Chapter Twenty-One
The morning sun coaxed Amelia awake. Camden was the first thing she noticed before her eyes opened to the new day. Despite the king-size mattress, they had navigated toward each other while sleeping. She was under the possessive grip of his arm and starting to panic.
Going to sleep hadn’t been a problem. Her brain had finally shut down under a mix of sheer bliss and exhaustion.
That was so very gone, and for the moment, she wasn’t sure her brain was cognizant of the human need to fill her lungs with oxygen.
Each breath required a litany of mental commands that were normally involuntary.
But while she was pinned next to the sexiest man she’d ever touched, managing to inhale was a serious effort.
Even when she did, her lungs demanded more oxygen than she’d quietly tried to suck down.
Exhaling wasn’t much better. Each exhalation somehow sounded like she was a linebacker grunting through the Super Bowl.
If she could escape without waking Camden, Amelia could hide in the bathroom and plan her next move.
How had everything seemed so simple before they’d had sex?
She’d wanted what she’d wanted and been up front.
He’d checked the precursory boxes to make sure she was absolutely, positively ready to fuck and then proceeded to nail her brains out.
Amelia rolled onto her side—he rolled too and pulled her close.
Shit. How the hell was she going to escape when she was officially a little spoon?
And oh God, was he an amazing Big Spoon or what?
Mountains of muscles enveloped her in a sinful warmth.
His lips brushed the back of her bare shoulder, and an erratic explosion detonated in her chest. Breathing was overrated.
“Good morning,” he murmured.
She almost laughed at how sleep-drenched his voice was, and she would have if not for the intoxicatingly gruff way he sounded.
The scratchy timbre worked over her skin as a ripple of goosebumps shivered down her limbs.
She should say something pithy and cute, something that would relay how casual everything should still feel, but absolutely zilch came to mind.
Nothing but a low-key hum of awareness blanketed her thoughts.
A sexy rumble of quiet laughter shook in his chest. Camden slept sexily. He laughed sexily. Everything about him was sexy. And she didn’t even have her own clothes or a hairbrush. He was holding onto the opposite of sexy. Why didn’t she see how complicated this would be?
The muffled chirp of his phone rang.
Camden groaned. He reached onto the floor, snagged his pants, and answered the phone with a quick, “Yeah? What?” He grimaced and sat up against the headboard. “Yeah, I was.” Whoever had called wasn’t Camden’s favorite person. Tension ticked in his jaw. “Yeah, we’ll be there.”
He caught her eye with an apologetic wince, and Amelia understood who was on the phone. “Beth?” she mouthed.
Camden raised his chin.
Well, at least Amelia didn’t have to come up with morning-after small talk. She rolled toward the side of the bed. Still on the phone with Beth, he snagged her arm, said goodbye, and tossed the phone aside. Camden scrutinized her face. “You good?”
Her eyebrows arched. Of all the things he might say, that wasn’t what she would’ve guessed. Amelia nodded.
“Gotta tell me, sweetheart. Either way, I want to hear the truth.”
“I’m good.”
His chin lifted almost imperceptibly, as though he was clocking what she said and whether he believed her. “And we’re good?”
“Of course,” she said too quickly. But it was the truth.
She didn’t feel pressured or taken advantage of or anything that should raise red flags.
But the truth was also that she felt… something that she didn’t have a name for.
Hell, she couldn’t even describe it. It was just a tension that went beyond her forgetting how to breathe.
He’d said “we’re” as if they were a we, as in a couple—temporarily.
She needed to remember they were time-boxed into a peculiar situation.
They weren’t friends with benefits. They weren’t fuck buddies.
She’d asked for a distraction, and he’d given her much more than she’d bargained for. That… was the indescribable unknown.
His eyes narrowed. “What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?”
She had no idea but wouldn’t share that little secret. “Last night was a lot of fun.” To put it mildly. “Glad you came to your senses and decided it was a good idea.”
The corners of his eyes twitched. “Glad I did too.”
He let her escape, and stealing the top sheet, she covered her body and retreated to the living room, where her clothes still lay on the floor. Instead of grabbing them, she headed to the kitchen in search of caffeine options.
An electric kettle and a Keurig sat on the counter, and she could have dropped to her knees in praise that she didn’t have to suffer through instant coffee.
The K-cups offered an assortment of options from tea to mocha to dark roast. She chose a medium roast with a pretty label and brewed two mugs of coffee.
She would retrieve her clothes after delivering his mug to him.
Camden stepped out of the bathroom with wet hair and a towel wrapped around his lean waist just above the world’s most dangerous V-cut of muscles. The coffee mugs shook in her hands for a second before she pulled herself together.
“I have caffeine.”
He ignored the mugs and eyed the precariously wrapped sheet tucked into place. “Fuck, you make it hard to focus on work.”
Her cheeks heated, and when he stalked forward, she didn’t know if the coffees would be tossed aside.
But, smart man that he was, he set them on the nightstand and returned to her, tipping her chin up and slanting his mouth over hers.
The clean scent of soap and his minty mouth was irresistible—until she remembered that she needed a toothbrush and a quick rinse.
“I have to take a shower,” she said against his lips.
His phone rang again, and his body tensed.
She could almost read the excuses running through his mind so that he didn’t have to answer.
But for as impulsive as he claimed to be, he let her go, cursing until he answered with the same “Yeah? What?” as before.
He raked a hand through his wet hair and said, “I’ll text you the address.
” He hung up, and the hungry glimmer in his eyes had almost dissipated.
Camden tossed the phone onto the bed, reached for the coffees, and handed her a mug that she’d doctored with powdered creamer and sugar. “Beth’s on her way.”
“What?” Amelia had no doubt that Beth would be able to pick up on how they’d spent their night if she didn’t jump into the shower. “I don’t have my bag.”
The problem wasn’t just a lack of clean clothes.
She didn’t have her makeup or hair products or anything that would leave her feeling as on top of the world as she needed to be when facing off with Beth.
Then she stopped and turned to Camden. She hadn’t even asked the reason for the meeting.
How could she have let one night of really great sex erase the reason they were doing this to begin with?
Guilt needled under her skin. “Why are we meeting Beth?”
“She says there’s some place we need to see.”
“Was my sister there?”
He lifted his shoulders. “Guess so. Beth doesn’t give straight answers, and I didn’t waste my time asking.” His finger tapped against his coffee mug. “You ready to go down this path?”
She nodded. “You didn’t tell Beth about the people following us last night.”
“I didn’t say a whole lot of anything.”
“How come? I thought the CIA didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I don’t think they do. Otherwise, they would have just knocked on the door and not gone through that whole shitshow. But…” He shrugged. “Trust but verify.”
She sipped her coffee and wondered what news about Hailey the day would bring. Three weeks had passed since that awful night, almost four. Where the hell was Hailey?
“There’s different sizes in there.” Camden gestured toward the dresser. “I don’t know about bras but socks and underwear. I’m not sure if there will be any pants and shirts you want to wear, though. We can swing by your condo later and stock up on whatever you need.”
“I’ll wear my shirt and jeans from last night.” She padded into the bathroom, which was still steamy from his quick shower.
In the corner of her eye, Camden dropped the towel and dressed.
This was a terrifying level of intimacy.
Or maybe he didn’t even think twice. When a person looked like Camden did, maybe modesty didn’t matter.
But he didn’t come off that way. How had she blustered her way into his bedroom?
She was so far out of his league that she didn’t know which way was up.
Until that morning, the idea of getting physical with him had seemed like the best distraction she could imagine. Distractions had consequences.
An hour later, Beth had whisked Amelia and Camden from the safe house and wasn’t telling them where they were going except that it was someplace Hailey and Jonathan had worked.
Camden didn’t seem all that concerned. From the back seat of Beth’s sleek Lexus, Amelia had come up with ten thousand possibilities and stopped adding to her list only when Beth drove through the front gates of an industrial complex, announcing that they were there.
Amelia scanned the decrepit landscape. Overgrown weeds threaded through a rusted chain-link fence topped with sagging barbed wire.
The parking lot looked immaculate compared to the building behind it.
The three-story brick monstrosity might have once been a bustling manufacturing depot, but that wasn’t the case anymore and probably hadn’t been in decades.
This place wasn’t on her list of ten thousand possibilities.
Camden snorted from the front passenger seat. “Hope everyone’s up to date on their tetanus boosters.”