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I put a hand on my hip. “And kill the anticipation? Not a chance. Let’s start in what your office would look like here, shall we?”
“You’re killing me,” she laughed, but she stuck close to my side as we walked.
I couldn’t get enough of her enthusiasm, her excitement about the place, leading her around and showing her the design elements, the views, the features. The bedroom with the seamless glass wall integration into the romantic vine-draped rooftop space got a breathless wow, and then a laugh as she twirled in the center of the room, taking it all in. A king-size four-poster with the most luxurious linens set against a classic theme of black and silver, it was made immaculately, and I was hoping we wouldn’t mess it up, but Cameron grabbed my hand and tugged me into the bed with her. I fell with a gasp, fumbling as she laughed, until we ended up lying side-by-side breathing in the cool, clean air, watching clouds roll by over the city out the sweeping vista of the window.
Cameron fell into the kind of quiet where I knew she was about to say something, and—on some level, I just had to inwardly remark that I even knew the weight of all her pauses. She was an expressive woman. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t attractive.
“It’s not just you,” she said. I was damn impressed I figured it out, turning back to where she lay next to me.
“You being what, then? He’s upset with the women you…?”
A smile danced over her lips, but it was hollow. “He does not like that in the slightest. He hates the Amelie thing. But no, not that. He was calling because he’d found out I’d signed up with Queen Pearl.”
I frowned. “And…?”
Her expression darkened, and she gestured to the window, the pool outside it rippling. “And this. He’s furious I’m living like a monarch. Says we agreed to live like normal people no matter how big we got.”
I wrinkled my nose. “As if he has a say in that after he’s the one who called things off between you?”
She gave me an impossibly fond look, and it sent my thoughts reeling. “I need to keep you around just to validate me when I’m frustrated.”
“Well—” I was suddenly awkwardly embarrassed, and I prayed I wasn’t blushing. “It’s your money. And if you’re separated, what does it matter to him if you’re living in a luxury penthouse suite right across from a Saudi oil billionaire?”
She pinched her lips, relaxing against the headboard, looking up to the soft concealed strip lighting at the top of the room. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m doing this.”
“Doing what?”
She gestured to the room around us. “Buying a place like this. What use do I actually have for it?”
My stomach lurched. I couldn’t afford to have her back out of this deal. None of us could. But I couldn’t push back directly, or I’d break this… rapport. “From the sounds of things, he knows how to get you to question yourself.”
She gave me a grateful smile. “You’re not wrong. He always talked me out of wanting things. Not even wanton expenses—just a thirty-dollar bottle of wine from the grocery store, or getting the blue car instead of the silver one.”
“He was insecure about you being wealthier than him, sounds like. Wanted to make sure he didn’t get any reminders of it, reduce your money to just an arbitrary number.”
“So maybe I’m just overcorrecting,” she said. “I couldn’t get a thirty-dollar bottle of wine, so I’m getting a sixty-million-dollar penthouse. I’d always been a spiteful, willful child. When my mother told me I couldn’t have sweets after nine, I hid and stockpiled a secret trove of candies and cookies only I knew about, and I ate ten times as many sweets after nine as I would have if she hadn’t told me not to. Maybe I’m just doing the same thing.”
My chest ached. María and I needed this case to close—for Cameron to slap down sixty million on the table for us to take our cut. But this part of me that was growing impossibly attached to Cameron didn’t want her to go through with something like this if she didn’t really want it.
Finally, though, I rolled onto my side to face her, and I said, “Did you stop hoarding sweets after nine?”
“Mm-hm. When I got to high school, my mom stopped trying to enforce it, saying I was a big girl and I could make my own decisions. Then it wasn’t as exciting to sneak cookies.”
“Maybe this is the same,” I said. “Maybe you don’t really want this and it’s just a way to show that you can. So, you buy it, enjoy it while you’re here, let yourself have the things you want, and then if a time comes where you realize this place isn’t actually bringing you happiness, you sell it and move onto what makes you happy next.”
She arched her eyebrows at me, studying me, before she broke out in a radiant smile. “You’re just saying that to close me on the deal.”
It should have been. But I didn’t feel like I’d actually been called out. I didn’t want to think about why. I tossed my hair back. “Hey, the Earl has to eat.”
She kissed me.
It happened in a rush, Cameron shifting forward and her lips finding mine, and embarrassingly, it didn’t even enter my mind to fight it. I pressed my lips against hers with a soft moan, sinking against her, and she rolled me on top of her, lying on her back and caressing her hands down to my waistline, sneaking under my shirt. That perfume, the most erotic thing I’d ever known after everything I’d associated it with, flooded my senses, and the touch of her delicate fingers against my skin, her lips moving with mine…
She broke away from the kiss, a smile with a craving hunger in her eyes. “You’re wearing it.”
“I—” I felt my face prickle. Her fingers caressed the garter belt, slipping along the length of it, and my whole body responded, aching to show her—to stand up and bare myself to her, let her see everything she wanted to. Touch everything she wanted to.
But with the heated awareness came back the sense of reality, and I pulled back, breathing hard.
