Page 54 of Be Mine Forever

“Here you are.” Jo placed a bowl of peaches on the table and set the basket she carried onto the patio flagstones. “I wondered where you’d gone.”

Cam looked up from scribbling in his sketchbook. There were miles between the smile on his face and the look in his eyes.

“Sorry I disappeared after dinner. I just needed…” His words left a trail in the quiet Jo couldn’t follow. He rolled his charcoal pencils on the patio table.

“No problem.” She passed him a cream-covered peach slice. “Great idea stopping by that fruit stand, by the way. These are so fresh. You like peaches and cream?”

“Never had them together, actually.” He popped one in his mouth, licking at the cream lingering in the corner. “Hmm. Good.”

He rested his elbow on the patio table and watched her for a moment before reaching for another cream-slathered slice.

“Is this the moment of truth?” He passed a grin to her across the space separating them, the muted fairy lights leaving his hair and eyes inky. “You softening me up with fresh fruit?”

“And cream.” She popped a peach slice into her mouth, talking around the sweet juiciness. “Don’t forget the cream.”

Cam’s grin, halfhearted at best, fell into a somber curve, finally catching up with his eyes. He knew the time had come. She couldn’t let him go into one more night like the others. She needed to understand this hell-induced insomnia of his. They could only go so far with his secrets wedged between them. Not go so far just sexually, though shehadreached for her knitting needles today.

Hor-ny.

But she hadn’t waited seventeen years to sleep with Cam. She had waited seventeen years tobewith him. To peel away all the layers and lay naked with him, not just skin to skin, but heart to heart. Soul to soul. She needed him to bare everything, but she would go first.

“So the peaches aren’t the only treat.” She reached down into the basket by her feet, bringing out two lidded mason jars. “Ta-da!”

Cam sketched a silent question between his raised brows.

“Remember when Aunt Kris used to give us these?” She handed him a jar.

“To catch fireflies.” Cam smiled, twisting the hole-punched lid off and laying it on the table. “You always caught twice as many as me and Walsh.”

“That’s because I knew the secret.”

“Which was?” His eyes followed her body rising from her seat.

“Let them come to you.”

She held out her jar and waited for a firefly to come near and then swiveled the jar to capture it. She replaced the lid and turned to Cam, giving him anow you trylook.

For the next few minutes they both tried, wandering past the patio border and down to the river where the bugs clustered into small clumps of flitting light. They may have been seventeen years older, but to Jo’s ears, their laughs sounded the same as when they were kids. Careless. Light. Free. Breaking through the night, accompanied only by the sound of the restive river, falling asleep for the night.

Jo flung herself onto the grassy bank, carefully placing her jar on the ground beside her. With the fireflies flaring against the glass, it was like a living lamp. Between her jar and Cam’s, she could just make out the outline of his face, much more relaxed than before. She hated to steal that, but there was actually a point to all of this.

“You remember what Aunt Kris told us about the fireflies?”

Cam stretched out beside her on his side, elbow bent and head propped in his hand.

“No, enlighten me,” he said with a straight face.

“Was that a pun?”

“I can be clever.” He raised her hands to his lips, drawing her pinky finger into his mouth.

She stared at her finger in his mouth. Desire built sweet and taut between them. She hated to squelch it but pulled her hand away.

“She said the light was how they communicated with one another.”

She watched the masonry of his changing expression, saw him build a wall brick by brick until his face showed nothing of what he was thinking. But she knew.

He sat up, facing the river, elbows on his knees and the jar of light at his back. She couldn’t see his face anymore and wondered if that would help or hurt this conversation.

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