C
am followed Jo down the silk-wallpapered passageway toward the Chevalier suite he’d occupied the last few days. How could he not notice the way her ass corrupted the straight and narrow line of the dress so beautifully, her body firm and cursive beneath the clinging fabric? Jo had never been a small woman. Five feet ten shoeless, and looking him right in the eye in her four-inch heels. Her breasts, just enough to overflow his palms. Her legs, infinite and sleekly muscled. Everything was tight and lean. But her ass? A lush anomaly. An exaggerated curve from the trim line of her back. You couldn’t help but marvel at it. You would have thought it was Stonehenge the way his cock responded. Hard and ready and in awe.
It was torture and it was foolishness to ask her to stay with him tonight.
Not
with
him. In the suite. The
two-bedroom
suite.
He’d known this thing was stirring in him at Christmas. This compulsion to look and to wonder how things would be with Jo wasn’t a new fight. He’d fought it at fifteen when Jo invited him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. When she’d suggested they attend senior prom together. When with every look she told him he had a chance. He wasn’t oblivious to what Jo felt. He just knew better. Would it be good with her? Probably addictively good, but Jo had always been, besides Ms. Kris, the stalwart supporter in his life. The one he could count on to think the best of him, even at his worst.
Cam had a special talent for ruining beautiful things. Like the dark, beautiful images he painted on the sides of condemned buildings, destined for the wrecking ball.
He
was the wrecking ball. He had wrecked his marriage to Kerris. He had killed Amalie.
And so much more. So much more. Things he’d never confessed but couldn’t forget.
He wouldn’t destroy the person who had embodied unconditional love to him. Jo was the one beautiful thing he’d spare.
“Which one is it?” Jo looked over her shoulder, just in time to see his eyes trained on that glorious derriere. Her raised brow asked the question she didn’t have to voice.
“You have something right, um…” This was lame, but he dove deeper into the crap pile. “Right here on the back of your…dress.”
Jo peered over her shoulder, down the line of her back, and then back up at him.
“A stain?”
“No, a, uhhhh…” He reached to pull some nonexistent fluff from her dress, flicking uselessly with his empty fingers. “Just lint.”
“Lint.” Skepticism dropped her chin into her neck, leaving her silvery eyes staring at him from beneath the dramatic arch of her dark brows. “Okaaaay. Do I need a compass or are you planning to tell me where we’re going?”
“Sorry.” He glanced ahead, nodding toward their destination. “There. Only a few suites on this floor. That’s hers.”
Jo leaned up against the wall while he opened the door, slim hand on the handle of her Louis Vuitton roll-on. She closed her eyes and dropped her head forward until her hair obscured her face. The color of the milkiest chocolate and streaked with caramel, it had grown past her shoulders. The thick, silky waves were the wildest thing about Jo. Cam had always marveled at her discipline. Her control. She was a woman of limits and boundaries. He was the kind of wicked guy who wanted to blur all her lines, kiss her until her inhibitions melted and her walls fell away. That wild hair tempted him to do it.
She looked up, blinking a few times when she realized he’d been staring. She raised both brows, quirking her wide, expressive mouth to one side.
“More lint?”
Touché.
Cam stared back for a moment. Jo had the steadiest eyes he’d ever seen. She’d been raised as the Walsh family princess and had grown into a queen. Her eyes held the kind of confidence most would never know or understand. But when Jo looked at him, Cam knew he was her loophole. He didn’t want to be. He hated that moment when her shield slipped and he could see that he was the one thing that could shake her. The one thing she’d be weak for.
She didn’t know what she was asking for. Angels don’t choose devils. Jo wanted people to think she was hard, but she was an angel. Ms. Kris had raised her with a heart that always looked out for others. He might have been avoiding her since Christmas, but he always knew what she was up to. She had made it her mission to continue and expand all the programs Ms. Kris had championed before she’d lost her battle with cancer. Jo was a tough-minded, tenderhearted angel who deserved better than the likes of him.
Eyes soft, bottom lip pulled between her teeth, she looked beyond his shoulder into the room he was blocking.
“You gonna let me in?” she asked.
Not if I can help it.
“Sure.” Cam grabbed her bag and rolled it into the suite, throwing an arm out to encompass the opulence-on-steroids suite. “Her
casa es su casa
.”
Jo scanned the marble floor of the foyer beneath her feet; the Oriental rug, like a private island set on the gleaming hardwood floors in the living area; the fine art hanging on the walls. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes, pointing to one of the first he’d painted in Paris, a gargoyle with diamond studs in his ears and a gold grill.
“Isn’t that one of yours?”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
Jo gave him a long-suffering look. “I’d know your work a mile away.”
“It looks different in every form, though.” Cam considered the painting before looking back at Jo. “My graffiti stuff really looks nothing like anything else I do.”
“It’s not the style necessarily.” Jo walked over to the painting, running her fingers around the ebony frame, stark against the white wall. “It’s the oddity.”
“Oddity?”
“There is always something…not quite right, something off about everything you do.” Jo turned to him, a smile tugging at her full mouth, bare of lipstick and lush at the end of the day. “Even in the first picture you ever drew of me, I was wearing one polka-dot sock and one striped. It’s like you’re sneaking a middle finger at the world with every piece.”
Cam laughed because she was right. This girl knew him better than anyone else. Cam sobered, the laugh dying on his lips. But she didn’t know anything that really counted. If she did, she’d run in the other direction.
“You hungry?”
Jo opened and snapped her mouth closed. Yeah, he’d changed the subject. It felt too intimate, just the two of them. He needed to get Jo fed and to bed and out in the morning before he did something he’d regret. Jo looked between the painting and Cam one more time.
“Starving.”
“The suite actually has a kitchen, but would room service be okay tonight?”
“Of course, the quicker the better.”
Her words evoked an image of him pounding into Jo against the wall quicker and better and dirty with her go-on-forever legs wrapped around his back. He shot that image down and rolled her suitcase through the discreetly lit dining room toward the bedroom where she’d sleep. He allowed himself a quick head-to-toe before returning to Jo’s eyes, watching him watching her.
“Assuming you want to change.” He opened the door and pushed the luggage in. “Food shouldn’t take long. They have a great bison burger.”
“Sounds good. Hold the—”
“Onions.”
“Yeah, and extra—”
“Pickles.”
“And for cheese, I’d like—”
“Gouda, if they have it.”
“I’m that predictable, huh?” Jo laughed, walking in and turning her back to Cam, pulling her mass of wavy hair over one shoulder.
“Could you help me with this zipper? I’ve been wearing this dress and these shoes so long I think they may have to be surgically removed.”
Cam swallowed, his mouth dry. He smelled her. Something floral and clean—half perfume, half just Jo. He grasped the zipper and slid it down to the base of her spine. A flash of black silk and lace banding her back and edging the curve of her ass left him as hard as diamonds behind his zipper. The skin of her back stretched fading-tan-gold and silky in front of him. He took a quick step back and turned, tossing a few words over his shoulder.
“There you go. Food should be here soon.”
Cam thanked the heavens above there was no lace or silk in sight when Jo emerged from the bedroom, freshly showered. That chocolaty fall of hair was wet and bundled on top of her head. She’d taken out her contacts and wore her cat-eye tortoiseshell glasses, yoga pants, and a Walsh Foundation T-shirt.
“You look pretty much exactly like you did in college.”
Jo grimaced and took a bite of her bison burger, catching mayonnaise with one finger and sliding it in and out of her mouth.
Holy sexy condiments.
“Hmmm. College. It’s a blur of exams and tears. What possessed me to go Ivy League, I’ll never know.”
“I was glad when you transferred to Duke and came back home.”
“I loved the thought of Wellesley, but in the end, I didn’t want to be away from Daddy, the foundation, Aunt Kris.”
Jo trapped his eyes over the rim of her glass.
“And you.”
Cam cleared his throat and took a sip of his Peroni, leaving that comment and that look in the open, unaddressed.
“Remember that time in Cabo when we ordered all that room service on Mr. Bennett’s card?” The memory persuaded Cam’s mouth to smile.
Jo laughed around a bite of her burger.
“The man has a Black Card. He didn’t even notice.”
“And that was what Walsh wanted more than anything.” Cam stood and crossed over to the fridge for another Peroni. “For his dad to notice.”
“So…you and Walsh.”
Cam turned, pressing his back to the refrigerator and watching her with wary eyes.
“What about us?”
“I know things have been hard, but Walsh says you guys have been talking. How’s it been?”
Cam shrugged, grabbed a high-backed dining room chair, and flipped and straddled it. He crossed his arms on the back, resting his chin on his forearm.
“As well as can be expected, I guess.”
Jo pulled her long legs under her on the leather couch, crossing her arms over a throw pillow on her stomach. “Can I ask you something?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“If you don’t want to talk about it, then, yes, you have a choice.”
Cam wanted to avoid the potential that kept crackling in the air between them, but talking with Jo was like drawing a fresh breath after living in the stale room of phonies and opportunists who had been populating his life the last six months. He could always count on the truth from her, if from no one else.
“Do you still have feelings for Kerris?”
Wow, she went for the jugular.
“You know, I—”
“Don’t hedge.”
“I’m not going to. I’m just thinking of how to answer.”
“Try the truth.”
“Okay.” Cam contemplated the label circling his beer bottle. “I think over the last year or so, I’ve drawn some of the same conclusions Kerris did.”
“Meaning?”
“After the divorce, she said we never should have married.”
“To which you said, ‘Thank you, Captain Obvious.’”
They shared a grin. In their two-member club, sarcasm was like the secret handshake.
“No, at the time I just thought she wanted to make herself feel better for her part in our breakup. Now I realize she was probably right.”
“Meaning?”
“As bad as it sounds, I think we settled for each other because we knew we were both so screwed up by our pasts. I guess we kind of thought only another person as damaged as we were could accept us…as we were.”
“So you were never in love with Kerris?”
“Well, I was attracted to her, of course. I cared about her.”
“But were you in
love
with her? Gun-to-the-head answer.”
“Gun to the head…probably not.”
“Gun to the head and I still can’t get a straight answer.”
“That’s as straight as it’s gonna get tonight.”
“So if that’s the case, doesn’t it clear the way some for you and Walsh?”
“In retrospect, I can see that we shouldn’t have married.” Cam took a quick swig of his beer, the muscles of his face tightening. “Doesn’t make the way things went down easy to accept or forget. Once I knew for sure how it was between them, what was there to fight for except…”
“Except Amalie?”
Cam looked down at his boots, feeling like something stuck to the bottom of them. “Yeah, except her.”
Hesitation was all over Jo’s face, an expression so rare for her that it caught his attention like a peacock in a blizzard. She wasn’t one to hesitate long. Sooner or later she’d spit it out.
“Cam, Kerris is in therapy for all she went through. From the abuse in her childhood, the divorce, Amalie, all the crap she’s endured. Have you talked to anyone about…everything?”
“About my feelings you mean?” Derision twisted Cam’s mouth. “I’ve lived with my…feelings…all my life. I’ll be fine.”
“No, but this is different.” Jo swung her feet from beneath her, placing them flat on the floor and leaning forward. “You lost a child, and your marriage and your best friend. Not to mention everything else in your past you’ve probably never dealt with.”
Cam shot to his feet, gripping the neck of the beer bottle until he thought it might shatter.
“What the hell do you think you know about my past?”
“What do I know about your past?” Confusion muddied Jo’s crystalline eyes. “Um…everything?”
Cam turned his back on her, facing the small but shiny and well-appointed kitchen. He slammed the bottle on the marble countertop.
“You don’t know as much as you think you do, Jo. And if you knew…”
“Well, tell me.” He heard her feet padding across the Oriental rug toward him. Smelled her when she was right at his back. “Cam, what don’t I know?”
He dropped his head, pulling a damp palm across the pinched muscles of his neck. If she ever found out the secrets he planned to take to the grave, how would she look at him? Like poison. Like the devil he was.
“Just drop it, Jo.”
“No, I won’t drop it.” She stepped in front of him, reaching up to cup his chin, eyes hot and intense on his face like quicksilver. “Cam, I see how sad you are, how alone, and I don’t like it.”
Cam leaned forward a few inches until only a breath separated their mouths. He reached up to lace his fingers with hers against his face.