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“Alright, alright. You don’t gotta manhandle me.” Ivy remained in the doorway even as Cam held the edge of the door, clearly wanting to close it. They maintained eye contact for a strangely long time, blue versus green, an entire conversation passing between them in a language I didn’t understand.

Her eyebrows lifted in warning. “Camden.”

“Ivy?”

She crossed her arms. “What?”

“Get out.”

She huffed and clacked away, and the door closed with a soft snick. The temperature in the small room rose by several degrees while electricity ignited across my entire body, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in years. I’d imagined what Cam would look like dozens—hundreds—of times over the years, but nothing could have prepared me for this. In high school, I’d thought him perfect, but if I’d known this is what he’d turn into, that this dazzling man with his intelligent eyes and his devastating face existed inside the slender boy he had been, my teenage self would have wept at the injustice.

Adult Cam Shepherd was spectacular, yet still absolutely, unequivocally, one-hundred percent too good for me. Our circumstances hadn’t changed. He considered me trailer trash, and he was right. That was where I came from, and I wasn’t ashamed of it.

Not proud, but definitely not ashamed, and too intelligent not to know that Cam was a peacock while I was a pigeon. We didn’t mix.

Oil and water.

Vodka and good decisions.

While he seated himself at Ivy’s desk, I gave my body a quick, stern lecture that attraction was stupid and meaningless, and if said body didn’t get its head in the game right this instant, there would be a punishing spin class at Maribel’s gym later.

Then the winter blue eyes landed on me again, and logic fled.

“Been a long time,” he said.

I attempted a smile. “Time flies, or so I’m told.”

He studied my face, so I took a moment to peruse his own—so familiar, yet changed. A new scar through his eyebrow gave him the slightest air of danger.

The placid, polite expression did not.

“How’s your mother?” he asked.

“She’s well. How’s yours?”

“Fine as always.” His tone was courteous, but a thread of energy connected from his voice to my spine, an undercurrent of the something that had always fizzled between us.

I relinquished any courage I’d mustered and stared at my fingers fidgeting in my lap. “That’s great. And…your dad?”

A beat passed.

Then another.

“He’s fine, too.” His voice had gone distant, and when I looked at him, so had his eyes.

“That—that’s great.” I took a sip of the water Ivy gave me. “I—um—so—you’re…working here now?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Obviously.”

“That’s…great.”

God. Did I have to keep saying the same banal thing over and over again? He was going to think I’d gone mushy in the head.

Another charged silence passed before he asked softly, “What are you doing here, Honeycutt?”

Blinking, I shifted in my chair. “Ivy invited me⁠—”

“No, I don’t want to know what you’re doing here in my distillery. That part’s obvious. What are you doing here, in Sugar Springs? After all these years? Shouldn’t you be off saving the world by now or something?”