Melt for You (Slow Burn #2)(30)

Anyone who’d like to know what hell is like should spend an early morning exercising in freezing temperatures with a professional athlete who has an endless supply of energy and no soul.

“Keep up!” Cam barks over his shoulder at me as I lag behind him on the sidewalk, breath steaming white from my nose and open mouth, sweat pouring into my eyes, my will to live quickly being extinguished.

“Must. Stop. Death. Imminent.” My wheezing and staggering frightens a flock of pigeons into screeching flight from their perch on the back of a bus bench.

Cam turns around and trots back to me. He hasn’t even broken a sweat, the heartless bastard. “Joellen,” he begins patiently. “We’re two blocks from the apartment.”

“Oh my God! I made it two whole blocks?” I wonder how the heck I’m getting back and decide I’ll take a cab. If we don’t have to call an ambulance first.

Cam runs a tidy circle around me as I stagger, just to be a prick. “How did this happen? You’ve got the cardiovascular system of a ninety-year-old!”

I holler, “I told you I was allergic to exercise!”

He trots the other way around me, backward. “I thought you were joking.”

I wave an arm at him wildly, hoping to smack him a good one, but miss because the man is the devil and he can’t be caught.

“Are you always this ornery in the mornin’?”

“Don’t you dare taunt me, devil man.” I gasp for air as my gelatinous legs continue their horrific quest to keep me upright and headed forward. I think I might be going blind. “What was in that green goop you forced me to drink before we left? Poison?”

Cam does ten jumping jacks before he answers. “Yep. It’s an old Scottish tradition. A draught of poison just after wakin’. If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll put hair on your chest.”

“Oh goody.” Gasp. Wheeze. “Just what I need.” Wheeze. Cough. “Hair on my chest.”

Shadowboxing around me, dancing on his toes so flurries of snow sparkle around his flashing feet, Cam threatens, “If you’re about to follow that little speech with somethin’ derogatory about your looks, I’ll kick your arse six ways to Sunday, lassie.”

I make a sound that reminds me of the death rattle bad actors make right before they expire dramatically in the movies. Only mine is authentic. “That dang dog again! I’m really starting to hate that dog!”

Cam chuckles. He looks annoyingly good in his stupid sweats outfit, the picture of health and well-being, while I look like an old armchair someone threw out a window into an alley hoping it would be picked up with the trash but instead was colonized by rodents. Thank God the sun isn’t up yet, because the possibility an alarmed citizen would call animal control to come and collect me as soon as they caught sight of my hideous visage is high.

“I can’t believe you voluntarily do this every day. For free. Not at gunpoint.”

Cam lifts the waistband of his hoodie, exposing acres of rippling abdominal muscles. “All for a good cause.”

I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. “Do you hold yourself tightly in bed at night while whispering sweet nothings into your own ear?”

“Think of pretty boy. Visualize his face when you walk into the holiday party in a sexy dress, lookin’ all toned and bedazzlin’.”

I huff and puff, pondering the image he’s put into my head. “Toned is good. Skinny is better.”

“Wrong! Strong is the goal, lass, not skinny. A man doesn’t wanna grab onto a sack of rattlin’ bones when he’s in the mood. He wants a nice, thick, juicy woman with buttery curves, sizzlin’ hot and tasty.”

“You literally just described my perfect steak.”

“My mum always said you can’t trust a skinny woman. Skinny body, skinny heart, skinny love.”

“I think I love your mother.”

“Aye,” says Cam softly. “She was easy to love.”

Was. That drains the last bit of energy from my legs. I stagger to a stop, holding my side and panting, and look at Cam. He’s refusing to look at me for some reason, keeping his face averted as he jogs in place a few feet away.

“She passed away?”

A curt nod is his only answer.

“I’m sorry.”

He swallows, squinting up at a streetlamp. In the cold yellow glow, his face is all stark angles and planes. The sharp cut of his jaw. The razor-straight nose. The dark hollows beneath his full cheekbones.

The pain on his face is another sharp feature, etched there like carvings in glass.

“Hundred years ago. Ancient history. But thanks.”

His voice is low and raw, and I’ve never seen him so naked. Without the usual bravado he wears like a suit of armor, he seems like a stranger all over again, one darker and more complicated, and far more compelling.

But the moment is gone as quickly as it came when Cam turns to me with a brilliant smile. “Quit your lollygaggin’, lass, and pick up your feet! We’re only just gettin’ started!”

He turns and jogs away down the sidewalk into the predawn gloom, his back straight and his head high, his step lively.

But it’s too late. I’ve peeked behind the golden curtain. I’ve glimpsed the real man behind the Great and Powerful Oz.