The Thrill of It by Lauren Blakely Page B

got to chatting, and then we got to exchanging numbers, and then I got to know more about him than she ever did.
    I learned something he never told her.
    I learned about his moonlighting job.
    “You and I could go places,” he said to me that day.
    He’s a lawyer and he was one of my mom’s sources on a huge story she broke uncovering the sexting senator. Cam had all sorts of shady clients, but that also meant he knew all sorts of shady things – things she wanted to know to bust the senator. He’d played a role in prosecuting the guy, but yet he also ran a high-class call girl ring on the side.
    Call Cam morally ambiguous. Call him a hypocrite. Call him the best fucking time I ever had.
    “Hey babydoll! You look so fucking beautiful,” he says as I sit on the bar stool next to him. I barely have time to say hello, because he continues, “How could you let me go this long without seeing you? I’ve been starving. I’m like a dying man in a desert and you walk in and I can drink again.”
    “You’re mixing metaphors. When you’re starving you’re hungry. When you’re in the desert you’re thirsty,” I say playfully, wagging my index finger as I correct him.
    “When it comes to you I’m starving and I’m thirsty,” he says, inching closer, so I can smell his cologne, a cool, forest-y scent that’s both sexy and sleazy at the same time.
    “Looks like you already started.” I tip my forehead to his martini.
    “I couldn’t help myself. I was waiting for you, babydoll.” Then he leans in for a kiss. I turn my face so his lips brush my cheek.
    I loved teasing him then. Turns out it still rocks. It still sends a tingle from my toes to my nose. God, this feels so good. It’s the opposite of being blackmailed. It’s the other side of my mom setting me up with boys.
    It’s my side. My turn. My time.
    “The cheek? Six months and I get the cheek? It’s been a long six months. C’mon, just one kiss for your old man Cam.”
    I shake my head. Cam’s never been about the kissing. Cam’s about the access for me. An entree into a world of power, into my very own war games.
    “How about a drink then?”
    “You don’t remember?” I give Cam a pointed look.
    He leans in to whisper. “Course I do. But you’ve got your ID. And Tom —” Cam nods to the bartender at the other end “— has always believed you were twenty-two, my babydoll.”
    “Cam! I’m not talking about my age. I’m talking about the fact that I don’t drink.”
    He holds up his hands and shrugs. “You changed everything else. How’m I to know you didn’t change that too?”
    “Touché,” I say.
    Drinking has never been my thing. You could surround me with trays of cocktails, with tables full of sexy, little frothy drinks, sugared on the rim, and I wouldn’t even notice them. I wouldn’t even touch them.
    “A Diet Coke for my babydoll, Tom,” Cam says to the bartender, then winks at me.
    “Hey, Layla,” Tom says and I flash him a bright smile. Then to Cam, “You remembered.”
    “I remember everything about you. I remember you’re a junkie for your diet pop. And maybe for what I got going on again too?” He raises an eyebrow.
    I give him a coquettish shrug. This is what I miss most. The banter, the back and forth, the chase.
    “C’mon. You miss the biz, don’t you? You miss the way we played them all. You wore my favorite outfit after all. You wore the outfit they all wanted you in,” he says and trails off to look me up and down.
    He holds me tight with his dark blue eyes, the color of the early-morning dawn before the sun breaks. His eyes are like a tractor beam and I can’t let go. I know I shouldn’t be looking at him like this, or letting him look at me like he’s doing, reeling me in with reminders of power, of playing, of the game being on our terms. But I’ve taken the pill, I’ve swallowed it once again, and now the effects are kicking in.
    I finger the hem of my skirt — my admission that I came to