“Wow. Seriously?” I whistle, long and low, even as I gesture for her to step out of the shower. When she does, I wrap the towel around her and begin rubbing her dry. “Why didn’t you tell us? That’s incredible!”
American Snowboarder is one of the most prestigious snowboarding magazines in the country—in the world, really—and they only ever put top talent on their cover. Z’s been on it three times, Ash twice. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us that they’d want Cam, too. She’s the best female snowboarder in North America right now. It’s shocking more magazines haven’t come calling. Then again, maybe they have and she just hasn’t told us.
The thought doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t like not being in the loop when it comes to her. Not at all.
“I don’t know. I guess I just figured, in case it doesn’t go well, the less people who know, the better.” She grins up at me. “You know, my hair pretty much needs its own zip code on the best of days. It definitely needs its own towel.”
“Oh, right.” I grab her one, then hand it to her and watch as she wraps it around her head, turban style. You know you’ve got it bad when just the act of watching a woman wrap her hair in a towel makes you want to fuck her. In my defense, pretty much everything Cam does makes me want to fuck her—with the exception of when she moons over Z.
“Why wouldn’t the shoot go well?” I demand, forcing myself to focus on the topic at hand and not how hard my dick is.
“So many reasons.”
She walks into the bedroom, pulls open the drawer where I keep my sweats. She grabs one of my oldest pairs—I assume because it has a drawstring at the waist she can tie and hopefully keep them from falling off—then opens the next drawer and pulls out a Board Park City T-shirt.
“These okay for me to borrow?” she asks.
“I already told you you can take whatever you want.”
She nods her thanks, then pulls the sweats on, commando style. Considering she doesn’t even flinch at the idea of it, I can’t help wondering how often she goes without underwear. How many times has she been standing next to me with nothing on under her pants or skirt?
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m going to drive myself crazy if I don’t stop thinking about her and how easy it would be to pull those sweats down and shove myself inside her. And if I can’t look away from those long, long, long legs of hers, it’s nobody’s business but mine.
“You don’t have any reason to be worried,” I say, shoving my hands in my jeans pockets in a last ditch effort to keep from touching her. “You’re going to smash it.”
“I know.”
Still, she doesn’t look up from where she’s fumbling with the drawstring on the sweats, a surefire tell that there’s more going on here than she wants me to know—which, of course, only makes me more determined to figure this shit out.
I wait for her to finish, then grab hold of her shoulders as soon as she reaches for her purse.
“Hey,” I tell her, as I tilt her face up to mine. “I know things have been kind of fucked up between us lately, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me.”
“Considering all the things we’ve spent the last twelve hours doing, I think I’m pretty clear on that,” she says with a smirk. “But there’s nothing to talk about. It’s all good.”
It’s pretty much the worst affirmation in history considering she still won’t even fucking look at me. I want to push it, want to push her. There used to be a time when she told me everything—but that time is obviously long gone. And judging from the look on her face and the set on her shoulders, if I push too hard she’s going to shut down completely.
Still, I’m not going to stand here and let her lie to me either. I’m so done with that shit. From both of us.
“If it’s all good, why do you look like you’re going to puke any second?”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
She glares at me, tries to shrug my hands off her shoulders. I just raise a brow and keep my hands exactly where they are.
It doesn’t take long for her to figure out that I’m not going to budge. She drops the glare with a sigh, then leans forward and presses her face into my chest.
“It’s nothing,” she tells me, her words muffled against my shirt. “I’m just nervous. This isn’t exactly my thing, you know?”
I do know, but it’s not like I’m going to tell her that. “You’ve got this,” I say as I stroke a hand down her back. I can feel the bumps of her spine beneath my hand and it surprises me how fragile she feels against me. She’s so strong, so larger than life, that I forget sometimes that she’s delicate, too. That, in her own way, Cam is as breakable as I am. “You’re going to barge that photo shoot.”
She laughs a little shakily. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we? If you don’t hear from me in a few hours, assume I screwed it all up and am relocating to somewhere they’ve never even heard of snowboarding in an effort to bury my humiliation.”
&nbs
p; “So, the wilds of the Congo, then?”