My brain leaps into action, digging for reasons why I would recall that day so vividly. It wouldn’t be because I was in any of the photographs. I was actually the photographer, taking the pictures of her with her family. It wasn’t because I got to properly congratulate her, because she was doing her best to ignore my existence still, at that point in her life.
Then, it hits me.
“I only remember because Camden shoved your face in your cake, and you screamed at him for getting it on your favorite dress.” Not her hair, not her face. Her dress. Simply because it was her favorite.
She giggles. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. I’m pretty sure I also jumped his ass later that night.”
I bark out a deep laugh. “Oh, you did. We were out back, sitting by the fire, when you snuck up behind him and attacked like a vicious, rabid dog.”
She gasps. “I did not!”
“You did!”
She laughs hard again, gliding her fingers across my lower back. It’s not sexual, but it’s not part of the massage either. It’s as if she’s just…touching me. “Okay, so I might have attacked, but he deserved it. That was my favorite dress.”
And she looked fucking breathtaking in it.
She continues on with the massage, and while I try to relax and stop my brain from thinking, that’s not what happens. I think about her in the dress…and then out of it. And the result is not what needs to happen right now when the very woman is in the room with her hands all over me.
Professionally, of course.
Needing a redirect, I ask, “Ready for the big thirtieth?”
“Age is just a number,” she replies. “You’re right after me.”
“I am,” I reply. My twenty-fifth is May sixth, but I’m sure it’ll be just like every other birthday I’ve had in the last few years. The Millers will host a dinner to celebrate. My mom will call me before she goes to bed, and my dad will be too busy.
“Twenty-five. I remember my twenty-fifth. I was freaking out about turning a quarter of a century,” she replies with a chuckle.
The memory brings a smile to my face. Collin and Cade were both out of the military by that point, so we all wentup to Chuck’s Place—the old bar Lizzie ended up buying—since Collin was working. All of Charli’s friends were there to help her celebrate, and even though Camden and I were only nineteen at that point, Chuck turned a blind eye at us being there, as long as we stayed back by the pool table and didn’t draw any attention to the fact we were underage. Or didn’t drink, which, I’ll admit, we might have snuck drinks from his older brothers a time or two.
“And now? Are you freaking out about turning thirty?”
“Naw,” she replies casually, working her magic on my lower back. “I’ll just get another tattoo and toast to another year.”
“Good idea,” I tell her, thinking about all the ways I wish I could help her celebrate. She’s always been so out of reach, unobtainable, and completely out of my league. Not only that, but she’s always seen me as a kid. Her younger brother’s best friend, five years her junior. I didn’t have a shot in hell with her.
“What happened there?”
“Hmm?” I ask, lifting my head from the headrest. “What?”
“You went completely tense.”
“Oh, uh…”Think, think.“Just thought of something for work.”
“Ahh,” she replies. “Work. The reason you’re in this predicament.”
“Yeah, but it’s what I do and who I am. I love my job.”
“That’s good. I rather enjoy mine too,” she says, finishing up my lower back. She grabs the blanket on top of me and holds it up. “All right, turn over.”
Turn over? She thinks I can turn over?
I’ve been hard as concrete since the moment I saw her through the window as she exited her massage studio. I’m used to the perpetual state of arousal I seem to always be engaged in when she’s near, but that doesn’t mean I want her to see it. And there’s nonotseeing it when I roll over and my dick is tenting the blanket.
“I’m okay,” I tell her lamely.
“What? I prefer you to roll over so I can do your shoulders, neck, and legs.”
