Chapter 40
I was so relieved to find him sleeping when I got back to the villa. His arm was flung across his chest, and he was . . .
God, he was clutching my pillow.
We were due on Victor and Amber’s yacht tonight, so I decided to take the opportunity of him being unconscious to get changed in peace. What he’d said earlier – or almost said – had freaked me out more than I wanted to admit. I was glad he was out cold.
I went into the bathroom and struggled for longer than I should have getting myself into my evening dress, the one Philly had insisted on. As I walked out again, I was making a final adjustment to the straps.
‘Wow. You look amazing.’ His sleepy voice came wafting up from the bed.
‘At least this one has a hem,’ I said, looking at myself in the mirror.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ he asked.
I shrugged. ‘No idea, found you like that.’
‘What’s the time?’
I glanced at my watch. ‘Almost time to go. You have thirty minutes to get ready.’
He stood up lazily and stretched. God, his arms . . . I was so pathetic, it was embarrassing.
I looked away and back at my face in the mirror.
One of the hardest parts about this undercover assignment had been the make-up.
I’d never really worn much – some concealer for a breakout, mascara here and there, and lip gloss if it was a special occasion.
When I’d gone shopping for clothes, Philly had also talked me into getting some fancy cosmetics, and I figured that if there was ever a time to try and look like I belonged on a yacht, it was probably tonight.
I reached into my make-up bag and pulled out a lip pencil and lipstick.
They were both a vibrant red. I’d never worn that colour before, though I’d often seen women with red lipstick and thought how amazing it looked.
Kind of badass. I was about to put them back when . . .
‘You’d look amazing in red lipstick.’
I turned. Cam was standing closer to me than I’d realised.
‘It would go really well with that dress too.’
‘I’ve never worn red lipstick in my life,’ I said. I opened the lipstick and rolled it out, then took the top off the liner. ‘Yeah . . . uh . . . no. I’m not going to try this. I have no idea how to put it on.’
He moved closer. ‘I can do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Put it on.’
I looked at him sideways. ‘You absolutely cannot.’
‘I can.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. For two reasons: firstly, I genuinely didn’t think he could actually do it, and secondly, I did not want him close to me in any way, not after what had happened earlier, which was something I was totally okay with pretending had not happened.
‘I’m not going to take no for an answer,’ he said.
‘And what makes you qualified to be my make-up artist tonight?’
He grinned. ‘Well, you know how I told you I do Wordle every day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I also took up art.’
I blinked. ‘You what?’
‘Once a week I go to this art class. It’s me and about ten women in their sixties. They mostly complain about their husbands’ snoring and the way their kids parent their grandchildren, and then they fuss over me because I haven’t settled down with a nice woman yet.’
I burst out laughing.
‘I’m serious. I’ve actually got pretty good,’ he said.
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘What possessed you?’
‘Don’t you ever feel like your life is a bit . . . one-dimensional?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like all you do is work, and that if you didn’t work, you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself?’
‘I mean . . . work is all I do.’
‘No hobbies?’
‘My work is my hobby.’
‘Yeah, mine used to be too. Until I got injured in the field and had to take six months off. I thought I was going to go insane and I needed to do something, so I took up some hobbies. I thought I’d give them up when I went back to work, but I missed them, and I missed my pensioner friends too.
I’m really good at painting fruit bowls now. ’
My stomach had plummeted. I hadn’t heard anything past the injured in the field part. ‘You were injured?’
‘There was an altercation. I got shoved. Hit my head.’
‘What? Oh my God.’ My heart thumped.
‘It’s fine now.’ He took my hand and brought it round to the back of his head. ‘Feel here.’
‘Is this a scar?’ I asked, running my fingers over the clear ridge that cut across the back of his skull.
‘I had to have surgery,’ he said, and my heart did more than thump this time.
‘Brain surgery . . . in the brain?’
He smiled. ‘That’s usually where they do brain surgery.’
I shook my head. A sudden bolt of panic was followed by a wave of intense sadness. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I didn’t know what else to say, so many strange emotions were sprinting through me.
‘I’m fine now. Don’t worry. Now give me the lipstick.’
I pulled back. ‘Just because you can paint a fruit bowl doesn’t mean you can apply lipstick.’
‘Want to bet?’
‘Yeah. Actually I do.’
Cam laughed and snatched the lipstick from my hand. ‘Okay, what are we betting on?’ But before I could open my mouth to reply, he’d already taken my chin in his hand.
‘I—’
‘Shh.’ He silenced me with a finger over my lips. ‘Now don’t move.’
‘But—’
‘Just close your eyes,’ he said softly.
And so against my better judgement, I did.
He tilted my chin up gently with one finger.
I paused, waited for something to happen, and when it did, when he brought that pencil down on my lips and started tracing the outline slowly, so, so slowly, it felt more like foreplay than actual make-up.
Then came the lipstick itself. My lips tingled from the pressure, from the closeness of him, from hearing his breathing, from feeling it on my face.
I opened my eyes slowly.
He was staring at me. Just like he had earlier, except this time I couldn’t smell incense and there wasn’t a woman floating around us in white linen. I stared back, and the world seemed to shrink down around me. His eyes drifted from mine back to my lips, then back up to my eyes.
‘There,’ he said, pulling away to admire his work.
‘No, wait. Come back.’ He leaned in close again, then placed his finger on the edge of my lip and dragged it slowly across.
The world shrank even more. It was now impossibly tiny, consisting only of my lips and his finger tracing them, nothing else.
‘Perfect,’ he said softly, before removing his finger. I immediately missed it more than I could describe. ‘Beautiful.’
I cleared my throat and quickly turned away from him. ‘Not bad,’ I said, looking in the mirror. ‘If this whole undercover thing doesn’t pan out, I guess you can always get a job at Sephora.’
‘Are we still doing this?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘What Sage said. You deflecting with spiky sarcasm and then me making a joke, and the two of us going round and round like that. Apparently, according to her, we’ve been doing it for ten lives already.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Please, you didn’t actually believe all of that, did you?’
‘I didn’t believe it all, but let me tell you what I did believe.’ He moved closer to me again. ‘That moment when you were on my lap and we were looking at each other, I believed that.’
‘That was probably just you high on the incense fumes.’
‘See . . . this.’ He gestured between us. ‘This is what she was talking about, and what I mean. The sarcasm, the snappiness, the constant one-upmanship. You winning, me winning, trying to beat each other at everything.’
‘That’s just what we do, Cam. What we’ve always done.’
‘Well, maybe I don’t want to do that any more.
Maybe I don’t want to only touch you because I’ve got you in a submission hold and I’m trying to get you to tap out.
’ He took another dangerous – very dangerous – step closer and his voice grew softer.
‘Maybe I want to touch you because I just want to.’
My mouth opened, then closed again. I had nothing to say to that.
‘Why does it all have to be about winning?’
‘We’ve never not been like that,’ I said.
‘Yes, we were. Once. That morning when we woke up and just . . . lay there. Together.’ He reached out and touched my chin again. ‘We were on the same team.’
I looked down at my hands. It felt too intense to look straight back at him. ‘You bring out the competitive streak in me.’
‘You too, and don’t get me wrong, I like that we do that. Sometimes I fucking love it, but also, sometimes it would just be nice . . . not to.’
‘You know we have to be on the yacht in ten minutes, right?’
‘I know,’ Cam said, still looking at me.
‘So technically we are almost running late.’
He smiled. ‘Technically, but maybe cosmically we are actually finally on time.’
I pushed him away. ‘See, now you’re doing it. Deflecting with humour, or whatever Sage said.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Lizzy, I’m being dead serious.’
‘Really? Cosmically?’
‘Maybe it’s the only thing that explains the effect we have on each other.’
‘I doubt that. It’s time to leave, Cam. I’ll wait outside.’ I started walking away, but then stopped. ‘And by the way, we’re doing it my way tonight.’
‘And what way is that?’
‘Less chatting and more breaking and entering.’ I stepped out into the hot night.
In many ways she was so predictable. She was no doubt going to pretend that all of this meant nothing. But I knew better. It meant everything, whether she was ready to admit it or not.
Maybe we weren’t ready for it six years ago; maybe that was why I hadn’t chased after her and said what I needed to say. But now that I had her in my sights, I wasn’t letting go. This time I was going to say what needed to be said.
I smiled. She could deny it all she wanted, but I would make sure she realised how so not pretend any of this was.
Because I was also going to remind her just how good we were together . . .