Redeeming You (Before You #2)(5)
“So he’s fine with it?” she asked, suddenly a little nervous. She rubbed her hands against her black, shiny, skinny jeans to eliminate some of her anxiety.
“Fine wouldn’t be the word I’d use, but he agreed and that’s all that matters,” Jax said affirming her suspicions.
Alec walked toward her and threw his arm around her shoulder. “Tay…are you sure you want to do this? If this is just about money, I’ll give you money to live on until you find a job you love. You don’t have to settle.”
She shrugged Alec’s hand off of her shoulder. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. It’s only thirty days and then I’ll have some awesomeness to add to my resume. I can spin it as a PR job.” She smiled faintly and even she didn’t think her smile was very convincing. “Trust me.”
Alec growled. “I trust you. I don’t trust him.”
Taylor laughed a real laugh, not some phony “I’ll be fine” laugh that she’d been dishing out since she dumped her ex-boyfriend. “Don’t worry about me. He’s just a little kindergartener pretending he’s a badass playboy. His charm won’t work on me.”
She lifted her brush from the dresser and brushed her long black hair. Last week, she had added a blue streak at the very front on the right side of her face. She liked the way it highlighted her blue eyes. They looked almost navy today. The hair color change was all part of reinventing her image after leaving her ex-boyfriend, Miles, six months ago. It made her feel as though she was recapturing some of the control she lost over her life when she dated him.
“So what’s the plan? When do I start?”
Jax pushed away from the wall. “Cam’s meeting you in the hotel lobby restaurant in about five minutes.”
Great. Now she was nervous again. She thought she’d have until tonight or even a couple hours to mentally prepare for this meeting. “All right. Well, I’ll touch base later tonight and let you know how it goes.”
“Tay,” her brother called after her. “I can go with you. You don’t have to go alone. I’ll act as a buffer.”
Shit, her brother could always read her like a book, and right now, he knew the idea of talking to Cam made her nervous. She and Cam hadn’t exchanged more than a few words over the last two years; mostly because she’d never felt comfortable around him, but she had to get over it if she was going to do this job.
“I can do this on my own. It’s not a big deal. We’ll make a plan that we can both live with over the next thirty days and we’ll stick to it.”
“Just so you know,” Jax said as she started walking down the hotel hallway. “Cam isn’t happy about this. It’s not going to be easy. He’s going to fight you every step.”
“Uh huh,” she responded as she walked down the hall holding her hand up to wave. She didn’t expect anything else based on the pictures of him flooding the internet over the last month.
Five minutes later, she walked into the hotel restaurant and she immediately spotted Cam sitting at a corner table with aviator sunglasses shading his eyes from the dim light of the restaurant. She suspected the sunglasses were a part of his attempt to be anonymous and also a tool to protect his sensitive, bloodshot eyes after another night of drunken stupidity. His back rested lazily against the red booth, his arms stretched out on either side of him like he didn’t have a care in the world. He was wearing a black, faded long-sleeved t-shirt, the sleeves pushed up exposing the swirling designs on his forearms that had slowly been growing over the last six months—not that she paid attention to his arms or any other part of his body.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked as she cruised past the hostess stand.
“Nope. I see the person I’m meeting,” she answered without turning around.
When she reached Cam’s table, she stood next to the vacant side of the booth waiting for Cam to acknowledge her presence. He knew she was there, staring at him, but he patiently flipped the pages of the menu refusing to look at her. Typical. After a few prolonged seconds of her temper steadily rising, she cleared her throat.
Cam still didn’t look at her. “Are you going to sit or do you want to stand there admiring me for a couple more minutes?” he drawled lazily.
“Are you going to take off your cheesy sunglasses or are you too hung over to act like a normal human being?” she shot back, anger pumping heatedly through her veins as she sat in the booth across from him.
Cam peeled off his dark sunglasses and carelessly tossed them on the table. “Better?” Cam asked gazing at her with his heavily hooded eyes, a sardonic smile floating on his lips.
She already wanted to kill him; well, maybe not kill him. That was too extreme. Tossing a glass of ice water at him might be more appropriate, but thirty days of this back and forth shit and one of them would probably be dead. “Slightly, but now I have to look at your eyes and they’re a bit distracting.”
Cam leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the edge of the table. “Are you trying to tell me something…like you’re attracted to me? I get that a lot, you know.” His lips curled up at the corners sinfully.
Smiling contemptuously, Taylor purposely let her eyes trail over his face down to his chest and back up again. Blessed with the face of an angel and a body made for sin, he was good-looking; there was no doubt. His messy light blonde hair, his black t-shirt stretched across his obviously muscular chest in all the right ways, his normally piercing blue eyes and perfectly sculpted bone structure made him one smoking hot rocker, but she’d never tell him that. He already knew. She didn’t need to contribute to his already inflated ego.