Читать книгу Her Baby and Her Beau - Victoria Pade - Страница 6

Prologue

Standing at the front door to his grandmother’s Denver home on that sizzling August afternoon, Beau Camden heard a car pull up the drive behind him.

He spun around so fast he might as well have still been in the caves of Afghanistan with a rifle in his hands.

Then he recognized his older brother Cade at the wheel of a blue sedan and relaxed.

Beau watched as Cade parked behind his own black SUV, thinking that maybe Cade would have better luck getting someone to answer the door.

“Beau! Hey!” Cade called as he got out of his car and headed for the landing. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“GiGi asked me to come over. But I rang the bell and knocked, and no one seems to be here.”

Cade raised his chin knowingly. “Oh, that’s right, GiGi said you’d been doing that—knocking and ringing the bell instead of just coming in. Acting like you don’t belong here—that’s what she calls it. She doesn’t like it. This is home, pal. Our home—we grew up here, remember? I know you’ve been gone a long time, but nothing’s changed. We don’t stand on ceremony.”

But standing on ceremony had been ingrained in him in the Marines.

And he had been gone a long time. Thirteen years. The first four of them in college at Annapolis with summers and holidays spent on the Camden ranch in Northbridge, Montana, to toughen up. The last nine years a marine.

Once a marine, always a marine...

“Hard to get back to things,” he muttered.

An understatement.

Beau was having a lot of trouble fitting in again. The few occasions over the years when he’d been home on leave had been vacations from reality. Every waking hour had been filled with activities and seeing family and friends who all wanted to spoil him and show him a good time before he left again.

Being back for good was something else.

When Cade joined him at the oversize front door with its arched top and the stained glass in the upper half he reached in front of Beau, punched in the code that unlocked the door and unceremoniously turned the handle.

“Finally! It’s about time, Beaumont Anthony Camden!” came a victorious call from inside before the door was open all the way. “I thought I was going to have to stand here till dark before you got the idea!”

Georgianna Camden, matriarch of the Camden family and the woman who had raised all ten of her grandchildren—the grandmother they called GiGi—stood several feet inside the entry, facing the door as if she’d been there all along.

Spotting Cade, she deflated slightly, her shoulders drooping into her dumpling-like shape, her head shaking enough for her salt-and-pepper curls to shimmy and her frustration showing on the lined face that still bore evidence of beauty.

“Oh, Cade...” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming—you opened the door, didn’t you?”

“Well, it’s open, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Cade asked.

Beau knew his older brother was covering for him.

So did GiGi, if her disapproving frown meant anything.

Cade ignored it and said, “I left my sunglasses when we were here Sunday. Just came to pick them up on my way home.”

“Ah. We wondered who those belonged to. They’re in the kitchen on the counter.”

“But you were waiting for Beau?” Cade asked with a glance from GiGi to Beau. “Standing here in the middle of the entry? With a bowl of marshmallows? What’s that, his reward if he came in without ringing the bell or knocking?”

“I was waiting for him to come in, yes,” GiGi confirmed. “I’m trying to get that stick out of his—”

“GiGi!” Cade teasingly cut her off.

“He keeps acting like a stranger around here. It has to stop!” To Beau she added forcefully, “It has to stop!”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Beau apologized automatically.

And for that, his grandmother threw a marshmallow at his chest.

Beau’s reflexes were lightning quick and he caught it as his grandmother’s frustration erupted.

“Every time you call me ma’am that’s what you’re getting!” she warned. “I changed your diapers and wiped your nose and kissed your boo-boos. I am not ma’am!”

Cade laughed again and said, “I told you she wants the old Beau back. We all do. The uniform is off. You’re just one of us again. That’s how we want you to feel.”

Beau kept himself from saying the automatic yes, sir that was on the tip of his tongue and merely mimicked his brother’s earlier tilt of the chin to acknowledge Cade’s comment.

But he was thinking, easier said than done...

Unsure what else to do with the marshmallow, Beau ate it.

“Is this why you invited him over today?” Cade asked GiGi then. “To keep him hostage here and thump him with marshmallows until he’s retrained? Un-boot camp? Marshmallow deprogramming?”

“No. I need to talk to him,” GiGi said more seriously. “I just decided that from now on I’ll leave him cooling his heels on the doorstep until he figures out to come in like everyone else does. And every time he calls me ma’am he is going to get thumped with one of these,” she threatened, jostling the ammunition in her bowl.

Beau thought how like his strong-willed grandmother it was not to accept something she didn’t care for. And he made a mental note to try harder not to be so formal with her. With everyone. But his training went deep and he wasn’t sure what it was going to take to change that.

His brother’s expression sobered suddenly, as if something had occurred to him. “Oh, GiGi, you aren’t thinking about sending him out on one of our missions, are you? Give him a break—it’s too soon for that. He’s only been home two months. You can’t—”

“There’s something he needs to know and he needs to know it now,” GiGi insisted, sounding determined to conquer an unpleasant task.

“I’m fine,” Beau said to Cade, appreciating his brother looking out for him even as it secretly amused him. They weren’t kids anymore and he was a long—long—way from needing his big brother’s protection. Cade was as tall as Beau and in shape, but Beau knew he could have Cade on the ground and out cold before Cade knew what hit him. Certainly there was nothing their seventy-five-year-old grandmother could come up with that he couldn’t take in stride.

“I can handle whatever she needs to tell me. Whatever she needs me to do,” he assured his brother.

“Don’t bet on it,” Cade countered.

“I’ll be glad for more to do,” Beau added, meaning it. He wasn’t working for Camden Incorporated yet and had too much idle time on his hands. He was lifting weights and working out for hours these days just to expend his pent-up energy. And even after all that he still couldn’t sleep at night.

“We need some privacy to talk,” GiGi said to Cade.

“And I’m supposed to make myself scarce, is that it, ma’am?” Cade said facetiously.

GiGi threw a marshmallow at him.

Cade’s reflexes were good, too, because he also caught the confection, popping it into his mouth before he said, “Come on, GiGi, cut him a little slack—”

“Your sunglasses are in the kitchen,” the woman repeated. “Beau and I are going into the den.”

For a moment Cade locked eyes with GiGi, but when she raised one eyebrow at him Beau knew his brother had lost the standoff.

Cade apparently had the same realization. “Looks like there’s nothing I can do for you, little brother. You know how she is when she sets her mind to something—”

“More determined than Afghan rebels,” Beau confirmed. “But I did all right with those. I think I’ll be okay.”

“I hope so,” Cade said, as if he wasn’t too sure. Then to their grandmother he added, “Really, GiGi, give it to someone else—”

“Kitchen,” she commanded Cade. Then to Beau she said a definitive, “And you, this way.”

“Good luck,” Cade said.

“Thanks,” Beau responded as they both followed orders, going where they’d been told to go, with GiGi herding Beau into the paneled den.

She closed the door behind them before she let out a deep sigh and moved to the desk.

“Sit,” she said, indicating the tufted leather sofa against the wall of the large, stately room.

Beau followed that order, as well.

GiGi unlocked a drawer in the enormous antique mahogany desk in the center of the room and removed what looked like an old leather-bound book. She brought the book and her bowl of marshmallows to sit at the other end of the sofa, angling toward Beau.

“There’s something you need to know,” she said then. “Something I read in H.J.’s journals just before you were discharged. I wanted to wait to tell you until you really were settled in. But as of today it can’t be put off.”

Beau knew what his grandmother was talking about when she mentioned H.J.’s journals. Beau’s oldest brother, Seth—who ran the Camden ranch in Northbridge and oversaw all the other Camden Incorporated agricultural interests—had come across journals kept by H. J. Camden, Beau’s great-grandfather and the founder of the family’s fortunes.

H.J.—as well as his son, Hank, and grandsons Mitchum and Howard—had long been accused of ruthless and unscrupulous practices. H.J. had gone to his grave denying all accusations, but apparently his journals told a different story.

Beau had been in Afghanistan when the journals were found, but he’d been told about the information they held. Many things were done that shouldn’t have been.

Underhanded deals, backstabbing, string pulling, sabotaging, payoffs, lying and cheating that had cost other people property or livelihoods, that had wrongly altered and sometimes destroyed lives and futures, and even had ripple effects on later generations.

Since finding the journals and realizing the truth, the current Camdens were endeavoring to make amends where amends could be made. It was being done quietly to avoid scandal or lawsuits against Camden Incorporated.

But if Beau was facing the prospect of one of these missions, he was more eager for it than his brother suspected. A mission with a direct target, a plan of action he could devise and put into effect—it was all actually familiar territory to him. And it felt good to have a purpose again.

“Whatever you need, ma’a—” He caught himself when he saw his grandmother reach into the bowl in her lap. “Whatever you need, GiGi,” he corrected himself with a wry laugh.

But his grandmother’s expression remained solemn as she removed her hand from the bowl and went on.

“I’m sorry, Beau. It’s been bad enough reading what I’ve read in H.J.’s journals and learning that some of the worst that’s been said of him, of my own husband, of my sons—your dad and your uncle—is true. But this...”

Another sigh. Another shake of her head. Her brow furrowed and she clearly didn’t want to reveal whatever it was that she’d discovered.

“It didn’t occur to me as I was going along,” she said in a quieter voice, “that H.J. had wronged one of his own family...”

Beau watched his grandmother purse her lips and she seemed to age right before his eyes.

But then she bucked up like a good soldier and opened the book she’d taken from the drawer, turning to a page marked with a paper clip.

“I’m going to let you read this for yourself. And all I can do is apologize to you on behalf of H.J. and say that—mistaken or not—he honestly thought he was doing what was best for you...”

She shook her head again. “It’s still inexcusable, but that’s what was behind it. And I would never—ever—have let it happen if I’d have known,” she added remorsefully. “When you’ve finished reading I have to tell you why this is information that couldn’t wait even a day longer.”