“There you are. I was wondering where you’d disappeared to.”
Jasmine turned and smiled at her aunt. “I was just thinking about something.”
Danita returned Jasmine’s smile. “I hope it was about your boyfriend.”
Jasmine’s smile faded. She knew it was time she settle the matter of her relationship with Cameron. “Come sit with me in the parlor. I need to talk to you about Cameron.” Waiting until Danita sat on a brocade armchair, Jasmine sat on a matching one.
Of all of her father’s siblings, she was closest to his youngest sister. Danita had been the one she’d confided to about sleeping with a man old enough to be her father, and she’d been the first one she told when she uncovered her husband’s infidelity. There were times when she felt more like Danita’s daughter than her niece.
“What about Cameron?” Danita asked after a comfortable silence.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“He’s your husband.” Danita’s question was a statement.
Jasmine rolled her eyes upward. “No. He’s not my husband, and he’ll never be my husband.”
“Is there something wrong with him?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s just that I don’t intend to marry again. Cameron is a friend. We met at a mutual friend’s wedding and he told me that he comes to New York every May to reconnect with his college frat brothers. A couple of days ago he took me out for dinner, and I thought I’d repay the favor by bringing him out here.”
Danita’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “So, there’s nothing going on between the two of you?”
Jasmine slowly shook her head. “Absolutely nothing.”
Taking off her bandana, Danita pushed it into the large patch pocket of her apron. “I’m willing to bet that Cameron would like something to happen.”
Jasmine went completely still. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Open your eyes, Jazz. Don’t you see how the man stares at you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That he wants to be more than friends. I’m certain you’ve heard the song “Hungry Eyes,” fromDirty Dancing.The man has hungry eyes whenever he looks at you. Keith mentioned it to me when you and Cameron were upstairs.”
“He stares a lot.”
“That’s because he likes what he sees and wants more than friendship, Jazz.”
“What he wants and what he gets are two different things.”
Danita met the younger woman’s eyes. “Are you still angry with men because of what Raymond did to you?”
Jasmine shook her head. “I’m so over him.”
“I don’t think so,” Danita accused softly. “If you were then you’d willing to start dating again, or do you intend to spend the rest of your life alone? After Jaelynn’s funeral, Mark told me not only could he not bear to live in this house because there were too many memories of the good times he and Jaelynn shared here, but he never wanted to love another woman as much as he’d loved his late wife. Four years later I got an invitation to his wedding. The man was babbling incoherently because he was so happy his fiancée was pregnant with their first child. As devastating as it was for him to watch Jaelynn change from a young vibrant woman to one as helpless as a newborn, he has been given a second chance at love.”
“Maybe he proposed marriage because his girlfriend was pregnant.”
“Stop it, Jasmine! Men nowadays don’t feel compelled to marry a woman because they’ve gotten her pregnant. Every time you turn around you hear a woman refer to a man as her baby daddy, or she’s his baby mama.”
“Maybe Mark married again because he didn’t feel complete unless he had a wife,” Jasmine rationalized. “Some men like the idea of ownership when they say ‘my wife.’ ”
“I doubt that. I’d just passed my state boards and was hired at a small, private hospital on the Upper East Side when Mark brought his wife in for an evaluation because she’d begun falling. And once she was finally diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor she asked if I’d be her private-duty nurse. Mark’s father was on the hospital board, so he arranged for me to take a leave and I moved out here to take care of her. The man drove into the city every Sunday night and drove back on Fridays, until he finally installed a computer so he could communicate with his office and clients.
“I’d watch his face whenever he stared at his wife and I knew that he was in love with her and not just her beauty, and that’s when I told myself if I could get a man to look at me like that I’d marry him. And when I met your uncle and the first time he smiled at me I knew he was the one. You’ve had two men look at you that way, and neither was the one you married.”
Jasmine temporarily found herself at a loss for words. “What are you talking about?” she asked, once she recovered her voice.
