The Truth About Tara. Darlene Gardner
listing included the name and phone number of a contact as well as other particulars about the camp. It went from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. daily for the next two weeks and started...today.
This camp was, without a doubt, the one that Tara Greer’s brother, Danny, was attending.
Adrenaline surged through Jack for the first time all day. Not only might volunteering at Camp Daybreak bring him back into contact with Tara, he genuinely enjoyed being around children like Danny. Because of his cousin’s son, he even had some limited experience.
If volunteering awarded him a chance to change Tara’s mind about him, so much the better. He’d seen Tara again last night when he’d stopped by the fitness club. She’d been smiling and laughing, her upbeat personality and a good cheer shining through even as she pedaled faster and faster. He’d been tempted to stick around until her class ended, but was afraid she wouldn’t believe it was a chance encounter.
Jack leaped to his feet and went into the rented cottage to find his cell phone. One voice-mail message later, he disconnected the call and made a snap decision. Camp Daybreak didn’t end for another three and a half hours. Three and a half hours that would be interminable if Jack spent them here alone.
He had the address of the camp. Why not volunteer his services in person?
CHAPTER FOUR
CARRIE GREER FIGURED now was as good a time as any to get this over with. Actually, considering camp had started a few hours before and the children were settling down to lunch, it was past time.
If nothing else, the confrontation would take her mind off the approaching anniversary of the saddest day of her life and Tara’s odd plea to see a baby photo of herself. Carrie always had trouble sleeping in the days leading up to the anniversary. Last night she’d tossed and turned even more than usual, wondering what had prompted Tara’s request and worrying that her daughter hadn’t bought her explanation.
She shoved the problem to the back of her mind. Now wasn’t the time to obsess over things she couldn’t change, not when the director of Camp Daybreak was alone in the community center’s small office.
“I’ll be right back,” she told Tara.
“Sure thing.” Her daughter glanced up from the long table in the all-purpose room where she was helping one of the ten campers unpack his lunch. The other nine were happily munching on the sandwiches, chips, fruit and assorted goodies they’d brought from home in their packed lunches.
“Bye, C-Carrie!” Danny waved, his face wreathed in the biggest smile he’d worn since coming to live with her. Just as Carrie suspected, this camp was exactly what Danny needed.
She forgave herself for tricking Tara into volunteering by telling her Danny’s tuition would be waived. There was a kernel of truth in the claim, since the children of volunteers got the first week free. With both Carrie and Tara helping out at the camp, Carrie had a strong argument for not having to pay for the second week.
If she couldn’t sway the director to her way of thinking, Carrie would have to ask Tara for the money. She was loath to do that. Even at half the cost, camps like these were expensive.
The facilities were top-notch. Camp Daybreak had rented space at a privately owned community center that boasted an oversize air-conditioned room. On rainy days, tables could be pushed aside to create an empty space in the center of the room. Campers also had access to a playground and a community pool. The staff was impressive, too. The director was not only the father of one of the campers but a special education teacher, his assistant was a developmental disability nurse and one of the four volunteer camp counselors was a physiotherapist. Another staff member was a speech therapist.
Carrie walked across the all-purpose room, the heels of her sandals making clicking sounds on the linoleum floor, the skirt of her sleeveless cotton dress swishing about her legs. Gustavo Miller was in the cramped office, his head bent over paperwork, one hand poised over a calculator. He didn’t look up.
Here goes, Carrie thought.
“Hey there, Gustavo,” she said.
His head jerked up, his green eyes fastening on her. The color was quite remarkable, considering his dark hair and swarthy complexion. After a few brief meetings, she’d already noticed he was a man of contradictions. Take his name. Miller was as common as names in the United States came. Gustavo was not.
The intent expression on his face morphed into a smile. “Call me Gus. Most people do.”
“I don’t believe I will,” Carrie said. “Gustavo suits the tall, dark and Latin thing you’ve got going on.”
If he’d been seven or eight years older—in other words, her age—she wouldn’t have worded the compliment quite that way. With men as old as she was and older, she was very careful not to flirt.
He laughed, a nice rumbling sound. “My mother’s from Argentina, but I’m only half Latin. My father grew up near here in Exeter.”
“How interesting. How did your parents meet?” she asked.
“Dad was a month into what was supposed to be a trip around the world when he saw her on a beach in Mar del Plata,” he said. “He stayed in Argentina to romance her and six months later they were married. I spent the first ten years of my life in Buenos Aires.”
“Now I understand why you have an accent.”
“You can hear it, then?” He shook his head, as though he didn’t realize how attractive his slightly different pronunciations were. “I learned to speak Spanish first. I’ve lived in the States so long, though, I keep expecting to lose it. You’ve got an accent, too. Southern?”
“That’s right,” she said. “Nothing exotic. I’m just an American girl from Charlotte.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Gustavo said. “I quite like Southern girls.”
Was he flirting with her? No, that was highly unlikely given their age difference.
She nodded to the empty chair at the table. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Not at all.” He folded his hands on top of the papers while she settled into the chair. “Is there something I can help you with, Carrie?”
She shouldn’t be flattered that he remembered her name. She’d been at orientation last week and they were more than halfway through the first day of camp. She’d never heard Carrie pronounced quite that way, though, with the slight rolling of the r’s.
Strangely reluctant to bring up the reason she’d sought him out, she asked, “Aren’t you going to have lunch?”
“A little later,” he said. “But that’s not what you came to see me about, is it?”
Still not ready to talk money, Carrie smiled at him. It wasn’t difficult. Gustavo had a face that made her want to smile. She got a whiff of something. Not cologne. Something clean and fresh like soap or shampoo. Whatever it was, it made him smell good. “I’m wondering how you got to be director of a camp like this?”
“It’s important to me that Susie have the camp experience,” he said. “There wasn’t a special-needs camp close enough, so I decided to start one. First I had to set up as a nonprofit agency. Then I was lucky enough to get a grant to offset some of the costs. We’re starting small this year with the ten campers, but my plan is to keep growing. We might even make next year’s camp residential.”
“I’m impressed,” she said. “You can’t have lived here very long or we’d have run into each other.”
“About six months,” he said. “I’ve been homeschooling Susie, so haven’t met a lot of people yet. We moved from Baltimore when my grandmother had a heart attack. She was running a bed-and-breakfast. Maybe you know it? The Bay Breeze?”
“That sounds familiar,” Carrie said. “It’s a two-story