Page 64 of Bachelor Cop Finally Caught? (Hot off the Press! 2)

His narrowed brown eyes snapped with barely suppressed emotion. “You aren’t being fair.”

“Well, excuse me if I’m not in the mood to protect your tender feelings!” Pausing in the doorway, she turned to fire one parting shot. “Congratulations, Dan. You’ve finally accomplished something I’ve been trying to do for the past twenty years. Thanks to you, I can finally, wholeheartedly say that I’m completely over you.”

It seemed like a pretty good exit line. She decided she’d better make her escape before she ruined it by bursting into tears.

She would have the rest of her life to cry over him.

Dan had always found peace fishing. The lapping of the water against the sides of the boat. The call of birds overhead. The soft wind against his face. The quiet—no phones, computers, fax machines. He wore a pager on his belt, but that would go off only in an emergency.

He should have been completely relaxed. Content. But, as his companion on this particular outing observed, he was neither.

“Want to talk about it?” Cameron asked casually, keeping his eyes focused on his fishing line.

Wearing a battered fishing cap Dan had once given him, Cameron had shown up at Dan’s door on this Sunday afternoon and all but kidnapped him. Dan had been increasingly antisocial during the past couple of weeks, spending less time at his office and more time at home alone, which had probably caused some talk around town. He hadn’t seen Lindsey since she’d walked out on him just over two weeks ago—didn’t even know where she was, for certain. She’d left town with no more than a message for him that he wasn’t to worry about her. That she would be just fine.

He wasn’t so sure the same could be said about him.

He had initially resisted Cameron’s fishing invitation, thinking he’d rather spend the time holed up by himself, but Cameron had been insistent. Dan had ended up in this boat almost before he knew it, not quite certain how his friend had accomplished the feat.

“Talk about what?” he asked, his tone as offhanded as Cameron’s.

“Whatever’s been eating you the past couple of weeks. I gotta tell you, man, your hang-dog expression is breaking my heart.”

Though Cameron had spoken teasingly, Dan sensed that he was somewhat serious. He sighed. “Hell, Cam, I wouldn’t know how to begin,” he muttered.

“Let me get you started. You and Lindsey had a major falling out, right?”

Wincing at the sound of her name, Dan nodded grimly. “We had a pretty serious quarrel. Did she tell you about it?”

And if she had, just how much had she told him?

“No,” Cameron replied. “She didn’t tell me anything specifically. She just asked for some time off and said she had some things to work out. She looked so miserable that I couldn’t help worrying about her. Marjorie asked me later if Lindsey had mentioned you when she asked for the leave of absence. That got me thinking—Marjorie’s pretty perceptive, you know.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that.” Actually, the last time he’d seen her he’d had the feeling that Marjorie could read him all too well.

Cameron worked his bait a bit, then let it settle again. “You and I haven’t talked much about my life before I moved here, have we?”

“Not a lot.” Dan knew that Cameron had suffered an unhappy childhood—his parents had been wealthy but abusive. He’d worked as a reporter in Dallas for several years, ending up in Edstown when h

is pursuit of a juicy political exposé had made him enemies who’d beaten him and left him for dead on a little-traveled rural road. Serena had found him there, battered, broken and suffering a head injury that had robbed him of his memory for a time. Cameron had fallen in love with Serena, married her and left his former life behind so completely that he hardly ever mentioned it, maintaining only a few ties with close friends in Texas, who sometimes visited him here, since he rarely went back. “You still haven’t recovered all your memories, have you?”

“I’ll probably never get some of them back,” Cameron confirmed. “There are pretty big gaps in my past—most of which I would probably just as soon leave alone. There are a few memories that have returned to haunt me, though. Mistakes I made that I wish I could forget again.”

Dan wondered where this was leading. “Er…I’m sure everyone has things in their past they’d rather not think about. I certainly have.” His ill-advised marriage, for one.

“One of the worst mistakes I ever made involved a longtime friend. Her name was Amber. We went to high school together and remained in the same circle of friends for years afterward. Our gang used to get together at least once a week to visit and play games, watch movies and just hang out. You’ve met some of them when they’ve visited me here.”

“Yeah. They all seem nice. I don’t remember meeting Amber, though.”

“No, you never met her. Her last name was Wallace. Sound familiar?”

Dan frowned. Wallace was the surname Cameron had selected apparently at random when he couldn’t remember his own name. A Freudian coincidence, perhaps?

“Amber and I made the huge mistake of trying to turn our friendship into something more,” Cameron continued. “She sort of initiated it, but I didn’t resist too much. She was pretty and amusing, and we obviously had a great deal in common. But that was all there was between us, I’m afraid. And it wasn’t enough.”

Grimacing, Dan suddenly realized exactly where this was headed. “Uh, Cam…”

“Needless to say, it was a disaster. I hurt her very badly, and I’ve never forgiven myself completely for doing so.”

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