Camden (The Casanova Club Book 13) Read online

  I nodded and thought about how I’d walked away from Piper, leaving her in the dark living room in my absence. “Yeah. I did.”

  “You’re such an ass.”

  “I know.”

  Bradley cocked his head to the side. “It’s saying something that you took the steps to try to do the whole Christmas thing, though. She must have something special going for her if she’s able to get that much out of you. That’s better than I’ve done in what, twenty-two years of friendship?”

  “Sounds right.”

  Bradley leaned forward. “What about talking to her, Cam? She sounds like someone who would be easy—well, not easy per se, but easier—to open up to. She sounds like she has a good head on her shoulders. And if you ask me, it sounds like she might be able to show you a way to do Christmas properly. If you want to, of course.”

  Was that what I wanted? Someone to show me how to do Christmas properly? Was there even such a thing?

  I doubted it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like I’ve already pushed her out too far. Things didn’t start well. She might not be willing to stick around through the rest of this shit. And she doesn’t owe me anything. I think it would be best if I cut her loose and spared her my bullshit.”

  “I think that would be a mistake. Try, man. Just try. What’s the worst that could happen? She goes home and you still hate Christmas? There’s no loss there.”

  He had a point.

  “Talk to her,” Bradley pressed. “A woman’s way of looking at things is always different than you expect. She has unique experiences. She’s your opposite in nearly every way. Maybe you can learn a thing or two from a girl who loves Christmas who came from nothing.”

  I sighed.

  Bradley got to his feet. “Talk to her, or go get yourself a therapist. You need one or the other, man. Seriously. I hate seeing you beat down like this over a damn holiday. It can’t hurt you anymore. Not if you don’t let it. And I know that’s easier said than done, but still.”

  He moved to the sofa and picked up his jacket before going to the door.

  “Brad?”

  He turned back toward me.

  I nodded at him. “Thanks.”

  He smiled. “Anytime. Just keep your head above water for another three weeks. All right?”

  Chapter 13

  Piper

  My evening wasn’t sublime.

  I’d spent it alone, curled up on the sofa in my pajamas watching Christmas movies back to back while devouring a small tub of chocolate-chip-mint ice cream. It was something Janie and I did together at least two times during December.

  I wished she was here to keep me company. Christmas movies were a little less magical when you watched them by yourself, something I was just learning now.

  They also didn’t ring true when your very own Christmas tree wasn’t even lit. It was dark, nothing more than a tree-shaped shadow blocking out a small portion of New York’s lights. I turned it on every day but always made sure to switch it off around four in the afternoon, just in case Camden came home earlier than usual.

  He never did.

  The week had been nothing but late nights and early mornings. He was avoiding me.

  But he could only play this game for so long. And I had resolved to talk to him about it as soon as I got the chance. I’d been hopeful tonight would be that chance, but it was already ten o’clock, and he still wasn’t home, and my bed was calling my name upstairs.

  Maybe I could get a little tree for my bedroom that I could leave lit all night long. It might help my spirits to fall asleep and wake up to a little bit of Christmas.

  I heard the elevators chime when they opened at half-past ten. Groggily, I reached for the remote and struggled to find the pause button on the very modern, ultra-sleek, hundred-button-filled controller. I squinted in the dark as a bit of panic tugged at my insides.

  Camden’s shoes clipped the hardwood floors as he came into the living room.

  I grimaced and looked over my shoulder at him.

  His eyes were on the television screen, but he didn’t look upset. And he was holding several shopping bags in his hands.

  I frowned down at them, and he moved around the sofa to set them down on the one across from me.

  “What is all that?” I asked.

  There were nearly a dozen bags spread out on the sofa. They were from varying shops, and I craned my neck to try and get a good look as Camden buried his hand in one of the bags.

  He pulled out a long strand of garland. “I was hoping you’d give me another shot and we could try this whole Christmas thing again. I bought eggnog, too.”

  “Eggnog?” I asked as I extracted myself from the sofa. What had gotten into him? Smiling like a fool, I went over to him and gazed down at the bags. They were filled with all sorts of Christmas decorations. “Where are we going to put all this?”

  “Wherever you see fit,” he said simply.

  I stretched to the tips of my toes, balanced myself with one hand on his shoulder, and pressed my lips to his cheek.

  “What was that for?” he asked as I settled back down to my heels.

  “To say thank you.”

  He searched my eyes. “You’re welcome.”

  Camden and I spent the next two hours finishing the decorating we’d kicked off almost a week ago. When we were done, it was a quarter to one in the morning, and the house sparkled with festive cheer. We’d added more decor to rooms we’d missed or didn’t have enough to cover during our first round, like the dining room and kitchen. We even wrapped garland around the staircase leading up to the second level, and again to the third where the spa and in-home gym were. We didn’t have enough decor to do the other floor where the extra guest rooms were, but Camden did take me up to the observatory to string lights around the railings there.

  The view of the city from the highest point of the tower was marvelous, especially as the snow began to fall, creating a blanket of white down below broken up only by the rainbow of Christmas lights.

  It was completely and utterly magical. And very, very cold.

  Camden put a hand in the small of my back. It was the most intimate touch we’d shared since I arrived. He tipped his head down to mine. “Should we go inside and get you warmed up? We could share some of that eggnog and rum?”

  “That sounds lovely,” I said. The fatigue that had settled in my muscles prior to his return from work was long gone, replaced by the excitement of finally being able to share some meaningful moments with the twelfth bachelor.

  This was infinitely better than watching Christmas movies by myself.

  When we made it to the kitchen, Camden fixed us our drinks. He opened a box of chocolates that had been hiding in one of the bags of new Christmas items and set it on his coffee table before he and I took up seats on his sofa. I tucked my legs under myself and angled myself toward him and watched as he popped a caramel-filled truffle in his mouth.

  I liked the way his jaw flexed when he chewed.

  How his throat moved when he swallowed.

  How he smiled when he caught me staring.

  I blinked and looked away as my cheeks burned. “This has been really lovely, Camden. Thank you. It’s all so much more than I ever could have imagined.”

  He was still smiling at me. “Does it remind you of home?”

  I laughed. “No. Not really. Not at all, actually.”

  He frowned. “Is that bad? I was hoping you’d feel at home here with the decorations and the tree and—”

  “Oh, no, I do,” I said hurriedly. “But all of this is so far from my experience of Christmas. I grew up in a home where we didn’t have much money, you see. We still don’t. But we manage to make the holidays special by spending time together. My parents instilled that into me and my brother when we were young. Especially my mother. She used to say it wasn’t about the gifts but about the quality of time you spent with the people you loved. When we were little, we thought that was nonsense, of course. P
hillip and I—Phillip is my younger brother—always looked forward to the presents under the tree and in our stockings regardless of how full or empty they were.” I shrugged. “My parents did a wonderful job with what they had. I’m grateful to them.”

  Camden nodded slowly. “Your parents are still struggling financially?”

  Not just my parents, I thought as I nodded. “Yes. It hasn’t been an easy few years for my family. Or a few decades, if I’m being perfectly honest. But we make ends meet.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Money is nice. It makes things easier. But not having it didn’t ruin anything for me growing up. Especially not at Christmastime. My brother and I were in charge of decorating the house every year. We used to make those hideous paper snowflakes. You know the ones where you cut random patterns into a piece of folded paper, and then you open it up and you have something sort of like a snowflake?”

  Camden arched an eyebrow. “No.”

  I laughed. “Of course not. Well, we made garland out of those and strung them up all over the house. I think my mother secretly hated them, but she never said a bad word about it. Although I did catch her trying to take some of them down one year without Phillip or I catching on.”

  Camden was staring at the fire. His eyes had gone blank, and as I sat beside him, I could tell he was no longer in the room with me. He was remembering whatever it was that ruined this time of year for him, whatever it was that had spurred him to unplug the tree on Sunday evening.

  He was shutting down.

  “Camden?”

  He looked over at me. “Sorry. Yes? Did you say something?”

  I inched closer across the sofa. I was close enough to put a hand on his shoulder, which I did. “Look. I know this is hard for you. I appreciate you trying to make Christmas special for me, but if it hurts you, we don’t have to do this, okay? We can pack it all up. We can donate it. We can—”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Camden closed his hand over mine on his shoulder before standing up and making his way over to one of the bags yet again. “I got a little something else. Something to show that I’m willing to wipe the slate clean if you are.”

  “All right,” I said, watching every move he made.

  Camden pulled something out of the bag that jingled, but he hid it behind his back as he went over to the Christmas tree. He bent down, picked up the plug, and plugged it in. It lit up the room, and he came back to join me on the sofa.

  I nodded behind his back. “What are you hiding back there?”

  A smile lingered on his lips, and he drew the thing out from behind his back. It was a pair of gold jingle bells attached to one another by a spiral of gold rope. Dangling from the middle of the rope was a green sprig.

  Of mistletoe.

  Camden shook it gently and the bells chimed.

  “Very subtle,” I said.

  Camden leaned in closer. I could smell his cologne. His massive frame took up all the space around us, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. “Sometimes, you have to make your own romance, right?”

  Whatever had gotten into him, I didn’t mind it. Janie’s words rang in the back of my head when he said the word romance, and I considered pulling away and telling him I wasn’t there yet. But his lips looked so deliciously kissable. And he smelled like pine and fresh snow and cold winter air. And I wanted to know what it would be like to be held by him.

  So I moved closer too.

  Camden held the mistletoe over our heads as he reached out with his other hand to cup my cheek. He traced the line of my jaw and gazed into my eyes, and I became lost in his sapphire gaze. It was dark and light all at once. It held the promise of something more—something powerful. And I wanted to know what that tasted like.

  My eyes fluttered closed a millisecond before our lips touched. The kiss started off soft and gentle, like a polite greeting, and then he gathered a great breath and pulled me against his chest, letting the bells fall to the sofa beside me. I ran my hands up his chest to grip the front of his shirt, and he held me to him as his tongue slid between my lips and explored my mouth. I yielded to him as his hand roamed up my back and snaked into my hair.

  I hadn’t expected the kiss to be so good. And I definitely hadn’t expected that I would want more. There was a slow burn there. Flames licked at my insides as the kiss deepened and Camden pushed me back against the sofa, pinning me between him and the back cushions. I ran my hands up over his shoulders, traced the muscles in his back, and held myself to him as both of us became breathless and tangled up together.

  Then he stopped and held his forehead to mine as we both collected our breath.

  “I want to tell you, Piper,” he breathed.

  My eyes were still closed. All I could smell and feel was Camden. “Tell me what?”

  “About Christmas when I was eleven.”

  I opened my eyes and found myself staring into his royal irises. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I don’t need to know.”

  “I want you to.”

  I licked my lips.

  Camden pulled me up and pushed away, giving me space to piece myself back together after the moment of intense and unexpected passion. There was a knot below my belly. A familiar, greedy, lustful knot. I willed it away, but it would not listen.

  Camden raked his fingers through his hair and then draped both arms over the back of the sofa. There was something unabashedly sexy about a man draping himself over furniture like that. I wanted to crawl on his lap and taste every inch of his skin and find out what sort of body lay under those clothes of his.

  A well earned one, I suspected.

  “My parents were heavy drinkers,” Camden began. “Holidays and special occasions usually meant that they were going to get even more plastered than your average Saturday night. But at Christmastime, Mom made an effort to make it about me. To make it special. To stay sober.” He paused, and I didn’t say a word, granting him the space and the silence to work through how he wanted to continue. A good twenty seconds stretched between us before he spoke again. “They fought a lot. Mom never started it. But my father would get so uncontrollably angry that she’d lock me in my bedroom while he wailed on her and the house itself. Walls would shake. I’d be helpless in my room, listening to it all.”

  I shifted in my seat. Camden was staring at the Christmas tree. I wanted to touch him and console him, but he was reliving trauma, and I didn’t want to push him over the edge and ask for too much from him. So I kept my hands to myself and did the only thing I could. I listened.

  “When I was eleven, my parents had a raging fight on Christmas Eve. The lights on the tree went out, you see. Mom was distraught. She wanted things to be perfect, if just for a night, and a lightless tree simply wouldn’t do. When she tried to fix it, she made it worse. Dad came in and wreaked havoc. Smashed the whole thing to pieces. I can still remember how she cried as she tried to salvage the ornaments she’d had since she was a little girl. It was no use. My father was a wicked man, Piper. Her tears only egged him on. He loved the distress and the chaos.”

  I gritted my teeth and looked away. I couldn’t imagine something so horrible.

  “My mother sent me to my room at eight o’clock. I wasn’t allowed to come out for the night. Where most kids were anxiously waiting for Santa to come and leave their presents, I was anxiously waiting for the fighting to stop. It lasted another hour and a half or so. By ten o’clock, the house was calm and still. And I slept.”

  I swallowed. There was a far-off look in Camden’s eyes. It didn’t bring me comfort. I knew the worst of the story was coming, and I found myself wishing I hadn’t let him tell me all this.

  Camden cleared his throat. “When I woke up on Christmas morning, I found my parents in the living room.”

  I waited for the words I knew had gotten stuck in his throat.

  Camden looked down at his hands. “They’d overdosed together
on the sofa.”

  My breath got caught in my chest. A little sound of surprise escaped me, and I wished it hadn’t because Camden looked at me with regret.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a lot. I know. I shouldn’t have burdened you with it.”

  “No,” I said hurriedly, shaking my head. “No. You’re not burdening me. I just don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s… uncomfortable.”

  I searched his eyes. “I’m not uncomfortable, Camden. I promise. I’m just so sorry for that little boy. I’m sorry for what he lost and what he can never get back.”

  The lines in Camden’s forehead softened. His tightened jaw relaxed. “You’re not like anyone else, Piper James. Are you?”

  I blushed. Many men had said similar things to me this year, but it still served to make me flustered.

  Camden reached out and stroked my cheek, pausing to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “For the first time since I was eleven, I can see the beauty in Christmas.”

  Before I knew what was happening, his lips were sealed to mine again. He kissed me like I’d saved him. And I kissed him like I could suck the darkness from his past right out of his soul.

  Chapter 14

  Camden

  Piper shuffled in close to my side as we made our way through the ever-thickening crowd at Rockefeller Center.

  People clambered against us to get front and center, but I was determined to make sure the girl at my side had the best seat in the house for the annual tree-lighting ceremony that would be taking place in T-minus one hour. She’d been brimming with excitement since I told her I was taking her here this morning.

  That excitement had nearly spilled over entirely when I suggested she invite her friends and family.

  Her eyes had gone as wide as I’d ever seen them, and she gasped, asking if I was serious.

  Of course, I’d been serious. That would have been a cruel trick. I was genuinely interested in meeting her family and her best friend, Janie, who she said might be a bit of a handful but was a friend with the best intentions.