Garrett Bravo's Runaway Bride

Her lush mouth got pinchy. “Nice try. I’m not going down there till Wednesday. I’m just not. I want this time away from everything, Garrett. And I’m going to have it.”

“We can use my credit card if you’re worried they’ll—”

“No.”

“Well, then, I could take you back to the cabin and then go down myself and get you some better clothes.”

“Better clothes can wait till Wednesday.” Her pinched look had softened. “Please. Will you just let it go?”

He figured it was about the best deal he was going to get from her. “Fair enough,” he said gruffly. And he had to hand it to her. She’d picked the right place to disappear. No one was likely to come looking for her up here.

She was smiling again, her good eye a little misty. “You are the best.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it. You are.”

“So how come I have so much trouble telling you no?”

“Don’t be a grump about it.” She slapped at him playfully. “I happen to love that you can’t tell me no. My parents and Charles never had a problem with no when it came to me. It was always ‘Camilla, no’ and ‘Camilla, don’t’ and ‘Camilla, behave yourself and do what I say.’ I’ve spent my whole life doing what other people think I should do, interspersed with the occasional attempt to escape their soul-crushing expectations.”

Again, he had to quell the urge to reach for her. She was the cutest thing, with her black eye and her scrappy attitude. “Well, you’re running your own life now.”

“Oh, yes, I definitely am.”

“And we have an agreement. We’re at the cabin till Wednesday and then you’ll let me drive you home.”

“Got it.” She stuck out her hand and they shook on it.

* * *

At the cabin, he had firewood to split.

She volunteered to help so he got the maul ax, his goggles and two pair of gloves and led her out to the chopping block behind the cabin. “I’ve never chopped wood,” she said cheerfully.

He put on his goggles. “And you’re not starting now. Not in flip-flops.” A slip of the maul and she could lose a toe. “You can stack the split logs, if you want to.” He pulled on his work gloves and handed her the extra pair. “But take it slow and be careful.”

“I will.”

For a couple of hours, he worked up a sweat with the ax. He tossed the split logs away from the chopping block. She gathered them up and stacked them against the back wall of the cabin. Then when lunchtime approached, she went inside to make sandwiches. He washed up at the faucet behind the cabin and joined her on the front steps where she had the food waiting.

They ate without sharing a word, but the silence was neither tense nor awkward. Just easy. Relaxed. After lunch, he went back to splitting wood.

When he came to check on her later, she was sitting in one of the camp chairs drawing pictures in her notebook.

He peeked over her shoulder at a pencil sketch of Munch snoozing at her feet. “You’re good at that.”

“I wanted to go to art school,” she said as she shaded in Munch’s markings, the beautiful spots and patches of his blue merle coat. “I always dreamed of studying at CalArts. But my father prevailed. I went to Northwestern for a business degree and took a few art classes on the side. Then, the summer I graduated from college, I knew I had to do something to make a life on my own terms.”

“But your dad wasn’t going for it?”

“No, he was not. I tried to make him understand that I didn’t want to work at WellWay, that I needed a career I’d created for myself. He just wouldn’t listen.”

“What about your mother? She wouldn’t step up and support you?”

“My mother never goes against my dad.” She shaded in Munch’s feathery tail, her pencil strokes both light and sure. “And she basically agrees with him, anyway.”

“So you went to work at WellWay, then?”

“No. I tried to get away again.”

“Again?”

“There were several times I ran before that. The time I ran after college, I packed up my car and headed for Southern California—and was rear-ended by a drunk driver on I-70 in the middle of the night.”

Garrett swore low, with feeling.

“Yeah. It was bad. I almost died.”

“That coma you mentioned last night...?”

She nodded but didn’t look up from her drawing of Munch. “I was unconscious when they pulled me from the wreck and I stayed that way for two weeks. You probably wondered about that scar on my leg? Another souvenir of that particular escape attempt.”

“But you made it through all right.”

“Thanks to the best medical team money could buy and a boatload of physical therapy, yes, I did.”

He had that yearning again to touch her. To pull her up into his arms and comfort her, though she didn’t seem the least upset.

He was, though. Just hearing about how bad she’d been hurt made something inside him twist with anger—at her father, who wouldn’t let her live her own life. And at her mother, too, for not supporting Cami’s right to be whatever she wanted to be.

“When I was well enough to go home, I moved back in with my parents.” She kept her head tipped down, her focus on the notebook in her lap. “My father insisted. And I was too weak to put up a fight. There was more physical therapy—and the other kind, too, for my supposed mental and emotional issues. And when I’d completely recovered from the accident and finished all the therapy, I moved to my own place at last—and started my brilliant career at WellWay.”

He clasped her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, because he couldn’t stop himself.

She didn’t lift her head from her focus on the sketch, but she did readjust the sketch pad on her knees enough to give his hand a pat. “It’s okay, Garrett. I’m all better now.”

Feeling only a little foolish, he let go.

She sighed. “Mostly, I like to create my own comic strips.” She flipped the sketchbook back a page to a cartoonlike sequence of sketches where a cute little bunny with a ribbon in her hair used a stick to fight off a bear with the help of a patch-eyed Aussie dog. A boy bunny in jeans and a T-shirt similar to Garrett’s ran toward the girl bunny wearing a freaked-out expression on his face.

“I’m guessing that’s me?”

She slanted him a teasing glance. “Okay. I took a little artistic license. You didn’t look that scared.”

“Maybe I didn’t look it, but that scared is exactly how I felt.”

A giggle escaped her. “Yeah. Well, it’s not like you were the only one.” She flipped the page back and continued working on the drawing of Munch. “I have a whole series on the bunny family. Unlike my real family, the bunny family works on their issues. They respect each other and try to give each other support and enough space that every bunny gets what she wants of life.”