Free Twister: Party Games, Book 3 by Lexxie Couper Page A

She watched him all but skip around the nose, tossing her another grin before heading for the blackness beyond the trees.
    Where were they? And why did he seem so…so…
    Excited. Like a kid at Christmas.
    She chewed at her bottom lip. She had no idea where they were, no clue what lay on the other side of the trees. Any other time, she’d be climbing over the gearshift and hightailing it out of there. Dark. Unknown. A man she barely knew… This was not how she lived anymore. And yet, the urge to climb from her car, to follow Lachlan, to see what made him smile with such open beguile and boyish charm didn’t just surge through her, it consumed her. What could possibly turn the smoldering arrogant bastard who’d scorned her profession into a sexy, mesmeric young man?
    She opened her door.
    The warm summer night enveloped her, the soft song of cicadas and crickets joining its caress on her senses. A smile pulled at Cameron’s lips. Wherever they were it felt peaceful, and at that very moment, peaceful was exactly what she needed.
    She left her stilettos in the car and crossed the car park. Lachlan stood on the edge of the concrete, his form tall and strong and relaxed in the pale moonlit shadows. He studied the darkness before him, a darkness growing lighter as her eyes adjusted to the dim night.
    A soccer field? He’d brought her to a soccer field?
    “Interesting,” she said, stopping beside him. “Do you come here often?”
    He grinned at her, his eyes somehow alive with a life she hadn’t expected. “Not since I was seventeen.”
    Cameron lifted an eyebrow.
    “I used to play soccer here with Mac. Every Saturday from the age of fifteen.”
    “Mac?”
    “Mackenzie Harris. McDermott Media Corps’ head lawyer.” He chuckled. “And my best friend.”
    Cameron smiled. The term sounded so unusual coming from the mouth of a man with Lachlan’s ruthless business reputation. It was…sweet.
    She swung her attention to the empty expanse of manicured grass, the waning moon and nearby streetlights bathing it in a pale silver wash. “Were you any good?”
    He chuckled again. “Put it this way, I never brought the MVP trophy home to the old man. Something the great Roland McDermott was most displeased about. But I loved to play. And I felt—” he paused, his gaze moving over the field, the corners of his mouth curling, “—normal when I was on the field. Equal to the other boys on the team. Not the son of the country’s most powerful businessman but a normal kid doing normal kid things.”
    He blinked, a frown pulling at his eyebrows. Something told Cameron the confession had taken him by surprise. The way his shoulders straightened, the way his nostrils flared. Hell, it had taken her by surprise. And shed him in a totally unexpected light.
    Normal. Right now, right here, he was like a normal man. Admitting things no hyper-influential, ridiculously powerful business tycoon admitted.
    Cameron’s belly flip-flopped. This was the man she’d wanted to meet tonight. The one she’d suspected existed every time Lillian spoke of her brother. And yet it unnerved her more than the arrogant, dominating Lachlan of the party. This was a Lachlan she could spend a long time talking with. A long time getting to know beyond the potency of sex.
    This Lachlan—
    “Hey, check it out.”
    She started, watching as the man messing with her head jogged a few feet away from her. He dropped into a crouch and retrieved something white and round from under the long bench skirting the field’s sideline.
    He turned back to her, holding up a soccer ball, a wide grin on his face. “Wanna play?”
    Before she could answer, he walked backward onto the field, bouncing the ball on his knees as he did so. His grin stretched wider. A fluid energy took his body, his arms loose beside him, his legs pumping up and down in alternating pistons.
    A purely female side of Cameron, the primitive sexual side that recognised a prime male specimen, reacted