It was starting to scare me how much.
20
CAMI
Ihad so much fun with Lily and Con that I almost didn’t want the night to end. It had been so long since I’d just sat around with friends and laughed. But then, it had been even longer since I’d sat next to a man and wanted him so badly that it didn’t matter how much fun I was having, I wanted to get away. Get him alone.
As she had been for the last three years, Emma was the deciding factor for when the night ended. She had been happily watchingBlueyinside when all of a sudden, she was outside, eyes red rimmed, lower lip thrust out in a pout. She wanted ice cream. She’d seen a pint through Con and Lily’s glass refrigerator door. She wanted itnow.
“Oh, this looks familiar,” Con said as she began working herself up into a tantrum.
“Halley and the donut meltdown,” Landon agreed, and they both traded grim looks, like buddies remembering a particularly gruesome war story.
“She doesn’t usually do this.” I gathered Emma up into my arms, a little perplexed. She didn’t even like ice cream that much.
“Halley’s tantrums reached new levels when she turned four,” Con said. “Peaked before her fifth birthday, but she stayed dramatic.”
Landon took Emma from me and murmured something into her ear I couldn’t make out. Something that made her quiet down and cheer up. Something that I suspected was a bribe. I couldn’t even pretend to be disapproving though. Not when I saw her arms wrap more tightly around his neck and her cranky, screwed up face soften. I thanked Con and Lily for dinner and told them I hoped they meant it when they said to come back anytime.
“Of course,” Lily said immediately. “With the baby, I don’t get out much, and Halley is one of my only friends in the area.”
“With the stalker, I don’t get out much either,” I said, and she laughed.
In the car on the way home, I reached over and tried to intertwine my fingers with Landon’s. He squeezed briefly, then put his hand on the wheel. Two and ten. More than once, his gaze flicked to the rearview mirror where I knew he had a view of Emma. Her head was slumped against the side of her car seat, her chest rising and falling behind the five-point harness.
“I had fun tonight,” I whispered, putting my hand on his thigh instead. The muscle tensed, and he sent me a warning sideways glance.
“No funny stuff while I’m driving, Cami. We’ve got precious cargo.”
“I guess I can wait until we get back home.”
Another sideways look, this one glimmering with speculation. “I’ll drive faster.”
He didn’t though. I could have slid the straps of my tank top off my shoulders and sat next to him topless and he wouldn’t have gone even a mile over the speed limit, not with Emma in the backseat. It made my heart ache with love for him–and squirm with impatience. Surely, he could go the standard five miles over the speed limit that everyonewent so we could get Emma to bed and then ourselves into his bed. I couldn’t wait to slide in between the cool, silky sheets and find his hot, hard naked body against mine.
“Cami,” Landon warned again, and I pulled my hand away.
“I like your friends,” I murmured, trying to distract myself from what was waiting for us.
“They like you, too. Con always did.”
That was nice to hear. I’d never gotten a feeling one way or another what his friends thought of me. We hadn’t spent much time together. Before tonight, I’d grouped Con with Landon’s three other closest friends and thought of them as a male monolith. All tall, successful, good-looking men who moved with unnerving confidence and exuded power, both in the boardroom and, I imagined, the bedroom.
I searched my thoughts frantically for something to talk about that would get my mindoffthe bedroom. We still had ten minutes left in the drive. Another fifteen or twenty after that to get Emma ready for bed and then back to sleep. Andthen–
“I want to introduce you to my mom,” Landon said, knocking all the hedonistic thoughts right out of my head.
“Your mom?” I repeated like he’d said a word I wasn’t familiar with.
“Yes,” Landon said, the corner of his mouth twisting sardonically. “I do have one, you know. I didn’t just spring from Zeus’s head, fully formed.”
“You’re not a Roman god?” I feigned surprise to cover the fact he had shocked me. He’d mentioned his mother so infrequently when we were together that I’d assumed they were estranged.
Landon turned onto the street that led to his building. “I want her to meet Emma. She’d given up on me giving her grandchildren.”
Grandchildren. Emma was this woman’s granddaughter. I spared a thought for my mother, who I suspected had secretly loved being Emma’s only grandmother. She never did like competition.
“Of course,” I murmured.