Page 10

CHAPTER 10

JENNER

W e left Brooks’s house like it was any other day. Like I hadn’t just kissed their sister in the kitchen. As far as her brothers were concerned, I hadn’t.

Fuck. This was hard.

The person I’d usually talk to was Silas, and I couldn’t go to him with this. He wasn’t going to help me figure out how to make his sister not hate me so much that being in the same room was a problem, mostly because I couldn’t tell him why.

Camden didn’t want any of them to know what had happened the night she’d gotten hurt. When it had happened, I’d assumed it had been because she’d been embarrassed that she had run off. Now, I was starting to think she didn’t want to tell them because I was the one who’d rejected her.

It didn’t make sense, though. I’d done the right thing, so protecting me would’ve been for no reason. Well, maybe they would’ve been pissed how I’d done it, but the fact that I had done it would’ve been good.

Not one of them would’ve wanted me to get into anything with their little sister.

That meant my dad was the only person I could talk to about it. I owed him a call, anyway, so I did that Saturday after the game since it was a day game.

I was back in my hotel room, planning on staying there because it’d been a tough loss and I didn’t want to do anything. We had one more game in Minnesota and then were off to Wisconsin for a three-day stand before we could go back home.

Brooks would be the happiest to get there.

“Hey, Jenner. How is everything?” Dad answered after the second ring. My parents were still young enough. Only fifty and both worked, even though I’d told them I’d take care of everything if they wanted to retire. They didn’t. Hell, they barely accepted the vacation I gave them every year to thank them for all of the time and money they’d put out to get me where I was.

“Things are good.”

“Tough loss today.” He reminded me all the time that I was grateful that he had sat back and just been my dad through my climb in baseball. Having him as my coach or having him push the way Mr. Briggs did would’ve led to us having a very different relationship.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “It was, but we’ll get them tomorrow.” Putting the last game behind us was necessary to do well in the next game.

“So, what’s up?”

“First, did Mom get all of her tests back?” I asked. My stomach clenched and my heart beat rapidly when I was met with his silence. “Dad?”

“She did. It’s all going to be fine.”

Fuck that. I wasn’t a kid anymore. “What does that mean? They found something?”

Again, he was silent. “They saw something on the PET scan that they want to take a closer look at, that’s all. It’s all going to be fine. ”

I gripped my phone too hard, so I loosened my hand a little. “Why didn’t she call me?”

He cleared his throat. “She wanted to wait until the tests are back. This happens sometimes. On someone else, they might not even want to look, but her history, they don’t take any chances.”

Yeah. I knew that, but every year, I worried. Mom had said that she’d get through whatever came along. She was just happy she hadn’t passed the genetic condition on to me.

“Can you please let me know as soon as you do?” I asked, hating that they’d tried to wait this time. “I worry too.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to her. So what’s going on in your world?”

I lay back onto the bed and sighed. Dad knew about the accident with Camden. He knew why she’d gone running, so I didn’t have to cover any of that with him. He was the only who knew and had convinced me that the accident hadn’t been my fault, the same way I had tried to convince Silas that Jayce’s accident hadn’t been his fault.

“Camden,” I said. He choked on something. It took four coughs to clear whatever was happening on his end. “Dad?”

“I’m OK,” he grunted out. “I’m OK. I took a drink of coffee and it went down wrong because you surprised me. What do you mean, Camden?”

“Before we left Kalamazoo, I kissed her in Brooks’s kitchen.” No reason not to tell him.

“What? Why did you did that? ”

“I couldn’t not.” I sighed as I ran my hand over my face. It had been stupid.

“Well, I did tell you to work this out with her a long time ago.” Yeah, right away. “So did she slap you?”

I chuckled. “No. She kissed me back. But she still hates me.”

“Clearly not as much as she thinks she does.”

“That remains to be seen.”

Dad let out a sigh. “Listen, Jenner, all you can do is talk to the woman. You’re going to have to have it out about what happened back then, but I know you’ve had feelings for her for a long time. Looks like they’re about to come to a head.”

Yeah, that was an understatement.

That night, I couldn’t get her out of my head, so I went to take another shower to cool off. I’d taken one after the game to get clean. This one was for my soul.

Except that in there, I still thought about her. I just thought about her with a lot fewer clothes on.

The need I had for Camden, I’d been able to bury for so long, but it was now coming to a head. I hadn’t thought of her this way when she’d been seventeen because it would’ve been wrong. Now… she was a grown woman. There was only a four-year age difference between us and she had just turned twenty-two.

It was like my body had a mind of its own. Getting hard when I thought about her shouldn’t have been a thing, yet here I was standing in the shower with a massively hard erection knowing that there was only one thing that would calm it down enough for me to sleep.

Under the hot stream of water, I hoped it would relax all the muscles in my body, yet it only worked on some. There was no driving this desire away because there was no getting her out of my head.

There really wasn’t a point in fighting it.

I grabbed the bottle of conditioner sitting there because it was the slipperiest thing within my reach and I squirted a bit into my hand. When I took my cock into the same hand and stroked it once, I had to lean against the wall. Images of Camden on her knees in front of me flooded my mind. Of her bare, perky tits pressing against me, her hand replacing mine.

Fuck. This wasn’t going to take much.

My hips jerked unintentionally as if I didn’t even have control over my own body and I had to brace against the wall so I wouldn’t fall.

I could see the headline now. Jenner Greene Found in Hotel Shower, Naked, Massive Erection. No one in the world needed that.

The thought of touching her pushed me over the edge. It was like I could I actually feel her under my fingertips as I cupped her breasts in my mind. Then the pressure at the base of my spine formed and I knew I’d be free from this torture soon. I stroked and twisted my hand over my cock until I came with a frustrated growl.

As good as imagining touching her was, it wasn’t enough.

But at least I’d probably be able to sleep .

In the morning, I met up with the guys for breakfast. It wasn’t like they’d know what had gone through my mind in the shower last night.

Brooks talked about Harlowe and the baby, though to answer Urban’s question—no. He didn’t know when they were getting married, but when he did, we would.

Sitting there with them, I made a promise to try not to think about their sister at all until we were back home. Regardless of what I so clearly desperately wanted, I had to get her to not hate me for the good of the group. So we’d start there.

In my mind, there wasn’t any chance I’d get her to do anything but not hate me so damn much.

Four more games later, we landed back in Kalamazoo Wednesday night. We’d had a game day that day, but the next one tomorrow would be a night game. So we had a little time.

We all went home, but the next day, I left early for the park to give myself some extra time. Silas had said that most of the girlfriends were coming to the game, which meant Camden probably was. Even Everly was coming, which was not always a given due to her work schedule. But night games, she tried to make.

If Camden was coming to the game, she might want something to eat first, so I hurried over to Cleats & Kegs before anyone would be able to see me heading there. I didn’t want all the guys to follow.

Did I fucking know this woman or what? She was there, in a booth with her back to the door, running her fingertips up and then back down a glass of ice water, much like I’d imagined them running over something else that was far more personal.

Without saying anything, I slid into the other side of the booth just as she took a bite of her chicken sandwich and her eyes widened. Camden’s eyes locked with mine as she chewed slowly, neither of us attempting to speak.

Finally, she swallowed and said, “Can I help you?”

“I mean, yes, but I don’t think now is the time to tell you how.” I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning. She pressed her lips together and pulled her arms off the table, wrapping the fingers of one hand around the wrist of the other.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she snapped.

I shook my head instead of answering. “How’s school going?”

She narrowed her eyes on me as her cheeks pinked up with what I thought was frustration. “Are you serious right now? You kiss me in my brother’s kitchen, don’t talk to me for a week, but want to know how school’s going?”

My stomach clenched at the easy way she’d mentioned that kiss. “Yup.” Fuck, I’d wanted to call her or text her while we’d been gone, but there was a good chance that would’ve set everything back. Camden was like an injured animal sometimes. Anything I did could either hurt her more or make her lash out.

I always hoped for a lashing out .

“Great.” She threw her hands in the air then let them fall into her lap. “School is great. Graduation’s around the corner. Now can you go away so I can finish my sandwich.”

I reached over and stole one of her french fries as her eyes widened again and her mouth dropped open. “I can’t believe you just took one of my french fries.”

“I think you can believe it.”

She groaned and dropped her head back. “Why are you here, Jenner? Why are you eating my fries when you know it bugs the hell out of me when one of you takes food off my plate without asking?”

Damn. Even mad at me, she was beautiful. Today, she had her brown hair down, part of it coming in front of her shoulder, and her hazel eyes sparkled even in the unnatural light we were in. The fact that she was wearing jeans and a Knights T-shirt and I happened to notice a Knights sweatshirt next to her meant she was coming to the game in a few hours.

Finally, that anger wiped away from her face. “What’re you doing here?” she asked again. “You kissing me in my brother’s kitchen… you, the man who told me there’d never be anything between us because you’d never see me that way because I was nothing but your best friend’s little sister, and oh, by the way, you want to be free to fuck your way through every baseball groupie the Major League had to offer. Now you’re asking me about school.”

I tried to keep from cringing, but it didn’t work. My words were coming back to haunt me. But not all of those had been my words. “I didn’t say that I wanted to be free to fuck my way through anything.”

She rolled her eyes. “No. You didn’t. But that’s what you meant.” She swallowed hard before continuing. “Just… can you tell me why you’re here right now so we get this over with?”

Damn. I wanted to pull her into my arms so badly, but right now, it’d end with me getting a knee to the balls, so I wouldn’t. “You’re my best friend’s sister, Camden. I’ve known you a long time. I care about how your life is going. Are you dating anyone?” This brick of dread settled right in my stomach. I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.

“Yes,” she said, causing that brick to become cold, hard cement. “I’m fucking the university lacrosse team.” Then she leaned in and narrowed her eyes on me. “As you know, I hate baseball players, but lacrosse… I don’t have anything against them.”

I tightened my jaw and shook my head, wetting my bottom lip quickly. “That’s not funny,” I said quietly. The idea of her with one man was hard enough to take, let alone fucking the entire lacrosse team.

She sat back with a quiet thud. “No, Jenner. I’m not dating anyone because I’m stuck around a bunch of asshole professional baseball players, most of whom are my brothers. Makes dating a little difficult.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “Your brothers aren’t assholes.” I couldn’t include me in that because I had been an asshole to her on purpose before. It had been for her own good and the only way I could’ve gotten her to stop having any feelings for me. Nothing could happen then.

She snorted. “Not now, they aren’t. They’re in relationships, but sometimes they were. Not to me, but that doesn’t mean I can ignore how they treated other women. How all of you have treated women at one point or another.”

I cocked my head to the side. “Does that mean you’ll stop thinking I’m an asshole if I get into a committed relationship?”

Her gaze jumped to me and her jaw tensed, but no answer came. That reaction right there said that yeah, she might, but there was something else still there, too. She didn’t want me with someone else any more than I wanted her with another man.

Fuck. I’d never seen her with another man. Not since that night. Before, I’d seen her with a boyfriend, but that hadn’t mattered. They’d been kids. We all knew it wouldn’t last.

But fucking hell. She had seen me with other women. And now I had a whole other set of shit to feel guilty about.

“Good to know,” I said because I read her like a book. I had my answer, even if she hadn’t meant to give it.

Right then, Luz, one of Harlowe’s waitresses, brought me out a to-go order. I’d placed it before coming here, so at least I’d have a reason to be there if things went in another direction. Would I eat it? I wasn’t sure, but I took it, anyway .

“I’ll see you later, Camden,” I told her before walking away and leaving the restaurant.

There might be no way I could change her mind about me. She’d formed her opinion a long time ago when I hadn’t maybe been in the best headspace and that was it.

Camden was stubborn as hell and part of the reason she was that way was because of me. Her brothers were also to blame, but she’d loved me then, or so she’d said, and I’d pushed her away. If that didn’t build walls, what did?

I knew how that worked. It was the reason I hadn’t been in a committed relationship since high school. Having your heart broken fucking sucked and I never wanted to experience it again. So I’d become the asshole man-whore she’d said I was.

But I wasn’t him now.

Yet she might still hate me for the rest of my life for what I’d done.