He wasn’t sure why he’d come here. Or why he got out of the car and stood on the front porch. It was stupid. It was beyond stupid really, especially when he heard footsteps come up behind him. He whipped around and froze.
CJ stood there, gun out. “Good way to get yourself killed.”
Just looking at the first and only love of his life was a gut punch. And a heart punch. And a soul punch . . .
God, he’d been so stupid. And wasted so much time. “Getting killed isn’t the plan,” he said mildly, even with his heart in his throat. “At least not tonight.”
CJ just shook his head as he shoved his gun into the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back. The jeans were the only thing he wore, and the difference between the too-skinny eighteen-year-old CJ and the now ripped twenty-eight-year-old CJ was . . . eye-opening.
“So what was your plan?” his past asked, still looking pissed off.
Plan? Gavin had no idea. So he went with his first instinct. He yanked CJ close and kissed him, the man’s erotic growl of surprise spearing heat through Gavin’s entire body. His hands came up to slide into CJ’s hair, against his scalp, tugging him closer still, the kiss a haunting, almost forgotten combo of promise and connection.
“Stupid plan,” CJ said when they came up for air.
“No shit.”
“I should kick your ass.”
Gavin smiled. “You could try.”
CJ shook his head. “You’re not even the slightest bit sorry you tried to sneak into a cop’s house undetected.”
“I’m a little sorry,” he said with a shrug, adrenaline still pumping through him. “But probably not nearly as much as you think I should be . . .”
Swearing roughly, CJ gripped Gavin’s biceps hard.
Shoving me away or pulling me in?
They stared at each other until a rough groan tore from CJ’s throat and he yanked Gavin inside.
Chapter 15
“Careful, payback’s a bitch.”
A few days later, Piper was exhausted and just leaving the station after a long twelve hours at work when she got a text from Winnie.
Meet me at the lake at the tire swing. p.s. maybe change first. Nothing personal, but it wouldn’t hurt you to up your game from your usual fashion sense, which screams “I’m cold and tired.”
Piper looked down at her fleece-lined stretch pants and oversized flannel button-down. Okay, so maybe her sister had a point. When she got home, she upgraded to jeans, but stuck with the flannel shirt because comfort.
Besides, there were other things to worry about. Like her siblings. Her motto had always been, if she couldn’t fix it, she put it on a list and set it aside for later. Some people might consider that denial, but she called it survival.
But she and Winnie had a lot to work on.
The swing was about a half mile around the north side of the lake where the landscape was open wildland. The three of them had spent many, many summer days there, chasing the ducks, swimming, and using the tire swing—which hung from a huge old oak tree—to jump into the lake. Well, Winnie and Gavin had. Piper never jumped into the lake.
As she walked, she told herself that Winnie’s text seemed like a white flag, a way to meet in the middle, in a place where there were only good memories. She had no idea what to expect, but when she got there twenty minutes later, there was a cute picnic basket at the water’s edge.
But no Winnie.
Piper sat down on the blanket, and while she waited, pulled out her journal. She thumbed to her Home Depot list and what she needed in order to finish upgrading the cottages, but quickly got bored with that and flipped the pages to her secret secret bucket list.
So many things to add . . .
But she realized that all of them, the things she’d written and the things she hadn’t, represented one thing.
Loneliness.
It was a hard pill to swallow. She’d purposely protected her heart to save it from the pitfalls of life, and in doing so, had closed herself off.
The truth was, she wanted to be wanted. She wanted to feel something. She wanted passion and hunger and desire, but more than any of that, she wanted someone to feel those things for her.
It’d been a long time since something or someone had moved her. She stared out at the water. It was still warm. This entire winter had been warmer than any she could remember. The lake sparkled from the late-afternoon sun, the water a deep blue. But that wasn’t what she saw. She was seeing, remembering, Cam coming out of the shadows late at night, as he had a few nights before, to help her paint the cottages. She was seeing the muscles in his arms and shoulders bunch and stretch the material of his shirt taut as he moved so effortlessly with the roller, making more headway in minutes than she had in hours.
She was seeing him grin at the paint on her face, looking so playful and relaxed that she “accidentally” painted her hand and then patted him on the back as he worked.
And then his butt. “Oops,” she’d said. “I just got paint on your best body part.”
He’d flashed her a full wolf grin. “That’s not my best body part.”
After they’d finished painting, he’d kissed her good night, and it’d been her to deepen the kiss. He’d given a low, rough, sexy male growl of approval and pressed her up against a dry wall to free up his hands. And goodness, those talented, knowing hands . . . She’d been desperately trying to get down to bare skin when her phone had gone off. One of the other EMTs had gone home sick and they’d needed Piper immediately.
Now, in the light of day, with her good spots still quivering at the midnight memories, she added a new item to her list:
Discover Cam’s best body part.
When she realized she was smiling wickedly, she shook her head. She’d finally cracked, no doubt from a deadly lack of orgasms. But hey, that was a fixable problem. And if she got it together before Cam left Wildstone, she could fix it with him. Hmm. Maybe she should start a list on how exactly to make that happen. Or where she wanted it to happen . . . With a grin, she wrote: Have sex not on a bed . . . Then a shadow fell over her.
She jumped and slammed the journal shut as Cam sat down next to her.
He studied her face, his own amused. “I’d give a lot of money to know what you were just writing.”
She lifted a shoulder. “Making a shopping list.”
He shook his head. “You’re a terrible liar.”
This was true, and she felt her cheeks burn. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Wow. Lies on lies. Now I really want to know.” Leaning in, his mouth brushed her earlobe. “Bet I could get it out of you.”
If he kept doing that, the truth wasn’t the only thing he’d get out of her. And where was Winnie? She looked around. No sister in sight. What the hell?
“You waiting for someone?” Cam asked.
“Winnie. And she’s late. What are you doing here?”
He opened his mouth, but her stomach growling loudly beat him to it.
With a smile, Cam opened the basket and pulled out the cheese and crackers, and got busy with a knife.
She devoured the first cheesed-up cracker he handed her, and he quickly made her another.
This time she managed to slow down enough that he was able to make one for himself in between feeding her. When he stopped to suck some cheese off his thumb, the sound made her shiver.