Crazy about Cameron: The Winslow Brothers #3(24)
“Yes,” she said gently. “You can come in.”
***
Margaret was having trouble filling her lungs completely.
From the moment she’d opened the door to see Cameron Winslow’s muscular body taking up most of the tiny doorway, the wind had been soundly knocked from her chest. The way he looked at her, like she was the most delicious morsel at a hundred-table buffet, made her toes curl.
“I thought you were Shawn,” she said, gesturing to the love seat in her snug sitting room. “Please sit.”
“I met Shawn,” said Cameron, taking a seat. “He told me where to find you.”
Cameron’s emerald eyes shone like jewels in the low light of her cottage, and she stared at him, still shocked by his unexpected visit. “Oh?”
“Yeah. But he didn’t seem that pleased about it.”
“He’s protective.”
Cameron didn’t smile at her, his face tight and intense. His eyes almost burned her, the way they stared, the way they seemed to see through her, into her. It made her feel naked.
“I understand.”
Two words that said nothing about his feelings for her, and yet they made her tremble with longing, her body clenching with need, with want, with . . . with . . . Get ahold of yourself, Margaret!
“Be right back,” she said in a breathy voice, then hurried into the kitchen, bracing her palms on the edge of the sink and forcing herself to take a deep breath.
Because he was touching you . . . I understand.
The words circled round and round in her head, and her body, completely naked under her bathrobe, flushed from head to toe. Her thoughts from last night—the possibility that Cameron had long harbored feelings for her—edged into her mind, and she weighed them against his words, her heart fluttering with hope and desire. But common sense wouldn’t let her completely run away with herself: there was nothing said between them, nothing declared except for a tenuous truce.
She reached over her head for a small silver platter and placed the pastries on it, then peeked her head out of the kitchen doorway. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
She poured water into the pot, then into the old-fashioned machine, measured the grounds into a filter, and pressed the On button. After taking two mugs from the hooks over the sink, she grabbed the platter and headed back into the sitting room.
It felt like Cameron took up the whole room, his massive form sitting squarely on the antique gold-upholstered love seat set across from the hearth. His thick, blackish hair begged for her touch, and she had a brief mental fantasy of climbing onto his lap and straddling him as she sank her fingers into his hair. Her robe would fall open, and her naked body would rub wantonly against the tough denim of his jeans, wetting them with the force of her desire. And he would reach for her—
“Meggie?”
“Yes!” she chirped, placing the platter and mugs on the table before him with a clatter. “Breakfast is here. Coffee’s on.”
“Thanks,” he said, grinning up at her. “Sorry for stopping by unexpectedly.”
That smile. Oh, good Lord, that smile. She needed another moment.
“Mind if I get dressed real quick?”
“Do you want an honest answer?” he rumbled, his eyes sliding from her face to the V of her robe and back again.
“No,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “Be right back.”
She hurried up the dozen steps that led from her living room, kitchen, and bathroom to her attic bedroom. Safely out of sight, she unknotted her robe with trembling fingers and let it fall to the floor with a soft whoosh. Her skin felt feverish even though she stood outside the sunbeam that streamed in from the window over her bed. What was happening to her? And why was she allowing it to happen?
For, though Cameron Winslow had recently extended an olive branch, he hadn’t proved himself worthy of her attention, and certainly not of her affection. So why wasn’t she protecting herself better? Why was she letting his sexy grins and hot, bothered words get under her skin?
Because a lifetime’s worth of infatuation doesn’t take long to turn into something more, and there was a reason her interest in him hadn’t flagged over the course of almost three decades—because Cameron Winslow would be someone worth falling hard for . . . when he stopped being such a jerk.
She sighed heavily as she reached into her blue-painted bureau and took out her frumpiest cotton bra and panties, determined to behave herself and stop acting like a moony schoolgirl, and then pulled on her jeans and a white cotton buttoned-down shirt. Leaving it untucked, with two buttons open, she took a navy-blue and white silk scarf from the top of her dresser and bound her hair into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck.
“Coffee’s ready,” he called up the stairs. “I poured us each a cup. How do you take it?”
“Milk, please.”
“Sure.”
She pulled on a pair of white tennis shoes, then hurried back down the stairs just in time to find him coming out of the kitchen with two steaming cups of coffee, one of which he extended to her.
“Good morning,” he said like the awkward, delicious, electrically charged ten minutes since he’d arrived had never happened—though his grin at her, from over the rim of his cup, maintained that it had.
He was such an unintentional tease, she couldn’t help smiling back. “Good morning.”