that made no sense to him, was ever so slightly envious of her cousin. She’s got cheekbones! She’s tall! Things like that. He saw no reason Cameron should envy anyone. She was the best-looking and most enjoyable woman he knew, that was certain. If there had been a Best Body category in their high school yearbook, she’d have won, hands down. All his classmates had carried fantasies about her.

Now, she sounded as if she were about to cry.

She spun away from the stove and said, “If you tell anyone what I’m going to tell you, I will never speak to you again and I’ll tell that groupie that you want to marry her so she can have your babies.”

Some small voice in the back of Cameron’s head whispered, Reckless…reckless…don’t do it.

She ignored the voice. She couldn’t stop, now that she’d started. “I just don’t see why I can’t have a normal relationship with a nice man who is actually an adult—someone who knows his own psyche and doesn’t project his demons onto me.”

Paul squinted. “Didn’t Sean Devlin beg your phone number tonight, or am I imagining that? Is this going to be another salvo in the Great Crusade for All Men to Have Therapy?”

“Forget it!” She spun away again.

Cameron, he knew, didn’t actually believe all men should have therapy. But she seemed to want some kind of fantasy relationship where she and the man in her life talked about everything, had no secrets from each other, constantly shared every emotion. Sometimes he wanted to point out to her that, in a strictly intellectual sense, she didn’t want a boyfriend, she wanted a girlfriend.

But now Paul suddenly saw, suddenly understood. She wasn’t crying about her friendship with Mary Anne, and she wasn’t crying about the general lack of the uninteresting kind of love relationship she thought she wanted; she was crying because she wanted Graham Corbett. The radio guy who looked like an extra on Sex and the City. Talk about someone totally wrong for tomboy Cameron. And Cameron could have virtually any guy she wanted.

Paul knew it would be a mistake to say anything. Especially anything on the subject. But he had to try. “Graham Corbett’s just not…” he said inarticulately, unable to say exactly what Corbett wasn’t.

He thought Cameron might turn around and shout at him.

Instead, she turned to face him again, dragging her sleeve across her eyes. She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m getting over him. Bridget gave me something so I wouldn’t like him.”

All the hair on Paul’s body stood up. Bridget, his sister, was not someone you should accept funny drinks from. She and his mother had uncanny powers which Paul, who had grown up with these females, could not pretend away. He had seen too much to be complacent on the subject. “You drank something Bridget gave you?”

“A s-s-specific—” Cameron sniffed. “For emotional healing.”

Paul supposed it could be true. But he also knew that his sister was mad at him. She hadn’t been watching her son beside the duck pond at the zoo. It was dangerous, and he’d told her so. Not tactfully, maybe, but come on! Nick could have fallen in and drowned while Bridget was talking meditation techniques with another mom.

Cameron moved away from the counter and picked up her purse, which she’d slung onto the table. From within she retrieved a small vial that she skidded across the table to Paul.

Paul didn’t want to touch the thing. Bridget could be really treacherous.

Cameron noticed that he didn’t pick up the vial. It was empty but for any last drops that might remain. Abruptly, she laughed.

“What?” said Paul.

“You. You’re so afraid. Everybody in the world laughs at love potions and thinks they don’t work.” Though Cameron also believed in the efficacy of the potions, she didn’t find them to be a big deal.

“Everybody in the world didn’t grow up with two witches,” said Paul emphatically.

“It’s not even a love potion,” Cameron needled him, unable to resist. “Maybe you should see if there are a few drops in there for your emotional equilibrium.”

“I’m not the one bursting into tears over a—” He stopped.

Cameron’s eyebrows drew together. “A what?”

“He’s so—preening. He belongs on cable. With his girl curls, that Jim Morrison do. It’s hilarious.”

Cameron pursed her lips briefly at this unfair description of Graham. She was beginning to enjoy herself. “You sound jealous.”

“Of Graham Corbett?” To Paul’s dismay, his voice cracked.

Cameron picked up the vial and carried it over to the stove. “What if I just put the last drop in your tea?”

“I won’t drink it,” he said, shaking his head.

Cameron rolled her eyes and set the vial near the sink to rinse and reuse for an herbal tincture. A pity that such an attractive man—and Paul was downright handsome—should be hopeless as a mate for anyone. Not because of anything to do with his faith in love potions. Just because he was so determinedly unattached. Which was childish.

A little catch in her heart warned her, cautioned her. But she had nothing to fear from Paul. Not emotionally. Not in any way.

She vividly remembered four or so things about their Halloween encounter back in college. One—her own costume. Two—surprising tenderness, or maybe a tender surprise. Three—the glitter in his bed in the morning. Four—his announcing upon awakening that the sex would wreck their friendship. She knew that excuse was covered extensively in the useful book He’s Just Not That Into You. Because it was a lie. It meant, I don’t want to have sex with you again. Period.

Paul had rejected her. This permanently eliminated him from her pool of men with whom she might have an intimate relationship in the future.

As she was thinking this, he said, “You know what the Chinese remedy for lovesickness is?”

“What?” said Cameron without interest. There was no remedy.

“To make love with someone other than the object of your attraction.”

Cameron eyed him suspiciously. “You’re not propositioning me, are you?”

Paul hadn’t been. He had been trying to goad her as she was goading him about the love potion. As far as he knew, Cameron hadn’t been on a real date in years, and he’d been planning to suggest Sean Devlin as a possible choice. But now they’d entered murky waters. Possibly deep waters.

He didn’t know Cameron’s entire sexual history, but knew she’d done more than her share of fending off unwelcome advances on dates. He thought of her, in a brief unspoken second, more like a breath, of someone innocent and vulnerable, the girl he used to surf with, kick Hacky Sack with, toss a Frisbee with. One night she’d been in his bed, full-breasted, so sexual, so different. Now, suddenly, she was both those things. And he felt protective toward her.

He tried to answer and couldn’t. Sleeping with Cameron… He liked the idea and also thought it was a mistake, not part of his plans. But he felt a curiosity, curiosity about who she was now, what they might be together. And his mouth said, “It’s an idea.”

Cameron almost gasped with the shock of it.

It was unthinkable.

She and Paul were friends, just friends. In any case, she liked sex, but she wasn’t much into the sport of it, and what he was suggesting sounded like sport. Suppose she did it, would this Chinese cure work? She wasn’t in any danger of falling in love with Paul.

A shudder swept over her with her next thought, a thought she tried to suppress.

Cameron was terrified of pregnancy. There were good reasons for this, several. And she knew her fear was irrational. But it was a fear that had many times made her decide not to go home with someone she might otherwise have accepted. Which was crazy. Birth control did work. And she and Paul would use condoms. It would be fine.

That’s always what you think, Cameron, and then the next day you freak out.

But it was nonsense. She’d talked about it in therapy. She could handle that fear. Because it wasn’t rational, and she was a very rational woman. Which left only the question of sex as sport. “I’m not the kind of woman who does things like that,” she said emphatically. She took honey from the cupboard, leaving the door open.

Paul noticed that she had considered.

She said, “Want some toast?”

“Sure. Things like what?”

“Casual sex.” She popped two slices of rye bread into the toaster.

“I wasn’t thinking casual,” Paul said. Though he’d accepted his share of invitations from eager women, the idea of “friends with benefits” slightly offended him. Sex was sex, friends were friends, lovers were rare. “More of a—” he sought for the right words, and found some he thought would appeal to her pro-therapy, talk-everything-through outlook “—healing experience.”

“Like last time,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “when you rejected me in the morning? I haven’t forgotten, you know.”

“Rejected you?” He frowned, eyebrows drawing together.

“You said it would ruin our friendship or something like that.”

Paul considered. “I do kind of remember that.” What had been in his head? he wondered now. Probably his inherent dislike of denigrating friends to “friends with benefits.” But why hadn’t he wanted more with Cameron, a real relationship? At the time, she would have made an excellent girlfriend.

Now, since the subject had come up, it was beginning to occur to him that he wanted to know Cameron as a lover. Again. He had some memories of the night they’d spent together, but they were mostly visual. “I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again. We’ll do it until we cure—” he found he couldn’t utter Graham Corbett’s name “—your affliction.”

“I’m not afflicted.” Spinning back toward the toaster, she banged into the open cabinet door and cried out. She swore, it hurt so much.

She heard Paul get up from the table and bit down tears.

He turned her around and said, “Let’s get you some ice. Looks like you’re going to have a shiner.”

“Great,” she gasped through the pain.

Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. But then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.

At first, she did not respond, and he was about to move away when she began kissing him back.

He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.

She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”

Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him because of her. His mind spun, seeing the teenage tomboy she’d been, the vulnerable person she still was inside, the lover he didn’t really know.

I SHOULDN’T BE doing this, she thought minutes later in the bedroom. Abandoning the toast which had popped up, they had gone straight to her bed.

What if this wrecked her relationship with Paul?

Well, maybe that would be for the best. It would be better if Cameron had nothing more to do with any member of the Cureux family—not midwife and love-potion brewer Clare, not her antiseptically skeptical obstetrician ex-husband David, not witch-in-waiting Bridget and not Paul.

But Cameron liked Paul. And he was a friend, a friend who didn’t mind if she woke him in the middle of night to drive Mariah to the vet because she’d eaten a tampon. She sometimes thought Paul would do anything for her. When she someday had a relationship with a man, she wanted it to be someone who would open up to her, talk to her about everything. But that wasn’t Paul. Their friendship wasn’t the talking kind but the being-together kind.

And sometimes she really wished she knew what went on in his head, what he really felt, the unspoken things.

And he wasn’t talking now.

He took off her clothes, and she liked this. It felt strangely…forbidden. Tossing his own T-shirt to the floor beside Mariah, he gazed down at Cameron. “You are fantastically beautiful.”

“What?” Her jaw actually dropped, and she found herself trying to assume a persona, trying not to be aware that she was naked and he was looking at her, clearly intent on only one thing. Having her.

She quavered. The air felt so revealing. It swam between them. She reached up to his jeans, and he gently caught her wrists, placing them back against the sheets. “Slower,” he said, and she felt the power of his intense maleness, his oppositeness from her.

He came down to her, to kiss her lips, to touch her face and her jaw.

Cameron believed herself to be jaded. During the years before Beatrice’s pregnancy and birth, before she’d acquired her own terror of pregnancy and birth, she’d had some wildness. Encounters on the spur of the moment, a live-in boyfriend who’d been not very nice in the long run. Certain words from the mouths of men made her laugh, generally promises that they were going to send her to a yet unknown Eden of ecstasy. They had often made themselves ridiculous to her, and through her work she often found them unworthy of respect, earning only her contempt.

But Paul, in this minute, seemed a fairy-man, a god-man, a pagan creature who was pure desire and impervious to ridicule or derision. She realized, acutely, why they had never done this again. It was too much, too perfect, too close to what-should-be. Too utterly terrifyingly near her ultimate desire in a lover.

His body was beautiful, and she tried again to touch, this time, his shoulders.

He let her, briefly, then removed her hands from him again as he kissed her throat, her heart, her breasts…

Myrtle Hollow

CLARE CUREUX sat in her cabin, drinking the herbal infusion that would relax her, allowing her to sleep after the birth she’d just attended. Few people in Logan County chose homebirths these days. It used to be a choice of poverty, but now the indigent had help from the government to go to the hospital.

Ladonna Naggy’s homebirth had been an educated choice. Ladonna had attended Yale, studied biology and was thinking of becoming a midwife herself. Bridget had come along to this birth as Clare’s assistant, and Ladonna and her partner, Michel, had given birth to a beautiful son. Everything had gone right. Bridget had talked less than usual—this was something Clare had counseled her daughter about, because chatter could distract and irritate a woman in labor. Yes, Bridget was learning; after all, she had two children of her own.

Clare knew she herself was unlike other women, though she shared many of their experiences. Sixty-seven years old, divorced, mother of two, grandmother of two. She was a midwife and an herbalist, and some people called her a witch.

Clare was Irish on her mother’s side, of Caribbean descent on her father’s, her paternal grandmother having been white enough to “pass.” Clare was not sure where “the Sight” came from, whether from Ireland or the Caribbean, but she had it, as did her daughter Bridget, her youngest. Clare had received the love potion recipe from her father’s mother but brewed the recipe without the elaborate rituals her grandmother thought vital.

Grand-mère’s view had been that if one did not make a sacrifice willingly, a sacrifice would be taken.

Clare refused to see that anything had been sacrificed in her life. Divorce from David? What had happened before the divorce? Just the price of her vocation—or so it had all seemed at the time.

The children believed that she and David had simply ceased getting along. Clare was content with this interpretation of the story, which had the advantage of being true, as far as it went.

But Paul, she knew, considered the explanation inadequate. And he used its so-called inadequacy to justify his own absurd belief that it was impossible for two people to remain married. Well, he claimed that he could never have such a partnership.

She sometimes wondered if knowing the whole truth would change Paul’s mind. It was academic. He never would know, of course, because David would never tell him and neither would she. It hadn’t been her finest hour; and if her son ever learned the truth, Paul would see it just as David had.

When given the choice, she’d chosen her vocation over her marriage. It had been selfish. But as she shut off the light in the kitchen and made her way through the dark cabin, reflecting on the birth she’d just been honored to witness, she was content.

CHAPTER TWO

CAMERON SOMETIMES thought she was actually insane. She considered her insanity as she crawled beneath her bed to retrieve the third used condom.

Paul had left all three wrappers on her bedside table, from where Mariah had stolen them and taken them to her bed.

Glad that Paul had been forced to go to the zoo, glad that nothing on Earth would come between him and his job, Cameron took her find into the bathroom to join the other two, turned on the water and prepared to make sure that every condom had kept its integrity. It was the kind of fanatical thing that an insane person might do, and Cameron had been told by various people that her fear of pregnancy was insane.

She didn’t care. She had been in the middle of her monthly cycle last night—only peak fertility could have made her behave so stupidly—and she would be happier by day and night if she knew that not one of these three condoms had a hole in it.

Strange, she had not been terrified by pregnancy last night. And maybe she was distracting herself now from something a bit more frightening than bringing forth children in pain. Paul. She remembered every detail of the night before. She absolutely did not want to be cured from her infatuation with Graham Corbett by falling in love with someone so avowedly against commitment as Paul Cureux.

She was trying to talk herself out of actually making sure the condoms had no holes when she heard someone call her name. “Cameron! Cameron!”

Not Mary Anne. Cameron was glad of that. If her cousin had slept with Graham Corbett—and why wouldn’t she have done so—she wouldn’t come around and tell Cameron about it. No, this was the voice of Cameron’s younger sister, Denise. Denise, unlike Beatrice and Cameron, had inherited a normal physiognomy that would allow normal childbearing. She was a student at West Virginia University but home for the weekend.

Her little sister, with no respect for privacy, appeared in the bathroom door. “What are you doing?” said Denise. “My God, who hit you?”

“I walked into a cabinet door.” Cameron tossed the condoms in the trash.

Denise’s face filled with alarm. “No, you didn’t. You tell me people always say that when someone hit them.”

Cameron had told her that, basing the statement on her experience working with battered women. “I turned around in the kitchen and whacked the cabinet door. I’d never let anyone hit me.”

Unfortunately, Denise’s acceptance of the truth allowed her to return to her original question. “Were you washing out condoms?”

“Of course not. What do you want?”

“You asked me to join you for your Women of Strength herb walk, if you remember.”

Every weekend, Cameron planned something for Women of Strength, a program she’d instituted at the Women’s Resource Center to help battered women regain their self-confidence through physical activity. Sometimes it was a caving expedition, sometimes a self-defense class, sometimes a bicycle ride or hike.

“I’m sick. I might have to beg off,” Cameron said. She was sick because it was absurd to think she might have become pregnant despite birth control, but it was far from absurd that after such a very interesting—such a truly great night—with Paul, she could hardly think of anything but him. Never, never, had she experienced anything like it.

“You’re never sick,” said Denise.

The herb walk might distract her from Paul—if only any woman but his mother were leading it. Well, there was no begging off. She murmured, “True,” with distraction and hoped fervently that Clare could not or at least would not read her mind.

“IF A PERSON has already drunk a love potion, what happens if someone gives them a different one?” Cameron asked Clare Cureux. Because Graham Corbett had drunk a love potion, and he was now in love with Mary Anne. That he’d never been the intended recipient of the potion was moot. And Graham Corbett would still be a much better choice for Cameron than…

Don’t think about him.

Paul’s mother, her gray-threaded hair in one long braid, glared at Cameron. “Who are you talking about? Not that radio—”

“No one,” Cameron insisted. “It’s just theoretical.” In fact, she still couldn’t help fearing that Clare, who had “the Sight,” might somehow know what had transpired the night before with her only son. These questions were Cameron’s way of trying to distract Clare, to make Clare think that Cameron was focused on Graham.

Which she wasn’t at the moment. She did feel differently about Graham after sleeping with Paul.

“The answer is that nothing would happen. Nothing.” Clare gave her another irritated look. Though Clare sold love potions, she did so reluctantly, always trying to talk the buyer out of it first. Let nature take its course, was her unchanging advice.

Bridget said, “How is it going, by the way, Cameron?”

No doubt she thought her question suitably vague. Cameron made a noncommittal gesture with her hand. So-so.

Now, mother cast an appalled look at daughter, then coldly turned away.

“It wasn’t a love potion,” Cameron interjected.

She hadn’t been thrilled to find that Paul’s sister was along on this walk. Cameron felt edgy enough in Clare’s presence without the danger of Bridget’s sometimes greater perceptiveness.

Cameron was surprised so many women were interested in herbs. Four had turned out for the first herb walk and eight for this one, not including Cameron, Denise, Clare or Bridget.

Bridget tossed her long dreadlocks and said, almost reverently, “Coltsfoot. Look, Mom.”

Cameron stepped back to let the other women, three of whom had left abusive spouses and taken refuge at the Women’s Resource Center’s “safe house,” come in closer to see the plant and hear Clare describe its medicinal properties. Like nearly everyone else on the walk, these women had wanted to know who hit Cameron, if she was in trouble, what they could do, how she could let this happen to her. They seemed skeptical that she’d actually walked into a cabinet door.

Cameron thought she might lose her job over this black eye. She was supposed to be helping women to escape from abusive situations, and now her clients thought she was lying about how she’d gotten hurt.

Clare didn’t suspect her of lying. When Cameron had explained, she’d simply sniffed and told her the sort of poultice she should have applied at once.

Another memory of the night before—more a question—What had Paul really felt?—needled her. She had to stop thinking about the night before. It was nothing to get romantic about. She tried to distract herself with the fear of pregnancy, the illusion of a tiny hole. Surely a meaningful amount of sperm couldn’t get through. There was no way.

Of course, it was Paul’s father, David, a former obstetrician, who had once redefined competition to Cameron, when she was stressing over her chances before a 10K. “My dear, as I am constantly reminding my children, you are the sperm that made it. You’ll never face competition like that again.”

She didn’t care. It was a silly fear. And if she got pregnant, it was only what women had been doing forever, what women’s bodies were made for.

Had she been crazy to sleep with Paul? She could not afford to feel this way about him. She needed to be normal with him. If he thought she felt romantically toward him— She almost winced at the thought of it. Being in love with Paul would be a hundred times worse than being in love with Graham.

Chief Logan State Park Zoo

PAUL HAD FOUGHT as hard as anyone to get the pair of pale-faced saki monkeys to the zoo. What was more, he’d managed his fight the old-fashioned way, schmoozing with wealthy individuals who might become zoo benefactors. He’d wanted no part of his boss’s “Hold A Baby Snow Leopard” money-making scheme.

He was, at this time, head keeper of primates. In the past, Paul had worked in reptiles and with the felids, but for the past four years he’d worked with the zoo’s ring-tailed lemurs, black howler monkeys and chimpanzees. He found it difficult to go home at night sometimes because he was attached to these animals.

A grad student named Helena Ruffles was doing research with one of their chimps, a three-year-old female named Portia. Paul loved to watch Portia learn words. Portia loved Paul, who had known her since she was a baby. In fact, he often said that Portia was his favorite female.

But not at the moment.

What he wanted most of all was to make love with Cameron again. She was an astoundingly good-looking woman. He’d always thought so. Her face didn’t have Mary Anne’s model’s bones, but her smile melted his heart. Seeing her gave him the same feeling as diving into the river in the summer, going barefoot in damp grass, picking up his custom guitar…. However, what he’d always felt for her was friendship, and now he wondered why. It bothered him that Cameron had drunk something Bridget had given her, but he hadn’t accepted a drink from Bridget lately, not even a glass of water.

His father, long divorced from Paul’s mother, was an utter skeptic when it came to the love potions. Paul wished he could be a skeptic.

Paul did not want to be married. Women were treacherous and powerful, and he preferred a bachelor’s existence. So he wasn’t sure he should make love with Cameron again. Cameron was…sensitive. The local perception of her was of a man-hating champion of women’s rights, directing the Women’s Resource Center. Paul himself sometimes accused her of being that way. But on some subjects, she had the heart of a marshmallow. And her favorite reading material was pre-1960 romance fiction.

Paul found saki hair below the trees. Was the male still pulling hairs out of his tail? He glanced up, hunting for the primates, and found the male doing just that. Paul slipped back into the keeper area and returned with several dog toys. He particularly liked the flying monkey toy that screamed when you shot it up into the trees. He sent it flying upward so that the male could go retrieve it.

The female got it instead.

The male pulled more hairs out of his tail. Paul threw a dog’s Kong toy on the ground and also tossed out a plush gingerbread man, who promptly began singing, “Run, run, as fast as you can…”

He should at least go by Cameron’s after work. Just to…reestablish normality.

CAMERON HAD RIDDEN her bike to the trailhead for the herb walk, and she rode her bike home afterward. During a brief stop at the grocery store, a patron of the Women’s Resource Center asked, suspiciously, what had happened to her face.

She went home and found Paul’s quarter-ton pickup truck in front of her house beside her own ancient Datsun. As she began adjusting to the fact that Paul was inside, Wolfie and Mariah met her on the porch. Cameron petted Mariah, and Wolfie and Cameron looked at each other, the dog as wary as always.

She went inside, and Paul said from the kitchen, “I fed the dogs.”

He was at the kitchen table, reading her newspaper and eating pesto straight from the jar.

“Are you going to save me some of that?” she snapped.

“Your eye looks horrible.”

Cameron found she was shaking. She was shaking because she’d made love with Paul the night before and now he was in her house and she didn’t know how to behave around him. She found it terrifying that her most recurring thoughts of the day had been of him—nothing else. The minutiae of Paul and of the night before. Every single word and touch exchanged. It was absurd.

So now she didn’t say “What are you doing here?” because she was slightly glad that he was there, although she didn’t want to be glad. She’d barely thought of Graham all day. She’d thought of Paul.

“Thank you for feeding the dogs.” Wolfie ate outside and only when he thought no one was looking. Mariah had followed her into the house and sat politely beside Paul, looking hopeful. She had a beautiful black-and-brown face and fluffy black fur that had remained puppy-soft even as she matured.

Cameron managed to ask, “Why did you come over?”

He looked up, dark eyes wide, and it occurred to her that what other women—her cousin, Mary Anne, for instance—had been telling her for years was true. Paul was a hunk. He had one of those hard-jawed faces that you sometimes saw on guys who climbed Everest. The hint of five o’clock shadow, though undoubtedly uncomfortable for anyone who kissed him, increased the sexy mountain-man effect.

She wished she could stop trembling.

“To see how your day went,” he replied calmly.

“Everyone asked who hit me,” she informed him.

He winced slightly, almost as though he had hit her.

It was an unusually sympathetic response from Paul. Normally he would have said that it would help bond her with her clients, or something equally thoughtless. But he seemed to appreciate how bad it was for the director of the Women’s Resource Center to walk around with a black eye.

“Denise is coming over,” she said. “For dinner. You can stay.” She went out to her bicycle to collect the groceries she’d bought and bring them inside.

As Cameron began slicing vegetables, she noticed that Paul had made no attempt to touch or kiss her. She kept thinking of the way he’d kissed her the night before, not opening his mouth at first, just gradually doing so, just tasting her lips with his tongue, as though it was something he’d never done before.

So, we’re going back to being just friends, she thought. Maybe he thought they’d be “friends with privileges” or bonking buddies. Not a chance.

From the table, Paul watched her back, the two light brown braids swinging over the shoulders of her thrift-shop Fair Isle sweater. He could say something about last night. But what was there to say?

He wanted to do it again.

What he said was, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

At the counter, Cameron froze. Of all the things a man could say after a sexual encounter, this was one of the worst. Implicit was the fact that his hurting her was quite possible. In fact, it implied a certain likelihood. Attempting objectivity, she compared “I don’t want to hurt you” to “Sex will ruin our friendship.” Hard to judge which was worse, actually. What was she supposed to say?

She wheeled around. “You can’t hurt me, because I’m not sleeping with you again. For one thing, I don’t want to get pregnant.” She wished she hadn’t said that, for many reasons, from hating to discuss a terrifying subject to hating to tell lies. “But even if being pregnant wouldn’t kill me, you and I are just friends. What happened happened, but now my biggest concern is learning how to conceal a black eye before I lose my job.” Since I’ve already lost my mind and slept with you.

Paul thought she was acting strangely, but she’d been clear. He told himself it was a relief. And though the thought of her becoming pregnant alarmed him almost as much as it could alarm her, he knew that any fear of that outcome was neurotic. He said, “This is the twenty-first century. It’s totally irrational to believe you will die in childbirth.”

Her face flushed in a way he associated with her being particularly—well, hysterical. Oh, God, here we go.

“Easy for you to say! Didn’t one of your own mother’s clients almost die in childbirth?”

“No. It was a stillbirth, what you’re talking about, and it happened at the hospital.” Actually, Paul wasn’t sure of this. It had happened when he was six years old, and his father had moved out soon afterward. Sometimes the story of the stillbirth came up when people argued that homebirths were unsafe. He thought he could remember his mother saying, “If she’d been my client, I would have sent her to a physician.” But Paul didn’t know why this was, knew none of the details, though he was sure either of his parents could provide them.

Cameron was still talking. “Anyhow, you think dying in childbirth is the only unpleasant possibility. You think, ‘Oh, they’ll just give her an epidural. She’ll be fine.’ Roxanne Jacobs had an epidural, and she’s had crippling back pain ever since. You think, ‘Oh, Cameron will just have a cesarean section.’ My sister miscarried in the fifth month four times. You think a little miscarriage is nothing, but that’s like a stillbirth every time.”

Paul considered interrupting, but it was hard to find a place.

“And each time was physically excruciating. She thought she was going to die, not to mention being heart-broken because she’d lost the baby. And they are babies, premature but completely babies. Beatrice named every one.” Tears welled in Cameron’s eyes.

Horrified, Paul said, “Baby—” He almost put his hand over his mouth. He’d called her “baby.” That could lead to lack of clarity. About their relationship. But he forced himself to finish saying what he’d begun to say. “You know how you get before your period. You’re just freak—”

“I AM NOT EXPECTING MY PERIOD!” she shrieked. “Would I be worried if I was? Do you know nothing about women?”

He considered asking her to please put down the knife but decided to remain silent.

He heard the front door open. Denise called, “Cameron?”

Thank God, he thought.

Cameron grabbed a dishcloth to wipe her eyes.

Two days later

CAMERON PEERED around the Charleston Walmart as she waited in line, clutching a magazine on top of her two-in-one, double-check home pregnancy kit. Paul was not with her, having dropped her at Walmart and gone alone to prowl the endless aisles at Home Depot. That night, he was going to be the soundman for an English band called Crawl at a Charleston concert, and he’d asked her to go with him, and she’d agreed. So, though this was the Charleston Walmart, it was not out of the realm of possibility that she would see someone from Logan here.

With the coast clear, she went through the checkout, smiling tensely at the clerk. She paid for her purchases, then hurried into the ladies’ restroom, where she closed herself in a cubicle to find out the worst.

Alone, she watched the test strip, prepared to wait the three minutes, waiting to exhale in relief.

One line appeared, confirming that the test was working.

Nothing else.

She waited.

She looked at her watch.

She tried to breathe. It’s okay. It’s okay.

She wasn’t pregnant.

She waited for relief to wash over her, but relief wasn’t precisely what she felt. She was relieved, of course she was. But—well, it must be the biological clock thing. She’d been terrified by the possibility that she was pregnant, or she’d never have bought a test. But she’d had a sort of excitement, a sort of pleasure, in thinking she and Paul might have conceived a child.

Which was silly. She threw away the first test, stuck the second in her purse to take home, and washed her hands. There was really no way that pregnancy could have been good news. Even if she’d been pregnant, she’d have been likely to miscarry. This would save her so much heartache.

There was no reason for her to be depressed.

But she considered telling Paul she wasn’t feeling well, that she had run into friends and would make her own way home from Charleston. He could go to this gig on his own, a gig that epitomized everything about him that refused to grow up. He worked in the zoo to support his career as a musician and worked as a soundman to help pay for his equipment. Of course, he should be a musician. And he did love his job at the zoo. Okay, she was being hard on him, but she needed to keep her distance from Paul for the time being.

The thing is that she’d sort of, almost kind of, wished she was pregnant. It would have been a catastrophe. There was no way it could have turned out well. Paul would never have married her, and she didn’t think she would have wanted him to. Permanent children did not marry, and the thought of Peter Pan being a father to anyone but the Lost Boys was both ludicrous and scary.

No, she’d go to the Crawl show and be friendly. Paul was no threat to the peace of her heart.

But as she emerged from the ladies’ room, she collided with someone entering the men’s. She looked up into the handsome and obviously delighted face of Sean Devlin.

“HOW DID YOU MEET these guys anyway?” Sean asked Paul, looking around the nearly empty club where roadies and members of Crawl were setting up. Sean had paid the cover charge, telling Cameron he was interested in young bands.

Paul pretended he hadn’t heard. He was angry at Cameron, who had explained Sean’s following them to the club with, It’s okay. I told him you and I aren’t really together.

He’d told her it was not okay to tell random people from Logan that they weren’t really together.

She wore jeans and a brown long-sleeved T-shirt, with her hair in braids. Paul didn’t know that she’d deliberately dressed down to emphasize to herself that she and Paul weren’t really dating, that they were friends and her presence here tonight was all part of the sham they’d developed.

A roadie walked past in a T-shirt showing their first CD, In the Name of Fear.

“Facebook,” Paul finally answered Sean. “I met Angus.” The bass player. “He sent me a CD, and now I’m a fan. Also, he came to see me play in Logan at the campaign party, before the election. We talked then, and I said I’d do sound for them at this gig and the one in Morgantown Wednesday.”

Cameron, aware that Paul wasn’t keen on Sean’s presence, asked him, “Want anything to drink?”

“Some orange juice. Something nonalcoholic. It should be on the house.”

“I’ll get it,” Sean offered. He looked down at Cameron from his towering six foot three. “And what can I get you?”

“The same, please.”

When Sean had gone, Paul said, “Why did you ask him?”

“I thought the band would appreciate more people coming.”

“Plenty of people are coming.” Sean had been allowed in early only because he was with Paul and Cameron.

“Well, you won’t be able to talk to me or dance with me,” Cameron pointed out. “Sean can.”

“No doubt.” He managed to mutter, “Thanks,” as Sean handed him a glass of orange juice, after giving Cameron’s to her.

The club began to fill, and when Crawl finally came on, Cameron was pleasantly surprised by the music, which showed both originality and the influence of many other groups she liked. She danced with Sean, not far from where Paul worked the soundboard, because it was farther from the speakers in front. Sean seemed to share her opinion on avoiding the speakers, and he also seemed disinterested in dancing with anyone else.

At the break, he escorted her outside, where they watched other people smoke. “I used to,” Sean admitted, watching the smokers enviously. He shook his head.

“It’s hard to quit, isn’t it?” Cameron asked.

“Miserable. But I was going through counseling, and that helped—a bit. Some of the things that come up just make you want to smoke more.”

Therapy! Cameron wanted to shout. This man had had therapy! No wonder she could talk so easily to Sean. He wasn’t all masculine barriers, all inaccessible emotions, all defensive silence.

He asked her about her job, and he told her about his and about his avocations, writing plays and poetry.

Cameron said she’d like to read some of his poetry sometime.

He said he’d like that. “I was reluctant to—you know—pursue it,” he said. “I thought you were in a relationship.”

Cameron thrust away the memory of sleeping with Paul that one night. “Well, I’m not. And you?”

He shook his head. “Divorced. After that was when I decided on some counseling.”

“That’s a very mature choice,” she told him and confessed that she’d gone the same road after a tough experience with a man with whom she’d lived.

Sean said, “So—is Paul going to drive you home?”

Cameron thought guiltily that it was because of Paul that she’d gotten into the gig free. “Yes,” she said definitely. “I actually am his date.”

He nodded. “I’ll be gone this week on some teacher training, but I’ll call you as soon as I’m back.”

PAUL FOUND her presence distracting. He had always liked the way Cameron danced, but it had never affected him so strongly, and he didn’t care to see how strongly Sean Devlin was affected, too. Paul remembered making love with her. What bothered him in retrospect, as—he admitted now—it had bothered him then, was that she preferred Graham Corbett.

Never doing that again, he thought. She was preoccupied still, probably still mooning over the radio personality. Yet as he watched her dancing to the music of Crawl, her expression distant but also, to him, vulnerable, his heart tore in all directions. How did he feel about her, say, hooking up with Sean Devlin? Becoming Sean’s girlfriend?

Frankly, Paul hated the idea. Sean was an all right guy and good-looking, anyone would admit that. But Cameron was his, Paul’s, best friend. Her falling in love and marrying someone like Sean—not a good idea at all.

He shouldn’t have invited her along. There was no reason. He’d just wanted to show her that no matter what, he still cared for her, still wanted to be around her. He’d wanted to prove that they remained friends.

Or something like that.

Did he want Cameron for his own girlfriend?

No. Of course not. Definitely not. He didn’t want a girlfriend. First you had a girlfriend, then you had someone who wanted to marry you. Perhaps someone who would want you to find a different job, a job that paid more. And someone who would insist on a certain way of being that would ultimately destroy the magic of life.

At least Cameron wasn’t in love with him.

That was good, he told himself. Best for her, best for him. Best all around.

After the final set, after the fans had screamed and stomped the floor and begged the band for one more, Cameron chatted with them while they moved equipment and Sean dogged her like a shadow. Paul saw the band liked her, even seemed to like Sean, and he felt left out, forgotten by Cameron. Later, he found her waiting in his car, reading a novel with his headlamp, which she had borrowed.

“Where did Sean go?”

“Home.” She didn’t look up.

“And how is Jane Eyre on the two thousandth reading?” he asked.

Her eyes remained fixed on the page. “If you had a modicum of education, you would know that Jane Eyre is the story of a self-centered older man, who dislikes children, deceiving a vulnerable woman twenty years his junior. After she learns that he is actually married and keeps his first wife, whom he claims is insane, locked in an attic, he continues to attempt seducing her and she continues to love him, and after he is blind and crippled and his wife dead under mysterious circumstances, the female protagonist returns to him. It’s a creepy story, and one reading, in school, was enough for me.”

Paul reached across the front seat, lifted the cover of her book slightly. A novel by someone named Emilie Loring. It was entitled My Dearest Love, and the woman on the front looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Familiar with Cameron’s reading material, he suspected it had been published sometime between 1920 and 1960.

Cameron ignored him.

He started the car, plugged his iPod into the dash, and put on some music. Cameron recognized the start of “So Alone,” by Rhesus. Paul had given her the English band’s CD Narcolepsy Baby two months earlier.

She told Paul, “Those guys—and girl—were sweet. The band members. I think there’s another band with the same name.”

Paul nodded absently. “I think there may be.”

More than an hour later, when he reached her house, she thanked him, and just for a second she glanced at him, and Paul wondered if she wanted him to kiss her. He did want to but knew better. If he did, she would become his girlfriend, and that would herald a world of things he did not want.

But then he thought he’d imagined the look. She got out, and he let her. Made himself let her go.

Myrtle Hollow

CLARE CUREUX woke with a start.

The dream had been horrible. It was Flower Patten all over again, but this time, that case of true cephalopelvic disproportion, CPD, had been Cameron McAllister’s, and it was Cameron DOA at the hospital.

What a nightmare. Clare closed her eyes again, then reopened them.

Silly Cameron thought she was in love with Graham. Clare knew her dream had been no vision. She knew when something was an omen of the future, and this had been a nightmare, nothing more ominous.

The question was, why had she dreamed about Cameron and dreamed that Cameron was pregnant?

Thinking of Cameron made Clare think of Paul, and she frowned at the thought. Paul’s life was his own, but he certainly lived for himself to a greater degree than she’d have liked.

Which had to be something she’d caused, that selfishness, that fierce…well…childishness.

She breathed relief. Just a nightmare. Cameron was not pregnant.

CHAPTER THREE

FIVE DAYS LATER, Cameron, glancing in the mirror as she dressed for work, thought her nipples looked larger than usual. There could be no reason for this. Theoretically, it could occur because of pregnancy. But pregnancy didn’t show signs this early, and she wasn’t pregnant.

Still, she decided to use the second pregnancy test.

She knew it would say that she wasn’t pregnant, and then she could forget about the optical illusion she’d just had and also completely forget about making love with Paul, which she was having trouble forgetting.

She wished Paul was the kind of man she could be in a relationship with.

She thought of Mary Anne, in love now with Graham Corbett. Cameron knew Mary Anne was in love, and in their case the attraction had begun on Graham’s side. A fairy-tale romance. Why can’t it happen to me?

Briefly, Cameron considered Sean Devlin. How bizarre that she felt so little attraction to him. And he was just what she should want. They had talked so easily at the Crawl gig. He’d been willing to tell her of his vulnerability following his divorce, even tendencies he might have picked up from the kind of childhood he’d had. But there seemed, to her, no spark between them—not on her side, anyway. Maybe she wasn’t ready to have a lasting relationship. Her job had made her appreciate the freedom of not having to adapt to another person’s wants, schedule, whims. But selfishness wasn’t the reason she felt no attraction to Sean. And they’d been great friends in college, too.

Paul, however…

Sometimes, sometimes when she saw Paul’s name and number come up on her cell phone, she felt an overwhelming comfort that she thought must be what people felt in good marriages. No—more than comfort. Different than comfort. Attraction. Attraction to Paul—that frightened her. Paul, like Rhett Butler, was “not a marrying man.”

In the bathroom, she used the pregnancy kit and set it on the sink ledge, went into the kitchen and found a banana for breakfast and returned to the bathroom and the sight of two thin lines.

She remembered, in panic, the mild disappointment she’d felt in the restroom at the Charleston Walmart. What had prompted such insanity?

But despite her fears—of being pregnant, of losing the pregnancy because of an inability to carry a child, of loving the child and perhaps losing it—she couldn’t deny some private pleasure. She was, at this moment, a mother. She didn’t understand her own feelings but she well guessed the reason for them.

It was because this child was also Paul Cureux’s.

SEAN CALLED later that day and asked if she wanted to meet for coffee.

Cameron was abruptly off coffee but promised to meet him at the coffeehouse anyhow. She would order herbal tea.

When she entered the Chief Logan Coffeehouse and saw Sean stand up, she almost gasped at how absolutely handsome he was. Breathtaking. Truly one of the best-looking men she’d ever seen.

Maybe she was attracted.

He got their drinks—double cappuccino for himself, raspberry leaf tea for her—and joined her at a table by the window, out of hearing range of the other patrons.

He was easy to talk to, told her about his marriage and the ex-wife who was a model. He’d brought her a chapbook of his poems, for which she thanked him.

Watching her with great penetration, he said at last, “I think there’s something on your mind.”

Cameron knew that he was someone who could keep a secret, knew because he had been that way in the past. So she said the requisite words. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t say anything to anyone.”

“Of course.”

And she told him. His mouth fell open slightly, and he gazed at her with an expression of wonder. His dark brown hair was going prematurely gray, but his eyebrows remained extremely dark and bushy. “When are you going to tell him?”

Cameron shook her head. “Not yet.” She wouldn’t mention the possibility of miscarriage because she could no longer acknowledge that possibility, even to herself. It was unthinkable. And if she didn’t think of it, it could not happen.

Sean gave her a very serious look. “You should tell him, Cam.”

“I will. Just…not yet.”

SEAN CALLED every day and became Cameron’s confidant. Cameron really wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t been put off by the reality of her carrying another man’s child. She’d seen men who were just terribly attracted to mothers, and maybe Sean was one of these. Some of these, Cameron felt, were looking for a second mother for themselves, but she couldn’t believe Sean fit into this category. In any case, Sean was not an object. Paul was the man who interested her—and she didn’t want him to interest her.

Paul and she always talked daily, but now Cameron found herself avoiding him. Besides, whenever he brought up Sean—which he always did—they ended up sniping at each other. But it was nearly Thanksgiving before she had a heart-to-heart with her cousin, on the telephone, and felt no jealousy when she learned that Mary Anne had indeed slept with Graham Corbett—only relief at finally speaking with her best friend. Cameron was again astonished by her own reaction. She no longer cared. Not remotely. Cameron could picture Graham in her mind’s eye—the tall body, the curly dark hair—she could imagine his voice, that radio voice—she could imagine all these things beside her tall, model-beautiful cousin with no discernible feeling. Was she actually over him? She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until Mary Anne replied.

“You mean, Bridget’s potion worked?”

Cameron now wondered if the draught Bridget had given her had been a love potion, so she wasn’t impressed with Paul’s sister at the moment. After briefly excoriating Bridget, she invited Mary Anne to go caving with her Thanksgiving weekend—a Women of Strength outing. Big Jim Cave was at the state park. Maybe Cameron would go by the zoo afterward. Maybe she’d do what Sean kept urging her to do and tell Paul…. It took Mary Anne’s mentioning her own “suffering” because days had passed without Graham calling to bring Cameron out of her reverie.

Suffering made Cameron think of her sister Beatrice giving birth and of her own pregnancy. It all came out then. Cameron admitted that she was pregnant, avoided mentioning the father and used Mary Anne’s sudden burst of compassion—for Mary Anne knew how terrified Cameron was of pregnancy and birth—to persuade Mary Anne to go caving.

Cameron, who had been talking on one of the lines at the Women’s Resource Center, abruptly feared that somebody might have overheard, that she shouldn’t have said out loud that she was pregnant. Because she had not yet told Paul. Wasn’t sure how—or even if—to tell him. What if he thought her silly for doing a pregnancy test, because it was so early? What if he believed she wanted to be pregnant with his child?

In any case, she was alone at the Women’s Resource Center, catching up on work—checking statistics for a grant writer who was trying to get more funding for the center—and holding down the hotline until the scheduled volunteer showed up later that afternoon.

The hotline rang, and Cameron picked it up from her desk. “Women’s Resource Center Helpline.”

“Hi. Mm. I’m upset by something. Something my husband did.”

“Yes?”

As she listened to the horror story that slowly unfolded, Cameron’s skin began crawling. She felt a terrible anger toward the man who had treated his wife so shamefully.

“He says it’s his right because he’s my husband.”

“He’s wrong.” Cameron questioned the woman about what she planned to do. Nothing. I can’t leave him, can I?

Fifteen minutes later, when she was off the phone, Cameron wondered if her answering the helpline might be bad for her baby. Weren’t you supposed to avoid negative emotions? And on the helpline, she listened to women in impossible situations, who truly believed there was no way out. The doubt and despair of rape, of violence, the constant echoing of Was it my fault?

She liked helping people, liked helping other women, and she knew she was good at it. She’d experienced enough unpleasantness in her life, seen enough, that she had compassion, that she knew bad things, or at least sad things, happened—eventually, to everyone. She’d been in bad situations with men, and what had been ghastly at the time had ultimately made her stronger.

But she wanted to do everything right for this baby, and she was only going to think positively about out-comes. Not for a second would she allow a negative thought to enter her head.

She wondered if it was too early to see a physician. Or a midwife.

Cameron believed that most women in the United States in particular—and especially their babies—were better off when birth happened at home. Hospitals routinely did things that made it difficult for women to labor and that compromised the health of the baby. The perfect example was the electronic fetal monitor. Hospitals used these, which forced a laboring woman to be on her back; the only worse position for giving birth would be standing on one’s head. The weight of the baby then pressed down on the mother’s vena cava, robbing the baby of blood and oxygen. Then fetal distress occurred.

But Cameron didn’t have a normal pelvis. Well, she suspected she didn’t, though she couldn’t really judge for herself. She was built like Beatrice. After miscarriage number four, Beatrice had decided to have her baby at the hospital. The baby had been premature, so the best place was the hospital. Preemies should always be born in the hospital. They were so vulnerable with their organs not fully formed.

Cameron knew midwives, of course. Clare Cureux was a “lay” or direct-entry midwife, meaning she hadn’t been to school to become a midwife, though she certainly was well-educated, her office filled with medical texts. And she went to workshops and conferences—or had done, for years. Bridget was thinking of going to school to become a certified nurse-midwife.

But Cameron couldn’t go to the Cureux women because she hadn’t yet told Paul she was pregnant.

She reached for the phone book to see who else she could find.

Thanksgiving

Myrtle Hollow

DAVID CUREUX had carved the turkey and was filling plates for the assembled family. Though he had divorced Clare more than two decades earlier, this was still his family: his eldest, Paul; his daughter, Bridget; Bridget’s husband, Beau; their two children, Nick and Merrill; and Clare.

He and Paul had put the extra leaf in the table so that the entire family would fit.

Bridget said, “Couldn’t Cameron make it?”

“She’s with her family at her grandmother’s house,” Paul said, not liking something sly in Bridget’s tone. He refused to encourage Bridget by asking what kind of concoction she’d brewed for Cameron or if it really had been innocuous, just something to help Cameron get over Graham Corbett.

Bridget was annoyed with him anyhow; she said he’d been insensitive in how he’d told her that she needed to watch Nick at the zoo when Nick was near the pond. Basic child safety! He hadn’t thought tact was an issue. Bridget, your kid could drown, hello? Which wasn’t what he’d said, admittedly.

His sister could hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Clare said, “We’re supposed to get snow next week.”

She spoke matter-of-factly. She loved to listen to weather reports. Though Clare had “the Sight” and knew some things in advance, she never knew what the weather would do except by listening to forecasters.

Bridget said, “Is her black eye gone?”

“Yes,” Paul answered succinctly.

“How’d she get a black eye?” asked David.

“Walked into a cabinet door.” Paul had given this explanation so many times that he’d begun to feel as though it was a lie. He did not want to talk about Cameron. Cameron was acting very strangely. She’d been avoiding him for two weeks. It reinforced that their sleeping together had been a mistake.

Bridget said, “Who’s that hunk she’s been hanging around with?”

Paul deliberately kept his face expressionless. “Someone we knew at school. Sean Devlin. New drama teacher at the high school.”

He could feel his sister watching him as though expecting him to turn neon-green.

“Are they seeing each other?”

“How should I know?”

Bridget made a sound that could have expressed amusement or scorn or triumph. “Because you talk to her every day?”

“She doesn’t talk to me about him.”

Bridget seemed to have exhausted the topic, for she exclaimed suddenly to her mother, “Oh, did you hear about Lou Anne Shaw?”

“That was a travesty,” her mother replied tartly.

Paul listened as Bridget described everything that had been done wrong by the local hospital for Lou Anne Shaw and her baby.

Paul’s father remained uncharacteristically silent on the subject. He was not going to leap in and support the colleague in question, which meant, Paul decided, that he felt that the people at the hospital had made some mistakes.

“They should have sectioned her right away,” exclaimed Bridget, an unusual point of view from a woman who’d grown up in a home where homebirth was considered the best way to have babies.

“Is everyone all right?” Paul finally asked, unable to forget Cameron’s hysteria a couple of weeks earlier. Childbirth was normal. He knew that. And, of course, Cameron wasn’t pregnant, would probably never get pregnant. But it seemed to him that labor and birth could be a risky business.

“Yes, everyone’s fine,” said Bridget. “No thanks to that quack.”

Her father roused himself to make tut-tutting sounds.

As far as Paul could make out, the woman had been a true case of something called CPD, which seemed to be what Cameron thought she had. A pelvis too small for having babies. The woman, who’d grown up in Logan but had moved away and was receiving prenatal care elsewhere, came in with premature labor. The physician, rather than listening to anything she told him, said he’d have a nurse monitor her for a bit and see what happened. Or something of that nature.

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