The teasing light died in his eyes. “Good or bad? Like, good in that I’m different from the other men you’ve known or bad as in you’re so not interested that you felt like you didn’t have to worry about me?”
“Just . . .” He was asking for too much. I couldn’t give him what he wanted. “Different.”
His phone rang and he didn’t even take it out of his pocket, which surprised me.
“You’re not going to get that?” I asked.
“Nope.”
He wasn’t even going to look at it? “What if it’s important?”
“A very wise woman told me to be present in the moment, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here with you.”
His words touched my heart, and as much as I tried to suppress the feeling, I couldn’t let him in like this. “So basically we’re giving each other the same advice.”
“Sounds like.” He shifted then, making the entire mattress dip, and I nearly rolled into him.
“Your turn,” I said. “To give me a truth. Like why you’re single.”
“That’s easy. Too busy. I mean, it’s been a long time since I’ve been serious with someone. The last time was probably in college but it turned out that she was sleeping with my roommate whenever I traveled for meets. She blamed me for leaving her alone.”
“That doesn’t sound fun.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said, making a small shrug. “I haven’t been avoiding relationships; I’ve just been focused on other things. It doesn’t help when your best friend is marrying the woman of his dreams. Dan once told me that the night he met Sadie all he wanted to do was to keep talking to her for forever. It made me realize what I was missing out on. A woman I could stay up all night talking to.”
Like you. He didn’t say the words, but he didn’t have to. I felt them. Again my heart lurched happily.
“My turn,” I said, my throat feeling a little tight. “My truth is . . . I’m not a spy.”
“Honestly, I don’t think you’re a spy, either.”
“That’s not really a truth. It’s more of a ‘you decided to stop being dumb and believe what was right in front of your face.’”
He seemed to take that as some kind of challenge and said, “Okay. Truth from me that I haven’t told anyone else—earlier tonight when I was rubbing your shoulders? I had to stop and walk away because you leaned your head to one side and you exposed your neck and the only thing I wanted to do was press my mouth against your skin.”
Warmth pooled in my gut; my breath stuttered in my lungs. “Just friends, remember?”
“That was a friend thing to say.”
“Um, no.”
“Being honest is friendly,” he insisted.
Saying stuff that made me want to pounce on him was not friendly. This conversation needed to be stopped. I turned over to reach for the TV remote on the nightstand next to the bed. “Do you want to watch a movie?”
He seemed to be at ease and completely aware of the fireworks that were going off inside me. “Sure. What did you have in mind?”
What I had in mind and what was going to happen were two entirely different things. “Something with Noah Douglas or Chase Covington in it.”
The hotel had the option to log in to my personal Netflix account. I made Camden cover his eyes while I entered the password and pulled up a romantic comedy I’d watched a dozen times already.
“I know it makes me sound old, but nine times out of ten I’d rather stay home and watch a movie than go out,” I told him.
“That sounds like a perfect night to me.”
That made me feel a bit giddy. With a smile plastered on my face, I started the movie. We were about a minute into it when he asked why the heroine was wearing so much makeup despite the fact that she’d just woken up and it set me off. “Right? Like there’s not enough pressure on women to always look perfect, now we have to be models when we roll out of bed.”
There was a look on his face, like he wanted to say something to me. Based on the way his gaze traveled from my head to my feet, I guessed it was going to be something nice about how I looked. I wanted to hear what he might have said, and it was my own fault for shutting all that down.
We kept up our commentary while we watched the movie, and it turned from being about what we were watching to us talking about our lives. I walked him through how I’d set up my business and the mistakes I’d made and things I wished I could do over, as well as the successes. At first I felt a little dumb, given that his company was operating at such a higher level than mine. He could have been a jerk about that, but he wasn’t. He listened intently, commenting and praising me. It made me feel . . . significant. Like what I’d done mattered.