Chapter 15 #2
“Tax evasion?” he chokes out.
“In my humble opinion, the IRS has bigger issues to deal with than an undocumented sale of a birthday cake. But nope, my accountant’s too straitlaced to even consider the idea.”
“Probably because it’s illegal.”
With a hmph, I shrug. “So is jaywalking and not picking up after your dog.”
“You realize you just admitted to wanting to commit tax evasion in front of your investor, right?” he asks with an indulgent grin.
I shake my head and wander to the kitchen, waving at him to follow. “Nope. I was telling my fake boyfriend, not my business investor. Separation of church and state and all that.”
“I don’t think that’s how that phrase works.” He sheds his jacket and hangs it on my coatrack. The tension from earlier has dissolved completely, the air no longer so thick.
“Well, it should be,” I say as he enters the kitchen.
I look out at the living room, doing a quick scan. By some miracle, my apartment isn’t too messy, other than in here.
“Besides, you can’t use fake-boyfriend intel in your investor capacity. That’s entrapment.”
His shoulders shake with silent laughter. “Also not how that works.”
“Considering I’m the one who went to law school, I trust my expertise.” I cock a brow, daring him to use my dropout status as an argument against me.
He doesn’t.
He only watches me, his expression even.
Satisfied, I nod to a nearby stool. “Make yourself at home. I need to take these out of the oven.”
He wanders over to the counter, where my calendar and notebook lie open. “This looks like a Candyland board game.”
I let out a loud laugh as I set the trays on top of the stove to cool.
“Seriously. I think I need 3D glasses to decode this thing.” He squints, leaning closer to the pages. With his lips pursed, he tilts his head one way, then the other, like he’s analyzing the page, trying to piece out how my brain works. “What are all of these notes for?”
“I’m doing a wedding in the spring and had a meeting with the party planner this morning.”
“Interesting,” he says, nodding.
I laugh, the ghost of a flush kissing my cheeks. “Is it?”
His green gaze captures mine, nothing but honesty there. “Yes.”
I turn away and busy myself finishing up the frosting so he doesn’t see the flush on my cheeks. While my friends and family enjoy my final products, I can’t say any of them are particularly interested in the process of creating them.
“This wedding seems like a lot of work,” he notes after a minute.
“It is,” I admit, setting down a piping bag. “The biggest cake I’ve baked and decorated was for a seventy-five-guest backyard wedding, and even that had me working sixteen-hour days in the week leading up to it. Four hundred guests is a completely different ballgame.”
“Worth it, though?”
My heart skips a beat. “Very much so.” Since the moment I left the meeting, my fingers have tingled and my mind has raced with possibilities. “It’s for an ultra-wealthy couple, and if all goes well, this could lead to a lot of new business.”
“It will go well,” Cameron replies almost instantly.
My chest tightens a little, anxiety creeping back in. “The bride wants soft flavors.”
That cracks his cool composure. His lips curl up on one side. “What the fuck’s a soft flavor?”
“Could be a champagne cake with fresh berry compote between the layers or a vanilla bean cake with Swiss meringue buttercream,” I muse, running a hand through my hair.
“She also wants florals on the cake, specifically lilies. But they can be poisonous, so there’s no way in hell I’m going to use them.
” I shuffle to the sink and wash my hands, peering over my shoulder at him.
“So I also have to design a few cakes that wow the pants off her so she forgets what a lily is. And I want to practice sugar flowers as a backup if something goes wrong with the floral vendor. I’m not familiar with her florist’s work, so I’d rather be cautious.
Then, of course, I need to rent a bigger vehicle for transport, maybe even invest in a better cake stand, and…
” I sigh as I dry my hands on a clean towel. “There’s a lot of room for error.”
He lets out a low whistle. “Damn.”
“Yup,” I confirm with a grimace, partly because my uterus is torturing me again, partly because I’m psyching myself out. “I was offered the opportunity right after the bank rejected my loan, so you have this cake to thank for my willingness to be your fake boo thang.”
“I’ll be sure to send the happy couple a thank-you note.”
I laugh, readying to tell him how relieved I am to not have to stress about baking in a cramped space anymore, but I’m cut off when a sharp pain shoots through my stomach, stealing my breath.
Fuck. If men were the ones with menstrual cycles, I guarantee there’d be paid time off to deal with the anguish and no such thing as the tampon tax.
“What’s wrong?” He sits up straighter, his muscles tense and on alert. “Are you okay?”
I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. “Yep.”
He stands, frowning at me. “You don’t look okay.”
“Thanks. That’s just what every woman wants to hear,” I mutter.
Grunting, he crosses his arms. “Answer my question and tell me what’s wrong.”
I’m too distracted to point out that barking orders and asking a question are two very different things.
“I’m fine,” I repeat. “Simply shedding an internal organ.”
He tilts his head, that brow pulled low. “You have your period?”
“Yep.” I choke out a laugh. Leave it to Cameron to be confident enough to not sugarcoat a woman’s biological functions. “Can you grab me a glass of water while I find ibuprofen? Cups are in the cupboard above the sink.”
By the time I’ve located the medicine, he’s waiting with a glass of water in hand. My fridge is one of the fancy ones that has a built-in ice and water machine on the door, yet there isn’t a single cube floating at the surface.
“I remember you asking for no ice when we went out to dinner,” he explains, answering the question before I’ve voiced it.
Worried the idiotic smile trying to break free will succeed, I toss all three pills into my mouth and swallow them down. How I prefer my water wasn’t on my list of get-to-know-you questions, nor was it a detail I explicitly told him. It’s one he clearly picked up on his own.
Once I’ve chugged half of the water and wiped my mouth with my wrist, Cameron sits again. “What else do you need?”
“To lay on the couch with a heating pad and wallow in the woes of being a woman.”
With a snort, he stands again. “Okay. Show me the way.”
I snag my heating pad off the counter, then lead Cameron to the couch, where I promptly slump into the over-worn cushions.
He sits next to me, giving me space, yet close enough that his body heat soaks into me. “Do you want me to give you an orgasm?”
My lungs seize up and I choke on my iceless water. “Excuse me?”
He shrugs casually, as if that wasn’t the most out of left-field thing he’s ever said. “Orgasms can help with pain. They trigger oxytocin and dopamine. When I have a headache, I jerk off. It does more than Tylenol or Motrin ever has.”
All I can do is blink at him. Is this how he feels when I ask him questions he isn’t expecting? Completely thrown off and not sure what to think, let alone say? Did he switch my ibuprofen out with a hallucinogenic? Because there’s no way he said that. Right?
He laughs, his eyes lit with amusement. “I didn’t think it was possible to stun you silent.”
“You—” I snap my mouth shut, then try again. “You just announced that you jack off when your head hurts, as if you were mentioning the weather. And then offered to give me an orgasm.”
“Would you have preferred I used more clinical terminology?” His lips kick up on one side. He’s enjoying this far too much. “Masturbation for the purposes of pain relief through endorphin release?”
Another cramp hits, worse than the last, before I can come up with a witty response. I curl in on myself, pressing my palm against my lower abdomen like that’s ever helped. It feels like my insides are being wrung out like a wet towel.
“Jesus,” Cameron mutters. “That bad?”
“It’s fine,” I grit out, though we both know it’s a lie.
“It’s not. You should have an orgasm.”
I muster up the energy to glare at him. “I’m not sure what you know about female orgasms, Cameron, but it takes more than telling a woman to have one to actually make it happen.”
“I’ll excuse your sarcasm since you’re clearly in pain.” He quirks a brow. “And I offered to give you one.”
“Are you a vampire?”
He jerks his head back. “What?”
“You must be a vampire.” I nod at my illogical conclusion. “You’ve only entered my apartment after being explicitly invited in and it’s the only explanation I can think of for why you would want to experience the horror movie known as my uterus right now.”
He bursts out laughing, the deep sound making my stomach flip in a way that has nothing to do with cramps. “I was thinking along the lines of you riding my thigh with your clothes on.”
Oh. That’s a whole lot less intimidating than what I’ve been imagining, but also infinitely more intimate. The idea of grinding against him, of his attention on me, holding the reins of his control—
Another cramp hits, the pain breaking through my spiraling thoughts and pulling a gasp from me.
“Yes or no, sweetheart?” He watches me carefully, his face serious despite the casual lean of his posture.
“You make no sense,” I tell him. “I invited you up after the Copper Lantern and you said thanks, but no thanks. Now you want me to ride your thigh?”
“You’re in pain, and I have a solution,” he says as if that explains it. “And my response that night had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me.”
If I wasn’t in such agony, I’d roll my eyes. “That’s a cliche.”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”
“This is ridiculous.” I shake my head. “You’re ridiculous.”