Evers & Afters (Dare With Me #2) - J.H. Croix Page 0,14

mind, she whispered, “This is a bad idea.”

“Maybe,” I murmured.

I waited, although I didn’t know why. When her tongue darted out to swipe across her bottom lip, I was gone. Decision made.

Her hair was up in a bun with loose tendrils dangling around her cheeks. Lifting a hand, I brushed one back, the lock of hair sliding like silk through my fingers. I dropped a kiss on one corner of her mouth, and then the other, capturing her gasp with my lips when I fit my mouth over hers.

She made this little throaty sound. It was like spurs in the flanks of my desire. Closing the inch between us, I slid one palm down her spine into the dip of her waist and over the sweet curve of her bottom, pulling her into a full body clench as I deepened our kiss.

Kissing Cammi was dangerous. I dove into the sweet heat of our kiss, her tongue gliding like liquid silk. She made a little impatient sound, flexing into me as one hand curved over my shoulder to cup the back of my neck and pull me closer. Her tongue was bossy against mine and for a few moments there, I lost sense of everything but her.

She was intoxicating. I finally needed air, and broke my lips free, leaning my head back and gulping it in, inhaling her scent, which only served to cloud the haze of lust in my mind. I could feel the press of her nipples against my chest with every ragged breath she took.

Looking back at her, all my cells were scrambled, and I couldn’t think. Cammi, sweet Cammi, was something else when she let her guard down. Her cheeks were flushed pretty and pink, and her lips plumped and swollen from our kiss.

I shocked myself with what I said next. “I want to see you.”

“I’m right here,” she murmured.

“No, I mean not just a kiss.”

She swallowed, and something flickered in her eyes. Worry, I thought.

We stared at each other in the quiet, and then Cammi jumped when there was a knock on the door. “Your next appointment is here,” Claudia’s voice called through the door.

“Be right there,” she called in return.

Cammi was all in a fluttery hurry then. “Okay, um. Claudia will schedule you. I’m not sure if the next one will be with me, or somebody else.”

She practically shoved me out the door, while I tried to absorb the implications of the fact that it seemed I couldn’t get too close to Cammi without kissing her.

Chapter Eight

Cammi

“Finally,” Susie said as she looked around the booth.

Tess grinned at her. “Finally, what?”

“We’re finally having girls’ night. Every time we’ve tried, we either reschedule or only some of us make it. I sent that first group text about four months ago. Everybody’s too busy,” Susie grumbled as she shrugged out of her jacket.

We were at Last Frontier Lodge, Diamond Creek’s high-end ski and adventure lodge, which also happened to have a fabulous restaurant.

“Three of the nights that were suggested, you had a conflict,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes from across the table.

“It’s hard. Finding a babysitter feels like an act of God sometimes,” Susie replied.

I looked around at my friends. Along with Susie, Tess, and Hannah, Emma had also joined us. Susie, Hannah, and I had all grown up in Diamond Creek together. Emma moved here about five years ago. She was Hannah’s biological sister who’d been adopted before Hannah was even born. Tess had shown up here on vacation and fallen in love with Nathan Winters. Nathan, along with his brothers, Jared and Luke, owned a fishing charter business. With Susie married to Jared and Hannah married to Luke, Tess was in the thick of that family mix.

Emma was married to Trey Holden. He was an attorney and also a pilot who happened to be friends with Elias. Elias, who I seemed to have developed a habit of kissing, if two times counted as a habit.

Hannah flicked Susie a quick look. “I don’t know what I’d do without your mom.”

“She’s a godsend when it comes to babysitting, even if she’s not available all the time,” Susie said. She lifted her hand and pulled out the elastic holding her curls up, and they fell in a rumple around her shoulders.

Emma grinned. “Trey’s my babysitter,” she said.

“Trey is a saint,” Tess added. “Plus, he’s got a much better schedule than our husbands.”

Emma smiled. “He does, and I’ll never complain about it.”

“With you about to have another baby, you’ll be