Blake walked out in the black Speedos she’d purchased. Dark hair dusted his tree trunk, and muscular thighs. The long, thick imprint of his dick had her swallowing hard.Was the joke on her?
He did a slow spin, flexing his butt cheeks, before spinning around to catch her red-faced drool.
Ahh, so the joke was on her. Not this time, Blakey.
Cameron rested her arm along the brick fireplace mantle, enjoying the view as he walked further into the room. The tight black swimwear hugged his groin like a lover as he walked. “Aw, you look like my old Ken doll.” She arched her brow and grinned wickedly. “Well, not quite, but I think after your hair dye, you’d be perfect. Summer blonde is your color. You’ll see.”
“You’re not bleaching my hair.” He growled over her laughter. “How far do you think you can take this? I’ll go along because you’re right; I deserve it. But you only paid for a week of fun in the sun. Not a week of absolute servitude.”
How many ridiculous shenanigans had she worked around because she loved her job? “Why not? It’s what I gave you.”
The shift in Blake’s eyes was so subtle, that she almost missed it. “I never tried to change you.”
“Didn’t you? Whenever you looked at my suit or hair and asked me ifthatwas what I was wearing.”
“You looked uncomfortable. You needed to loosen up, be a little less perfect.” He rested his hands on his hips. Which made it harder to focus on his words. “It’s hard living under your shadow, your face glowering from on high.”
The shift deepened his eyes to the darkest green she’d ever seen. He looked—hurt. No, impossible.Why did she feel guilty?Sure, she might have been a little starchy with him, but the playground needed at least one adult.
“Never.” Cameron massaged her temples and took a deep breath. “Blake, never.”
She sighed. “Okay, maybe I was a little stern. But I’d just finished grad school, where I dealt with professors giving me the same look. The invisible pat on the back, the one that says.‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.’I may have been desperate to prove that you’d done the right thing by taking a chance on me.” She walked towards the back porch and stared out the picture window into the forest as he followed. His bare feet soundlessly padded across the hardwood floor. “You wouldn’t believe how many applications I sent before you responded.” She sighed and dug up the courage to meet his gaze. The warm early morning rays did nothing to stop the chill covering her arms. “You were setting up Scott Electronics. I got caught up in your goals and enthusiasm, but I still had a lot to prove. Not just to you…”
His brows drew together in that funny way he had when he was puzzling over a bug in a piece of code that wasn’t performing correctly. He’d sit and focus on his screen. Working and reworking the code until he figured it out. Sometimes staying at the office well past midnight. It was another reason he’d set up his home office.
“You’ve been with me since the beginning. You have nothing left to prove. That’s why you’re leaving, isn’t it?”
Cameron nodded. “It’s not about you. I’ve loved every day at Scott Electronics, and I’m so proud of what we accomplished.”
“Remember when it was just a staff of twelve? We worked out of the fifth floor of that terrible, stuffy office. Every day, management would slip a fresh note under the door about a rule we’d broken. You were like a schoolteacher, reigning in a bunch of teen boys. Jeff and Tim would take their skateboards to the parking garage and figure their problems out on the ramps. Karl would sail his paper airplanes down the hall.”
She grinned when Blake laid a hand on her shoulder. Brushing her curls behind her ears. “You’d hoop it up with your basketball banging against the office door. It was crazy.”
“Not crazy, creative.”
She nodded to concede his point.
“You didn’t come from the corporate computer world. I’d already worked there for ten years before I’d had enough. Micron snatched me up after graduating high school because of those silly apps. Saying they loved my ideas but then did everything they could to kill my imagination. I stayed as long as possible, saved every dime of their generous salary, and got out. And when I left, I swore I would look for talented, imaginative people and give them the space to be who they were.”
“Then why’d you pick me?” She spun around, ignoring the way her breasts grazed his chest. “I never belonged here.Neverfit in. You guys balked at every rule I tried to establish. Resisted any attempt at order. I was the geeky nerd girl, and you all were the cool guys. It wasn’t a good feeling.”
Blake’s hazel eyes went golden. “I understand. I was that nerdy kid throughout high school.”
“Maybe when you were younger, but later–”
“Later, you mean after I started making more money than I could spend and got a makeover?”
Cameron’s mouth dropped open. “No way. You did not.”
Blake arched his brow. “Of course I did. You’ve seen the social media pics. The ones comparing high school me to corporate me.”
“The ‘how ya like me now’memes?”
He shook his head, and his hands fell away while he looked down. Of course, she’d seen it. The planet had seen it. Whenever someone bested someone else, they’d flash the meme of his transformation with the caption‘how ya like me now?’. They used the popular catchphrase after any significant change: a marriage, a new job, a divorce. There were endless applications, but it never seemed to affect him.
“You never seemed upset by it. Not even when people stopped you at the airport or in a restaurant to say it.”
“How could I be angry? My lifedidchange. It’s like the geeky Clark Kent became everyone’s Superman. I didn’t mind at all.”