Almost Just Friends Read online

  After they’d finished painting, he’d kissed her good night, and it’d been her to deepen the kiss. He’d given a low, rough, sexy male growl of approval and pressed her up against a dry wall to free up his hands. And goodness, those talented, knowing hands . . . She’d been desperately trying to get down to bare skin when her phone had gone off. One of the other EMTs had gone home sick and they’d needed Piper immediately.

  Now, in the light of day, with her good spots still quivering at the midnight memories, she added a new item to her list:

  Discover Cam’s best body part.

  When she realized she was smiling wickedly, she shook her head. She’d finally cracked, no doubt from a deadly lack of orgasms. But hey, that was a fixable problem. And if she got it together before Cam left Wildstone, she could fix it with him. Hmm. Maybe she should start a list on how exactly to make that happen. Or where she wanted it to happen . . . With a grin, she wrote: Have sex not on a bed . . . Then a shadow fell over her.

  She jumped and slammed the journal shut as Cam sat down next to her.

  He studied her face, his own amused. “I’d give a lot of money to know what you were just writing.”

  She lifted a shoulder. “Making a shopping list.”

  He shook his head. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  This was true, and she felt her cheeks burn. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Wow. Lies on lies. Now I really want to know.” Leaning in, his mouth brushed her earlobe. “Bet I could get it out of you.”

  If he kept doing that, the truth wasn’t the only thing he’d get out of her. And where was Winnie? She looked around. No sister in sight. What the hell?

  “You waiting for someone?” Cam asked.

  “Winnie. And she’s late. What are you doing here?”

  He opened his mouth, but her stomach growling loudly beat him to it.

  With a smile, Cam opened the basket and pulled out the cheese and crackers, and got busy with a knife.

  She devoured the first cheesed-up cracker he handed her, and he quickly made her another.

  This time she managed to slow down enough that he was able to make one for himself in between feeding her. When he stopped to suck some cheese off his thumb, the sound made her shiver.

  Noting her squirm, he smiled, and his eyes seemed to darken with heat. “You okay?”

  She decided not to answer on the grounds she might incriminate herself, but when he held out another loaded cracker, she bit his finger, making him laugh.

  “Careful,” he warned. “Payback’s a bitch.”

  That gave her an anticipatory shiver. Seriously, his voice alone could give her an orgasm. And by the look on his face, he knew it too. She busied herself with eating, and he laughed again, softly, knowingly.

  Next time she’d bite him harder.

  “You’ve been putting in long hours.” With this, he gave her yet another cracker. “Both at work and at home.”

  He was making sure she was eating, she realized, discombobulated by the barrage of sweet and sexy from him. He made her dizzy, in the best of ways. “I need to get everything fixed up sooner than later.”

  He nodded. “Are you going to rent the cottages out, then?”

  “Sell. I need out from the huge overhead.”

  “Oh,” he said, seeming surprised.

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Feels like something.”

  “Have you talked to Gavin and Winnie about selling?”

  “No. Up until this latest visit home, they’ve shown no interest in what happens to the place. So I figured they’d be excited about having their portion of the profit.”

  “Maybe you should talk to them about it.”

  She shrugged. “As you’ve seen firsthand, we don’t do ‘talk’ so well. Oh, and I tried the listening thing. It’s . . . a work in progress.”

  He looked like he one hundred percent understood that. And she knew he did, and that also, he missed Rowan. Scooting closer, she reached out her hand, which he took in his and squeezed in silent thanks. And now suddenly she didn’t want to bite him so much as she wanted to hug him.

  Digging into the basket, he came up with some grapes, which he shared with her. “What happens if you sell?”

  “We’d divide the profit three ways, which should leave me with more than enough to follow my dream of going to college to become a physician assistant. The sale would hopefully cover the move and tuition at the University of Colorado.”

  “When do you start?”

  “The program has six start times a year, so it just depends on when I get it all together. It’s about the money at this point. I need to have enough to cover myself for the two-year program, and I need Gavin and Winnie to have enough that they won’t need me to supplement them.”

  He ate a few grapes. “You’re a good sister.”

  “One who’s made a lot of mistakes.”

  “Such as?”

  “Being too tough on them, and maybe not affectionate enough. I never had the time to really listen to them. I was just hyperfocused on not screwing up all our lives.”

  “You did your best.” He shrugged. “Besides, we all have our faults.”

  “Yeah? What’s yours?”

  He looked at her for a long moment. Instead of answering, he went back into the basket and pulled out a bottle of wine. He held it up and she nodded, so he poured them both a glass.

  “Are you trying to say you have no faults?” she asked.

  He snorted. “I’m definitely not saying that.”

  “Well, then?”

  He cocked his head and studied her. “Maybe I don’t want to tell the woman I’m insanely attracted to exactly what those faults are.”

  That gave her body a shot of pure lust. How many times had she been told by a sexy man that he was insanely attracted to her? Exactly zero. To cover up her reaction, she gestured at him with her glass of wine. “But you do admit you have them.”

  “I’m human, aren’t I?”

  She’d been teasing, but her smile faded because he wasn’t. He’d fooled her for a moment, distracting her, but yeah, he was still grieving. And who wouldn’t be? She lightly nudged her shoulder to his. “I’ve got lots of faults. I’m impatient, single-minded to the point of distraction, hate to be vulnerable, which means I avoid real conversations, and . . .”

  He raised a brow when she trailed off. “Don’t stop now, it’s just getting good.”

  Drawing a deep breath, she admitted her truth. “Despite what you seem to think, I’m not a great older sister.”

  He cocked his head, his gaze warm but curious, and utterly devoid of judgment. “Let me recap what I know. You came here with Winnie and Gavin when you were just a kid yourself. You had your grandma’s help for a while, but you mostly raised them on your own. Yeah?”

  She nodded, and he squeezed her hand.

  “In my book, that makes you a great sibling, and possibly the best person I’ve ever met.”

  She took a deep gulp of the wine. The shockingly good wine. She looked at the bottle. “Wait a minute. Winnie hates wine. Why would she buy herself such a good one?”

  “Probably because she didn’t buy it.”

  She lifted her head and stared at him. “Because . . . you bought it? You set all this up?”

  He held the eye contact. “No.”

  She stared at him some more, and then it hit her. “Ohmigod, you think I did this?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  She closed her eyes. “She set us up. I’m going to have to kill her.” Standing, she looked around, certain they were being spied on by her annoying, meddling, interfering sister.

  Cam stood too. “Okay, so you didn’t do this.”

  She moaned. “I don’t know what’s worse, that you think I did and then denied it, or that Winnie thought I needed so much help getting your attention that she had to put it all together for me.”

  That got her a smile. “Tr