“Whoa, there, tiger,” he said, laughing. His single arm cinched under my ribs and he lifted me off my feet. In an instant, our faces were inches apart. His blue eyes were on mine, and something in his grin softened, turned into…something else. My breath caught in my chest.
Then he set me down and brought his other arm around. He held a dozen white roses.
“Oh my God, you’re—they’re beautiful,” I breathed.
He looked at them, appraising. “They are, aren’t they?” His lips pulled into that half smile I knew so well, that I now saw was so much more than just the quirk I had always thought it was. “Second most beautiful thing I’ve seen today.”
I pursed my lips. I should step back,I reminded myself. Don’t get carried away. “Laying it on a little thick, don’t you think?”
He arched his eyebrows. “It’s the only way I know.”
Behind him, cars jockeyed for position and the sun was lowering in the west. Dusk settled.
“So you’ve dressed up and you’ve brought me flowers. What’s your plan, Romeo?” Could I keep it light? Should I even try?
He took a step closer. Rose petals, soft and cool, brushed my arm. “To woo you. What else?”
What else, indeed? Had I expected anything else? Had I wanted anything else?
“You don’t think you’re moving a bit fast?”
Now his grin turned wicked and he was very close to me. I could feel heat radiating from his chest. “Thick and fast. That’s me.”
I made a face. “Jesus, you sure know how to turn the temperature back down.”
He laughed. “I was getting worried you were going to start trying to tear my clothes off right here on the sidewalk.”
“You wish.”
“You hungry?”
“I’m starved.” Then I looked down at myself. Unlike Cam, I had not taken the time to dress in going-out clothes. In fact, I had planned to stay in, warm up leftover Chinese, and watch Netflix until I got sleepy. So I was wearing jeans and an old, soft white tee shirt and sandals. “But I can’t go like this. I need to go upstairs and change. And,” I said, reaching for the roses, “I need to get these in water.”
Cam held onto the roses.
“Thing is,” he said, running his palm up my arm. It felt good and I wondered what it would feel like running up other parts of my body. Then I put that thought out of my mind. Or I tried to. “If we go upstairs and you go into the bedroom to change clothes, I’m going to be standing on the other side of that door, knowing that you are getting mostly naked, right next to a bed, and I might wind up dropping the roses on the floor by accident.”
My mouth suddenly felt dry. “That’s very presumptuous,” I managed.
“And then we might not get the chance to eat,” he continued, unphased. I realized, maybe for the first time, that Cam’s lips were very full and mobile. They were parted and his perfect teeth gleamed.
“It’s early,” I breathed.
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.” The promise in that statement nearly stopped my heart.
“We’re sitting in the darkest corner of the restaurant.”
Cam nodded, very serious. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
You're Not Going To Like It
Now
Cam
“Not to be judge-y, but this is pretty fucked up.”
I’m standing in Aimee’s living room, looking at what appears to be the aftermath of a Van Halen cocaine-and-Everclear party. Complete devastation. The coffee table: stomped to flinders. The wall above the dining table: annihilated by a flung chair. The sofa appears to be the victim of a knife fight, but I’m pretty sure she just kicked the fuck out of it until it bled out stuffing. I don’t even want to look at the other rooms.
“I mean, how are you not in jail right now?”
She’s quiet and staring at the rose on the counter. “I don’t know.”
I try on my best grin and show it to her. “Well, if you were trying to impress me, color me impressed!” I put my hand on the back of a dining chair and immediately regret it, as it buckles to pieces and nearly dumps me on my ass. “Whoops.”
She looks at me, tears in her eyes. Again. My heart clenches in my chest and I feel the sudden urge to find whatever is making her cry these past couple days and…
“I need your help, Cam.” The words catch in her throat, and I can tell it costs her a lot to say them.
I try to keep my own voice steady. “Done. Where’s your vacuum? I’ll get started.”
She raises her eyebrows at the suggestion that I might vacuum her floor instead of, you know, hiring someone to do it. I shrug.
“That’s not the kind of help I need.”
I want to go to her. Take her hand, hug her, something. It’s what I would have done, easily, for years. But that doesn’t seem like my place any longer. Based on last night, it feels as if my presence here is tentative, and I am one step away from being persona non grata. So instead I say, “Anything. Whatever you need, just say the word.”
Aimee’s mouth opens, just slightly, and she reaches a hand toward me. Only halfway, only at hip-height, and then she drops it.
And bursts into tears.
Now I cross the few feet between us and take her into my arms for the first time in months. At first she tenses, but then she relaxes and it feels as if she is melting into me. For me, it feels like coming home.
“Tell me.”
She sobs into my chest, shakes her head. “There’s so much to say.”
So I wait until she’s through crying and take her to breakfast.
Over Waffle House eggs and hash browns, she tells me about all of it. About her dad. About her mom. About her shitty job that just barely covered caring for her mom. All things I missed in the time since she broke up with me. She tells me about losing her shitty job. She doesn’t add, “Because of you,” but she doesn’t have to. I know, and it makes me furious. This time, at myself.
Aimee unburdens all of her life misery to me in a flood of grief and anger. Tells me all her unsolvable problems.
Except…
When she’s done venting, she just looks at her food, pushing it around her plate in a puddle of ketchup. Toward the end she became quite passionate, and we drew some looks from a couple of other diners. I stared them down until they went back to their own business.
When it comes to Aimee, sometimes my hands just seem to know what they’re doing without bothering to get permission from the rest of me. Now, my hand finds hers across the table and my fingers entwine with hers and she stops playing with her fork. Just sits across from me, looking back at me looking at her.
It’s been so long since we’ve done this. Just sat like this, looking at each other like this. I want nothing more than to pretend none of the months without her happened, that last night never happened, that her mother was fine and well, and the furthest thing from her mind. I want to pretend I did not have a looming deadline from my father lurking at the corners of my own mind.
Except…
“I think I have a solution to your problems. Not all of them, but most.”
Her nose scrunches up the way it does when she hears something unexpected and wants to concentrate to hear it more completely. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” I pause to clear my throat, “I mean that I think we can help each other. I can set all you money problems straight. And I have a problem I need your help with.”
She leans back in her chair and I almost think I’ve lost her right here, but she keeps her hand in mine.
“What is it?” she asks, her voice low.
I grin, rueful. “You’re not going to like it.”
Mid-August, Around Ten and a Half Months Ago Part II
Aimee
Oh my God, I loved it.
Cam’s lips traced along my jaw, in the hollow beneath my ear. Muscles in my stomach tightened and I moved against him.
“You’re squirmy,” he said, smiling against m
y neck. His hands were huge. How had I never noticed before? They held my waist, cutting off an exit I had decided I didn’t want to take. When they traveled up my ribs, I took in a deep, shuddering breath.
Cam pulled his head back. His eyelids were heavy, and his voice came out somewhat hoarse.
“I don’t want you to say no,” he said. “But you know you can.” His lips brushed mine, fine electric current thrumming from his mouth to mine. “It might kill me though.”
“So you’re holding yourself as ransom?” I breathed. His teeth nipped at the flesh where my neck and shoulder joined. His hands, those giant hands, snaked under my shirt and slid along the naked skin beneath my ribs, at the small of my back. Naughty fingers dipped below the waist of my jeans and traced the upper globes of my butt. It made me shiver.
“You have no idea what I’m capable of doing to me. It could get pretty dicey.” He groaned as my own hand moved under his shirt. The tips of my fingers did their own thing, exploring ridges and dipping into crevices of muscle that roped across his belly.
“Apparently you weren’t lying about these,” I said, dragging my nails across his abs. I idly wondered if one would catch and break. Jesus, that belly was impressive.
The air went out of him in a soft whoosh. His hands went around my waist and I squealed as he lifted me and plopped me on the bed. “I do work out,” he said, pulling me so my legs dangled off the bed to either side of him. He knelt on the carpet in front of me.
Cam had discarded his coat and tie, and the top two buttons of his untucked shirt were undone. Soft, sandy hair curled on his chest. He looked up at me, his eyes earnest.
“Are you sure?” he said.
I bit my lip. This was a side of Cam I had never seen. Normally he was so presumptuous, so sure he would have his own way in the world. To be simultaneously so bold and yet so considerate, so bare to rejection, resolved any lingering doubts I might have had. If those even existed.
“Pretty goddamn sure,” I said, seizing the back of his hair and pulling him to me. Our tongues slid together and I thrust mine into his mouth. I wanted, in that moment, to take all of him I could get, to give him all of me there was. He apparently felt the same, because he thrust his tongue between my teeth. Our mouths chaffed together, our teeth clicked against one another. One of his deft, magical hands slid behind me and unclasped my bra with a single twist of his fingers.
In a sudden surge of boldness of my own I grabbed the edges of his shirt and pulled. Buttons popped and launched across the room. Cam laughed, his voice vibrating into the space between our locked lips. “You seem sure to me,” he said, lifting my arms and sliding my shirt and bra up, over my head, and then gone, floating across the room to join his buttons. The sudden coolness of air against my skin drew my nipples tight.
Cam pulled back from me. His eyes raked me from the crown of my head to my waist, taking in every inch of exposed skin. They lingered on my breasts, my hardened pink nipples, but not long. Mostly they searched my face, locked on my eyes, peered into me more than looked at me. “God, you’re beautiful,” he said, his voice hushed. “I’ve always thought you were beautiful. I just couldn’t think how to tell you.”
I reached out, my palms running across the round mass of his shoulders, down the sloping planes of his chest. “You’re telling me now.”
His head dipped down until his lips barely touched my left nipple. “Let me show you,” he murmured. The grazing motion of his mouth against the sensitive flesh was maddening, but when his lips parted and he took the agonized bud into his mouth, all the nerves in my body went on high alert and pleasure shot from his strong, hot tongue, through my over-anticipating nipple, and down into me, down to the very middle of me where a fire awoke in the pit of my stomach. I moaned, but the word doesn’t describe the sound. It was torn from a place inside me that had never existed before, that had only sprung into reality the moment Cam had asked me if I was sure. A new place that melted my body and my spirit into a single, molten thing that could only utter this deep, wrenching groan as his lips suckled, tugged, and tormented my body. It was maddening and exquisite and when his teeth closed lightly, squeezing just so softly, I cried out and held his head to me.
His hands went again to my waist, this time to the front of my jeans, and undid the button and slid the zipper down in a single movement. Just the motion of his hands on my jeans drove me crazy, and I pushed my hips against him. I got my heels under me on the bed and he slid the jeans and my panties down over my hips and then down my thighs. I drew my knees up so he could pull them off my feet, and one of his hands worked its way under my ass, cupping the cheek and squeezing. Then the jeans were gone and I sat on the bed totally naked except for my socks. Cam knelt between my knees, his hands gliding along the outsides of my thighs.
“You’re wearing too many clothes, Cameron Simons.”
He kissed both my nipples, first the right, then the already-stimulated left. “I didn’t want to assume,” he said.
I pushed his head back so he rocked back on his heels. “Take your fucking clothes off, Cam.”
He cocked his head, smiling. “Yes ma’am,” he said, standing smoothly. “Brazen.”
“Impatient.”
He stripped his much-abused shirt from his shoulders and let it drop to the floor. His shoulders, broad when he was wearing clothes, seemed to fill the room. Trick of the light. I wanted them above me, pinning me to the bed. Muscles in his stomach rippled as his belt practically leapt from the loops of his trousers, and then he bent, pulling them off. When he straightened, he still wore boxers. They were sky blue, and his erection strained against them.
“Is this what you want to see?” he teased.
It was, admittedly, more than I’d ever seen of Cam. His trunk narrowed to a firm, tight waist and then flared again to thick, powerful legs. I longed to lock my ankles around that body and pull it to me. Into me.
“Lose it all,” I ordered.
He nodded, seemingly to himself. “Remember, you asked for it.” And drew his underwear down his legs. I felt the breath stop in my throat.
He had the most beautiful cock I had ever seen. Long, broad, perfectly vascular (ribbed for my pleasure, I thought crazily). It stood straight up, looking at the ceiling.
“That looks impatient, too,” I said, unable to take my eyes off it.
“You have no idea,” Cam muttered, pushing my knees apart and kneeling between them again. “But first…” and he traced kisses across my stomach, down to my hip, his tongue drawing circles beneath my belly button.
I slipped a hand beneath his jaw. “No.”
He looked up, his eyebrows raised. “No?”
“Not now.” I pulled him up and slid further onto the bed. “I want you inside me.”
Cameron crawled up onto the bed, cat-like, his palms going under my knees and pushing them up, back, wider. He was kneeling again, but now I lay back on the bed and he was between my thighs, his cock inches from my sex. I saw the head make tiny, jerking motions with his pulse, and I felt corresponding surges of need between my own legs.
I stretched my arms out and pulled him down so his body covered mine. Cam held himself up on one elbow while his other hand moved between us. He gazed into my eyes as his fingers slipped between my folds, finding me wet and sliding deeper. I gasped as his fingertips grazed across my clit, then again as two of his fingers slid into me.
“Oh God, baby, you’re so wet,” he moaned.
I nipped at his ear. “Not your hand.”
He nodded, and gripped himself, maneuvering the head of his member where his fingers had just been. I wrapped my legs around him, my heels digging into his ass.
“Aimee,” he breathed, and slid into me.
I felt myself open like a flower, my channel hot and slick for him, my lips gripping his shaft. He felt huge, pushing slowly into me, and his gentle penetration was agony. I wanted all of him, right now. I pulled with my clasping legs and he filled me, touching me in places I had nev
er even known existed.
“Jesus, you feel so good,” he whispered.
“Please,” I said.
He began to move, slowly pulling out and then gliding back into me. At first he moved only an inch, two inches, making sure I was ready, that the supple muscles within me were relaxed. I bit his shoulder, almost crazy with need, and lifted my hips against his. “More,” I groaned.
Cam obliged. The powerful muscles in his stomach bunched against mine and he ground into me with more force, his cock spearing deep into me. I cried out, moving against him.
“Yes!” I grated out. “Like that.” Our bodies found a rhythm, his rolling back and then plunging forward as mine rose to meet him. He kissed the top of my head, issuing a strangled cry of his own.
The universe shrank to a single point, a tiny, dense collapsed star at the center of my body. Cam’s prick lanced into it, feeding fire into it, stoking that point white-hot. I bit down on a scream as he pushed harder into me, his own need increasing, his control slipping.
“Yes!” and,
“More!” and,
“Harder!”
My legs felt like lead and my pussy felt like the inside of a volcano. I clenched my teeth, holding onto the muscles of Cam’s upper arms, afraid if I let go I’d fly off into the cosmos. And then the star inside me exploded into a supernova.
My muscles clenched around him as the orgasm rocketed through me and I screamed, not bothering to clamp down on it this time. I was vaguely aware that my body bucked against him, but I was not longer within it. I was flying, riding wave after wave of pleasure even as I locked my arms and legs around him to hold myself to the earth. I screamed again, my focus entirely on the sliding of his cock within me.
And then his arm beneath me tightened, drawing me closer to him, anchoring me in place as his body quickened, driving into me. He arched his back, shouting inarticulately and coming into me, his own pleasure erupting from him in a hot jet that filled me and brought me back to earth. His body, slick with sweat, was rock hard as he shuddered atop me, plunging into me again, and again, until at last he was still and collapsed.
All Yours: A Second Chance Romance Page 6
