Return To You: A Small Town, Second Chance Romance

15. Grace

fifteen

My mouth goes dry. “What are you doing here?” I pick up Damian. “Are you okay, baby?”

“He’s fine,” Ethan says, “but we need to talk.” He drops my box on the kitchen counter. “Care to explain yourself?”

My heart beats hard, and I squeeze Damian for comfort. Protection. But the fiend jumps off me and runs away.

“How did you get in here, and how dare you snoop through my things?”

Ethan lifts his hands as if to plead innocent. He looks like nothing innocent right now. Tall and menacingly handsome, his eyes raking over my body like he could consume me right here and now, his breathing heavy with… desire?

Ohmygod, here I go again. Making stuff up. “Answer me,” I snap.

“I came to do a job. Fix your closet door.”

“I didn’t ask you to!” I shriek.

He shakes his head and lowers his hands. “I know you didn’t. Lucas did.”

“Lucas?” I did see Lucas’s truck outside. And it was Lucas who called me at the spa to tell me his “worker” had called about Damian.

“Look, the point is, I didn’t snoop through your things. Your cat threw the box almost literally at my feet. I was picking it up and… well…”

He’s at a loss for words and so am I. This is so embarrassing.

“You need to go,” I say.

He crosses his arms. “That seems to be your go-to phrase when it comes to me.”

What does that even mean? “Just leave,” I snap.

“Nope.” He reaches over, his heat and scent invading my space in a way that agrees way too much with my lady parts. “Not until we talk about this.” He snatches the box.

I try to grab the box from him, but he lifts it over his head, holding it in just one hand. I jump to get it and only achieve bumping into his hard, wide, warm chest.

Screw this. “Give it to me,” I hiss, and from the look on his face, I’m pretty sure he feels the anger coming at him the way I feel it seeping from me.

“Fuck, but you were always even more beautiful when you were angry. You haven’t changed a bit where that’s concerned.”

My mouth gapes. What? What is he doing? “Give it to me!” I yell and punch his chest with a closed fist.

He backs up, the box still over his head. “Are you trying to turn me on? ’Cause it’s working.” He backs into the bedroom.

I storm after him, speechless.

“Now that I think about it, I’m always turned on by you.”

“Ethan!” I seethe.

“But now, maybe more than usual.” He circles the bed until he’s on the other side of it.

“Give. Me. The. Box.”

“Come and get it.”

I jump on the bed to try and reach the box. Now two feet higher, I lunge at him. He grabs me by the waist with his free hand and turns me around, pinning me against the wall.

The feel of him against me is so good and so wrong at the same time. I want it to last forever, and I wish it had never happened. Closing my eyes, I lean my head against the wall.

His hand leaves my waist and takes my wrist, pinning it above my head, lifting my breasts until they graze his chest. “Look at me, Grace.”

Flitting my eyes open, I trail my upward gaze to take in his corded neck, his stubble, the pulp of his bottom lip—

“Look me in the eye.”

I exaggerate the tilt of my head back to reach his gaze. Round my eyes on him. Pretend I’m choking because he’s so out of reach.

He nudges his knee between my legs, forcing my thighs apart. What is he doing? God it feels so good. I resist the urge to rub myself against him. Ohmygod, Grace, get a grip.

His knee reaches my clit, and he makes a soft stroking motion. I’m going to lose it. I swear, I’m losing it. Then he slowly lifts his knee higher…slowly…until my pubic bone is fully resting on it, the pressure making me throb, and then he continues lifting, slowly, slowly, my body straddling his thigh, my feet leaving the floor, lifting until my eyes are level with his.

He doesn’t show sign of any effort. “Better?” he asks.

I swallow loudly.

A small smile plays through his beautiful blue eyes. He throws the box behind him, and it lands with a soft thump on the bed. He takes my other wrist in his free hand and places it next to my face. Both his thumbs stroke my palms. His smell of fresh sweat hits me right below the ribcage, making me pant.

My mouth is dry, my breathing labored. The itch between my legs is unbearable.

“So tell me,” he says in a low rumble. “What’s with the jersey?”

“The—the what?” Why is talking about his jersey? Did he not see everything else that’s in the box? Did he forget what everything in the box means to us—to me?

“Why do you have a jersey from when I was a kid when I gave you… at least three more.”

Now he’s upset not to find other stuff? I’m so confused right now. “What?”

His eyes trail down to my neck, and he tilts his head slightly as if to kiss me right there. His breath tickles me to my core, making me squirm. “You know…” he starts, then interrupts himself, takes a deep breath that lifts me higher against him. “I got grounded a whole week for losing that jersey.”

I blink. I don’t know what to say about that. I’m sorry, I guess? I stole his jersey, okay? I was eleven. Can I get a pass? I remember that weekend vividly. There’d been a snowstorm, sudden, unpredicted. Lynn had called Mom and asked if her kids could crash at our place instead of making the uncertain trek back up the mountain to their farm. I’d had trouble falling asleep, my heart beating too hard at the thought of Ethan right on the other side of the wall. So when I’d found his jersey in the bathroom, I’d rolled it into my own clothes. “Do you want me to confess to your mom?” I say snarkily.

“Mmm…” he says, trailing his gaze down to my breasts, the rumbling of his voice almost making me come against his thigh. “No. What I’d like to know is where are the other jerseys. Those I actually gave you.”

I shut my eyes.

He tightens his grasp on my wrists and jerks his leg up, sliding me lower against him. “Answer me.” His mouth caresses my hair. “What did you do with the other jerseys?”

I shut my eyes and focus on my erratic heartbeats and his ragged breathing.

Like that’s going to calm me down.

“Lemme guess. There’s one under your pillow?”

I gasp. “You did not. You did not look under my pillow.”

He laughs softly. “Just a wild guess.” He rubs his chin over my temple. “And the others? Where are the others, Grace?”

I rotate them. There’s one in the wash and one with my lingerie. Jeez! We’re quite the pair of pervs. “Does it matter?” I whisper.

“No. We’ll get to that later.”

Now he’s sort of freaking me out. “What do you want?”

There’s a little fantasy playing in my head where he answers, you, Grace, I want you and then he kisses me passionately and we make savage love and we walk into the sunset together, happy forever.

Instead, he lowers his knee, his heat ceding place to cold solitude. “I want answers,” he says as he drops his hold on my wrists and steps away from me.

Now he’s going to drop me? “You had no business snooping through my stuff!” I yell as he turns his back on me, leaving the bedroom.

“And you had no business pretending I mean nothing to you,” he answers over his shoulder.

Oh no he didn’t. After what he did to me? I stomp after him and stand in front of him when he reaches the kitchen counter. “There was a time when you meant everything to me.” I poke his chest with my finger. “A long, long time ago. I would have done anything for you!”

He turns his gaze to the side, to my patio and beyond, looking utterly bored.

“Do you hear me?” I continue. “I would have followed you anywhere you were stationed. But that was stupid me. That was before I realized you were just fooling around with me. And with other girls.”

Now his attention is back on me. “What other girls?” he snaps.

“That poor girl who died. She was your college girlfriend, wasn’t she? And I was your hometown side… whatever you guys call that.”

“I wasn’t—” he interrupts himself and frowns. “What did you say earlier about being a military wife?”

Of course! Let’s not talk about the other girls. How convenient. “I never said I’d be your wife.” Liar! Liar liar liar. How many times had I fantasized about being his, entirely his?

Hurt paints his face, and I almost hurl myself at him, kiss him, confess. But he’d only hurt me more. I always saw—projected—more with Ethan than what was really there, as far as he was concerned. “I said I would have followed you anywhere you were stationed.”

Ethan trails his eyes on me, seeming to hesitate. He rakes his hand through his hair. Something seems to be tearing at him, and for the life of me, I don’t get it.

”It’s all in the past, Ethan,” I plead. “So what if my cat threw an old box of forgotten childhood souvenirs on the floor? So what if Emerald Creek had the softest jerseys ever? Can’t you see it doesn’t mean anything now?”

He keeps looking past me, to the garden and beyond. “Hold that thought.” He bends to pick his shoes up, doesn’t even bother putting them on. Before walking out in just his socks, he adds, “This conversation is far from over.”

The way he clicks the door softly behind him is what undoes me.

I know Ethan to the core. No matter how life, especially life in the military, may have toughened him and wizened him, to the core Ethan has passion within him. It may be tamed, but it’s there for the stuff he cares about.

The fact that he can walk away from me so entirely calm?

I can’t stand it.

I whip the front door open. He’s settling in Lucas’s truck, the door wide open, fumbling with his shoes. “Just take another ten years, you… agh!” I don’t even know what to call him. I slam the door and the whole house shakes.

Then I throw myself on the couch and cry like a teenager.

When I’m calmer and Ethan is long gone, I pick up the phone.

“Hey honey.” The deep voice settles me.

I sit back into my couch and tuck my legs under me. “Hey.”

“Somethin’ wrong?”

I take a deep breath. “He’s back, Kyle,” I breathe, tears filling my eyes again.

The line goes silent. A charged, heavy silence. Then, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

I think back to what everything that is Ethan does to me. To the way I feel alive again. And fragile again.

To the way he makes me feel, the way he does look at me. Like I mean the world to him. And then like he hates me. Wishes I wasn’t there.

To the way he pinned me against the wall like he was about to ravage me and then walked away without emotion. “I don’t know yet,” I whisper. My gaze turns outside my window to Woodbury Knoll.

Kyle clears his throat. “Want me to talk to him?” He chuckles, but I know he’s only half joking. I know, if I asked him right now, he’d jump on a plane and be with me.

I sit upright, my spirits lifted by his half joke. “Tell me what you’re doing right now.”

And he does, without insisting, without asking how I’m feeling. He knows what I need. And what I need right now is to sit with my feelings but not dwell on them. Just let them be. And talk about other things.

When he’s done talking, he says, “You should go out with the girls.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m usually right, when it comes to you.” He is.

“Love you.”

I hang up, straighten my makeup and my hair, then get back to the spa right in time for my first appointment.