Demand is more like it.
“I can’t,” he finally said.
Her brows twitched as though she were trying to keep from crumbling. He knew that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but what did she expect him to say?
She averted her face, turning it up toward the moon. He thought he heard her release a shuddering breath, but it was so minimal that he couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t crying, was she?
“Audrey,” he said. He tried craning to see her face, but she kept her attention on something far away.
“Giorgio Armani, Gloria Vanderbilt,” she recited.
Shit, she was doing that thing again. Piper had told him she said people’s names when she was upset. How was he supposed to get her to stop? Would she sit there and keep talking to herself if he left her alone?
He touched her bare arm. “Audrey?”
“Hattie Carnegie,” she whispered.
Maybe he was making it worse.
He gripped her chin between his thumb and index finger and slowly turned her face to his. “Audrey,” he whispered. “I’m going to need you to stop doing that. Because it’s kind of freaking me out.”
Her eyes dropped closed. “Hedi Slimane.”
Before she could utter another clothing designer, even though he’d only heard of one of them, Cameron leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers.
And yeah, that did the trick. Not only did it shut her up, which had been his only intention, but it also solidified what he’d suspected the whole time. Her lips were soft and yielding and warm enough to set off sparks. The sparks may have only been in his head, but damn. The split-second decision to kiss her, and yeah, okay, probably not his smartest move, had been only to calm her down, to take her mind off the weird conversation they’d been having and the fact that he’d somehow managed to upset her.
But then she softened and sighed against him, and suddenly his original purpose had gone up in smoke. Now it was about the contact, the warmth suffused by the touch of her lips and the hand curling around his shoulder. She was even more responsive than he expected her to be, leaning into him and probing his mouth with a searching touch of her tongue.
He answered back, because it was too good and hot, and her grip on him tightened. And yeah, she didn’t want him to pull back either. She leaned closer to him and moved her hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck. Cameron couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think a woman had ever dove her fingers into his hair like that. Usually they were trying to unbutton his shirt or shove their hands down his pants.
He liked that she kissed with everything she had and the little noise she made. He liked how her breath caught when his hand found a sliver of flesh beneath her shirt, as though the contact was new and unexpected. The woman was a breath of fresh air, even if she did drive him crazy sometimes.
Then she yanked herself away and pressed a hand to her mouth.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Isaac Mizrahi.”
Yeah, ditto to whoever that last guy was. “You’re supposed to stop doing that.”
She refocused her dilated gaze on his. “Was that why you kissed me? To calm me down?”
The lady didn’t miss much, did she? “At first,” he admitted.
Her tongue darted out and swiped across her lower lip, which was still swollen and moist. Damn if he didn’t want to kiss her again. “And then?” she prompted.
“And then…” He blew out a breath and leaned his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” she sighed, and rubbed her hands down her thighs. “I guess I should thank you.”
He cast a glance at her over his shoulder. “No need to thank me.”
She stood from the step and looked down at him. “Isn’t there, though? You sensed I was on the verge of losing it, so you found the perfect solution.”
Slowly, he pushed to his feet so she had to tilt her face up to his. Yeah, he liked that better than her looking down on him. “I think we both know there was more to the kiss than that.”
“Really?” she countered with half a smile. “And what else was there?”
Shit, did she want him to compose a sonnet? He was a guy, and guys usually didn’t put that much thought into kissing a woman. Their thoughts usually went from “This is hot as shit” to “What do I need to do to get her clothes off?”
When he didn’t answer right away, Audrey lowered her gaze and pursed her lips.
“Good night, Cameron.” She opened the door to the guesthouse, the screen door creaking in the quiet night and sounding like a cannon firing his execution. “By the way, the wine was yours.”
And just like that, he’d gone from his libido firing off like a rocket to wondering what he’d epically screwed up.
Nine
Audrey woke from a dreamless sleep with a startling jerk, immediately sensing something was off with her surroundings. The early Sunday morning sunshine poured through the open drapes that she’d forgotten to close last night. But it wasn’t the shocking brightness that threw her off.
The place was too quiet.
The bedside clock read nine fifteen and Audrey’s first thought besides why the hell she hadn’t closed the drapes last night was Piper. The kid was always out of bed by seven thirty or eight, with the boundless energy of kids, ready to tackle the day. She’d slide out of bed, then curl up onto the couch to watch whatever cartoons she could find, while she waited for Audrey to get up and make some breakfast.
But Piper wasn’t in the guesthouse. Even as Audrey tossed the covers back and jerkily pulled on a pair of flannel pants, she knew the kid was gone. There were no sounds
