Slashed (Extreme Risk 3)

“I can’t,” I tell her again, backing away from the rack. From her.

I don’t get far before I back straight into Luc, who steadies me with his hands on my waist. “It’s okay,” he tells me softly, leaning forward to all but whisper it in my ear.

But it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all.

To give her credit, Charlene seems to realize just how freaked out I am. Instead of pushing me, she puts the sexkinis back on the rack, then takes a couple steps toward the door. “Look, why don’t I give you a few minutes?” she says. “You can look through the clothes on your own, see if there’s anything you feel comfortable in. If there is, great.”

“And if there’s not?” I ask, already knowing that there’s no way I’ll find anything to wear in the selection they’ve presented me.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, okay? I’m just going to step out and close the door. Pick out whatever you want. Try it on. See what you think. And I’ll check back in a little while, okay?”

It’s not okay. None of this is okay. But I don’t know how to say that any more clearly than I already have, so I just nod and watch as she shoots me a smile before quietly closing the door.

I’m across the room in a heartbeat, snapping the lock into place. And then I’m whirling on Luc.

“I can’t do it!” I tell him. “I just can’t. You know I can’t. I’m not sexy. I’m not beautiful. There’s no way I can carry off those clothes—and no way in hell I’m going to try so that everyone out there can laugh at me. Or worse, so that they can actually put me on the cover and the whole world can laugh at me. It’s not going to happen.”

He holds a placating hand out to me. “Cam, let’s just calm—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down! I don’t want to calm down. I want to leave. I can’t do this. I can’t, Luc. I can’t.”

&nbs

p; Panic is welling up inside of me, making me shake. Making my chest hurt. Making it hard—so hard—for me to breathe.

“I’m going to kill Mitch. I swear to God, I’m going to kill him. He told me this would be easy. Told me they’d take a couple pictures of me being me.” I point at the skimpy bikinis on the front of the rack. “Those are not me being me. Those are like Cara Delevigne being me. I mean, I don’t even know how to get them on. I can’t do this. I can’t, I can’t, I—”

“Cam!” He grabs me then, wraps his hands around my upper arms as he pulls me up to my toes. “Look at me,” he tells me, voice firm and commanding. “Don’t look at the bikinis, don’t think about the bikinis, don’t worry about the fucking bikinis. Just look at me and breathe. Okay? Just breathe.”

I nod, but my anxiety doesn’t go away. Instead, it just builds and builds and builds until my chest is heaving like a locomotive and my lungs feel like they’re going to explode at any second.

Even his voice sounds far away and tinny as he calls my name. I’m in full-on freak-out mode—something that almost never happens to me—and though I’m trying to stop it, trying to get a grip, the panic just keeps getting worse.

“Cam. Cam. Cam!” Luc calls again and again. I try to answer him, but nothing comes out but huge gasps for air.

In the middle of a full-on panic attack now, I clutch at his chest. I tangle my fingers in the soft fabric of his shirt. I’m shaking so badly that I nearly rip a button off.

I think that’s what does it, what finally makes him figure out that I’m not going to be able to calm down on my own, because suddenly Luc snaps. He lifts me right off the floor, snarling, “wrap your legs around me!” just as his mouth slams down on mine.

Chapter 8

Luc

My brain stops working the second Cam wraps those long, gorgeous legs of hers around my waist. This is exactly what I tried not to have happen, exactly what I’ve been fighting against since I found her in my kitchen this morning. But now that it has—now that I have her back in my arms—I can’t even pretend that I’m sorry. Because when I pushed her away this morning, claimed that I didn’t have a condom, it wasn’t because I didn’t want her. It’s because I want her too much. Because I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. And now that she’s here, wrapped around me like a vine, I never want to let her go.

Which is the problem.

Still, I can’t leave her like this. All freaked out and hyperventilating and convinced she isn’t hot enough to wear a bikini on the cover of a magazine? As if. She’s so fucking sexy it’s all I can do not to get a hard-on every time I look at her—even when she’s covered from head to toe in snowboarding gear. So fucking sexy that if you added up all the time I’ve spent thinking about her naked or in something like that little lime-green bikini she was holding up earlier, I’d have years of my life back.

Cam shifts a little, trying to get closer, and I slide my hands under her ass to support her. Now that I’ve got her in my arms, the last thing I want to do is drop her. Or let her go.

“Cam, baby.” I rip my mouth from hers to say, “You’re going to look fucking amazing on that cover.”

I walk us slowly across the room until I’ve got her backed up against the wall. Her legs and arms are still twined around me, but at least now I have the leverage to do what I want with her. To do what she needs as much as I need it—though for totally different reasons.

“You’re beautiful,” I tell her, pressing kisses to her mouth, her throat, the tops of her breasts. “And you totally turn me on.”

I slide my hands under her shirt, run them up and down her spine, tell her over and over again how hot she is. How much I want her. How fucking sexy she is and how fucking hard she gets me.