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My throat went tight, and I wished I could yank the words back into my mouth. But then he tipped his head back and laughed, the warm booming sound curling through my veins.
Until I met him, I wasn’t aware that a sound could do that—warm you up from the inside out. The little girl in me, who thrived on praise for a job well done, couldn’t help but stand a little straighter and feel a bolt of pride that I’d done something to make him laugh.
If that didn’t show a screaming need for weekly therapy sessions, I didn’t know what did.
“It is,” he said, eyes wrinkling attractively as he smiled. He swiped a thumb under his eye and shook his head. “It really, really is.”
My lips twitched like they wanted to join him in that easy smiling, but they weren’t sure how. And because he owned some secret blueprint for reading my facial expressions, Cameron noticed my hesitancy.
“What’s going on in that brain of yours?” he asked quietly. “I’d love to know.”
My throat bobbed on a swallow, and his eyes tracked the movement. He couldn’t know what it was like, feeling the bubbling curiosity for a normal life. The desire to understand what it’s like because it was completely foreign.
I didn’t understand fighting with siblings and meddling moms and baskets of giant food and patient men with kind eyes and strong bodies and big hearts.
Words crowded my tight throat, but I couldn’t push them up and out.
They’d give too much away, and I didn’t know how to overcome the fear that if I spoke them out loud, they’d be used against me.
“It’s just me,” he said. “I’m not going to judge you or pity you, Ivy.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, mirroring the sharp way his words bit through my hefty reserve.
“I don’t understand your family,” I said slowly. “I don’t have … there’s no shared experience for me. And even if I did, I don’t understand how they’re like this all the time. They’re just nice … for the sake of being nice. They don’t want anything, or expect anything.”
His eyes seared into me while he listened, only the slightest nod as he did.
“Except Ian,” I added. “What happened with him?”
Cameron’s lips pulled to the side in a crooked grin, and it caused a dangerous weightlessness under my ribs.
“How much time do you have?”
I almost closed my eyes when he asked it, because it so closely mirrored our conversation in the elevator that the overwhelming relief of setting down the armor had my body feeling weak.
But despite that weakness, I held his gaze. “A lot, apparently,” then I gestured at the cat.
A dimple appeared in his cheek as he grinned.
Before he could answer, the cat decided it was time to be social.
He stood on my lap and arched his back, doing that weird kneading thing with his paws against my leg.
“Good morning,” I said.
Mew.
Lightly, he hopped off my lap and then onto the floor, padding over to where Cameron sat. Cameron leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the tops of his thighs, and dangled his fingers down so the cat could jump at them. His smile was kind and warm and sweet and made my insides go dangerously soft.
“He should go in by that litter box,” Cameron stated. “Anytime he wakes up, I’d bring him in there.”
“Oh, right. I read that,” I said. “I did some research after you left.”
Cameron stood, unfolding all that great big height with ease, leaning down to fold his hand underneath Neville’s tiny body.
And oh boy, seeing him with a kitten tucked up against his broad chest was a sight.
A thigh-clenching sight, too. I slowly sat up on the couch, running a hand over the top of my head to smooth any stray hairs.
