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“Mm.” She sipped delicately, buying time, thinking it over. “And neither of you know what you’re doing, but you know you can’t walk away. True love.”
“I mean—” I looked away. “Told her I’m not walking away, at least. But the stakes are hers to deal with, so…”
She laughed. “It’s like I don’t even recognize you, hija.”
“Been… getting that a lot.”
“And all you can do is trust that she’ll make the right decision.”
I shifted in my seat. “I don’t know what the right decision is. Just… the decision I want her to make.”
“You know what the wrong decision is, though, don’t you? Going back to a situation like that…”
“Yeah. But she wouldn’t…” I looked down into my drink, mind drifting back to Cameron’s cute, girly drinks. Her love affair with my cosmopolitans. Adventurous, fun, she would say.
Someone who would never let herself be controlled.
“She wouldn’t,” I said, gripping my glass tighter. “She won’t.”
∞∞∞
Guess it figured it was raining.
Robert had given me a dirty look on my way here, but I’d still been riding the high of dinner at Ruth’s place last night where I put my hands on the table, standing up, and said, well, I’m going to get to sleep so I can go close Cameron in the morning, and I hadn’t really believed it until I’d said it. Even now, I wasn’t sure I did, but… but at the same time, it felt impossible that I wouldn’t.
Closing, of course, was a whole host of things that that word normally wasn’t. For Leon Realty, closing was getting someone to sign on a dotted line. For Cameron…
It started with a gentle sprinkling of rain against the windshield as I drove out of the office right as sunrise was starting to break and off to the property, raindrops refracting hazy golds in the early dawn light, but it was already picking up heavily against the tall glass wall of the lobby as I met Cameron there, her oat-milk latte ready in my hand as she stepped out of the garage elevator.
“Don’t I feel spoiled?” she said, her voice bright as she took the latte. That look in her eyes—the way they gleamed as she looked into mine, stepped in just a little bit closer than we normally would, in the almost sacred quiet of the early morning—she took my breath away. “Thank you, London. And good morning. Sorry your special early morning is ruined by the rain.”
“Don’t even mind the rain when I’m seeing it with you.”
She smiled wider. “Not even waiting until we’re upstairs to start flirting with me?”
“Ah, well, you know. To be fair, I didn’t even wait to find out your real name before I started flirting with you.” Although honestly, these days, when I saw the rain, it just made me think of Cameron. Was it too sappy to tell her I was genuinely coming around on rain because it made me think of her? “But if you think we should go upstairs and flirt more there, I’m game.”
“I’m not saying no,” she said, walking past me, and my heart jumped into my mouth as she slipped her hand into mine, pulling me along towards the elevator with her.
I wanted to take her hand and walk with her everywhere. Wanted all of Miami to see me on this woman’s arm. Hell—everywhere else in the world she went, too—as far out as Tokyo, I wanted to be the woman Cameron Mercier had with her.
The elevator ride was long, in the anticipation that hung between me and her, playful little comments traded as she leaned against the elevator wall just next to me, looking at me with that gleam in her eyes, and I tried to pretend my heart wasn’t pounding. Felt like I was on my way to propose—the way everything else was a distant hum over the roar of blood in my ears, over the overwhelming awareness of what was happening. Of what I was asking.
It was our first time returning to a property, and she and I both knew what that meant. The tone in her voice when I told her about coming back here—and when—it spoke volumes. She hadn’t said anything about it, not directly, but I read every word between the lines.
And when the doors opened in front of us and we came out into the living room suite with the massive windows spilling out over the bay just as the sun broke over the horizon, casting the room in brilliant deep gold and rose colors, refracting off crystal accents and glinting on the floors—the drizzle of rain only made the effect more dramatic, light gleaming off water droplets like liquid diamonds, and next to me, Cameron let out a small breath.
“Oh…” she whispered, her hand falling to her waist. I took her latte, freeing up her hands as she walked, slowly, forward, up towards the glass, and I walked with her.
“Told you I’d bring you back to this one for the sunrise.”
She let out a long, slow sigh, laying her hands on the glass. Daring, I stepped closer to her until our sides touched, and I slipped a hand to the small of her back. She got a little, distant ghost of a smile, something much deeper there in her eyes as she spoke. “I think I…”
“Yes?”
She laughed. “I think I have expensive tastes.”
I leaned in and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “We all do in some places. But you also like pancakes in the morning, dances to tacky EDM hits in your living room…”
