Redeeming You(6)

“I can do this on my own. It’s not a big deal. We’ll make a plan that we can both live with over the next thirty days and we’ll stick to it.”

“Just so you know,” Jax said as she started walking down the hotel hallway. “Cam isn’t happy about this. It’s not going to be easy. He’s going to fight you every step.”

“Uh huh,” she responded as she walked down the hall holding her hand up to wave. She didn’t expect anything else based on the pictures of him flooding the internet over the last month.

Five minutes later, she walked into the hotel restaurant and she immediately spotted Cam sitting at a corner table with aviator sunglasses shading his eyes from the dim light of the restaurant. She suspected the sunglasses were a part of his attempt to be anonymous and also a tool to protect his sensitive, bloodshot eyes after another night of drunken stupidity. His back rested lazily against the red booth, his arms stretched out on either side of him like he didn’t have a care in the world. He was wearing a black, faded long-sleeved t-shirt, the sleeves pushed up exposing the swirling designs on his forearms that had slowly been growing over the last six months—not that she paid attention to his arms or any other part of his body.

“Can I help you?” a woman asked as she cruised past the hostess stand.

“Nope. I see the person I’m meeting,” she answered without turning around.

When she reached Cam’s table, she stood next to the vacant side of the booth waiting for Cam to acknowledge her presence. He knew she was there, staring at him, but he patiently flipped the pages of the menu refusing to look at her. Typical. After a few prolonged seconds of her temper steadily rising, she cleared her throat.

Cam still didn’t look at her. “Are you going to sit or do you want to stand there admiring me for a couple more minutes?” he drawled lazily.

“Are you going to take off your cheesy sunglasses or are you too hung over to act like a normal human being?” she shot back, anger pumping heatedly through her veins as she sat in the booth across from him.

Cam peeled off his dark sunglasses and carelessly tossed them on the table. “Better?” Cam asked gazing at her with his heavily hooded eyes, a sardonic smile floating on his lips.

She already wanted to kill him; well, maybe not kill him. That was too extreme. Tossing a glass of ice water at him might be more appropriate, but thirty days of this back and forth shit and one of them would probably be dead. “Slightly, but now I have to look at your eyes and they’re a bit distracting.”

Cam leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the edge of the table. “Are you trying to tell me something…like you’re attracted to me? I get that a lot, you know.” His lips curled up at the corners sinfully.

Smiling contemptuously, Taylor purposely let her eyes trail over his face down to his chest and back up again. Blessed with the face of an angel and a body made for sin, he was good-looking; there was no doubt. His messy light blonde hair, his black t-shirt stretched across his obviously muscular chest in all the right ways, his normally piercing blue eyes and perfectly sculpted bone structure made him one smoking hot rocker, but she’d never tell him that. He already knew. She didn’t need to contribute to his already inflated ego.

“No, not even close. I was trying to tell you that you look like shit. Your eyes are bloodshot and swollen. I think your face is a little waxy and bloated looking too.” Taylor leaned forward, pretending to study him as she tapped her fingers on the table. “Other than that, I guess you’re okay if you’re into the yuppie loser pretending to be the big bad wolf type…and I’m definitely not.”

And she wasn’t, but there was something about Cam that made her heart beat a little faster and her stomach flutter, and she desperately hoped it came from disgust rather than attraction, because letting Cam into her life would be a disaster. She just walked away from one crappy relationship. She didn’t need to be chasing after another.

Looking genuinely amused, he burst out laughing, his low husky voice sending a shiver of awareness down her spine and a small part of her wanted to smile, but she ignored it. She had a job to do, and indulging in any part of Cam, even his laugh, would be stupid. Cam was an emotional black hole right now and she’d spent her whole childhood crawling out of one. She didn’t need to jump back in now regardless of how tempting Cam appeared on the surface with his sexy smile, his tattered jeans and his t-shirts that highlighted a chest her fingers itched to touch.

“I’m glad you set the record straight.” Cam relaxed against the booth again. “I wouldn’t want any misunderstandings to impair our professional relationship or your budding career as a rock star babysitter.”