CHAPTER SEVEN
Brooke
That snooty rich bitch.
Of course Cameron Brice would be dating her. All poise and perfection, she practically had First Lady stamped on her forehead.
The second I saw Cameron escorting her out of a swanky brownstone in Rittenhouse Square, I hated her. She was wearing a fur stole that probably costed more than my education, and a sparkling gown that was likely custom-made from some fashion maven in Paris who had her in mind when he designed it. I glowered. Despite all that wealth, the plastic bitch was draped over Cameron like a cheap suit. He was smiling, patting her hand, and laughing mildly at something she said. I couldn’t deny they looked good together.
Presidential.
Just what the public expected.
With his help, doting on her like a priceless china doll, she climbed into the limo like she’d been riding in them all her life, when I, embarrassingly enough, had never even seen the inside of a car that elegant. The limo took off toward Center City, and I put my piece of crap car in drive and clunked along after them, following a few car lengths behind. The limo pulled up at the Kimmel Center, and I stopped at the corner, watching as Cameron stepped out, offering his hand to the statuesque blonde. As they ascended the stairs, he had a hand on the small of her back, his long fingers splayed protectively. It made me think of the way his hand had felt on my back, solid, warm, and strong.
In the cold chill of night, it made me ache for that touch again. God, I wanted it so bad that my whole body flared with goose bumps.
Masochist that I am, I waited outside the Kimmel Center for three hours. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like there was any chance of catching Cameron doing wrong in there. But when I thought about going home to my lonely apartment, it made my stomach roil. So I sat there, behind the wheel of my car, waiting, and thinking about what made Cameron tick.
He had a picture-perfect life. Wealth beyond measure, amazing house, beautiful girlfriend. Ridiculously beautiful girlfriend, almost too beautiful to be real. God, she had absolutely no waist and huge tits. They had to be fake. Did Cameron really like that kind of look? Was that what turned him on?
No. What had he said? He liked ponytails, but mostly, he liked things loose.
This woman didn’t exactly look loose. In fact, she looked the opposite.
So it was clear… he was a liar. Maybe a habitual one, considering where he’d been last night. I just needed to catch him in one of them.
As I sat there, I texted Kiera. First day survived!
She came back a moment later. How was it, girl? Did you see the douche?
Yep. I actually spilled coffee on him. Score one for me.
Her response was instantaneous. Srsly?!!! You beast. Way to take one for the team.
I wondered what she would think of my “team spirit” if she knew that I’d had his tongue on me the night before, delving into my most private parts, tearing me apart in a rapture I’d never quite felt before. And now, what was I doing? Sitting alone in a car, watching him with his perfect girlfriend, navigating through their perfect life? This clearly had nothing to do with trying to get dirt on him. It was more like… stalking.
Sighing, my thumbs flew across the screen. He makes it so easy to want to bring him down.
A few moments later, she replied with a smiley face and… THEN DO IT!
Right. Easier said than done.
My phone pinged again. You’ll get what you’re looking for in no time. Victory celebration on Friday?
I cringed. I was all for a quiet dinner and drinks with her, but I knew celebrating victory over one small coup would only jinx things. Plus, a small part of me was glad I hadn’t snapped that picture of him last night. Maybe I’d wanted more of a challenge. Maybe I was enjoying this undercover tease a little too much. But maybe — and this was the part that made a shiver travel the length of my spine — maybe I was already hooked by Cameron Brice’s legendary magnetic charm.
I typed. Let’s wait until the goose is cooked to claim victory. I tossed the phone on the passenger seat.
As I sat there, I thought of the blonde woman he’d gone into the Kimmel Center with. I knew it wasn’t a first date or even a second one… she had been his chosen date the past few weeks, according to the tabloids. I imagined taking her on in the ring, sparring with her. I could see myself ripping her perfect botoxed lips and fake eyelashes off. I imagined giving her the big one-two punch, bursting those giant implants.
Then I cursed myself. What the hell was I doing? Cameron was my target. Not his girlfriend. She’d done nothing wrong but fall for a total asshole. Cameron was the one who’d killed toads. He was the one who was against raising the minimum wage. He fought against women’s rights. He was the douche I wanted to bring down. His girlfriend was an innocent. In fact, he’d been cheating on her with me. I should’ve felt sorry for her.
And yet, somehow, knowing all these vile things about him, I still couldn’t help but turn my vitriol toward her.
Maybe I was hooked.
The longer I stayed there, waiting, desperate for the sight of him, the more I sensed I was in trouble.
I shifted in the front seat of the car, my backside numb, when he and the blonde appeared at the top of the steps. I leaned forward, watching their every move, afraid to blink and miss something. They rushed down the stairs in step, avoiding the evening drizzle that had begun to fall again. It was sweet, how he held his jacket over her head, guiding her around puddles that reflected the streetlights, making sure she was nestled into the limo before worrying about himself.
Sweet. Cameron Brice was not sweet. It was all clearly just an act.
But for whom? The street was almost deserted. There was no one around but me, watching from a safe distance.
When he got himself into the car, I sighed. He may have been cheating on her last night, and she may have been nothing like what he said turned him on, but one thing was clear… he cared about her.
My stomach sank.
He took her back to her brownstone, and when they climbed the stairs, she was all over him once again. I knew right then that he’d spend the night. A man like him, so magnetic, so powerful. Judging from where he’d been the night before, he clearly had an insatiable sex drive. He struck me as the kind of man who took what he wanted, when he wanted it.
I swallowed when I remembered he hadn’t taken me. I’d been almost naked, reaching for him, and he’d pushed me away. No, he’d simply given instead of taken.
He was undefinable. Maybe that was why I followed him and hadn’t been able to go home. He did things that showed he wasn’t just a one-dimensional Republican asshole. I wanted to unravel the mystery of Cameron Brice. No. I needed to. I leaned forward again, watching intently as he closed the door, as if watching a heart-pounding thriller. What would he do next? I had to know.
Through the closed door, shadows moved in the gauze-curtained sidelights, and I imagined him pressing her against the wall, kissing her. I imagined her moaning in delight as he lifted her dress, spread her legs, and wrapped them around his waist. I imagined him lowering his pants and plowing into her, right there in the foyer, as she screamed in ecstasy.
Likely, she was already well acquainted with his masterful tongue. And they’d have all night together. All night to make love, again and again.
I heaved another sigh. Why did that sound like a luxury?
And why, oh why, was I feeling so terribly envious?
I cursed myself again, wondering what was wrong with me, and threw the car into drive. I was just preparing to pull out of my spot across the street when he stepped outside, tugging on his collar, only a few minutes after he’d entered.
He was leaving her. He wasn’t spending the night, after all.
A surge of victory coursed through me. So you don’t own him like you thought you did, rich bitch.
But then it dissipated, and I was left feeling even more mystified than before. “Exactly who are you, Mr. Brice?” I murmured through the window.
Heartbeat skipping, I pulled out of the spot, making an illegal U-turn to follow him. He didn’t go anywhere unexpected, simply headed right to his Delancey Place home. When he got out and the limo pulled away, I watched him fiddle with his keys at the top stoop before pushing open the door. When he closed it, I could see his silhouette through the stained glass. He tilted his head to the ceiling, ran his hands through his hair, and vised the back of his head, standing as still as a statue for the longest time.
It looked, not just tired, but almost… sad. He stayed there so long that I knew he was deep in thought, and I had to wonder, for the hundredth time that night, what was on his mind. The one thing that came to me was this…
He may have cared about her, but he didn’t love her.
Cameron had passion. I’d seen it. But he had purpose too. And maybe, just maybe, he didn’t fuck women unless there was something more there.
I wished I could open up his head and find out what.
When he started to the back of the house, I sighed. Out of sight. Then, light suddenly illuminated the windows on the side of the house. Then, more windows, toward the back of the house, as he must have been walking through the large home. I scanned the sidewalk, dimly lit by one small streetlight. While most of the houses on the street were sandwiched together, Cameron’s stood alone, with alleys on either side. There was a spindly black wrought iron gate to the right of his house, and a path, mostly covered in thick vegetation, leading into darkness.
I squinted into the darkness. If I really wanted to, I could wander back there. But that would be stalking. And, likely trespassing, which was illegal.
And beneath it all, I was a good girl who followed the law… mostly.
I rubbed my hands together as I warred with myself, shivering, watching the windows, wishing he’d come back into the foyer so I could see him again. But moments passed, and I knew that I needed to be back there, with him.
Screw the FBI. If I got caught, I would just claim I saw my cat run back there.
I needed to see him again, just once more, and then I would go home.
Making up my mind, I ripped off my seatbelt and pushed open the door. I was so focused on the idea that I didn’t realize I was crossing the busy street until a car zoomed past me at lightning speed, horn blaring. More cautious, I hurried onto the sidewalk, and checking to make sure the street was relatively empty, lifted the latch to the gate and quickly slid inside.
It only occurred to me when I was inside the dark garden that he could’ve had a security system. I sucked in a breath, wondering if I would be caught there, effectively ending my dreams of joining the FBI forever. The light did nothing to help illuminate the way ahead. When an alarm wasn’t raised, I shuffled into total darkness on the uneven path, stubbing my Easy Spirits on raised bricks, once so badly I nearly cried out in pain. All the while, I kept my eyes trained on the windows up above, trying to make out Cameron’s form.
The first room was draped in heavy reddish curtains. The only thing visible through them was the outline of light. But as I neared the room at the back of the house, I drew in a breath and held it.
It was a large room with a high ceiling, and a wall of windows overlooking the yard. Cameron was standing there, his jacket and tie now off, his dress shirt open and untucked, holding a tumbler of amber-colored liquid. Scotch, I knew, the ridiculously expensive kind that probably cost more a fix than I had in my bank account. He was staring at something that seemed to be in the distance, but when I craned to see what, all I saw was a blank wall. He’d been concentrating on nothing, all in his head. Once again, I had to wonder what was going through his mind.
Suddenly, he brought the glass down to the table in front of him with such force, I thought it would shatter. He unbuttoned the rest of the buttons on his shirt and shrugged it off, tossing it aside.
I nearly choked at the sight of his naked, sculpted chest. He was lean, but with just enough of a rise in his pectorals and enough corded muscles around his arms to make him look, not like a god maybe, but better. More real. Even from that far away, I could tell he had the makings of a six-pack, that if he’d devoted as much time to working out as he did to the campaign trail, he could’ve easily graced the covers of fitness magazines. His skin was a pleasant, smooth caramel color, like the scotch he was so fond of. It seemed a sin to hide such beauty under the many layers that a three-piece suit provided. He strode across the room, at an angle toward me, in just his tuxedo trousers, and I ached to be in the room with him, to understand what he was thinking.
Then he grabbed something off the wall. I moved farther down the path and an easel came into view. He was holding a paintbrush in his hand, staring at the canvas with eyes narrowed, partly in concentration, partly in anger.
He paints, I thought dumbly, watching him stroke boldly over the canvas. How apropos. Apollo. The god of art.
As he moved, drops of paint splattered on his bare chest, but he carried on, unfazed. He moved like a house afire — unstoppable, raw, sensual — like he was making love to the image in front of him.
It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t think. I could barely breathe or blink. It seemed so certain to me before that this man, this person who cared nothing about nature or the homeless and poor, would care nothing for beauty. I’d assumed he wouldn’t care for a thing unless it could make him rich.
But god, he cared about this image in front of him. Desperately. If a gaze could set something afire, this one would’ve burned down his house.
I knew I’d been out too long. I’d spent a shamefully long time following after Cameron Brice. If anyone knew, they’d certainly think me mad. But I had to go the step further.
I had to know what he was painting. What had moved him so that he was in such a fever, lost completely in himself, in the image on the canvas. I inched forward into the rhododendron bushes until I was nearly able to reach out and touch the building’s brick façade.
All at once, a white ghostlike form appeared in the periphery of my vision. Before I could react, it launched itself at me. The loudest of rolling barks stunned me, ripping through the quiet night. I jumped backwards, losing all sense of balance, my elbows and ass breaking my fall, sloshing through thick mud in the rain-soaked garden.
“Shit!” I yelped, heart hammering as I scrabbled away on my heels and hands like a frightened crab as the massive ball of white fur leaped at me again, launching another series of ror-ror-ror-ror-rors at me.
Luckily, the animal didn’t get closer, didn’t actually attack like his barks indicated he would. With relief, I noticed he really wasn’t the type of dog that would normally maul a person, more like the type that would lick a person to death. An Akita possibly. Heart hammering, I stumbled to my feet as the dog started to whine at me, and glanced up again at the window.
Cameron was striding toward it, eyebrows arched in concern, obviously alerted by the sound.
Shit.
Without thinking, I dove headfirst into the rhododendrons. Branches scratched my face, and my forehead slammed against something hard. I crouched in position under the window, praying the dog would shut up, and Cameron wouldn’t notice me there. I could see his shadow crowding out the light streaming through the window as he came near it, searching out the darkness in his small backyard. The dog circled the bush, and then whimpered and laid down, keeping a close eye on me. I watched the shadow in the window, sucking in a breath, wondering what the fuck I was doing. How would I explain this to him if I were caught? Answer: there was no explanation. Here I was, covered in mud in Cameron Brice’s backyard. What was I going to find here among his flowering plants? Illegal weeds?
I’d definitely crossed the line to stalker, to a pathetic Peeping Tom.
That was when I looked up and realized his shadow was gone.
I heard a latch at the back of the house open up, and a light illuminated the back of the yard. I shrank back against the wall, into the shadows cast by the bushes, feeling like I might have a heart attack. A moment later, footsteps echoed down an outside wooden staircase.
“What’s the matter, boy?” his voice sang out.
The dog jumped to its feet, tail wagging like crazy, looking deliriously joyful as it raced to his master. I grabbed my knees to my chest and said a prayer as I peeked between the branches and watched him bend and scratch the dog behind the ears. I smiled as he talked to the dog, telling him what a good boy he was. I listened to the click of claws on the steps followed by slower footsteps. Then the click of the door. They were gone, and I could breathe again.
The light flipped off, casting me in darkness. Gathering up what was left of my dignity, I quietly stole away to my car and sped toward home.