“I can’t believe Hannah went off and left you alone in the house with just a cat.”
“She hadn’t planned on having a family emergency.”
Cameron clenched his jaw in frustration. “She could’ve called me and I would’ve had you stay with me.”
“What about Smokey?”
“What about him?”
“Would you want him to come, too?”
“Yes. I love animals.”
Jasmine placed her hand atop his on her knee. “You did say you’d wanted to be a vet. You don’t have to worry about me because the house is wired with a high-tech security system.”
Cameron reversed their hands, gently squeezing her fingers. “I worry. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“He likes me! He likes me!” Jasmine said in a spot-on imitation of Sally Fields’s Academy Award speech.
Cameron laughed at her antics. He wanted to tell her he more than liked her. Yet he still wasn’t ready to admit that he was falling in love with her. The emotions he felt when with Jasmine were too foreign, too unfamiliar to equate them with love because he had never loved a woman. He did not want to believe that he’d waited until he was almost fifty to become involved with someone who had him tied up in knots where he was very careful to monitor every word that came out of his mouth. He was afraid he would say the wrong thing and send her running in the opposite direction.
Perhaps karma had finally come to confront him as it had his brother. He’d chided Preston for loving and leaving a revolving door of women until he met Madison who had refused to go out with him because of his less-than-savory reputation. Now karma had come to repay another Singleton, and this time in spades. She was reminding Cameron about the women he’d dated while making it known to them they should not plan to spend the rest of their lives with him. It may have sounded cruel, unfeeling, but he had wanted them to know up front that he would not marry them.
However his way of thinking changed the instant he spied Jasmine sitting and laughing with her dining partners at the table in DuPont House. The first thing he noticed was how different she looked from the women he’d been attracted to in the past—tall, slender blondes like Hannah, and on occasion, a redhead. But when he finally asked her to dance the difference was magnetic. Everything about her for the few minutes he held her in his arms drew him in and refused to let him go. Although she hadn’t outright rejected him when he’d asked to see her in New York, she didn’t seem all that pleased that he’d come onto her.
Cameron was more than surprised she’d responded to his text. He was shocked. His apprehension continued when he saw her step out of the taxi and it wasn’t until halfway through dinner that he was able to exhale when she invited him to accompany her to Long Island.
“You’re really good. I believe you missed your calling.”
“No I didn’t,” Jasmine said. “I never would’ve survived in show business. I’m not uninhibited enough.”
“Didn’t you tell me you performed in your school’s talent show?”
“Yes. It was a lip-synch competition.”
“Maybe one of these days we’ll have to have a lip-synch competition, including dressing up like our favorite singers.”
“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” Jasmine teased, smiling.
“Is that a challenge, darling?”
“Yes, it is,darling.”
“Oh, sweets,” he crooned, “now it’s on like Donkey Kong. You’d better start practicing if you hope to beat me.”
Jasmine rested a hand at her hip. “I hate to see a grown man cry, but I suggest you hire a professional because not only do you have to lip-synch but you also have to have the dance moves to go with your song.”
Cameron’s laugh was low, throaty. “The song I’m going to choose doesn’t need moves.”
“What are you going to sing?”
He downshifted, coming to a complete stop at a traffic light in the Upper French Quarter. Resting his right hand over the back of the passenger seat, Cameron tugged Jasmine’s ponytail. “I’m not telling.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“If it’s a challenge, then why should I give you a hint? I don’t want to know who you are going to impersonate.”
“Ohhh-kay,” she drawled. “Be like that.”
