Victoria Pade - A Camden's Baby Secret

“Married my first love.”

“And missed getting the experience of casual dating. And now you’re just stuck in this limbo—Patrick is gone and you don’t know how to do what the rest of us learned a long time ago. You need to get comfortable with the whole dating thing. Then maybe you’ll be able to—”

Don’t say move on again! Livi wanted to shout.

Instead she said, for what felt like the millionth time, “Patrick wasn’t just my first love, he was also my only love, and you guys need to accept that. I have.”

“People can have more than one love in a lifetime, Livi,” Lindie persisted. “Look at GiGi—she has Jonah now.”

“And I’m happy for her,” Livi said. “But Patrick was it for me.”

“So maybe you won’t find another love-of-your-life,” Jani reasoned. “Maybe you’ll just find a close second. But that’s still something. Don’t you want companionship at least? Someone to have dinner with? Someone to go to the movies with? Someone to—”

“Have sex with?” Lindie said bluntly.

Oh, that made her really queasy!

“No,” Livi said forcefully, meaning it. And unwilling to tell either her sister or her cousin just how clearly she now knew it was a mistake to veer off the course she’d set for herself since Patrick.

“I’m fine,” she went on. “Honestly. I’m happy. I’m content. Sure, I wish things had turned out differently and Patrick and I had gotten to grow old together. But that wasn’t in the cards and I’ve accepted it.”

“What about kids?” Jani asked, resting a hand on her pregnant belly, round and solid now that she was entering her third trimester.

Livi shook her head. “I get to have all the fun with my nieces and nephews—more of them coming all the time these days—and none of the work. I’ll spoil every one of them and be their favorite aunt and they’ll like me better than their mean parents who have to discipline them. Then, when I’m old and gray in the nursing home, they’ll all come to visit me just the way they do you guys.”

Jani rolled her eyes. “It won’t be the same.”

“It’ll be close enough.”

“Close enough to what?” Georgianna Camden—the matriarch of the Camden family—asked as she came into the kitchen.

“Livi thinks that being an aunt is better than having kids of her own,” Lindie answered.

The seventy-five-year-old grandmother they all called GiGi raised her chin in understanding but didn’t comment.

“She took off her wedding rings, though,” Jani said, her tone full of optimism.

“Oh, honey, I know how hard that is,” GiGi commiserated. “Good for you!”

“Her stomach is bothering her because of it,” Lindie explained.

“Well, sure. I’ll make you dry toast for dinner—that always helps. But still, good for you,” the elderly woman repeated like a cheering squad.

Livi was feeling guiltier by the minute. When this whole queasiness-swollen-fingers thing passed and she put her rings back on, she knew everyone would worry about her all over again.

But there was no way she could explain what was really going on. The true reason for her queasiness—the fact that she was so upset over what had happened in Hawaii—had to be her secret.

So she changed the subject and said to her grandmother, “I could use something to take my mind off everything, GiGi. I was hoping you wanted to talk to me today to tell me you have one of our projects for me.”

“As a matter of fact, that is why I wanted to talk to you,” she said, her tone more solemn. “Why don’t we go sit outside and talk?”

Thinking that that was a fabulous idea, Livi wasted no time slipping out onto the back patio. Luckily, the beautiful Indian summer that Denver was enjoying made the weather warm yet.

Livi went as far from the house as she could to escape the cooking odors, and sat on the brick bench seat beside the outdoor kitchen they used for barbecues.

GiGi followed her, pulling one of the chairs away from a glass table nearby to sit and face her.

“This one makes me sick,” her grandmother announced as a prelude. She then told the story of the Camden sons and Randall Walcott, who had been Howard and Mitchum Camden’s best friend and so close to the entire family that GiGi herself—Howard and Mitchum’s mother—had known him well.

As Livi listened her stomach finally did settle, allowing her to concentrate on what GiGi was telling her.

“Which brings us to today,” GiGi said, when she’d given her the background. “I only read about what your grandfather and H.J. and my sons did a few weeks ago. I’ve been looking into it ever since to see how we could make some kind of restitution—I thought it would be to Randall’s daughter. She and her husband and little girl live in Northbridge...”

“So you called Seth,” Livi guessed. It was a reasonable conclusion given that her cousin and his family lived in the small Montana town on the family ranch, overseeing the Camden agriculture interests.

“I did,” GiGi confirmed. “And he told me that two months ago, Randall’s daughter and her husband were killed in a car accident. Thankfully, their little girl, Greta, wasn’t with them.”

“How old is she?” Livi’s voice was full of the sympathy she felt, because she could identify with the childhood loss of parents.

“She’s only nine.”

“And does she have a GiGi?” Livi asked. It was her grandmother who had been the salvation of her and her siblings and cousins when their parents and grandfather had all died in that plane crash. If anyone had to suffer through what they all had, the best thing that could happen to them was to have a grandmother like they had.

“She only has the Tellers—the grandparents on the husband’s side. But Seth said that Maeve Teller has health issues of some kind and apparently neither Maeve or her husband, John, are in a position to raise the little girl. There’s some situation with a family friend who was granted guardianship of her in the parents’ will. A single man—”

“They left a little girl with a single man? How is he handling that? Does Seth know him?”

“Seth wasn’t able to get a name, though he heard that there’s something about him that doesn’t sit well with folks around there for some reason. But the parents must have trusted whoever this man is or they wouldn’t have left him their child.”

Livi hoped that was true.

“At any rate,” GiGi went on, “I don’t know what the financial situation is. The Tellers only have a small farm and Seth says it isn’t doing well, so he doubts there’s much money there, especially if Maeve has medical bills. And regardless, the little girl can’t be inheriting anything like what she would have if we’d treated her grandfather fairly.”

“That’s the ugly truth,” Livi agreed.

“So what I want you to do is go to Northbridge and make sure this child has the care she needs now and anything she might need in the future. Let’s make sure that whoever this family friend is wants her...”

“Hopefully, finding himself guardian of a nine-year-old girl didn’t come as an unpleasant surprise,” Livi muttered.

“Hopefully,” GiGi agreed. “But let’s make sure that he’s capable of taking care of her, that he’ll give her a good home. And maybe we can set up a trust fund for her, money for her college, whatever it takes to make sure she has the kind of life she would have had if...” GiGi’s voice trailed off as if she was too disgusted, too disappointed, too ashamed of what her own husband and sons had done to repeat it.

“So I’ll sort of be her GiGi,” Livi said affectionately, not wanting her grandmother to go on feeling bad.

She was pleased when GiGi smiled in response. “Not necessarily a GiGi, but maybe the little girl could use a sort of big sister or a mentor—a woman in her life, too, even if everything is going well with the guardian. Or maybe she won’t need anything but to be provided for financially. However, we won’t know that until you check things out.”