I’m busy plating our dinner when Camden casually looks up at me from across the island. I haven’t told him this, but he’s got a smear of flour across his forehead from when we were making the noodles. It’s too cute to have him wipe it away. I like the little imperfection across his face. It makes him look less cold and intimidating and more boyish.
He couldn’t look cold to me right now either way. Not with the way he’s looking at me. Everything about the way he’s watched me cook has been lit with passion. His stare isn’t cold. It’s hot, burning my skin even from across the room. I almost asked him to fuck me right in the middle of rolling out the dough for the noodles because the ripples of his forearms were turning me on too much. Even when I’d asked him to try the pasta sauce, his lips had sucked the sauce into his mouth so seductively that I’d imagined the other places his mouth had been. All the places along my skin he’s licked, kissed…bit.
A small laugh from deep in his throat pulls me from my dirty thoughts. I look down to find a little too much cheese grated on the dish in front of me.
“Shit,” I mutter, trying to pinch some of the cheese from this plate and putting it on the noodles from the other. It doesn’t look as good as it was supposed to, but it’ll do.
“You were licking your lips like you were having dirty thoughts about me, shortcake.”
“Maybe I was.”
He raises his eyebrows, pouring more wine into my glass at the table. We haven’t even eaten dinner yet, and tonight has been the best date of my life. The sex before the date really even started helped. But it was also the easy conversation as we prepared the three courses I’d planned for the night. He’d listened intently as I told him how to help prepare a salad and crab cakes. He was an excellent student as I taught him how to roll out the noodles and feed them through the noodle attachment on my mixer.
I thought things would get awkward after we finally had sex. Like maybe we’d both learn that our intense connection was only physical. Tonight taught us it isn’t. The more I’ve learned about him, and the more random conversations we had on what NFL team is the best—the Broncos, obviously—and what the best Adam Sandler movie is—his answer of Click shocked me—the more compatible we seem.
All of it is adding up to me falling for him little by little. I can easily imagine making him coffee in the morning before he lays me out and has me for breakfast.
“Are there security cameras in here?” Camden’s question brings me back from my daydream.
I cock my head, wiping a smear of sauce from the corner of the plate. “What?”
His eyes look to the ceiling, scanning the place. “Are there cameras in here?”
“How did you know we had cameras anywhere?”
“Because your employee, Lexi, caught me enjoying that perfect pussy of yours on camera.”
My hand drops in shock, hitting the corner of the plate and sending smears of pasta sauce all over. “Excuse me, what?” I shriek.
There’s no way Lexi saw us. Right? Oh my god. Has she seen my vagina?
The asshole doesn’t look embarrassed by it in the slightest. If anything, he looks proud as he continues to look around the room. “Yeah, I forgot to mention it to you. Figured it was best you didn’t know. But after tonight, I just needed to know if we just accidentally made an amateur porno.”
“Camden!” I yell, my face heating with embarrassment. Thank god there aren’t any cameras in here. I haven’t found it necessary—and haven’t really wanted to put the funds into getting an additional camera—so this and my office, which used to be a closet, don’t have cameras. “This isn’t funny,” I continue, thinking about whether I should text Lexi to apologize for whatever she saw.
He shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling. “I’m not laughing.” He coughs, totally lying because he’s absolutely laughing.
“Yes you are. My employee saw my bits! This is terrible. Is there some kind of law against this? Am I going to get sued?”
He brings my glass of wine over, handing it to me. I suck down a large gulp of it to try and ease my mortification. “She stopped it before she saw anything. She was only looking because you’d forgotten to lock the door, and she wanted to make sure no one broke in.”
I take another drink, squeezing my eyes shut as I pray to god that I didn’t ruin Lexi forever. I’m going to have to have a very awkward conversation with her and apologize for whatever she did end up seeing.
“God, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that. I’ll never be able to look at her the same.”
“It’s okay. She didn’t see anything. And even if she did, I bet my face covered anything intimate, anyway. I was very dedicated to making you…”
“Okay, that’s enough,” I interrupt, not wanting to picture it again. I don’t want to think too hard about everything she could’ve seen.
“So are there cameras in here?”
“No.”
He whistles, watching as I take another drink of my wine. At this point, I’ve almost sucked down the entire glass in under a minute. “What a shame.”
I almost spit my wine out at his words. “What?” I wipe at the corner of my mouth from where the wine drips from my lips from the shock.
“I look at that little photo of you often, the one of you in the hot-as-fuck lingerie—which you’ll have to wear for me soon, by the way.” He says it so nonchalantly as he grabs both our dinner plates and walks them over to the small table in the corner of the kitchen. “I was kind of hoping we caught all of that on tape. I wouldn’t mind fucking you while us fucking played in the background.”
My jaw hangs open. There’s too much to process at once. “You look at that photo of me?” I question, needing that answered first.
He pulls out one of the chairs, standing behind it and gesturing for me to take a seat. I untie my apron, pulling the top loop over my head and placing it on the counter. I’m still waiting for him to answer, even as I take a seat and let him push my chair in.
His eyes are pinned on mine as he takes the seat across from me, pouring more wine into my glass but a little less this time. He doesn’t look embarrassed by what he’s told me. “Why else do you think I sent it to myself?”
“I don’t know. To blackmail me?”
He sighs loudly, clearly not amused by my answer. “No. That was never my intention. It was because I felt pure, jealous rage at the idea of anyone else seeing you like that. And I fought it, but I think even then, I wanted you more than I’d cared to admit.”
“I would’ve let you kiss me that day. On the mountain at my family’s ranch. I thought it was going to happen.”
His dark eyebrows are pulled in on his forehead. He stares at me silently for so long I wonder if he’s not going to acknowledge what I said. His finger traces over his top lip as he thinks his words through.
“I wanted to, but I thought I’d hate myself if I did.”
His words sting a little, but it doesn’t mean I don’t understand them. It would’ve been the same for me. There was still so much uncertainty between us—there still kind of is, but in a different way—it’s best we didn’t kiss that day.
“It hurt. To have you leave like that.”
I don’t know how I once thought that Camden was a cold, emotionless man. Sitting across from me right now, he wears so much emotion on his face. It’s clear how well he’s trained himself to hide it. He’s hurt me before, and there’s a good chance he’ll hurt me again, but I’ll always remember that for some amount of time—however long that may be—he let his guard down for me. That I got to see the real Camden Hunter and not the one he wants the world to see. Not the son of two of the most famous artists of our time. Not one of the wealthiest art dealers in the world. Just Camden. The man who takes care of me when I’m sick and brings me flowers on our first date. The one who complains about how cold my feet are against his in the middle of the night but still presses his against mine to keep them warm. The one who woke up and let Kitty out early in the morning because she was whining, and he wanted me to get more rest.
I like this version of him. A lot. And all I can do is keep letting myself feel these emotions and hope I don’t get burned in the end. Or if I do, that it’ll be worth it.
“What are you thinking?” I whisper. He hasn’t responded to what I admitted. I didn’t tell it to him to make him feel bad. I just wanted him to know that even then, he had more of a pull on me than I wanted to admit, even to myself.
“That it fucking guts me to know I’ve hurt you.”
There’s no way he doesn’t hear me gasp. His words catch me off guard. They’re sweet and vulnerable and most of all raw. All things I never imagined Camden being.
“It’s okay. It was silly of me to feel hurt after that.”
“Your feelings are never silly, shortcake.” His voice breaks slightly. It does things to me. I feel the impact of his words deep in my chest.
