up in the dining room. That way, he wouldn’t disturb Jake when it was nap time later.
Cameron couldn’t get Julia’s irate words out of his head so, with great reluctance, he finally did as she suggested and went online to research her family business.
Now, he sat back in his desk chair and stared at the computer screen. A thousand different thoughts ran through his mind, but the first thing he did was pick up the phone and call his company’s tech department.
After putting in a request that they immediately recover the emails from Julia he’d deleted more than eighteen months ago, Cameron hung up the phone and went back to gazing at the online information he’d pulled up on Julia Parrish and her family.
It was disturbing to read that Julia’s parents had died in a small plane crash when she was ten years old. There were pages and pages devoted to her parents’ philanthropy, but almost nothing on young Julia Parrish until she opened her popular bakery shop in Old Town Dunsmuir Bay four years ago.
Did she have other family in the area? Who had been responsible for raising her? Cameron found more questions than answers and knew they would have to talk about these and other issues tonight.
Aside from the news of her parents’ death, the most shocking fact about Julia Parrish was that the woman was almost as wealthy as Cameron was. So why was she slaving away making cupcakes for other people?
It turned out that the Parrish Trust was one of the biggest and most influential charitable organizations in the state. The trust funded or underwrote everything from children’s television to scientific research to humanitarian efforts on behalf of children everywhere. Cameron had heard of the Parrish Trust, of course. Who hadn’t? But he’d never connected the dots from the trust to Julia, never had any reason to. Now, though, he had a reason.
No wonder Julia didn’t care about Cameron’s money. No wonder she’d given up on trying to contact him. She didn’t need Cameron Duke’s support. The mother of his son was worth millions.
He didn’t know how he felt about that. He supposed it wasn’t a bad thing that little Jake would never want for anything in his life. In fact, that was definitely a good thing. But Cameron wanted to be the one to provide those things for his son. And he would. As soon as Julia got back to the suite, they would talk. He would tell her she didn’t have to worry anymore about being the sole provider. Cameron was ready and willing to step in and take care of things from now on.
“Oh, that’ll fly like a lead balloon,” he uttered, then shrugged. Didn’t matter what she thought. Cameron was Jake’s father and he would be responsible for him. Besides, why shouldn’t Julia take a break and let Cameron shoulder some of the burden for a while? It’s not like he was forcing her into a marriage. God forbid. Neither of them wanted that.
Although, now that he thought about it, a marriage between Cameron and Julia would be the best thing for Jake.
“But that’s never going to happen.” He shoved his chair back from the table. If Cameron didn’t do relationships, he sure as hell wouldn’t ever do marriage. And that was okay. Jake would thrive with two parents who cared about him. They didn’t need to be living together in order for the kid to have a good life.
Cameron hadn’t exactly grown up with great role models. Quite the contrary, his dad had been a lousy excuse for a parent and a miserable marriage partner to his mom. Cameron had always said that if his parents were what marriage was all about, he wasn’t interested.
And if his unhappy parents weren’t enough of a reminder that marriage was out of the question for him, there was also the sacred pact he’d made with his brothers. He would never break that pact, ever.
Cameron could still picture the day, shortly after his eighth birthday, when he arrived at Sally Duke’s big house on the cliffs of Dunsmuir Bay. At first, it was unsettling to learn that Sally had rescued two other boys from foster care along with Cameron, and that she expected all of them to become a family.
Those early weeks he spent getting to know Adam and Brandon were bumpy, to say the least. A pecking order needed to be established, so the three boys fought for supremacy over everything: toys, food, television shows, Sally’s attention. They bickered and clashed just like eight-year-old boys were supposed to. At the same time, they worried that Sally might dump them back on the state coffers. It wouldn’t be the first time for any of them. But they didn’t know Sally Duke.
One day when she’d heard enough arguing, Sally banished the boys to the custom-designed tree house she’d had built for them. She told them they could come down when they’d learned to behave like friends and brothers.
Cameron, Adam and Brandon spent hours in that tree house, and eventually their worst secrets were unraveled and shared. Brandon’s drug-addict mom ran off and his dad used to beat him until the man was killed in a bar fight. Adam’s parents abandoned him when he was barely two years old. He was raised in an orphanage before being thrown into the foster care system.
Cameron finally confessed that his own father was a violent man and his mother bore the brunt of it. Not that she was all that loving, given her appetite for alcohol and drugs. Cameron knew she had lied and stolen and worse to support her habit, but he blamed his father for turning her into an addict. He still had nightmares of his mother screaming from the beatings his father inflicted. Even worse, Cameron could never forget hearing his old man hit his mom while yelling that he was doing it because he loved her. And he would never forget waking up and finding them both dead. He was seven years old.
When Adam and Brandon heard that Cameron’s dad thought he was showing love by beating the crap out of his mother, they both were disgusted. That led to the pact.
First, the three eight-year-olds swore loyalty to each other. Next, they made a sacred vow that they would never get married and have kids, because it was clear that marriage turned people mean and stupid. Married people hurt each other and their kids.
Finally, they vowed to make Sally Duke proud that she’d chosen them.
From that day forward, Sally let them know in a hundred different ways that they’d fulfilled their third vow-and then some. They’d all grown up to be honorable, successful men and she couldn’t be more proud. Of course, now Sally had come up with some cockamamie plan to marry the brothers off so they could give her a bunch of grandkids. And despite all of his diatribes, Cameron had just given her exactly what she wanted.
“Oh, man,” he said aloud. The realization had him rubbing his knuckles against his chin. “Wait’ll Mom gets a look at little Jake.” He chuckled in anticipation of the scene that awaited him when Sally heard the news.
Of course, she might be a little disappointed that he had no intention of marrying Julia, but she would just have to live with it. Cameron would never marry, that was all there was to it. He would never want to destroy someone else the way his parents had destroyed each other.
It’s not like he’d been a martyr to his fate. Cameron had tested the waters more than once, in spite of the boyhood pact. But things had never worked out, to put it mildly. There had been plenty of women in his life and a few attempts at serious relationships, but they’d been disastrous. He’d used those as strong reminders that he’d come from bad stock and things would never change. He wasn’t willing to put someone else through that kind of pain, let alone experience it again himself. No, he was meant to go it alone, and that suited him just fine, thanks.
He stood and checked his wristwatch. The babysitter had taken Jake for a long walk around the hotel grounds so Cameron could have a short meeting with his brothers here in the suite. They were due any minute.
They would soon find out they were uncles, Cameron thought. So much for sacred pacts. But at least Cameron hadn’t been the first brother to break it. That honor went to Adam when he married Trish James last month.
The doorbell rang and Cameron greeted his brothers, then led the way to the kitchen. “You guys want beers?”
“You have to ask?” Brandon said, swinging the refrigerator door open and grabbing three bottles from the shelf.
“How’s Trish?” Cameron asked Adam, knowing his brother had brought his wife along for a quiet, romantic weekend at Monarch Dunes.
“She’s great,” Adam said with a smile. “She ran into Mom and her friends downstairs so they’re probably relaxing at the pool by now.”
“Relaxing?” Brandon laughed. “We’d better get this over with so you can rescue her.”
“Good idea.” Adam sat at the dining room table and opened a thin binder of notes and spreadsheets.
Cameron and Brandon joined him at the table where they discussed some last-minute scheduling items that had arisen over the hand-off of priority projects from the Monarch Dunes resort to the Napa Valley property.
“You’ve done a great job with Monarch Dunes, bro,” Brandon said, tipping his beer bottle in Cameron’s
