Janelle Denison - Too Wilde to Tame

In her bedroom, Cameron propped her pillows against her headboard, toed off his shoes, and made himself comfortable on her bed with his sandwich in hand. Mia gave him the remote for the TV so he'd be right at home, and he automatically switched the channel to a cop show. Thinking he was such a typical guy, she grabbed her nightclothes from her dresser drawer and went into the adjoining bathroom to change. Ten minutes later she emerged, wearing a pair of soft cotton drawstring pants and a matching camisole top, both of which were designed more for comfort than seduction.

Still, Cameron's chewing slowed, and his hot, dark gaze raked over her as though she was wearing a provocative teddy instead. After a lengthy and very appreciative perusal, his eyes finally came back up to her freshly scrubbed face, free of any cosmetics.

A warm smile eased up the corners of his mouth. "You look nice without your makeup on."

"Oh please," she drawled, and rolled her eyes as she laid her blouse and skirt over a chair to send to the dry cleaners next week. "We're already having sex, so flattery at this point isn't necessary," she joked.

"I'm being serious." He took a drink of his soda, his expression earnest "You've got beautiful skin and a great complexion. Even without all that stuff you women wear on your face." Finished with his sandwich, he set his plate on the nightstand.

"Well, thank you." Accepting the compliment, she settled in beside him on the bed, crossed her legs, and picked up the bowl of fruit cocktail. "Judging by pictures I've seen of my mother, I definitely get my looks and complexion from her."

"Thank goodness, because I don't think you'd look very pretty as a female version of Joel."

She laughed as she fed him a slice of peach from her fork. "You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do." He reclined against the pillows and laced his hands over his now full stomach, content to let her feed him the fruit. "If you get your looks from your mother, she must have been gorgeous."

A warm blush swept across her cheeks, and she picked out a cherry half, her favorite part of fruit cocktail, and popped it into her mouth. "I don't remember much about her, just what I know from photos and from memories that are faded or even imagined at this point since I was only five when she passed away." She felt that familiar pang of sadness that always accompanied thoughts of her mother and the pain of losing her. "I miss her, yet I don't think I ever really knew her, if that makes sense."

"It does," he reassured her and accepted the chunk of pineapple she put to his lips. "What about you and Amelia? The two of you aren't very close, are you?"

His question startled her, and she stiffened defensively before she could catch herself. "What makes you say that?"

"You keep forgetting that my job is to study people, to gauge their actions," he said with a casual shrug. "I find I just do it automatically."

He'd obviously spent way too much time watching her at the party, and that thought made her bristle. "Well, you can stop analyzing me."

"I'm not analyzing you," he said, unfazed by her dismissive tone. "I'm just curious about your relationship with Amelia. Did you consider her the wicked stepmother?"

"Of course not!" Amelia had always been nothing but kind to her. If anything, it was Mia who'd been the wicked, difficult one. And that admission, even quietly to herself, evoked a wave of guilt that nearly smothered her.

"Then why do I sense tension between you two?" he asked in that gentle, coaxing way of his. "Not in a bad way, but it's clear the two of you don't have the kind of close relationship a mother and daughter normally would. I was just wondering why not."

Mia knew she had two choices: blow off the conversation and Cameron's personal questions, or tell him what he wanted to know. Her first instinct was to be stubborn and clam up, but she knew that would be the easy way out. She wondered if she shared that private part of her life with Cameron, a part that still caused her grief when she thought about it, that maybe it would help ease the many regrets she harbored about her relationship with Amelia.

The sweetened fruit no longer appealed to her, and she set the bowl aside and then exhaled a deep breath. "I don't even know where to begin," she said truthfully.

"Do you remember when your mother died?" he asked, helping her along.

The answer to that was very complicated, and she attempted to explain the best she could. "The last thing I remember about my mother was her leaving to visit her sister in Honda, and I never saw her again after that. It wasn't until at least a month after she passed away that my father finally told me she'd died in a car accident while visiting her sister."

A slight frown creased his brows. "You didn't go to the funeral?"

"I didn't know about the funeral," she said and saw shock register on his face. "I was so upset when she left for Florida, nearly hysterical because I didn't want her to go and we'd never been apart. I remembered kicking and screaming and throwing tantrums every night my mother was gone. I missed her so much."

"That's understandable," he said quietly. "You were just a little girl."

"I was a little heathen, even back then," she admitted with a small laugh. "The first night I threw a fit, my father should have put me over his knee and given me a good spanking, but being the only girl with three older brothers, I don't think he knew what to do with me, or how to handle my tantrums."

Cameron laughed, too, and she knew that was his way of silently agreeing.

"Anyway, my father told me that when my mother died, he didn't think I would be able to handle the news and he made the decision not to tell me about her death right then or take me to the funeral." She swallowed past the growing lump in her throat that always accompanied thoughts of missing her own mother's burial and service. "He said it was his way of protecting me from the pain of losing my mother, and I know he was so engulfed in his own grief that he probably wasn't thinking straight or logically."

Cameron rolled to his side, closer to her, and propped his head against his palm. "He had to tell you eventually."

"And he did, about a month after the fact." Her voice had grown raspy, and the back of her eyes stung. "And of course I didn't believe him, no matter what he or my brothers said. I was in complete denial."

"I'm sorry, Mia," Cameron said, placing his hand on her knee in a show of comfort.

"I know my father did what he thought was best for me at the time, but he made the wrong decision." She couldn't stop the sob that made her voice crack, or the tears that filled her eyes. "Because I never went to my own mother's funeral, there was never any closure for me with her death. I believed for years that she was coming back, that it was all just a bad dream and one day I was going to wake up and my mother was going to be there for me again."

The first drop of moisture trickled down her cheek before she could stop it, and it was Cameron who reached up and tenderly wiped the tear away with the pad of his thumb. She glanced down at him, so grateful for his silent understanding and the warmth of his soothing touch that was like a balm to the pain she'd carried in her heart for so long.

She gathered her composure and continued, because there was a whole lot more to the story to tell. "So now we fast forward three years, when my father has married Amelia and I'm eight years old. I've become this rebellious hellion who is always getting into trouble, mainly for attention, and now I'm feeling as though I've lost my father, too, because he has a new wife."

She drew a shuddering breath to ease the pressure in her chest, but it did no good. "Even worse, I'm this little girl who is afraid Amelia isn't going to love me the same way my mother did, so it just became safer for me to keep up those emotional walls between myself and Amelia. I didn't want to set myself up for the kind of hurt I went through when I lost my mother." Biting on her quivering bottom lip, she met Cameron's gaze. "How horrible is that?"