Stick Shift (2 page)

“Hi, Cam! Oh my God. I can't believe I'm meeting you. Can you sign this T-shirt?” Alli held up a brand-new shirt she'd just bought, and beamed at him, while Lily stood slightly behind her, trying not to stare. Cam winked and smiled brightly at Alli. Why wouldn't he? While she was thirty-two, she didn't look a day over Cam's twenty-five and had the bubbly personality that he seemed to go for, if his on-camera girlfriends were any indication.

He reached for the shirt, but Alli held it against her body. “Sure.” Seeing his long, slender fingers lying flat against the shirt, holding it down against Alli's chest while he signed his name, Lily had visions of being naked on the hood of his race car, those fingers inside her, that hand holding her down, that mouth…

“Lil? Earth to Lillian.”

Lily shook herself out of her erotic thoughts with a guilty smile and looked at Alli, who was now bouncing up and down and holding up the T-shirt with Cam's signature against her jiggling boobs. Lovely.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Sorry. Let's go.” She tried to nudge her friend, but Alli wouldn't budge. She was staring at Lily oddly, and it made Lily feel uncomfortable, as though her friend and Cam and everyone else in line knew what she'd been thinking.

Alli shrugged then and looked back at Cam with a wink. She blew him a kiss.

“Thanks.”

“Not a problem.”

Lily watched his smile and started to follow Alli past the table, but he stopped her by reaching out and tugging the sleeve of her shirt. Startled, she looked over at him.

“What about you?”

Crap. “Oh, uh…no, thanks. I didn't bring anything with me for you to sign,”

she said, her voice soft, her gaze darting away from his face, and heat creeping into her cheeks.

“Why not? Don't like me?”

There was humor in his tone, and she made the mistake of quickly returning her gaze to his. The crowd laughed at his always present sarcasm, but Lily was beginning to tune them out. Dark sapphire eyes danced with merriment, and she couldn't help but return the smile. “I like you just fine.”

“Embarrassed by it? As you know, I am the favorite of fans everywhere.”

More sarcasm and more laughter accompanied an “open arms” gesture, but the look between Lily and Cam was changing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alli glancing back and forth between them and scolded herself for making a spectacle.

She didn't like to be the focus of attention in groups of people. She preferred to just blend in, stand on the outside, observe. The way people were staring at them made her uncomfortable. The way Cam was staring at her made her uncomfortable in a completely different way.

She and Alli needed to get out of there.

7

“No, I'm not embarrassed. I just…”

She could see in his face that he was waiting for her to continue. When she simply shook her head and didn't say anything else, he smiled a softer, more personal smile and took a picture from a nearby stack of promotional photos. He signed his name, then flipped it over and quickly scribbled something else.

“Your name?”

“Oh, um, Lily.” Heat touched her cheeks and slid through her body to pool between her legs. He had such young features, like those of a guy just entering his freshman year at college, and his antics were less than grown-up most times in his dealings with the press, but his eyes—his eyes belied a maturity that tugged at her.

He'd found balance for both sides of himself, a balance that had seemed to escape her. She'd seen what his combined focus on fun and maturity had done for him on the race track, and she wondered about that same focus being trained on a woman.

“Lily. Just Lily?”

“Short for Lillian,” Alli supplied.

“Pretty name. Here you go, Lily, short for Lillian.”

“Th-thank you.” She took the picture and was careful not to touch him. If she did, she might do exactly what Alli had warned she would have done if Lily weren't with her.

His cocky smile returned for the benefit of the crowd, but the look in his eyes was still all for her.

* * *

She didn't want to have this conversation. She wanted to go back to Candi's house and curl up on the bed with Cam's picture pressed to her chest. She wanted to be in private where she could squeal like a teenager who had just met her favorite heartthrob. “How was he looking at me?”

“Oh my God! Lily! Are you serious? He was undressing you with his eyes in front of everyone! He was flirting with you, trying to get you to talk, and you…you looked like you were ready to strip naked right there or run.”

“Oh please, Alli. It wasn't at all like that.” The little she-devil in her head was dancing the jig knowing all too well it had been exactly like that.

“Oh yes, it was! I bet if he'd stood up, he'd have been rock hard. He wanted you, Lil. He wanted you on that table, and you, my sweet and not-at-all-innocent friend, wanted him on the table too.”

“Yeah, well, it was just a show, an act he was performing for his fans.” Lily took the latte off the counter and walked outside to the patio of the coffee bar.

Sitting at a small table under the tan umbrella, she thought back to her brief encounter with Cam and how aroused she'd gotten just looking at his hands. She never got aroused like that without actual touching going on. She wasn't sure she'd ever been that aroused even with touching.

But aroused she'd been, and aroused she still was every time she thought about his smile, his eyes, his laugh, his voice.

“Wanting to throw down in the middle of the race shop was not a show for his fans.”

Lily just shook her head and looked everywhere but at her friend. Alli was right. Lily had wanted him, but she didn't know how to flirt like that. She didn't know how to be so casual about such things. He was a man way out of her league, and whether it was or wasn't a show for his fans, she was sure he got the picture loud and clear.

“You're off in space again.”

“I don't know why I keep doing that,” Lily muttered, then took a sip of her drink.

“Uh-huh. Well, what did he write on the back of the picture?”

“A phone number.”

9

“What! Whose phone number? His? Oh my God! You have to call him.

Anything else?”

“A time and a date and a place to meet him if I'm interested.”

“He wants to see you again? Oh this is fabulous, Lily! When? Where? You're going to go, right? What are you going to wear? We have to go shopping. We have to get you something new to wear, something hot that will knock his firesuit off.”

“No, I don't think so,” Lily interjected into Alli's monologue.

“What? Why not? He wants to see you. You have to go.”

“It's not my thing to chase people, and I'm most certainly not going to chase him. Alli, he's a race car driver. He's famous. He's got women hanging on him all the time. I'm not his type. He was just giving the people there a little show. Nothing more.”

“I think it's him doing the chasing. And if it were just a show, which we've already established that it wasn't, why did he give you his phone number?” Alli asked smugly.

“We don't know that it's his number.” That sounded lame even to her own ears.

Whose phone number would he have given her? Lily didn't have an answer for why.

She had no doubt the number was real and really his. Would he show up at the date and time he had given her? Would she?

“You're thinking about it. I can see it in your eyes. You're going. You know that, don't you? You're going, and I don't care what you say. Even if I have to drop you off myself.”

“He's too young. I'm thirty-five.” Of the three of them—Alli, Candi, and herself—Lily was the oldest. She was also the most conservative, the most levelheaded, the most boring. Candi was only a year younger than Lily, and they had met Alli because she'd lived next door to Candi growing up. They all became thick as thieves and had remained so through the years.

“Age? That's the best you can come up with?”

1
No, it wasn't. Well, actually, yes, it was, but her friend didn't need to know that. “Allison…” Lily only called her by her full name when she was admonishing her or warning her, and evidently the other woman got the message.

Alli got up from the table and headed toward the car, effectively tuning out any other objections Lily had. She knew her reasons were weak excuses at best, but she really had no business going to see Cam Carter. She hadn't been with a man sexually in more than a year. Not that that was going to matter. She wasn't sure why the random thought had even popped into her brain. They weren't going to become lovers or fuck buddies or anything else that involved sex.

Suddenly the idea of staying at Candi's for the next month didn't seem like such a good idea, even if it was the only chance she had at a vacation this year.

The twinge of heat in her pussy told her differently though, and as much as she tried to ignore it, tried to deny it, she couldn't. Her body responded to thoughts of him now that she'd met him, ten-year age difference or not.

* * *

Cam looked up at Ronnie, his crew chief and best friend. “What do you mean?”

“You kept checking your watch and your phone all through that meeting. I'm not sure you heard a thing that was said. You got a hot date or something?”

“I hope so.”

“Oh yeah? Who?”

Cam wasn't sure he wanted to tell anyone about it, about her. It wasn't like him to try and pick up women in the autograph line—or any line at all, for that matter—but something about the woman named Lily had intrigued him. He wanted her. Plain and simple. “Just someone I met.”

“I gathered that. Where did you meet her? Does she have a name?”

“Lillian, but she goes by Lily.”

“Lillian? Sounds like a grandma name.”

11

Cam rolled his eyes and kept walking. Grandmother, indeed. She might be older than him, but grandmother was so not it. Just one look at her flawless skin, her bright green eyes that sparkled when she smiled, and he had ached all over.

“Look, she's—I don't know how to describe what it is about her, but damn, Ronnie…”

“Okay, okay. Where did you meet her? Was it here locally? Did you meet her at the grocery store or something? And when? How long ago? Did she say she would call? Di—”

Cam stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to his friend, exasperation lacing his words. “What the hell is this? Why all the rapid-fire questions? Why does any of this shit matter? I met her, I liked her, I want to see her again. End of discussion.”

Ronnie held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. Sorry, man. I just don't want you to get hurt. You know how these fan girls can be bouncing from driver to driver.”

“Yeah, I know, but this one…she's different. She wouldn't even ask for an autograph, would barely even look at me. She's different, Ron. My gut tells me so.

Trust me on this.”

“She could have been trying a different tactic.”

Cam shook his head in a quick movement of denial. “No, I don't believe that.”

“All right. I'll stop with the questions for now. Just be careful. Sometimes these girls—they put up a front of shyness when all they want is to trap you, be linked to you, and get their fifteen minutes, sometimes more than that.”

“I know that. But not Lily.”

They started walking down the hall again toward the doors leading to the parking lot. The week had been a long one, made more so by the fact that Lily hadn't called him. The need to see her again had consumed his thoughts, and images of her in various settings, mostly naked in his bed, had haunted his dreams since the day he met her.

1
He'd never really thought about women as older or younger, never really given it a passing thought, even though women of all ages threw themselves at him. He dated casually, usually within his own age bracket, give or take a year or so, but Lily wasn't just a year or so older. If he had to guess, she was at least ten years older than him. Was that why she hadn't called? Because he was so much younger?

Was that why she hadn't wanted his autograph?

The thought rankled him. Surely she wasn't that shallow. She'd seemed more intimidated than uninterested. Like he'd told Ronnie, she'd barely looked at him, always glancing down or over his shoulder. Yes, they'd made a scene by just staring at one another, but it had been because he hadn't wanted her to leave. He'd wanted to ask her to wait until the signing event was over, but she had looked ready to bolt, ready to be away from it all, ready to crawl over the table and take him on the floor, so he'd given her his phone number and a date and time when he was available, away from a crowd.

Which just happened to be today, in the next few minutes.

“Did you get her number? Maybe you should call her.”

“No.”

“Damn. Well, I'd say you're at her mercy, then.”

“No shit.”

“Let's go grab a beer, play some pool. Maybe she'll call if you get your mind off her. My mama used to say that a watched pot never boils, and ya know, sittin' there watching the phone ain't gonna make it ring. “

It amazed Cam how Ronnie's Southern twang emerged every time he talked about his parents or growing up in Georgia. At any other time, you couldn't tell where the man was from.

Cam gave the offer a moment's thought before declining. He just wasn't up for the rowdiness of the guys and the bar. “No, thanks. I'll catch up with you tomorrow about those changes and the team meeting.”