A Very Daring Christmas (The Tavonesi Series Book 8) (33 page)

Dylan chattered all the way to the hospital. He wanted to know the name of every hill, every bird, every road that they traveled. Cameron was glad he’d come along, glad for his lively curiosity. And glad for the distraction that his questions, and her and Jake’s attempts to answer them, provided.

All morning she’d thought about the vow she’d made as she drifted into sleep the previous night. Not just any night. Christmas Eve. And not just any vow. But Jake’s coolness toward her that morning had her wondering if it was a vow she could keep.

As Cameron had suspected it would, word of her planned visit had gotten around. There were at least a dozen members of the press with cameras and tape recorders waiting behind the stanchions the hospital staff had set up outside the entrance.

Dylan scrambled out of the car and came round to Jake’s window. “I want to get the bag with the baseballs out of the trunk. Can I carry them in? Please?”

“You’re the perfect guy for the job,” Jake said as he popped the trunk.

Cameron gently squeezed his arm as he pulled the keys from the ignition.

“You sure you want to do this?”

Jake tossed the keys in the air and caught them without taking his eyes off Cameron’s. “It’s something I can do, Cameron. I want to. Besides, I have the Kevlar cape that Dylan made me in the trunk. I’ll be well defended.”

“It’s a trash bag.” She nodded to the reporters. “And they’re the Evil Empire, remember?”

He waggled his brows, but she was too nervous to laugh at his expression. “My cape is more than meets the eye. It has childhood magic. No one can scoff at that.”

“You sure Santa didn’t swap you out for a Christmas superhero?”

He put a fist to his heart. “You wound me. But I decided Coco is right. If I don’t use my—what did she call it?—
social capital
, someone else will.”

She had to ask. She’d seen the look he gave her when she’d walked into the Great Hall that morning with Dimitri.

“You’re not doing this because of Dimitri?”

“Truth or dare, Miss Kelley? You had better choose truth, or our crown prince might meet an early demise.”

Feeling vied over by two remarkable men should have made her feel fabulous.

But it didn’t.

She wanted real. More than she wanted to admit.

She didn’t want to be some prize won in a clash of egos and then cast aside when the next challenge, the next thrill, came along. She’d learned that lesson with Elliott. It occurred to her that maybe she should thank him for the lesson, painful as it was.

“For your information, Dimitri is helping me secure interim funding for the project in Dominia. Funding that might keep it going until the powers that be get off their asses and wake up to the need.”

“Then the prince and I are on the same page.”

What the heck did that mean? Before she could ask, Dylan, holding the bag of baseballs, opened the door on her side of the car.

“Let’s go, sport,” Jake said. He tapped Cameron’s sling. “You ready?”

She bit at her bottom lip and then nodded.

“Be careful,” he added. He stayed by her side as they approached the bank of aimed cameras and microphones.

Most of the waiting reporters were far more interested in a World Series hero than an actress, but the two tabloid reporters snapped shots of her, Jake and Dylan and asked personal questions. It was easy to dodge them—she didn’t know the answers.

One reporter asked for a signed baseball. Jake explained that the balls were for the kids on the children’s ward. A murmur of approval went up from the group.

Cameron wondered where the reporters’ families were celebrating the holidays without them. So many people had jobs that pulled them from loved ones at important or critical times. Jake’s did. Hers would without hesitation.

Dylan tucked his hand into hers, and they entered the hospital.

The hospital staff greeted them like royalty. The man who’d asked her to come turned out to be the surgeon on call over the holidays. He laughed when Dylan asked if he could watch a surgery.

“No surgeries today,” he said, crouching down to Dylan’s eye level. “At least I hope not. What’ve you got in the bag?”

Dylan opened the canvas bag. “Baseballs. Twenty-two. And a cape.”

“A cape?”

“It’s Jake’s. It’s magic.”

The surgeon smiled. “I could use one of those.”

“See?” Dylan said to Cameron. “I told you everybody would want one. Want to see it?”

Jake put a hand on Dylan’s shoulder. “Let’s wait on that, okay? We’ve got official business to do, you and me.”

“And Cameron.”

“Yes. And Cameron.”

Only two reporters from the local paper were allowed to accompany them into the ward.

Dylan pulled away from Jake and started asking the girl in the first bed questions.

Jake started after him, but the surgeon stopped him. “He’s okay. These kids need the distraction.”

Jake signed balls, and Cameron signed photos and did a few voice impressions from
Jungle Tales.
The kids who were allowed out of bed crowded around.

Dylan came running and grabbed her hand. “You have to come and talk to Victoria. She’s nine. She doesn’t have a mom either.” He tugged at her hand again. “She only has one leg, so you have to come down.”

Jake did a few magic tricks for the tiny Victoria. Cameron performed more from
Jungle Tales
and smiled as Victoria chimed in with some of the other voices. It warmed Cameron’s heart to know the animated film had brought such joy to children. Of all her projects, it was her favorite by a mile.

She glanced at Jake and Dylan on the far side of the bed. To the outside world, the three of them probably looked like a family, the family she wanted. And right then, it felt like they were a family. But Dylan wasn’t hers. And neither was Jake.

On the way out, Jake asked about Victoria.

“No need to worry about that one,” Dr. Feinman said. “She’s doing great. She has one more surgery to go. Her dad—a great guy—is on his way to take her home for a few weeks.”

“Can she come to the castle?” Dylan piped up.

“We’ll see,” Jake said.

Dylan fisted his hands around the bag he clutched. “That means no. It always means no.”

“It means maybe.” Jake raised his finger to his earlobe and tugged. “This means no. But it’s a secret baseball sign, so don’t give it away, okay?”

The parking area at Trovare was packed with cars by the time they returned. Jake wasn’t sure he was up for another party, even if it was Christmas dinner. Maybe the three of them should have stopped somewhere, taken a walk. He would’ve enjoyed that.

Yet he understood obligations.

He circled the car to help Cameron out. She took his hand.

“Always the Southern gentleman.”

Unable to resist, he put his hands to her waist and pulled her to him, taking her lips with his.

“Tyler told me you two were obsessed with kissing,” Dylan said in an irritated tone.

Jake broke off the kiss. Cameron giggled.

“Do you even know what the word
obsessed
means?” Jake asked.

“Yeah. It means you can’t stop and you don’t think of anything else. My mom said I was obsessed with panthers. But that was last year.”

“Touché,” Cameron said as she straightened the scarf covering her sling.

They were the last to arrive in the Great Hall. Dylan’s place was set next to Jake’s, and Cameron was on his other side. Alex’s Italian cousins Pippa and Amber had arrived and were seated across from him. If he were still a betting man, he’d have bet the looks exchanged between Jackie’s brother and the lovely Pippa were signs of a pretty juicy evening ahead.

The table glittered from the light of small candles in bowls and the towering candelabras that marched down the center. The bough he’d helped Cameron make marked that center line. He stared at it, remembering. In a few days he’d be leaving Trovare. Cameron too. They’d go back to their lives—her to her film work, him to gathering his parents at the airport and sorting out Dylan.

Cameron tapped his arm. “Very far away, are we?”

“Farther than I’d like to be.” He took her hand in his, lowered it to where their twined fingers were hidden below the festive woven cloth covering the table.

She smiled and didn’t pull her hand away. Sabrina had engaged Dylan in a game of twenty questions. Jake had a few of his own.

He cleared his throat. “I’d like a date, Cameron. When life returns to normal.”

“We’ve had three, Jake. And I doubt life is headed anywhere near normal.”

He stroked his thumb along the back of her hand. “I didn’t count the picnic.”

She squeezed his fingers. “I thought maybe you hadn’t. What did you have in mind for this ultimate date?”

“The coast. The mountains. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

“I have a better idea.” She leaned close and whispered in his ear, “The view from my balcony is stupendous. Especially in the moonlight.”

The message under her words had his heart racing. He turned and brushed his lips against her cheek. “I rather like moonlight.”

“What’s an ibex?” Dylan’s chirpy voice brought him back to the swirl of the festivities surrounding them.

“Sabrina wouldn’t tell me, and I already used up my twenty questions,” Dylan added.

“It’s a wild goat with big horns,” Jake said with a chuckle and a wink to Sabrina. But the steamy look Cameron slanted his way made it impossible to focus on the sumptuous food or the lively conversation or Dylan. She had hijacked his heart, and it wasn’t giving up any territory to festivities or obligations or common sense.

Dinner went on forever. As they rose from the table, Alex offered to look after Dylan for the evening and insisted that overseeing the kid’s sleepover that he’d set up in one of the larger guest rooms would be good practice for his own parenting road ahead. News of the sleepover spread, and Dylan was the first to whoop with unrestrained joy. Jake’s own joy at the plan was barely hid behind a knowing smile of thanks.

Cameron said her good nights and went upstairs first.

Jake had a whiskey with Matt and Ryan in the library, glad to be out of the chatter and bustle of the other guests. When he excused himself, no one said a word. But the looks exchanged between his teammates made him glad they kept their comments to themselves.

He paused in front of the door to his guest room. And then reconsidered. Why change out of the formal dinner clothes if his ultimate goal was to have no clothes on at all? He really hoped there was magic in Trovare. He could use some about now.

He knocked at Cameron’s door, feeling like he was applying for entrance to the rest of his life. He would be honest. And she could refuse him. He’d have to live with the outcome.

She opened the door. Candlelight danced on the walls, across her face and across the flowing, nearly transparent robe that she wore. God, if she’d worn that downstairs...

“I realized that perhaps you have the same view from your balcony,” she said. “Maybe the prospect of seeing it from mine isn’t so terribly enticing.”

Was she
trying
to kill him? His entire body and soul were on high alert.

“I’m afraid I’m not experienced in the fine art of flirtation. And I’m not here for the damn balcony.”

“I’m not flirting.” She lowered her eyes, and her lashes cast feathered shadows on her cheeks. “I think we both know what it means for you to walk into this room. But I’d rather have a broken heart than a yearning one.”

Like water roaring over a dam, all his good intentions to take it slow—to talk first and act later—flooded away from him. He snatched her close, his lips plundering. The passion of her kiss was the answer he craved. He shifted his hands to cradle her head between his palms and kissed her as if his life depended on the path their kiss blazed. Blood hammered in his veins, but it was the soft sound she made in her throat as he deepened the kiss that undid him. He stroked a hand down and took the weight of her breast in his palm through the filmy material of her robe. The warmth, the soft smoothness drew him close and satisfied him as he rolled her bud-hard nipple between his thumb and finger.

He parted her robe with his fingers.

“I have to feel you, skin to skin.”

She broke off the kiss and pushed him away.

She released the material from her shoulders, somehow loosed it from around her cast. The robe whispered to the floor. Jake’s heart thudded so loud that it drowned out the sound of his breathing.

“My God, you take my breath, Cameron.” He reached for her.

She fisted her hand in the lapel of his jacket. “I want this off you. All of these clothes. Off.”

His hands started moving. The bow tie of his tux wouldn’t budge. He’d known there was a reason he hated formal clothing.

She laughed. He was sure that her laugh was the most powerful aphrodisiac known to man. But when she undid his belt and slid her hand into his pants, he knew he was wrong. The feel of her hand against his erection, the scent of her skin as he kissed his way back to her lips—hell, everything about her—drove him mad with wanting her.

He groaned and wrapped his arms around her back, pulling her against him. Her cast bit into his belly, a tantalizing medley of pleasure and pain.