He kept her pinned with his intense, borderline-angry gaze for a long moment, but just when it had started to become awkward, he dropped her foot and licked his lips. “I am hungry.”
She started to get up, but his hands clamped down on her thighs, one on each, at the widest part of them. Then, very slowly, he lowered his head until his mouth was inches from her mound.
“Open your legs,” he said.
And she did.
Chapter Thirteen
SUNDAY—SIX DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING
Cameron.”
There was a voice penetrating Cam’s consciousness.
And someone tapping his shoulder.
His first impulse was to pull a pillow over his head and ignore it, because he was so exhausted. He actually thought for a minute that he was back in Iraq, being roused at who knew what ungodly hour for who knew what drill or exercise.
“Don’t wake up all the way. Stay asleep,” said the voice, and it all came flooding back.
He reached for her. They’d moved to the queen-size bed in her bedroom after round two last night—after he’d eaten her out and she’d jacked him off in her office. But the bed beside him was empty, the sheets cool.
Christ, what a night. Who knew Muddy Jane had it in her? He smiled. Finally, he’d ticked the number one item off his return-to-civilian-life list. And he was going to need a new name for her. Wicked Jane, maybe?
“Sleep in,” said the voice. She was nearby. She must be in the bathroom now. He was only too happy to comply, so he scooted over to make room for her when she came back. They would need their strength for later.
Please let there be a later.
Probably they’d have to have the “I’m not your boyfriend” conversation again, to assuage his guilt, but maybe not even. His mind roamed back over the conversations he’d had with Jane, last night and earlier, about her vibrators and her waste-of-space ex. It seemed entirely possible that she was using him as an experiment. He let his eyes slip closed. Sleep was so close. He wanted to wait until she was back in his arms, but it was taking all his strength not to succumb.
“Hey.” The voice was louder now. He turned toward it.
She was standing next to the bed, towering over him.
No, correction: Xena: Warrior Princess, was towering over him.
His breath hitched. His dick hitched. Everything hitched. Because she was stunning. The knee-high boots—flat, he noted with amusement; she’d picked the right character to cosplay—the leather skirt, the armor, the black wig, the arm bands. All of it. Maybe the name he was looking for was Warrior Jane.
“I happen to know that Jay’s condo is going to be transformed into a dance studio today,” she whispered. “Elise decided to make Jay and all of the wedding party she could manage to get a hold of—the ones who weren’t previously committed to Comicon, mind you—to practice some kind of choreographed recessional she’s become obsessed with. So I suggest you hide out here today. I’m leaving a spare house key on the kitchen table. If you go, lock up and then shove it through the mail slot. But stick around as long as you like. If you’re still here when I’m back, maybe we can grab dinner.”
He tried to answer, but he was still struck dumb by the sight of her.
Also, he had no fucking idea what to say. He wanted to have dinner with Jane tonight. Like, seriously wanted it. The prospect of watching Jane eat food was now all he was going to think about for the rest of the day. But was that a good idea? He could hardly condemn Felix for leading her on and then turn around and do exactly the same thing.
She wasn’t waiting for an answer, though. She tipped the cardboard weapon she was holding so he could better see it in the low light. It was the one he’d made for her, and she’d painted it. “I did what you said with the chakram, and it’s perfect. Thank you.”
Then Xena saluted him and spun on her heel, leaving him alone with a boner the approximate size and hardness of the acropolis.
* * *
He stayed.
There were plenty of ways he could have filled the day without going back to Jay’s. He could have taken his overpriced rental car for a spin. He could have called his goddamned mother. Hell, he could have signed up for a campus tour at one of the universities in town. Not that he’d remotely made any decisions in that regard, but it couldn’t hurt to check things out.
Instead, he went to the grocery store and got the ingredients for eggs Benedict.
Also condoms.
He told himself that he needed to give Jane some credit for knowing what she wanted. It was entirely possible that he could make Jane eggs Benedict for dinner and then sex her up some more without her getting all starry-eyed and imagining them in a cozy domestic happily-ever-after scenario.
Cam might not be boyfriend material, but now that Jane had decided she liked having sex with humans, someone was going to get tapped for the job, right? All he had to do was think about that douche bag she’d been hitting on at the bar last night to decide that he was the best candidate. He cared about her pleasure. He cared about her. So what was the harm in giving her a few more screaming orgasms while they passed the time until the wedding? And, hell, maybe he’d find some more buildings for them to dangle off of while he was at it. Anything to induce “goddess mode.”
He would just have to keep his own emotional shit on lockdown. He could do that. If the army had taught him one thing, it was discipline.
It turned out that hollandaise sauce was really damn hard. Fussy. Easy to ruin.
Which he did twice while he practiced. He ended up locating a diner nearby that did all-day breakfast and had decided that taking her out for eggs Benedict would be close enough.
He spent the rest of the day fixing shit in her house. It started when her smoke alarm went off. He initially thought his hollandaise disaster might have been the cause, but upon further inspection, he realized that he was actually hearing the alert that signaled dead batteries.
So before heading out to buy new ones, he took an inventory of the other alarms in her house, and sure enough, their “low battery” lights were all blinking.
While he was at the hardware store, he thought he might as well pick up some caulk and redo her bathtub—he’d noticed it desperately needed it.
And the hinges on all her doors were squeaky, so he grabbed some oil, too.
So began his home repair spree. Once he started, he just kept going. He’d moved on to pruning back an overgrown hedge in her front yard when she appeared, still in her costume. She was pink-cheeked and smiling and…gorgeous.
The warrior princess was in full-on goddess mode.
“How was it?”
“It was amazing. I went to a bunch of awesome panels. I spent a small fortune on some rare early Wonder Woman comics.” She produced said comics from a bag she was carrying, and did an adorable little unveiling gesture that reminded him of Vanna White. She sighed happily. “The best part was I got to see my comics nerd acquaintances who I pretty much only see at conferences.”
Damn, she was positively glowing. It was easy to see what the day had meant to her. He only wished he could have been a fly on the wall, because clearly, she’d spent the entire day in goddess mode.
“Hey,” she said, belatedly taking in the sight of her tidied yard. “What are you doing?”
He was suddenly embarrassed. She had been so delighted with the stupid chakram he’d made her that he’d only been thinking of other ways to make her life easier. He’d had time to pass anyway, and it had been nice to putter around and attack problems that were actually solvable. But suddenly, all the home repairs and garden improvements seemed very boyfriend-like. He was glad, in retrospect, that the hollandaise had been a bust.
“Hey.”
This “hey” came from someone else. It was Wendy, coming up the sidewalk and, thankfully, saving him from having to account for his ill-considered home improvement frenzy.
Jane squealed in delight and blew her friend a kiss as she approached, wh
ich Wendy mimed plucking out of the air and pressing to her heart. “What are you doing here?”
Wendy’s eyes darted between Jane and him, then narrowed. “You weren’t answering my texts, so I thought I’d be all impulsive and just pop by, see how Comicon went.”
“Yeah,” Jane said. “My phone ran out of juice. I was trying to record so much of the conference that it died.”
Wendy held up a white box. “I bought pastries.”
Jane grinned. “Come in—both of you.”
“I should go,” Cam said. This was good. Wendy’s appearance had given him the perfect opportunity to retreat. To recalibrate. He should have just gotten up and left this morning. But okay, no harm done. Probably. He just needed to step back and play it cool. Cooler than becoming her own personal manservant, anyway. Maybe there was a way he and Jane could continue to get it on, but it would have to be because she initiated it with a full understanding of the circumstances—not because he was going all in with the domestic shit. So from now on, he was taking his cues from her.
“Oh, okay,” Jane said.
He was a bit disappointed that she didn’t try to object. That she didn’t seem even a little bit sad to say good-bye.
Which was a problem.
He cleared his throat. “All right, then. I’ll see you two soon, I’m sure.” He thought about telling Jane that she shouldn’t use her bathtub until the next day on account of the still-drying caulk, but Wendy was looking at him strangely, so he decided to save it for a text.
Xena waved at him, then went inside to eat pastries with Wendy instead of eggs Benedict with him.
It was for the best.
* * *
“What was Cameron doing here?” Wendy asked as she sat at Jane’s table and opened the bakery box.
“He was doing some yard work for me.”
That was true. Apparently.
She had no idea why it was true, but he had clearly beaten her tiny slice of overgrown paradise into submission—something she’d been meaning to get around to for ages.
“Cameron likes to be useful,” she tried to explain, the thought striking her as absolutely true the moment she put it to words. “He likes to—”
“Let’s play a game,” Wendy interrupted. “Let’s see how long we can go without talking about the wedding.”
“Oh, okay,” Jane said. “I—”
“Or its obnoxious guests.”
“All right,” Jane said, forcing herself not to give into her impulse to defend Cameron. It wasn’t like she was dating him. Her reputation and his weren’t intertwined.
She stuck her phone in the charger-stereo she had set up on a kitchen counter and futzed with it for a minute, scanning through playlists to give herself a second to adjust to the loss of Cameron. He’d left so…suddenly.
“Where’s your next trip gonna be?” Jane asked, reaching for a topic Wendy would warm to. Her friend was a devoted traveler, often jetting off to exotic places on short notice. Jane admired that. She didn’t have the independent spirit Wendy did.
“That’s why I’m here.” She dumped a bunch of brochures out of her purse. “I think we need a recovery trip.”
“A recovery trip?” Jane echoed.
“From the wedding, which I am heretofore officially calling ‘the w-word.’ It’ll be just you and me. Somewhere far away. Somewhere with no job list.”
Jane grinned and joined her friend at the table. That sounded awesome. “Sign me up.”
Wendy picked up Jane’s phone and silenced it as she shot Jane a look of disgust. She and Wendy had wildly divergent taste in music.
“Hey! Josh Groban is a genius.”
“So,” said Wendy, ignoring Jane’s defense of her beloved baritone. “I know you don’t really do adventure-type stuff, so I was thinking your basic beach resort—”
“I do adventure,” Jane protested.
Wendy looked up from the pile of pastries and papers, confused. “Not in real life.”
“What?”
“You do adventure in your books, and at your conventions, but not in reality.” She held up a hand to stop Jane’s further protest. “That came out wrong. I only meant that you’re cautious. Smart.” Jane opened her mouth, and another hand came up. “Look, it’s not an insult. It’s why we met, right? We’re the overly serious outsiders. The Lost Girls.”
Jane couldn’t help but smile at that. Jane and Wendy had become close, as kids, because both their dads had died. They called themselves the Lost Girls. Everyone knew the Wendy character from the Peter Pan books, but most people didn’t realize that, in one of the Disney films, Wendy had gone on to have a daughter named Jane, who had her own adventures with Peter. Jane and Wendy read the books and watched the movies with the single-minded devotion that only pre-teen girls are capable of, lionizing the stories’ qualities of adventurousness and fearlessness. In fact, it was a few tween Peter Pan–themed Halloweens that had ignited Jane’s interest in cosplay.
“The Dead Dads Club,” Jane said with a sad smile, referencing another phrase they’d come up with to describe their relationship back in the day.
“Right,” said Wendy with her characteristic lack of sentimentality. “Your dead dad made you cautious. Mine made me all carpe diem-ey.”
It was sort of true, though it stung to hear it stated so baldly. After the car accident that killed Jane’s father—after the car accident that she could have prevented—Jane had made a conscious decision never to rock the boat, to make life as easy as possible for her mom and brother by getting good grades, being helpful, and never getting into trouble. She hadn’t thought that necessarily translated into a cautious life devoid of adventure, but maybe Wendy had a point.
Of course, Wendy didn’t know that in the last three days Jane had hung off the CN Tower, gone through a haunted house, made out by a waterfall, and had meaningless sex—all with the “obnoxious wedding guest” whose name they weren’t supposed to mention.
And she wasn’t going to know about it, either. It felt weird, not telling Wendy something, but since her thing with Cameron wasn’t an actual relationship, why set herself up for the interrogation that would follow if she confessed? “Okay, so beach. When?” She went back to her phone and opened the calendar app.
“The week of June twentieth,” Wendy said.
“I can’t,” Jane said, smiling at the entry in her calendar. “My brother is coming that weekend.” God, she missed him. He’d raised her, basically, because after their dad died their mom had been pretty much useless. And all that boat-not-rocking she’d done in her youth had made the siblings extra close. He was like her father, her brother, and her non-Wendy best friend all rolled into one.
“Your brother is coming later this month?” Wendy said, looking slightly alarmed.
Jane cocked her head, trying to figure out what that was about. “Yeah. He’s winding up a trial, so he booked off some time to come see Mom and me. So can we do the beach trip the next week?”
“No,” Wendy said quickly. “I can only go away that week.”
“Well, you’re going to have to count me out, then. I haven’t seen Noah since Christmas. I’m planning to work on him some more to try to get him to move home.”
Her brother was a prosecutor in New York and was always saying that he needed to stay there because the Big Apple was “the pinnacle of both law and urban life,” whatever that meant. He definitely did okay. Jane knew because he kept trying to send her money. She’d taken to e-mailing him her royalty statements to prove that she was fine, financially. “There’s got to be prosecution jobs in Toronto, though, no?” Jane said, thinking out loud. “How different can it be? His degrees are from the U.S., but there must be some way to qualify to practice here.”
“You should leave him alone,” Wendy said. “Let him do his New York thing. He’s obviously happy there.”
“I knew you were both going to become lawyers,” Jane said, reaching for a pastry. “You’re so similar in some ways. It’s too bad yo
u’ll miss him if you’re away while he’s here.”
“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Bummer.”
“Damn!” Jane dropped her croissant. “I can’t eat this.” She spread her hands and looked at the ceiling as if maybe there was a deity up there she could appeal to for the quick loss of ten pounds. “I’m never going to fit into my—”
“Don’t say it!” Wendy shouted. “Throw the pastries in the trash for all I care, but no w-word talk!”
Jane grinned. For some reason she thought of Cameron saying, “Jane, you are as sexy as they come, so shut the hell up.”
She ate the croissant.
Chapter Fourteen
MONDAY—FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING
Cam texted Jane the next morning. They were moving to the rural wedding site on Wednesday, so he had two empty days ahead of him. He had done everything on his list except smoke a joint, and, really, he’d added that item because he could. Pot wasn’t really his style. At least as an adult—he’d smoked enough of it as a kid to last a lifetime.
He couldn’t stop thinking about repeating certain items on his list, though.
One in particular.
But still, as hot as Saturday night had been, as enthusiastic as Jane had been as she’d come apart in his hands—and under his mouth—he had decided that texting her a straight-up booty call was a bad idea. He’d freaked himself out with his weird, post-coital home repair session yesterday, and he was sticking to his stance that if anything more was going to happen, she should initiate it.
In other words, if there was going to be any booty-calling, she should be the caller and he should be the call-ee.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t give her the opportunity to make the call.
So he texted to invite her to Canada’s Wonderland. Because for some reason the image of Jane on a roller coaster had lodged itself in his mind. He didn’t want her to be scared like she’d been in the haunted house, but another exhilarating experience in the vein of the CN Tower would be just the thing to…set the mood. So he’d done a bit of research and come up with the idea of the amusement park that was a little ways outside the city. They would go on the gentler rides, and she’d shriek and clutch at him, but also laugh. Her russet hair would fan out behind her, and when the ride was over she would be pink-cheeked and tussled.
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