The Millionaire's Unexpected Proposal (Entangled Indulgence) (16 page)

He wasn’t sure if she was referred to the ocean or the emotions that were swirling inside her. But he was pretty sure he knew exactly how she felt.

The air was warm, and there was a slight breeze. He spread his jacket on the sand.

“You’re going to ruin your jacket.”

He shrugged. “I’ve got others.”

Camilla sat down, leaning back to look up at the stars.

He used his shirttail to smoothly pop the cork, then filled their glasses and wondered for a moment if Camilla imagined him bringing other women on midnight limo rides to the beach. She’d probably be surprised if she knew this was a first. And something he probably wouldn’t have thought of if she hadn’t orchestrated the moonlit ride and stocked the limo with champagne. He leaned over her, setting the bottle and glasses aside in the sand, and slid his hand up the inside of her thigh. She was warm and damp and she arched toward him as he stroked her.

“Sam,” her voice was soft, low, and tinged with excitement. “Again? What’s come over you?”

“You.” He stood up, pulled her to her feet, and slid the long zipper all the way down the back of her dress.

She glanced around.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way, dropping shirt and tie by his jacket. “There’s no one here but you and me.”

He watched as she let the dress fall. Her skin glistened in the moonlight. He stripped off the rest of his own clothes, kicking them to the side, and then scooped her into his arms.

“Where are we going?”

“You like old movies?” he asked, as he carried her down into the edge of the water.

“
From Here to Eternity
,” she said as she sank down onto the wet sand, and he slid his body over hers. Their legs entwined as the waves broke over them and he felt her heart pounding as his lips covered hers.

“I don’t think…Deborah Kerr…and Burt Lancaster…were naked,” she said, when he finally let her lips free for a moment.

“At least not while the cameras were rolling,” Sam said.

He looked down at her as the foamy water covered her breasts with the next wave and then receded again. Then he lowered his mouth to her breast and tasted the sweetness of her skin and the salty flavor left by the waves as she arched against him. He sucked harder on her nipple as the water buffeted them from side to side. Sam rolled with her, angling them a little higher on the wet sand so that her face stayed out of the water while the waves slapped their bodies. Her hands grasped his hair, his neck, her nails digging into the muscles in his back with sharp pressure points that inflamed his need for her.

She cried out his name as the next large wave broke over them and he entered her right at that moment, thrusting harder and faster with every new wave that pounded them until the pleasure was almost unbearable. He felt her go over, shuddering and gasping and clinging to his shoulders while her body convulsed under him and he emptied himself into her with the most intense orgasm he’d ever experienced.

Later as they rode back in the limo, Camilla fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, wearing only his discarded shirt. They pulled into his driveway in the early hours of the morning, with the first glimmers of pink tinting the sky before dawn. Sam had no doubt her dress was ruined, and he left it in a crumpled pile in the back of the limo. But he picked up the lacy panties from the seat, smiled, and put them in his pocket. Then, with the strappy sandals and the tiny excuse for a purse dangling from his hand, he carried his sleeping wife into the house and put her to bed.

Then he poured himself a brandy and went out onto the terrace, and waited for the sun to rise. Did people really change? Or did their traits, for good or bad, remain with them through life? It was a question that came up time and again in his law practice. He wished he knew the answer.

The Camilla he’d held in his arms tonight, the Camilla whose love for her son seemed to show through her actions every day, that Camilla was someone he could so easily imagine spending the rest of his life with. Part of him wanted very much to just take a chance, forget about the divorce and the petition for full custody, and build a future with the person she was now, regardless of the things she’d done in the past.

But if he took that chance—and he was wrong—it wasn’t just his own future he was gambling with. Sam knew that, if necessary, he could survive the heartbreak of a family dismantling in bitterness and betrayal. He’d been through it all before. But the experience was not one he was willing to risk for his own son. Protecting JD’s future was the most important thing,
the only thing,
that really mattered.

Chapter Sixteen

Olivia walked into the courthouse beside Sam, looking much older than her fifteen years in the jacket and skirt and high heels she’d selected. He realized with a start that he was going to really miss her when she returned to school up north in the fall.

Sam, usually so decisive, was starting to second-guess his own decisions. And if he was brutally honest with himself, he had to admit that he was no longer looking forward to his marriage with Camilla ending. And he was starting to wonder if perhaps he’d been too harsh in his plan to seek full custody of JD. As an attorney, though, he knew that the time to move decisively was when the divorce papers were filed, not at some point in the future when he might regret his moment of softheartedness.

Sam put his file on the conveyer belt, said hello to the bailiffs, and walked through the metal detector, picking the file up on the other side. Olivia followed, putting her purse on the belt as Sam had instructed. He noticed she seemed to hesitate a bit, then squared her shoulders and walked through. The alarm went off.

“Miss?” The bailiff approached her. “Do you have something metal in your pockets?” He glanced down at the narrow-heeled pumps she was wearing. “Maybe it’s your shoes.”

“No,” Olivia said, glancing apologetically at Sam. “It’s me. I have some metal pins in me from surgery after a car accident.”

The bailiff nodded and went over her from head to toe with the wand, which went off at least five or six times.

What in the world had happened to her in that accident?
The bailiff let her through and Sam looked at her as they rode up in the elevator. She smiled back at him, her face already telegraphing her excitement about the upcoming hearing. It made his heart ache to think how much Olivia must have suffered. He knew Camilla had cared for her sister during her recovery, but he’d had
no
idea how extensive that care must have been.

Sam introduced Olivia to the other lawyer and to the judge, explaining that she was still in high school, but was working in his office for the summer and was planning to be a lawyer herself. The judge told her it was excellent experience, and that she was welcome to sit in.

The hearing progressed, and Sam laid out his carefully planned argument. His opposing counsel made a persuasive case for the judge to deny Sam’s motion. When the judge ruled in Sam’s favor, he felt a surge of joy that Olivia had been there to see it. He glanced over at Olivia and saw pride shining from her eyes as she listened to the judge announce his ruling.
This must be what it feels like to have your family be proud of your accomplishments, even the small ones.

Having his young sister-in-law replaying the hearing on their way out of the courthouse caught him off guard. And surprisingly, he found himself utterly charmed by it.

“…it’s like you knew exactly what he was going to say, and then,
slam
, when it was your turn you just toasted him.” Her eyes were shining.

“You know, I should bring you to court with me more often. You’re good for my ego.”

“Yes, you should,” she said, and laughed at him. “I’d really like to be here for one of your trials,” she said wistfully.

The next case Sam had set for trial wasn’t until the middle of September, and Olivia would have already left for school by then. He felt a twinge of guilt that he really couldn’t in good conscience urge her to stay. But Olivia was bubbling on, apparently oblivious to his momentary discomfort.

“…and it’s so cool the way you and that other lawyer battled it out in front of the judge, and then once the hearing was over, it’s like you were friends. Seriously Sam, don’t you just absolutely love what you do?”

He hadn’t thought about it lately. He’d been too busy winning cases and building his firm. But yeah, she was right. He did love what he did.

They went into a deli and ordered lunch, grabbing a table in a little courtyard.

“I love the weather here,” Olivia said, as she studied the colorful tabletop, speckled with sunlight filtered through palm leaves. “It’s just so bright and sunny all the time.”

“The heat doesn’t bother you?”

“No.” She bit into a sandwich that featured avocados, mangoes, cream cheese, and sprouts, and gave a contented sigh.

Sam shook his head and picked up his turkey club. “What did they call that thing?” he asked, gesturing toward her sandwich.

“I think the Sea Breeze? It’s yummy.”

“No wonder you’re so skinny. You don’t eat any meat.”

“I eat fish sometimes.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of vegetarians at my school. We have an organic garden and everything.”

“Sounds like an interesting place,” he said, noncommittally. He was still puzzled that Camilla had sent her sister away to live at a boarding school. They appeared to be very close, from what he had observed.

“I love it there.”

“You wouldn’t have rather lived with Camilla year-round and gone to school locally?” he asked mildly.

A cloud seemed to come over her eyes. “It was really hard after I got out of rehab. I couldn’t remember things, and they didn’t want to put me back with my regular class because I couldn’t catch up.”

Sam saw her start to tear up and part of him regretted opening the door to this conversation. But he wanted to understand.

Olivia looked down at her plate. “Plus, people said mean things.”

“What do you mean? About you?”

She gave her characteristic shrug and didn’t answer. Sam tried another tack.

“Olivia, how long were you in the hospital after the accident?”

“About five months,” she said softly, still not looking at him. “Then more than six months after that in rehab. There were a lot of surgeries.”

Sam took a drink of his soda and waited until she was ready to continue.

“I guess it shouldn’t bother me to talk about it to you. After all, we’re family now,” she said finally, and Sam felt a stab of guilt.
We’re family
, he thought,
until I divorce your sister.

“I got hurt pretty bad in the accident,” Olivia said, which Sam was starting to think must be the understatement of the year. “I broke a lot of bones. Part of my hip was shattered, and my left leg was pretty much crushed. My arm was almost severed,” she said, and shivered. “But the worst part was the head injury.”

Sam stared at her, shocked. “I had no idea.” Apparently her injuries were even more severe than he’d imagined. It was a miracle she was alive, much less giving every appearance of being a completely normal teenager.

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

Yeah, he thought, he could see why she’d want to put all that behind her. The pain the kid had gone through must have been intense.

“They put me in a coma for months,” she said, her voice seeming carefully devoid of emotion. “And they told Cam I was probably going to be a vegetable for the rest of my life, if I even survived at all.”

She stopped talking for so long that Sam thought she had finished. He watched her pick up her sandwich and take a small bite, then a sip of her drink. He was about to change the topic just to get that sad look out of her eyes when she started speaking again.

“There were some new procedures a doctor in Texas was doing. Danny flew me out there. And then he put me in the best rehab center in the country. I had to learn to speak again—that was from the head injury. And walk again. It was so weird. Like, what I was trying to do was inside my head, but I couldn’t get my body to understand. And when I tried to talk, the words just didn’t come out right.”

She looked at him. “Rehab was hard. It hurt. Bad. I thought I knew what pain was, but this was worse than the accident. Worse than all the surgeries. I thought I would die, and most days I wished I could. One day I just stopped. I was just over it. I wasn’t going to do it anymore, and nobody could make me. Camilla tried everything to motivate me, to get me to care. Then mostly she just cried.” Sam felt an ache in his heart imagining how helpless Camilla must have felt, faced with Olivia’s surrender to the unimaginable pain she’d endured. This was what had lain ahead of the Camilla he’d met in Vegas, the woman he’d thought of then as a casual partner for few weeks of fun. He wanted to go back in time and hold her in his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay.

Olivia twirled the straw around in her glass of iced tea, took a long drink, then shifted back in her chair.

“That’s when Danny came to see me. It’s the first time I met him. Everybody felt sorry for me all the time, and I thought he would too, because he of all people knew what it was like to be in an accident like that.”

“So did he?” Sam prompted.

“No way. He said I was a whiny little coward, and the most selfish person he’d ever met aside from himself.” Her eyes sparkled a little at that, and she almost smiled. Then her face got serious again.

“He told me about his spinal cord injury, and how he was never going to be able to walk again no matter how much rehab and therapy he did, and if he
did
have even a possibility of walking he would have fought like hell for it, no matter how tough it got. He said it made him sick just to look at me, like a spoiled little princess, when I actually had a chance to get my life back. And that he despised me for not even trying.

“I got mad then, and tried to tell him that wasn’t fair, I’d tried really hard for months and months, but he wouldn’t listen, and he told me to shut up because he wasn’t done talking. Nobody had ever talked to me like that before I got hurt, much less after. I was so startled I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.

“Then he said I should be ashamed of myself to lie around wallowing in self-pity when my sister had been forced to marry a jerk like him. He said he was making Camilla’s life miserable because he knew she didn’t like him, but she had to stay with him or he’d cut off the money for my rehab. And he said, ‘The biggest joke of all, Olivia, is that she married me to save you, and you aren’t worth saving.’”

It took all the skill Sam had as a trial lawyer to keep a poker face, to betray no sign to Olivia of how her words had ripped through him. He sat there, listening in stunned silence, as Olivia continued.

“So I said maybe she would like you better if you weren’t so mean, and he laughed—not a happy laugh, though—and said maybe she would, but that I didn’t know what mean was and I was about to find out. He’d be back every day, he said, until I was released, and if he heard again that I wasn’t trying he was going to ream me out in front of everybody, and then he was going to go home and make my sister’s life more miserable than it already was.”

“So you got back with the program?” Sam asked.

“You bet. As hard as it was, I was more scared of Danny. I mean, I was just a kid then, and man, he was fierce.”

Sam thought he was beginning to understand.

“You must have hated living with Danny and Camilla. So that’s why you went to the boarding school.”

She looked at him as if he was dense. “No, Sam. I have never in my life loved another person as much as I loved Danny.”

“Okay, now I totally don’t get it,” Sam said.

“Well, he was right. I
was
being selfish. Once I thought about it—how with all the money he had he couldn’t buy the one thing he really wanted. To walk again. It made me feel small and cowardly and completely deserving of all the bad things he thought I was. And I decided to show him that I was better than that, that I was worth all Camilla’s sacrifices. I decided I wasn’t going to just get back to eighty percent like the doctors had said might be possible. I was going to get back to one hundred percent. And I did.”

“So just like that it turned you around?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say just like that. I still had my moments. And more than once he made the nurse push me into the common room and then he yelled at me until I cried so hard I almost fell out of my chair.”

“So what is that, tough love?”

Olivia shrugged. “Call it what you want, it worked.”

“So why the boarding school?”

“I guess when you have a head injury and stupid things you didn’t mean to say come out of your mouth, and when your dad loses all his clients’ money and everybody says he’s a crook, you find out who your real friends are. Turns out I didn’t have many.”

Sam was aghast. “That’s awful.”

She shrugged again. “A lot of my old friends’ parents had invested money with my dad, and they lost it. Plus, everybody was saying he ran the car off the road on purpose, and it wasn’t true.”

Her eyes had started to fill up again—those brilliantly blue eyes that were so like her sister’s, shining with tears that threatened to spill over.

“They were arguing,” Olivia explained. “We’d just picked Mom up. She’d had like a nervous breakdown and was at this fancy treatment place, but my dad didn’t have the money to pay for it anymore so she had to leave. And they were arguing about it and she was getting louder and louder, and I got upset and scared and I was yelling at them to stop, and then we went around this curve and Mom grabbed Dad’s arm, and there was a car coming toward us. We were in the wrong lane, and I remember my dad yanking the wheel back but we went too far on the other side and started spinning on the gravel, and my dad yelled, ‘Hang on!’ and the next thing I remember is just this horrible pain and I heard a voice from like really far away saying ‘I think the little girl’s still alive,’ and then nothing until months later. I missed the funeral,” she said.