Carolina Moon

Chapter 4

Cameron 

___

Cameron wasn't good at much, but if there was a language he spoke that could send chills down a girl's arms, it was the language of cars.

That was why he'd met Sidney Shepard outside her colonial-style home downtown and cranked open the hood of her Chevy to have a look inside. He'd had an eye on Sidney since he caught her wearing low-riders on campus and hadn't taken his eye off her since. She was standing on her front porch, twisting her hair around her finger and watching as Cameron dug around in the mucky engine of her truck.

"So what classes you takin'?" she asked.

"None," Cameron explained, for probably the third time that evening. "I just work on campus."

"You work on campus but don't take no classes?" asked Sidney.

"I work the snack-bar Mondays and Tuesdays," Cam explained. "Part time at Duddies the rest of the week."

"Duddies?" asked Sidney, wrinkling her nose. "That old mechanic shop down by the recyclin' center?"

Cameron sighed through his nose and shut the hood. The more Sidney talked, the less interested he was finding himself. "Everything looks fine. Why did you ask me to come check on it?"

"I swear I heard a rattlin' in there earlier today," Sidney said. "But if you're not finding nothin', how about you come in for a drink?" She smiled when she asked this—and damn, it was a cute one. But Cameron wasn't the type of man that college cheerleaders like Sidney lusted after for no good reason.

He wiped his hands on the rag, frowning at the streaks of oil. If there was one more thing he had in common with his sister, it was his lack of a love-life. And his desperate attempt to feign interest in one.

He squinted at Sidney, the sun in his eyes. "Weren't you dating someone on the team?"

Sidney tipped her sweet tea to her lips and took a sip through the straw. "We broke up last week."

There it was. The answer Cam had been looking for. He wasn't in the mood to be used as a rebound—nor was he looking to get his ass kicked by a six-foot-something, two-hundred-pound college athlete.

"There are better guys you could be using to make him jealous," Cam muttered.

This seemed to surprise Sidney. She blinked at him. "I'm not tryin' to make him jealous." She slumped down from the steps and crossed her scorched lawn with the straw of her drink still between her teeth. "I just wanna get my mind off stuff. You know?"

Then she touched his arm. And maybe it was because it'd been so long since Cam had felt the touch of anything, but the tingle of it traveled up his arm and scurried up the back of his neck. Then she was doing that thing girls do—the way they looked at your eyes, then your lips, then your eyes again.

He would have kissed her then—would've followed her inside and done whatever she wanted, had she not uttered next, "Is it true what they say about you?"

There was a spice of danger to her words. An edge to her voice that said she liked it.

She leaned in close and whispered in his ear, "Is it true you killed your dad?"