A Matter of Principal Read online

  This conversation had to be held some time, she thought. It might as well be now.

  Patrick set Susan down. She was chattering about her pictures as she tugged him over to see what she had been doing, and Camryn cut across the flow of words. “Susan, run into the house, please, and tell Nell that Patrick’s here. She’s in the solarium, I think.”

  Patrick’s jaw set, but he waited until Susan was out of hearing range before he said, “I was only going to admire her chalk drawings. Is that on the forbidden list now, too?”

  Camryn shrugged. “I assumed that you wanted to see Nell.”

  “As a matter of fact, I came to take her out to dinner.”

  And for nothing else, his tone seemed to imply. He brushed a streak of chalk off the sleeve of his sports coat, as if it didn’t really bother him but he needed something to do. “You didn’t come to the bank to keep your appointment today.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Why, Camryn?” The hardness had gone out of his voice. “Are you having second thoughts about the restaurant, after all? Are you thinking of giving it up?”

  She said coldly, “Now that I’ve had a chance to consider your persuasive remarks and realize that of course you must be right—is that what you mean?”

  His face seemed to freeze. “That catty attitude doesn’t suit you very well.”

  “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, Patrick, but your plans for the improvement of my personality are really of no interest to me.” She turned towards the house. She was trembling inside, shocked by her own hatefulness, and somehow unable to get herself switched back to a more pleasant track.

  I’m going to have to tell him what happened today, she thought, and why I didn’t come to the bank. I owe him an explanation. Why make the explanation harder on me by putting it off, and being snappy about it?

  He followed her, of course. She led the way up to the solarium as if he’d never been there before. Nell looked up from the patch she was applying to the worn-out knee of a pair of Susan’s jeans. Camryn wondered briefly where the woman had found them.

  “Hello, Patrick. So you decided to check up on me.”

  He smiled at his grandmother as charmingly as if everything was perfectly normal. “I thought you might be getting hungry by now. This isn’t a bed-and-three- meals-a-day, after all, just breakfast. I forgot that when we made the arrangements.”

  And he was laying the groundwork for moving her out, Camryn thought. He doesn’t want to come back, where he might have to see me. The logic nearly froze her heart. What happened to us, Patrick? she wanted to scream. We had so much to share.

  “Oh, Camryn and I settled that this morning,” Nell said comfortably. “She’s making an exception for me. Tonight it’s roast beef.”

  “Since I’m cooking for Susan and Sherry and me anyway, it’s no extra bother,” Camryn said stiffly.

  “So you don’t need to worry about me, Patrick,” Nell went on. She shook out the jeans and started on the other knee. “In fact, if you’re very nice, Camryn might be persuaded to stretch dinner to feed one more.” She bit off a thread. Her blue eyes held the barest trace of malicious mischief, but her voice was innocent. “It seems only fair. We’re putting it on your bill, of course.”

  Patrick shook his head.

  He didn’t even have to think about it, Camryn told herself. He can’t wait to get out of here.

  “I’d better check on dinner,” she said, and beat a hasty retreat to her kitchen.

  What did you expect? she asked herself angrily as she bent over the roasting pan in the oven. The minute he got out of his car you began treating the man like an infectious disease. Of course he doesn’t want to stick around for more of that!

  And she didn’t want him to stay, either, she lectured firmly. Not after the things he’d said to her yesterday, and the way he seemed to think that she should kneel down and kiss his hand in gratitude.

  But that was still no excuse for the way she was behaving, she admitted. After all, he had tried to find a solution to her problems. And even yesterday, with the whole discussion of the restaurant... well, they disagreed on lots of things, but she had to admit that he’d been perfectly sincere. Surely he deserved a little credit for that? It wasn’t his fault that nothing was working out right.

  “Camryn.” It was soft, almost a whisper.

  She didn’t even turn around. She pushed the roasting pan back into the oven and put her oven gloves carefully away in the drawer. “I’m sorry for being catty to you, Patrick.”

  He moved so quietly that it startled her when he spoke from directly behind her. “Why didn’t you come to the bank this afternoon?”

  “Because it wouldn’t have done any good.”

  “Don’t you think Warren should decide that?”

  “He would have turned me down.” She took a bag of carrots out of the refrigerator and started to pare them. “You got your wish, Patrick—I won’t be starting my luncheon and tea business. There are just too many regulations.” She steadied her voice with an effort. “I talked to the people in the city health department today, and they explained that the bed and breakfast rules were specially written to encourage people to start small— they have to be, or no one could afford to go into the business. But no matter what I call myself, serving food to people who aren’t staying here would make me a restaurant.” Just saying it made it worse; the pain was threatening to drown out her voice. “Please, don’t say I told you so.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “To do it, I’d have to comply with all of the city’s rules for commercial kitchens. About thirty thousand dollars’ worth of improvements and I might be able to open,” she added bitterly.

  “I’m sorry, Camryn.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  He hadn’t sounded surprised. She thought about that, and fleetingly wondered why. He tried to talk me out of it, she thought, and when that didn’t work, did he arrange for this to happen? No, she told herself. You really can’t get by with putting the blame for this on Patrick.

  He certainly hadn’t been behind that call from the inspector this morning; she’d been the one who had called to ask the health department for the rules. Even if he had wanted to interfere, the regulations couldn’t have been manufactured this morning just to suit Patrick McKenna’s wishes. There were volumes of them.

  Perhaps he had known about the rules, she thought, and he knew what a blow it would be to her. Perhaps he’d simply been trying to keep her from being hurt.

  But if that was the case, she thought severely, he could have tried telling the truth.

  She finished the carrots and looked up at him with a challenge in her eyes. “So that’s why I didn’t come to see Warren Stanford today. I didn’t have anything new to tell him. I’m right back at the beginning, again, and I’m running out of time.”

  “I’m sorry, Camryn.”

  “Would you stop saying you’re sorry? I don’t need your pity.” It came out more sharply than she had intended, and she said, a little more gently, “I thought perhaps you had something in mind yesterday, before we got into the argument about the restaurant. Some alternative, so I can keep my house.”

  For an infinite moment, the only sound in the room was the soft purr of the exhaust fan above the stove. “Not an alternative, exactly,” he mused. “I was going to ask you to marry me.”

  The exhaust fan seemed suddenly as loud as the roaring of a freight train. Camryn’s hands clenched on the edge of the stainless steel sink; without its support, she would have slid to the floor. My dearest dream, she thought for one infinitesimal instant.

  And then she realized that he had said, Not an alternative, exactly. Just what did that mean? That his proposal was based on conditions? Her refusal to give up the idea of the restaurant yesterday had obviously been very important to him; if he had really loved her, and honestly wanted to marry her, wouldn’t he have said so anyway?

  “But you just didn’t get around to it, i
s that it?” Her voice was light. “Because I didn’t cooperate? Have I got it straight—you were going to bail me out, but only if I gave up the restaurant? How charming of you, Patrick. Tell me, are there any other terms I should know about?”

  His face had hardened, and a tiny muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth.

  “Is it enough that there won’t be a restaurant, or are there a few other things about my life you’d like to change? You’ve said often enough that I should just get rid of the Stone House altogether. Is that part of the price for having you?”

  “I don’t exactly see a bed and breakfast in my life forever, no.” It was calm. “There are other ways, Camryn.”

  “Aren’t you being a little hypocritical? You implied yesterday that Mitch was a criminal fool for wanting me to be a wife and not have a profession.”

  Sherry pushed open the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room and came halfway in. “When will—?”

  “Not now, Sherry!” Camryn almost screamed at her. She flung her head back and looked defiantly up at Patrick. “I don’t see much difference, you know. Mitch didn’t want me to have a job—now you want me to give up the one I have and find something else, one that pleases you better. Is this a new application of the golden rule, perhaps— He who hath the most gold maketh the rules? Is that your idea of how marriage ought to work, Patrick? What a disappointment for you!”

  Sherry spun on her heel with military precision and vanished down the hall.

  Patrick leaned against the center island. “You don’t even realize how angry you are at him, do you, Camryn?” He sounded perfectly calm, almost clinically detached. “He deserted you, and you’re determined not to let yourself be put in that position again, of depending on a man.”

  “He didn’t desert me.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether he did it on purpose or not; the fact is he left you in the lurch. But you don’t even see that, do you, Camryn? You haven’t even faced up to that.”

  “At least Mitch was honest about what he wanted; he didn’t go around manipulating me! I am damned sure going to make my own decisions, Patrick—that’s not in question! I appreciate your flattering proposal. But no, thanks.”

  He pushed himself away from the island. “Haven’t you forgotten something? I didn’t actually propose to you. I only said I’d been planning to—once.”

  I was going to ask you to marry me. Past tense, with no hint of a future.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m beginning to think it was a damned lucky escape. Thanks, Camryn. You’ve certainly put things in perspective.”

  It hurt so badly that for an instant she was terrified she was going to faint. But then she straightened her spine and put her head up and said, “I’m in good company, aren’t I? Right up there with Dianna Stanford, among the girls you’ve considered proposing to. I’m so flattered I can hardly stand it.”

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said quietly, “You should be. You finished better than I did—I lost out to Mitch’s ghost. It’s just as well, I suppose. The Stone House isn’t big enough for the three of us, Camryn — you and me and Mitch.”

  The outside door slammed behind him, as if he couldn’t wait any longer to get out into the open air. In the long moment when the sound still echoed through the kitchen, Camryn sank down on a stool and buried her face in her hands.

  You’ve messed it all up now, she told herself. You’ve lost them both—the Stone House, and Patrick as well...

  No, I didn’t, she thought. It wasn’t all my doing. It was Patrick’s.

  But the question of which of them had been most at fault didn’t matter right now. She just wanted to throw herself down across her bed and cry. She didn’t even know for which one—the Stone House, or Patrick—she would shed the most tears.

  *****

  Sherry took one swift glance at the dining room table, set for four, and said, “Patrick’s not staying?”

  “Did you expect him to?” Camryn retorted.

  “Well, no, I guess not. From the bit I heard, that was a king-sized fight you two were having.”

  Camryn scowled at her. Didn’t the girl even have enough sense to be quiet in front of a guest—especially this guest?

  Sherry finally seemed to get the message. “Sorry,” she muttered, with a sidelong glance at Nell.

  Camryn suppressed a shudder, with great effort. Nell was capable of asking anything at all. If Nell starts on me, she thought, I will just start to scream and throw knives.

  But Nell didn’t seem to notice anything unusual in the air. She tucked a napkin under Susan’s chin and sat down beside her, inhaling with gusto. “That beef smells magnificent, Camryn,” she said. “Do you have some magical way of cooking it?”

  She talked gently all the way through dinner, and finally Camryn’s knotted nerves began to relax.

  Life hasn’t come to an end, she told herself. I’ve survived worse, and come out of it stronger than before. I still have Susan, and my health. Perhaps I can find some sort of job that will allow me to finish my education. And some day there can be another house.

  And another Patrick, too, I suppose, she told herself cynically. Now that I’ve found out that I still have physical longings, I should probably start looking for a man to satisfy them with!

  Her heart twisted at the very thought of that faceless someone—a man who wasn’t Patrick. A man who could never, never be Patrick.

  *****

  The evening had a sort of a sort of breathless stillness to it. The solarium windows were all open, and the ceiling fan lazily stirred the warm air. Camryn was curled up in the window seat in the corner of the room, looking listlessly out over the street and remembering how Sherry had sat there last weekend in the same pose, waiting hopelessly for John Marlow to call.

  But Sherry had been the lucky one. John had called. And Camryn had no doubt that, unless Sherry changed her mind, in one more year she would marry John Marlow, and they’d live happily ever after. But the wedding wouldn’t take place at the Stone House.

  She drew idle patterns on the screen with her fingernail and watched the birds play in the birdbath in the back yard. And she didn’t know that she had made a sound until Nell said, “That sigh sounded as if your heart was breaking, Camryn. Would it help to talk about it?”

  Talk about it? Tell Patrick’s own grandmother what a chauvinistic, domineering brute he was? Or, worse yet, confide in Nell the fact that she loved him anyway?

  “I don’t think so,” she said drearily.

  Nell didn’t answer. She had laid aside the patched jeans; she had, it appeared to Camryn, worked her way through the entire contents of the Stone House’s mending basket in one short afternoon. Somewhere she had found a scrap of tightly woven cotton fabric and some bits of brightly colored thread, and now she was patiently instructing Susan in some elementary embroidery techniques. The child lacked coordination, and her stitches were uncertain and wildly inaccurate, but she seemed to be having a good time. Her tongue was protruding a bit, as it often did when she was really concentrating, and her forehead wrinkled now and then.

  “How have you managed to raise such a feminine child?” Nell asked. “Of course, I’m sure it’s easier when there’s only one. I tried, with Dennis and Kathleen’s youngest—but with four older brothers, the girl was too much of a tomboy to save.”

  That was a funny thing for Nell to say, Camryn thought idly. She’d have said Nell had a fair amount of tomboy blood herself, with the horseshoes and all.

  But Nell looked a little more like a standard grandmother today, wearing a softly printed blouse and comfortable trousers, and sitting in the rocking chair with Susan in her lap, the mending basket beside her, and a pair of half-glasses balanced on her nose. Only the name-brand running shoes hinted that she might not really be what she appeared.

  “It’s difficult to raise children alone,” Nell said.

  Camryn braced herself. What would be coming next? A gentl
e lecture on why she should marry Patrick? If Nell only knew how clear he made it that she hadn’t actually been asked!

  Susan stabbed her finger with the needle, and she howled and looked up at Nell for comfort. Nell kissed the small wounded finger, smoothed the fabric with a work-worn hand, applauded the effort, and put it away for the night.

  I wish I was the one sitting beside Nell, Camryn thought, in the circle of a reassuring arm, and being helped and comforted. . .I don’t have to tell her about Patrick, after all. It would make me feel better just to be able to tell someone about the damned mortgage.

  She never quite knew how she ended up across the room, with her head in Nell’s lap, sobbing out the whole story, complete with every instant of hope and every traumatic blow. And all the time, Nell didn’t say a word, just sat very still, her fingers stroking Camryn’s hair now and then as if she were no older than Susan.

  Finally, she sighed. “You haven’t tried any other banks?”

  If the question had come from anyone else, Camryn thought hazily, she’d probably have felt offended. But from Nell…

  “No,” she said. “It does sound dumb, doesn’t it? But Patrick was helping me, and I thought surely I stood a better chance there, where they knew me, and where I already had a record of always paying my bills on time.” She smiled wryly. “Well, almost always on time.”

  “What does Patrick think?”

  “He says...” Camryn stopped, and corrected herself. “He said once that if it were up to him, he would give me the loan. But his boss...”

  Nell snorted. “That figures. I never could abide that stuffed shirt Patrick works for. Warren Stanford shouldn’t be a banker. He ought to own a used-car lot in California. He’s an expert at buying money at one end of the building and selling it back to the same people at the other end at a higher price.”