To Get Me To You: A Small Town Southern Romance (Wishful Romance Book 1) by Kait Nolan Page A

away.
    Miranda chuckled. “You’re so lucky that wasn’t me. I’d have pantsed you from that position.”
    “I had no desire to be that up close and personal with your brother’s—” She could hardly say junk in front of Grammy. “—well. I was laughing too hard to retaliate by that point anyway.”
    They kept turning pages, filling in Norah’s gaps in family knowledge with stories and jokes. Cam appeared again in the later album pages. He looked more like Mitch back then, easier and more carefree. That had to be before his mother’s cancer.
    “Ugh, somebody get a Sharpie,” Miranda said. “I need to draw some devil horns.”
    “On who?”
    “ Her. ” Miranda thumped a finger against the face of a red-head Norah didn’t recognize.
    Norah studied the picture. The girl was tall. A younger Cam, maybe twenty or so, stood with his arm around her shoulders, easily able to look into her laughing face. She was gorgeous, with perfect creamy skin and blue eyes that seemed to wink at the camera. And he was in love with her.
    The punch of jealousy was quick and vicious, despite the fact that this was obviously years ago.
    “Who is she?”
    “Melody.” Miranda sneered the name. “Cam’s college girlfriend.”
    “I’m getting a very powerful sense of gut-hating here. Why?”
    Aunt Anita picked up the thread. “Oh he dated that piece of work all through college. She was bright, beautiful, and always had an eye on bigger, better things.”
    “In a grass is always greener, cheated on him kind of way?”
    “Not that we know of,” Aunt Liz said. “But ruthlessly ambitious. Top of her class. She couldn’t wait to get out of the South.”
    “She was a nice enough girl,” Uncle Pete added. “Polite whenever she came to visit.”
    Aunt Liz snorted. “Polite. Sure. She had all you men practically drooling.”
    “Gross.” Miranda grimaced.
    “He was planning to propose,” Reed said. “But the weekend he came home to buy the ring was when the news broke about Aunt Sandy’s cancer. It was bad. Really, really bad. Cam quit school and came home to take care of her.”
    “And this Melody had a problem with that?” Norah couldn’t fathom the kind of person who would.
    “No, not as such,” Miranda said. “The issue came when it was time for her to go to grad school. Melody got into law school at Ole Miss and George Mason. But she’d applied before the cancer, and Aunt Sandy was in bad shape, to the point the doctors didn’t think she was going to make it. You remember how bad it was. Cam was devastated. Any decent human being would’ve stayed close to support him.”
    The outcome was painfully obvious. “She picked George Mason.”
    “It was the better, more prestigious program. She believed if she turned them down, she’d never get another shot at it, and her career was too important to put on hold.”
    “So she dumped him?”
    “Not then,” Anita said. “They did the long distance thing for a while. Couple years, if I remember. He didn’t see much of her. She didn’t come down here much, and he wasn’t willing to go far from Sandy. At least not until she’d stabilized. Even then, we had to practically kick him out of the house to make him go up to Virginia to surprise her.”
    “He drove up and came back in just over twenty four hours,” Aunt Liz said. “Never did tell us what happened, just that they’d decided to go their separate ways, that they wanted different things. Cam’s not the sort to bad-mouth anybody.”
    Grammy harumphed. “You ask me, they could’ve figured that out without all that driving. I think she’d moved right on without him and didn’t have the decency to say so on account of she couldn’t figure out how to break it to him given what was going on with Sandy. Figure our boy walked in on something.”
    “I wouldn’t put it past her.” Miranda flung a hand toward the album. “I mean, seriously. What kind of woman puts her own ambitions ahead of what’s