Chapter Twenty-Six
Caleb
I’d decided I was going to learn how to cook. Real food. Not the sandwiches and scrambled eggs that had been sustaining me since I’d moved in with Chantel.
“That meal was incredible.” Zadie read my mind as we shuffled out of the dining room, leaving Chantel to deal with the aftermath. “Do you think Solange would teach me? I’d kill to cook like that.”
“Get in line. I was thinking the same thing.”
“Or maybe I could just convince her to move here.” She smiled, and the ease of it sent a spiral of heat through my chest.
“Good luck.” I rubbed my full stomach and dropped onto Eric’s couch. “That woman is Montreal to her bones.”
Zadie hesitated before curling up beside me, close enough that her shoulder pressed into my arm. “I should probably sit on the other side of the room.”
“But then you’d be on the other side of the room.” I wrapped my arm around her waist and pulled her closer.
She huffed a laugh. “Exactly. Getting caught making out by Chantel was a little too reminiscent of being busted by my parents. Not a trauma I need to relive.”
“Can’t say I know what that’s like.”
“What?” She pulled back to look at me. “Your parents never caught you with a girl?”
“Nope.”
She shook her head. “How? I was elite level when it came to sneaking around and my mother still walked in on me enough times to make me think she’d bugged my room.”
“My teenage years weren’t exactly normal.” The words felt almost too heavy to say out loud, but there was no point in running from the truth. “I didn’t get the chance to sneak around with anyone. Although, I did smuggle myself out of my hospital room a couple of times. That’s how Eric met Jamie. I was hitting on her in the hospital cafeteria when Eric shut it down.”
Something shifted behind her eyes, and my gut clenched. I knew what pity looked like—I’d been on the receiving end of it since I was twelve. But right now, I couldn’t read her.
And I sure as fuck couldn’t stand the thought of her treating me that way.
“You were hitting on your sister-in-law?”
The tension let go, my held breath releasing, and I broke into a wide smile. “She wasn’t my sister-in-law at the time. Just a sad-looking woman in a cafeteria who I thought was pretty.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Seriously?” She laughed, her voice turning warm and flirtatious. “I would have paid money to see that. I bet you were just as smooth as you are now. Did she make those googly eyes at you, like she did with Eric at dinner?”
“You think you’re funny, don’t you?”
“A little.” A wicked glow lit her eyes, and her barely contained laughter drew my attention to the way her crimson dress pulled tight across her breasts.
Before she could register what was happening, I had her pinned beneath me on the couch. Flat on her back, her hands gripping my shoulders, her eyes wide and heated.
“How funny are you now?” My voice came out rougher than I intended.
I dipped my face toward hers, and her eyes fluttered shut, her mouth softening in anticipation. The temptation to take her mouth—to take a hell of a lot more—pulsed through me like a second heartbeat.
At the last second, I deviated to the right. My lips found the crook of her neck, and instead of kissing her the way we both wanted, I dragged my mouth across her skin, finding the spot below her ear that made her breath catch, then the hollow of her throat, then the curve where her neck met her shoulder.
She arched into me, a strangled gasp escaping her lips.
“Cal.” Her fingers dug into my shoulders. “We can’t. Not here.”
