The answers didn’t come to me. My arm continued on its journey unimpeded and I cupped Cam’s rough jaw in the palm of my hand. “Are you worried I am someone you cannot trust?”
“Should I be?”
“Always, in your life, no? But sometimes you will be wrong.”
“I don’t want to be wrong about you.”
I rubbed my thumb over the shadows beneath his eyes. “Does that mean you believe I am your enemy and you like it? Or that you do trust me and it’s your own judgement that concerns you?”
A low growl rumbled from Cam’s broad chest, but an obnoxious buzzing from the kitchen counter cut him off. His gaze left me and flitted to where two phones lay next to his open account books. “Two phones?”
“Business and personal.”
The buzzing stopped, the flurry of messages over, for now. Messages that I would delete without reading, cursing the fact that they left a pain in my chest regardless.I hate feeling. All of it. It hurts.
I let my hand drop.Cam brought his bottomless stare back to me, reaching into his pocket for his own phone as he stepped back from me. He moved to the counter and regarded the phones. “Which is which?”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
“About?”
He said nothing. Just waited for me to answer his question.
I fought the urge to rub the goosebumps from my bare skin and jerked my head at the phones. “The smaller one is personal. It’s old, as you can see from the model.”
“I don’t know shit about iPhone models. You can’t build a house with a handset.”
“Is that what you’d like to do, Cam? Build houses with your bare hands?”
Yes. He didn’t say it, but the fire in his gaze said it all.
Cam tapped his phone screen a few times. Moments later, my phone buzzed again, and his dark brows rose in a surprised wave. “You gave me your personal number?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed? It was a mystery I’d yet to solve, and the only logical explanation was that I’d wanted the possibility of him contacting me again to be permanent. Business phones came and went. This one? This number? I’d had it since I’d first set foot on UK soil ten years ago. I’d come and gone since then, but despite the primal urge to destroy it, this phone had remained. “I move around,” I said eventually. “And I wanted the offer I’d made to help you to stand the test of time.”
“You’d have taken my call in six months’ time?”
“Six years’ time. I do not make offers like that and not mean them.”
My phone was still buzzing. Cam killed the call and dropped his phone on the counter to join mine. The sudden silence was chilling, but I liked it. Whether he wanted to be or not, Cam was an emotive man. He didn’t need to speak for me to hear him, and right now, his contemplative quiet told me he didn’t quite understand what I’d said, but... he wanted to.
I liked that too.
It was hard to turn my back on him, but I did it anyway. I opened the fridge again and retrieved a glass bottle of water. For myself, I might’ve decanted it into an iced tumbler, but for Cam, I took it to him as it was and pressed it into his palm.
The cool glass against his skin startled him. For a man who’d had me in his crosshairs since I’d opened my door, he hadn’t heard me coming.
Be nice.
I gestured for him to take a seat at the kitchen counter. He hesitated. I sat first and waited for him to join me.
Three, two, one.He pulled out a stool and folded his large frame onto it. He cast a distant stare over the pages of scribbled accounts spread out in front of us but took nothing in.
