“We broke up.” She held her hand up. “Fine. I broke up with you. Ten years ago. You’ve hated me for a decade, Cam. Now you own my family’s company and you’re my boss. That is what is going on.”
He stalked to her desk, braced his hands on the top, and leaned in. “I do not hate you, Whitney.”
Her eyes flickered with vulnerability for just a second. Then she did that annoying straighten-her-spine-lift-her-chin-smooth-her-features thing that made him want to swear. Loudly.
“I’m glad,” she said coolly. “I really am. But the fact remains that we didn’t work out and now—”
“I’m back.”
“So?”
“So you sent me away. You broke up with me because you thought I needed to leave Appleby. You thought I needed to go off to college and see what I could do outside of this town. And you thought you needed to stay. So we did that. I left. You stayed. And now I’m back.”
“You’re back for now,” she said. “You’re here to help Aiden and Grant and Ollie get Hot Cakes going.”
“Why would I leave?”
“Your life is in Chicago.”
“My best friends in the world are here now. Aiden and Dax and Grant are all staying,” he said. They’d all fallen in love with Appleby girls. Girls who were happily tied here, girls who had no intentions of leaving. His sister and her best friends to be exact. “My family is here. My work is now here.”
They’d headquartered their company, Fluke, Inc. in Chicago because that’s where they’d all been when things had taken off. Grant was from there and he was the money guy. The rest of them hadn’t had a preference for where their offices would be. But they’d sold Warriors of Easton, their online game, to a bigger gaming company several months ago. Dax and Ollie were still involved in creative and marketing tasks. Aiden consulted here and there. But Cam and Grant were mostly out of the loop now. That company had their own money guys and lawyers. Fluke could go in a number of directions now but right now their focus was Hot Cakes. Cam had no reason to go back to Chicago, honestly.
“You’re staying?” Whitney said. “Really?”
He straightened. “Yes.”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. Obviously this was news to her.
“So we need to at least see if there’s anything between us anymore,” he said. “Everyone will be wondering.” He sure as fuck was. He suspected there was plenty still between them, but he really did need to find out. He didn’t know if what he was feeling was still all about the girl she’d been, the one who’d broken his heart, or if their past was something they could build on.
She was shaking her head now.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “We need to go out. We need to give it a chance. If it doesn’t work out, then we part as friends, and we can convince everyone that we gave it a fair shot, we both realize that we’ve changed and that we only want to be work partners now and everyone can finally exhale because the sexual tension will be gone and people won’t have to walk on eggshells around us.”
She frowned. “People aren’t—”
“They are,” he interrupted. “They don’t know how to act around us because we don’t know how to act. Are we friends? Are we more? Are we less? Are we just work associates? And are we both cool with that if so? Or is one of us uncomfortable or upset or horny? What if we’re not together and we have a big company party and we bring other dates? How are we both going to act? Is anything going to get thrown and broken? Anyone going to get punched?”
She rolled her eyes at that.
Yeah, he’d punched a guy over her in high school. Twice.
Not the same guy. Two different occasions. One of them might have been an overreaction on his part though.
“We need to figure all of that out and get a handle on how we feel. We don’t know because we haven’t talked about it. We haven’t explored it.”
“Horny?” she repeated.
So she’d focused on that word. Interesting.
“Yeah, horny,” he said. “My friends are wondering if I’m sitting in meetings thinking about fucking you on the conference table instead of actually listening to the details of the new proposal.”
She blew out a breath. “You keep saying this stuff just to get a rise out of me.”
“I’m saying it because it’s true.”
“Why would your friends be wondering that?”
“Because they know how I feel about you.”
She wet her lips. “Which is… horny?”
“We can call it intensely attracted if that sounds classier to you.”
“That would sound classier to anyone.”
He just lifted a shoulder. Not many people would apply the word classy to him. Or any people.
She was watching him, her eyes slightly narrowed.
“What?”
“That all sounds very… mature.”
He lifted a brow. “I’ve got my moments.”
“Huh.”
He couldn’t help the half smile. He could admit that “mature” was another word that not many people had used to describe him in the past.
“We’re ten years older, Whit. We’ve grown up. I went away and did other stuff. Now we have to find out what this is.”
She took a deep breath, focused on the very boring black and silver lamp on her desk. “It’s nothing, Cam.” She met his eyes. “It can’t be.”
He felt his gut tighten. “I don’t believe you.”
She lifted a shoulder. “We’ll just tell everyone we talked about it, decided to be friendly coworkers, that everything is fine and no one has to worry or wonder about anything.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I’m wondering, Whitney.”
She shook her head. “You’re not. Not really. Not if you thought about it.”
“What the hell does that mean?” He felt the back of his neck tightening with frustration. He really hated this uptight, cool side of her. Clearly she’d been perfecting this persona or whatever the fuck it was over the past ten years because it was pretty damned solid. Even when he was saying things about bending over
