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“What if I told you you already owned me?” he asked her.
She turned back with a sad little smile. “I’d call you a liar,” she said. “I don’t have enough of you, Cam. And that might be what breaks this little almost-relationship we have going on here. Because the day will come when what little I have won’t be enough. What will you do then?”
“Everything I can to change your mind,” he told her, aware of the arrogance that was reflected in his tone.
She could think he was arrogant until hell froze over, but he wasn’t going to lose her. Whatever it took, he’d do it. He just couldn’t tell her. He wouldn’t be able to bear the disgust he would see in her eyes if he did.
He loved her. He wasn’t fighting it, he had no idea if what he saw in her eyes was really love or just his own wishful thinking. Hell, he’d loved her seven years ago. It had nearly destroyed him when she turned away from what he was, without so much as considering the needs that drove him. But he had understood. He had let her go. And the hunger for her had only grown.
And Cam knew, it wasn’t going to go away.
Chase watched as Cam and Jaci got silently out of the Jaguar. He could feel the tension as he neared them, Jaci’s luggage in his hands, and watched as Cam pulled her bags from the back of the car.
For years he had fought to feel something through that twin bond they had once shared so long ago. Chase remembered when he stopped feeling it. When he started feeling as though the brother he had known since conception had died. Until they had learned Jaci was arriving at the mansion, that lack of a bond had only gotten worse over the years.
Now he wished he could make sense of what he did feel. Cam’s guard was dro
pping; whatever he had done to block his nightmares and the echoes of emotions that went along with that twin bond was weakening.
He could thank Jaci for that, and he knew it. As he watched his brother escort her up the staircase to the lower floor of the converted warehouse, he knew that Cam’s feelings for Jaci had started it.
Cam had always had a soft spot for Jaci, even before he had started desiring her. She had been a precocious snot-nosed little kid that trailed after Cam every time she saw him.
Come to think of it, Jaci had started trailing after him about the time Cam had started drawing away from everyone else. Just after he turned fifteen. With her big eyes and her wide smile, she had bounced around Cam every time she saw him. And she had known him even when he was with Chase; Jaci had always been able to tell them apart.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this. ” Jaci was laughing at Cam as they entered the lower apartment. “You are aware aren’t you, that bringing me here is like giving an artist a blank canvas, or a writer a blank journal?”
“I told you, do what you want with it. ” Cam’s voice was patient and sincere, surprising Chase. Nothing he had done over the years had ever convinced Cam to put up so much as a picture. Anything Chase had gotten for Cam’s apartment always ended up back in his own apartment, slipped back in there by Cam while he wasn’t looking.
He shook his head as he moved through the large open room to the screened-off bedroom, and put Jaci’s luggage on Cam’s bed.
If she thought the apartment was sterile, he could only imagine what she thought of the bedroom. Cam didn’t even have a fucking blanket on the bed. There was a sheet and a few pillows thrown on the headboard. Chase knew for a fact his brother slept on the couch with nothing but a light throw blanket for warmth.
The large sectional couch had been bought with sleeping in mind, Cam had told him once. For some reason, his brother hated beds. Another of those anomalies that had begun in his teens.
Jaci stared around the bedroom. The bed was plain. The wood chest and dresser plainer still. There was a closet at the side, open and empty.
She felt like crying. There was nothing in Cam’s apartment that proclaimed it as his. And here, in the bedroom, the one room that most people marked as their own more than any other, it was more sterile than the rest of the apartment.
“You can do whatever to it. ” Cam cleared his throat behind her, staring around the screened-off room and seeing what she saw. Starkness. Brutal emptiness.
Hell, he should have at least bought a comforter for the bed, for appearance’s, sake if nothing else.
“You can even do the frills and stuff. ” He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at her stiff back.
He glanced at Chase. His brother shook his head and turned on his heel, walking from the partitioned room. Son of a bitch. He grit his teeth and held back the ire building inside him. So he didn’t like bedrooms. So the hell what?
“Hell, it’s not that big a deal,” he finally snapped. “I don’t like beds, why would I care about the fucking bedroom?”
“You’re right. ” She swung around to face him, a bright smile curling her lips, though her eyes were shadowed. “It’s not that big a deal. Like I said, a blank canvas. I have a free hand through the whole place, right?”
“The whole place. ” He shrugged easily.
“You’re paying for it,” she told him as she picked up the first of the dress bags and moved to the open walk-in closet. “I hear Ian pays you a killer wage, so you should be able to afford it. ”
Of course he could. He didn’t have many vices. The Jaguar was his biggest expense. They’d bought the warehouse cheap, using money from the sale of the house in Oklahoma and some savings they had. He didn’t care about the damned money, either.
“I’ll make sure you have a credit card,” he promised.
