“Is your door locked?”
“Yes, why?”
Dipping his head, he kissed the hollow of her throat, then made his way to her ear, which he nibbled. “Because I’m about to thank you for watching over me,” he whispered, his voice and stubble both giving gave her a full body shiver. “And I’m going to be very thorough in giving thanks.”
“Cam.” Her hands slid into his hair as he kissed his way south. “You should really rest—” She broke off with a low moan when he pushed her shirt up out of his way to capture a breast with his mouth. “Um—”
“You don’t understand . . .” Apparently her shirt had to go because he tugged it off. “No one’s ever taken care of me before, not like you did.”
She tried to think about what he was saying, tried to grasp the meaning behind it, but suddenly she was naked and he was sliding down her body, his hands on her thighs as he looked his fill. Then he locked eyes with her again. “Pretty,” he breathed, and used his mouth to tour her body, mapping it. Every inch.
“Piper.”
The full-body Cam experience was incredibly distracting. “Hmm?”
“You with me?”
“Are you kidding me? When I’m with you like this, I can’t think of anything else, even if I wanted to.”
“Good.” He bent his head to her again, his mission clear. When his mouth touched her, heat exploded deep inside, melting everything else away as he performed his special brand of fire and magic. She already knew he liked to touch and taste, and especially liked to linger.
She had zero complaints.
By the time she could once again drag air into her taxed lungs, she was sprawled out, boneless and sated, making contented, purring happy kitten noises.
They dozed, until Piper jerked awake from the realization that she was feeling things she’d never let herself feel before. Terrifying, because this wasn’t real, it was temporary—
A pair of arms closed around her and she startled. Cam turned her around to face him and kissed her forehead. “You okay?”
Burying her face in the crook of his neck, she just breathed him in for a long moment, willing herself to let go of the worry and angst about what was to come, and just live in the here and now. The future would be what it would be. No use spoiling the present, since it happened to be pretty damn awesome at the moment.
“Very okay,” she whispered, brushing a kiss to his throat.
He took a deep breath and his arms tightened a little, his hand tracing circles over her back, reassuring. Comforting. And she wondered how it was that he always knew what she needed before even she did.
THE NEXT TIME she woke up, she was alone and a little befuddled. The sun was trying to burn her eyelids. Sitting up, she looked at her clock. Dawn had come and gone—three hours ago. She was alone, vaguely remembering Cam pressing a kiss to a bare shoulder, saying something about needing to get to the marina to help his dad because they were busy on Sundays.
She’d gone back to sleep.
She never went back to sleep.
She got up, wrapped herself in a blanket, and felt like a zombie as she staggered to the kitchen toward the scent of coffee. This meant going through the living room, where she jolted to a halt at the sight of Gavin letting a man out the front door.
Ry.
She nearly fell over trying to back up out of sight, but her inadvertent “oh shit” had both men turning toward her.
Gavin’s brows went up.
Her ex took a slow sweep of her and said, “About time.”
This from the guy who’d once claimed to love her, but had also said she was emotionally deficient. And for a long time Piper had believed him.
Until maybe right now.
Because she was beginning to realize she wasn’t emotionally deficient, at least not with the right guy. She had no idea why she hadn’t been able to let Ry in. He was charismatic, fun to be with, charming as hell . . . But something about his easy availability—and in turn, the ease with which he’d walked away when she’d broken up with him—had closed her off.
With Cam, she’d shockingly had no problem being vulnerable and open. But that didn’t mean he was the right guy for her, because he wasn’t. He was temporary, a bed of her own making, and so she shook her head at Ry.
“I mean it,” he said quietly, his voice free of any cynicism. “It’s about time you looked happy. You deserve that, Piper.”
And then he was gone.
She looked at Gavin. “What the hell?”
“Just hear me out, okay? I’m trying to step up in a way I haven’t before. You deserve that. Ryland’s sister works at town hall. Through Ry, she got me all the information we need to turn this place into a B and B. And even better, because this house is so old, it’s considered a historical building, which we can use in our flyers and brochures and on the website.”
Piper just stared at him. “We still don’t have any of those things.”
“Yes, we do. Or we have mock-ups. That’s what I was showing Ryland, because you know he was a marketing major before becoming a firefighter.”
When she continued to just look at him, dumbstruck, he took her hand and brought her to the coffee table, where indeed there were mock-ups of everything spread out in front of her, looking official and . . . damn. Amazing.
“I’ve got the website up as well.” He picked up his tablet and showed it to her. “No one else can see it, but I’ve got a tentative schedule mapped out and we already have customers.”
“What? How?”
“Answering phones at the marina. I met an old military friend of Cam’s. The guy sends people on corporate retreats. They’re always looking for something private, something preferably on the water, something that isn’t too close to a big town to give a sense of team building, and guess what? This place checks all the boxes for them. Cam also has a travel-service buddy and said he’d hook me up with him too, who’d recommend us to his clients. It’s a shoo-in, Piper.” He let out a rough laugh. “How often can any of the three of us say we’ve ever been a shoo-in for anything?”
She stared down at the gorgeous picture of the house they stood in, the cottages, the lake, the hills, the yard lit with the strings of white lights she’d had up since Christmas. But that wasn’t what she was thinking about. She was thinking about Cam helping Gavin find his way. And Emmitt being so helpful to Winnie. Seemed the Hayes men were also fixers.
But in a much better way than she’d ever been. They were constructive about it, not having to control every single thing. In fact, Cam, the master of self-control, never actually tried to control anything around him.
There was something to be learned from that, she knew, but hell if she could figure it out at the moment. She felt befuddled, probably from all the orgasms, but also probably from a nagging sense that while her life was still on the tracks, somehow she’d gotten off at the wrong station.
“I think the words you’re looking for are wow and amazing,” Gavin said.
“Okay, yes, both of those things. It was nice of Cam to help.”
“He said he can see all the things he didn’t do right with Rowan, and he’s trying to fix some wrongs.”
Piper worked hard at swallowing a huge lump in her throat and failed, so she turned away.