CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As if I’d conjured him up, Camden was standing behind me. I twirled around and saw the way his eyes darkened, how his chest went up and down a bit faster, like I was the one making him feel like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room.
“Wow,” he said. “You are stunning.”
I resisted the urge to preen a little, enjoying his appreciation more than I should have. It wasn’t too long ago that I didn’t want any men to look at me, but like I’d told him, he was different. “Thank you.”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to wear a red dress to a bullfight?”
I laughed and asked, “What does that even mean?”
“We already established that you’re a smart woman, Rachel.”
Was I about to get run down by a randy bull? Maybe Camden would pick me up and throw me over his shoulder to have his way with me. I tried to tamp down the little thrills rising up inside me.
While I was busy trying to calm my rampaging heartbeat, he pointed at my shoulder. “Maybe I should finish what I started. It looks like I didn’t do a good job of massaging your shoulder.”
If he’d done it any better, I might have died. “It’s fine, thanks.” I noticed that he was carrying a bottle of water. “You’re not drinking tonight?”
“Sadie asked me not to. I’m not the designated driver since we’re not going anywhere, but I’m the designated nobody-gets-a-face-tattoo-or-a-black-eye guy. I’ve got to protect those pictures, right?” When I smiled at him, he asked, “What about you?”
“I’m drinking soda to spite Mary-Ellen.”
He just nodded and I actually kind of loved the fact that he didn’t even ask me why. Krista would have done the same thing because she knew me so well. It felt a little like he did, too.
“So,” I said, “what are you guys doing here? I thought you had some big boys’ night planned.”
“We did. But Dan didn’t want to be away from Sadie. She told him she was going to drink tonight and I suspect he was afraid things might get a tad out of control.”
“He doesn’t trust her?” I asked.
“Of course he does. He’s just protective.”
“Nothing says ‘I trust you’ like a combined bachelor and bachelorette party.”
Camden shrugged and said, “I told him not to worry, but he didn’t listen. I knew that you were here and that you’d have things in hand.”
His words stung a little. Like I was some fuddy-duddy stick-in-the-mud. “Because I’m the boring one?”
“What? No. Because you’re the loyal one who puts her friends above everything else.”
Only I wasn’t really friends with Sadie. I mean, I was, we liked each other, but it was a lie. Maybe I should have considered it more of a white lie. Like, “I really like your new haircut,” or “We should definitely catch up soon,” or all of Instagram.
Either Vance or Rick made a huge whooping sound and the entire table broke into laughter. They all definitely seemed to be feeling more than a little happy.
“We should get back over there to keep an eye on them,” I said and Camden nodded. I hurried back, not wanting to linger too close so that my body didn’t get any bright ideas.
I slid into the seat next to Krista and she said, “Ooh, the man you obsess over is here.”
“I don’t obsess,” I corrected her, speaking softly so that we wouldn’t be overheard. “I think about him the exact right amount.” Which was all the time, so maybe she was right about the obsession thing.
“Well, know that I’m here as your best friend. How do we play this thing tonight? Am I going for polite but cool toward him? Or super friendly? Do I make myself scarce? Or are we going to end up in jail tonight? You know I’m down for anything.”
This was why I loved her. “I’ll be fine.”
And I truly believed that right up until the moment Dan said, “We should do something fun. Play a drinking game.”
Mary-Ellen pounded on the table with her open palm and said, “No! We should play something even better. Like Truth or Dare!”
I wanted to say that was not really a game for adults, but then she added, “I’ll go first. Camden?” It was obvious what her dare was going to be, that she planned on manipulating this situation, and I couldn’t stop the jealousy that swelled up inside me. “I dare you to ki—”
“Wait!” Sadie interjected, cutting her off. “I’m the bride. Shouldn’t I get the first turn?” Her gaze turned toward me and I knew. I just knew. “Rachel! I dare you to kiss Camden!”
She was trying to protect her fiancé’s best friend, in her own way. I could recognize that, even if all the blood had left my head and pooled at my feet. She was doing her best to head off Mary-Ellen. Sadie turned to me, apologetic and pleading and more than a little drunk.
“Aren’t you supposed to give me a choice in the matter?” I asked, already knowing what was going to happen. “Don’t I get to decide whether I’m telling a truth or doing a dare?”
Dan was mumbling something, looking annoyed, but Sadie ignored him. I couldn’t look at Camden. I didn’t want to see his reaction. My pulse was already throbbing so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t think straight—if he had that smoldering “I want to kiss you” look in his eyes, there was no way I could resist him.
“Wait, I get to go first and do my dare,” Mary-Ellen insisted, zeroing in on Camden and missing all of Sadie’s very blatant cues.
“Did you not just hear me say that I’m the bride?” Sadie said, sounding both determined and apologetic. She was definitely trying to help keep Mary-Ellen far away from Camden, even if I didn’t like the way she’d gone about it. “You have to do it!”
“Rachel’s the shy type,” Krista offered. “She’ll need privacy.”
I’d never been more grateful for her. I’d get away from prying eyes, rationally explain to Camden why this was a bad idea, and everyone would be none the wiser.
“How do we know they won’t just lie about it?” Rick asked, obviously noting my slight sense of utter panic.
“Camden won’t,” Dan said.
“Rachel totally would,” Sadie said, making my panic increase a hundredfold. Was she about to break the NDA herself and upend everything we’d been working toward? It would be better for me to just get this over with than to have a drunken Sadie try to explain herself and put my business in danger.
“There’s a storage closet!” Mary-Ellen shrieked with excitement, seeming to forget that she had just wanted to be the one making out with him. “I saw it when the bartender was getting more champagne!”
At this point it seemed like everyone was a bit overexuberant and I was going to say as much, but Sadie had jumped up and grabbed both me and Camden by the wrists and was pulling us back toward the storage closet.
“Sadie, wait a second,” I tried. This was truly the stupidest thing that had ever happened to me. I attempted to pull my wrist out of her grasp, but she was surprisingly strong.
Mary-Ellen raced ahead, opening the door for us, and Sadie pushed us inside, shutting us in. “Don’t come back out until you’ve smooched!”
It was a very tiny closet and Camden was pressed against me. I tried to back up but hit shelves and heard the clanking of glass bottles.
“Careful,” he said.
I felt something metallic brush against my face and realized it was a chain for the overhead light. I pulled on it and a very dim light bulb came to life.
“What is that?” I asked. “One watt?”
He didn’t answer. I finally made eye contact with him and realized that the fading light made shadows over the planes of his face, hiding his eyes from me. This somehow made him more exciting and this moment both thrilling and nerve-racking.
“Is it happening?” I heard Mary-Ellen ask.
“I don’t know!” was Sadie’s reply. I leaned over and hit the door with my fist, their fading giggles letting me know that they were scurrying off.
“You didn’t put up much resistance,” I said to him.
He reached up to rest his hand on the shelf just above my head, effectively boxing me into place. “Why would I?”
His words burned inside me, melting away my rational thought.
“This is stupid,” I protested, attempting to ignore the way my internal body temperature seemed to keep rising. “We’re not thirteen.”
“No, we’re not,” he agreed.
“We don’t have to actually kiss. They wouldn’t know.”
“We would know. We wouldn’t want to be dishonest.” He had shifted closer to me and my heart throbbed so hard in my throat that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to speak.
I held on to the one argument I could think of. “What about Dan?”
Now he was nuzzling my hair on the side of my face and even though he technically wasn’t touching my skin, it felt like he was. “I don’t want to kiss Dan.”
“No.” I gulped. “I meant he doesn’t want anything like this to happen.”
“Then they shouldn’t have put us in a tiny closet together.”
It wasn’t like we could hold them accountable. “They’re all tipsy.”
“That sounds like a them problem.” He reached up to push my hair behind my ear, then ran his fingers down the side of my face.
Sighing with delight, I said, “They don’t know what they’re doing. We do.”
“You’re right. We do. We’re adults. We can make our own decisions. Any decision we want.”
Everything he was saying made such complete and total sense. Here I’d been so proud of myself for keeping my urges in check. I’d spent an entire night next to him and totally resisted his overwhelming magnetism. I’d counted that as some kind of win.
But there was about to be a total upset.
I could feel it. I knew he could, too.
This was what had changed between us.
He reached out with his left hand, resting it on my waist and pulling me closer to him. The shock of his body pressed fully against mine made my brain stop working.
“We should kiss,” he murmured next to my mouth and I burned for him to press his lips against mine.
“We should kiss,” I said, like he was using some kind of Jedi mind trick on me.
“It would be a good idea.”
I nodded. He was totally right. “Yes, it would be a good idea.”
“Onomatopoeia.”
“What?”
“Sorry, I thought you were going to keep repeating everything I said.”
“Maybe ...,” I said, pushing forward, wrapping my arms around his neck. “Maybe this isn’t a time to joke.”
“I wish you were always this agreeable.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t. I like you just the way you are,” he said.
The anticipation was literally killing me. Even though a part of my brain was screaming that I was headed for a hormonal Chernobyl—that there would be a huge explosion and then a ton of fallout—I didn’t care.
I knew I should care. Maybe it was because the time we had left together would be so short that I was rationalizing why this would be okay, despite what I’d said to Krista. Or because I’d wanted to kiss him for what felt like an actual eternity that doing so suddenly seemed reasonable. Logical, even.
His hands pressed into my back. “Do you feel sick?”
Other than taking a total leave of my senses? “Nope.”
“Drunk?”
“Not even a little.”
“Good.” His lips made contact with my forehead, kissing me gently, almost like he couldn’t resist doing so for one more second. I let out a soft noise, loving the way that felt.
He pulled back. “Rachel, do you want me to kiss you?”
I was so focused on the physical sensations he was creating that it took me a second to register what he was doing. He was making sure I wasn’t impaired in any way and then giving me the option to say yes or no. He knew what he wanted and now he was telling me the rest was up to me.
There would be no backtracking on this, no “whoops, we made a mistake, I didn’t mean to put my tongue in your mouth, I was just caught up” kind of situation. I was here, so was he, and we were both agreeing to this.
The words justfriends kept repeating in my head, reminding me of the boundaries that I’d set for myself and what I should be doing. But I forgot about everything else. About Sadie and Dan with his rules, about the wedding, the NDA, my responsibilities—everything beyond that door ceased to exist for me.
There was only here and now with him.
Pressing my fingers against the back of his neck I whispered, “Camden, I want you to kiss me.”