Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 94630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Cam had a special talent for ruining beautiful things. Like the dark, beautiful images he painted on the sides of condemned buildings, destined for the wrecking ball. He was the wrecking ball. He had wrecked his marriage to Kerris. He had killed Amalie.
And so much more. So much more. Things he’d never confessed but couldn’t forget.
He wouldn’t destroy the person who had embodied unconditional love to him. Jo was the one beautiful thing he’d spare.
“Which one is it?” Jo looked over her shoulder, just in time to see his eyes trained on that glorious derriere. Her raised brow asked the question she didn’t have to voice.
“You have something right, um…” This was lame, but he dove deeper into the crap pile. “Right here on the back of your…dress.”
Jo peered over her shoulder, down the line of her back, and then back up at him.
“A stain?”
“No, a, uhhhh…” He reached to pull some nonexistent fluff from her dress, flicking uselessly with his empty fingers. “Just lint.”
“Lint.” Skepticism dropped her chin into her neck, leaving her silvery eyes staring at him from beneath the dramatic arch of her dark brows. “Okaaaay. Do I need a compass or are you planning to tell me where we’re going?”
“Sorry.” He glanced ahead, nodding toward their destination. “There. Only a few suites on this floor. That’s hers.”
Jo leaned up against the wall while he opened the door, slim hand on the handle of her Louis Vuitton roll-on. She closed her eyes and dropped her head forward until her hair obscured her face. The color of the milkiest chocolate and streaked with caramel, it had grown past her shoulders. The thick, silky waves were the wildest thing about Jo. Cam had always marveled at her discipline. Her control. She was a woman of limits and boundaries. He was the kind of wicked guy who wanted to blur all her lines, kiss her until her inhibitions melted and her walls fell away. That wild hair tempted him to do it.
She looked up, blinking a few times when she realized he’d been staring. She raised both brows, quirking her wide, expressive mouth to one side.
“More lint?”
Touché.
Cam stared back for a moment. Jo had the steadiest eyes he’d ever seen. She’d been raised as the Walsh family princess and had grown into a queen. Her eyes held the kind of confidence most would never know or understand. But when Jo looked at him, Cam knew he was her loophole. He didn’t want to be. He hated that moment when her shield slipped and he could see that he was the one thing that could shake her. The one thing she’d be weak for.
She didn’t know what she was asking for. Angels don’t choose devils. Jo wanted people to think she was hard, but she was an angel. Ms. Kris had raised her with a heart that always looked out for others. He might have been avoiding her since Christmas, but he always knew what she was up to. She had made it her mission to continue and expand all the programs Ms. Kris had championed before she’d lost her battle with cancer. Jo was a tough-minded, tenderhearted angel who deserved better than the likes of him.
Eyes soft, bottom lip pulled between her teeth, she looked beyond his shoulder into the room he was blocking.
“You gonna let me in?” she asked.
Not if I can help it.
“Sure.” Cam grabbed her bag and rolled it into the suite, throwing an arm out to encompass the opulence-on-steroids suite. “Her casa es su casa.”
Jo scanned the marble floor of the foyer beneath her feet; the Oriental rug, like a private island set on the gleaming hardwood floors in the living area; the fine art hanging on the walls. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes, pointing to one of the first he’d painted in Paris, a gargoyle with diamond studs in his ears and a gold grill.
“Isn’t that one of yours?”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
Jo gave him a long-suffering look. “I’d know your work a mile away.”
“It looks different in every form, though.” Cam considered the painting before looking back at Jo. “My graffiti stuff really looks nothing like anything else I do.”
“It’s not the style necessarily.” Jo walked over to the painting, running her fingers around the ebony frame, stark against the white wall. “It’s the oddity.”
“Oddity?”
“There is always something…not quite right, something off about everything you do.” Jo turned to him, a smile tugging at her full mouth, bare of lipstick and lush at the end of the day. “Even in the first picture you ever drew of me, I was wearing one polka-dot sock and one striped. It’s like you’re sneaking a middle finger at the world with every piece.”
Cam laughed because she was right. This girl knew him better than anyone else. Cam sobered, the laugh dying on his lips. But she didn’t know anything that really counted. If she did, she’d run in the other direction.