To Catch a Camden by Victoria Pade Page A

was funny?” All things Elliot had done as a boy...which she’d learned after she’d married him.
    Derek stopped midrinse to stare at her with a shocked expression. “Geez, no! I’m talking smashing pumpkins in the street on Halloween, or driving too fast, or punching a friend’s time card for him when he really left an hour early because his girlfriend had just told him she was pregnant. Or a couple of other things I got caught up in that I’m not proud of, but nothing like what you’re talking about. Who did all those things? You?”
    Did he seem the tiniest bit intrigued by the possibility that she had?
    “Me? No. I was never in any trouble.”
    His expression seemed to say that was what he thought and he went back to rinsing dishes. “If I’d have done even one of those things you were talking about, my grandmother would have called me a hoodlum and she’d have lowered the boom! We didn’t have the kind of perks you think we had because we were Camdens, but we did have it impressed upon us over and over that because we were Camdens we had to set a good example. That we had to step up to the plate if there was a plate that needed stepping up to. That because we are who we are, we had to be even more above reproach than other kids. ‘Eyes are always on you as a Camden,’ GiGi would say.”
    “And she wanted you to live down the bad reputation your family name already had...” Gia said, before it occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t have.
    But he didn’t take offense.
    “There was some of that. Like I told you before, GiGi thought the negative things said about us were lies, but just the fact that there were negative things said meant she wanted us to prove they were wrong. None of us would have dared to do anything like what you were talking about. Not to mention that they’re really rotten and I don’t think that kind of thing was in any of our natures. I don’t know who you knew to even hear about stuff like that...”
    Elliot Grant. Married him, didn’t really know him until it was too late....
    But Gia didn’t say that. Instead she said, “But you were a hell-raiser—with the smashing pumpkins?”
    “I suppose smashing Halloween pumpkins is raising hell, but it’s pretty normal ornery-boy hell-raising. I went to school, made good grades—”
    “And got caught up in a couple of things you aren’t proud of, mostly with girls...”
    He laughed. “I don’t believe I said those two things together. But yes, as a matter of fact, the things I mostly got in trouble for were with girls.”
    And those things were...?
    Gia didn’t have the courage to ask that out loud, but she waited silently, hoping he would go on.
    But he didn’t. Instead, he handed her the last of the dishes, looked around and said, “If you tell me what you use to wash off the counters, I’ll do that before I take off.”
    So she wasn’t going to get to hear the dirt from his growing up years, and he was going to leave, too.
    There was nothing good in any of that.
    Still, she felt obliged to say, “You’ve done enough. I’m sure you want to get home. I’ll take care of the countertops.”
    Confirming he was worn out, he rolled his broad shoulders, arching his spine until she heard it crack, and she got to see the outline of his pectorals behind the yellow T-shirt.
    Gia felt her jaw drop a fraction of an inch before she closed her mouth and swallowed. But her eyes remained glued to him as he relaxed into his normal stance and said, “Yeah, I’m starting to feel today a little.”
    Gia just wanted to feel him....
    Those shoulders, those biceps, that chest...
    She actually had to ball up her fists for a moment to fight the urge to reach across the open dishwasher door and touch him.
    Then she forced her eyes away and closed the dishwasher, telling herself that she was tired and that it was bringing out weirdly primitive, primal man-woman stuff. It didn’t mean anything except that he was quite a specimen of