8. Ethan
ETHAN
“ I wasn’t asking.”
Her lips part, ready with another refusal, but she doesn’t speak.
She just stands there until she nods her head and follows me to my car.
I open the passenger door and wait. After a pause, she slides in without a word.
That tells me more than any excuse she could have offered.
She’s scared. Not of me, but of something.
“Where are you staying?”
She doesn’t look at me immediately. Instead, she busies herself with pulling her hair into a messy bun, two strands falling down and framing her face. “The rental from before.”
Hmm. So she hasn’t moved or gone to stay at the Dawson house.
The engine purrs as I pull away from the curb, the streetlights slick on the windshield washing the city in gold and silver. Valleria is quiet tonight, too quiet, the kind of quiet that only ever means one thing—money has already had its say, and the rest of us are just living in its echo.
I glance at her. Ivy stares straight ahead, her body angled slightly toward the door like she might bolt if I say the wrong thing. She keeps her hands clenched in her lap. Her fingers twitch every few seconds. The rhythm is all wrong.
She’s lying.
I’ve spent a lifetime reading people—watching breath patterns in trauma patients, the way a vein jumps when someone’s about to crash, the way hands shake just before a confession.
Ivy is giving herself away in a dozen ways.
Her jaw clenches every time I shift lanes.
She’s chewing on the inside of her cheek.
My gaze flickers to her thigh. She’s wearing black jeans that hug the curve of her legs like they were stitched in place.
Her sweater is too big, sleeves pulled down over her knuckles, like she’s trying to disappear into it.
But I remember the body underneath. The way she opened under my mouth.
The way her hips locked around me like they belonged there.
I should be thinking about what she’s not telling me. The surgeon in me knows how to compartmentalize. But right now, all I want to do is pull the car over, drag her onto my lap, and kiss her until she breaks.
My knuckles strain against the wheel.
I want to unbutton that sweater one loop at a time, kiss down the line of her stomach, press my lips to the place just below her navel, and swear myself to the child she claims isn’t mine.
But if I push right now, I could risk losing her forever. And that’s not what I want. Perhaps a bit of deflection would ease the tightness between us and help her see that I’m not… whatever she thinks I am, whatever made her believe I had followed her to her rental two months ago.
“I still can’t believe you passed out in a grocery store,” I say, aiming for casual, letting the sharp edges of my voice round out.
Her head snaps toward me, and I’m caught off guard by the sound that slips from her lips. A snort.
“I didn’t pass out.” Her voice is dry. “I… fainted stylishly.”
I glance at her. She’s wearing that particular brand of defiance again. The kind that used to show up in childhood arguments and now slides into every room she walks into like a shield.
“Sure you did.” I lift one brow, indulging in the first real smile I’ve had all day. “I bet you did it right in front of the frozen pizzas just to make a dramatic exit.”
A beat, and then she laughs softly. I roll to a stop at a red light and look over at her again. The streetlamp outside catches in her hair, turns the strands to burnished bronze. Her eyes meet mine for a fraction of a second, and then she looks away.
That flicker of honesty is all I get. But it’s enough to light a fuse.
She’s lying.
She’s terrified.
And she’s doing everything she can to protect me.
What the hell has she gotten herself into?
The light turns green. I drive.
But the fantasies keep crawling through me like wildfire. The kind that won’t stop unless I burn.
I want to lay her back in this car seat, pull her thighs apart, kiss her until she forgets how to lie to me. I want to take her home and erase every trace of pain from her body. I want to fill her so completely that there’s no room for fear, no room for memory. Just me.
I steal another look at her as we ease down the quiet street lined with old sycamores and cracked sidewalks.
She stares ahead, spine straight, shoulders drawn in tight, like she’s bracing for impact.
But her fingers betray her—pressed flat against her thigh, twitching ever so slightly with each breath she takes.
What gets to me isn’t the silence. It’s that she still thinks I’ll walk away. Like I’m the kind of man who picks and chooses when to show up. She knows me better than that. And yet here she is, sitting beside me like she’s already decided how this ends.
I park at the curb in front of the address she gave me.
Another rental. Clean facade, cozy lights glowing through the front windows, forgettable in a way that’s probably intentional.
She’s still not at the Dawson house, still circling the city that built her like it might reach out and pull her back under.
Still running, even when her feet are planted.
My hands stay fixed on the wheel, my eyes locked on the soft profile of the woman beside me. Ivy doesn’t turn to look. She just sits there, clutching her bag like it might anchor her to something, as if the car might float off the ground otherwise.
“You said the father isn’t in the picture.”
I speak quietly, but the words carry. In the small cabin of the car, they land between us with all the weight of a scalpel pressed to the skin.
I see it—the way she stiffens. A beat of movement beneath her ribs. She exhales, slowly and unevenly, but not slow enough to convince me.
My voice is steady. Measured. “Are you in danger?”
Her head lifts a fraction, her lashes brushing her cheek. The answer is already forming before I finish the question.
“No,” she says, too fast, as if she’s forcing herself to believe it.
I study her, watching the slight tremor in her hand as it retreats to her lap.
She tries to make it look casual, but it’s not.
Ivy doesn’t fidget unless she’s cornered.
I know that. I’ve watched her long enough to memorize all the tells she thinks she’s hidden.
She’s still lying to me. And she’s counting on me to let it slide.
I suppress a sigh of frustration. I want to reach across the console and touch her face, brush the hair away from her eyes, force her to look at me when she lies. But I stay still, hands wrapped tightly around the wheel, knuckles rigid against the leather.
She opens the door before I can say another word, slides out of the car like she’s escaping something.
Maybe she is.
She doesn’t look back as she walks toward the rental.
I track her with my eyes, each step clicking into the hollow silence between us.
The porch light spills over her shoulders, her hair catching the glow.
She’s wearing one of those oversized sweaters she loves, the kind that swallows her frame and hides the woman I can still taste on my tongue.
I want to follow her inside. I want to drag her into my lap and kiss the truth out of her. I want to pin her against the wall and make her say my name while I bury myself inside her. I want to claim her again, every inch of her, until she forgets every reason she has to push me away.
But I don’t move.
I grip the wheel like it’s the only thing holding me together.
Because she lied, and I let her because what choice did I have in this moment?
She disappears behind the door, and I’m left staring at an empty porch.
Whatever she’s hiding—whatever made her flinch when I said the word danger —it’s there. I felt it in the hospital, in the second before the nurse said the word pregnant . I saw it again when I asked if it was mine and her answer cracked under the pressure of my silence.
She’s terrified, and if I don’t figure out why, it won’t just be her paying the price. It’ll be that child, too. Mine or not, I can’t walk away from this.
I run a hand through my hair, fingers tightening at the back of my neck.
The engine hums beneath me, but I don’t put the car in gear.
I stare at the house a moment longer, the shadows shifting behind the curtains.
One light clicks on upstairs. Ivy’s silhouette pauses briefly at the window before vanishing.
She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to protect her. Even if she fights me or hates me for it.
I check the rearview mirror, watch a car drift past behind me, then shift into drive.
But I don’t go far. My mind won’t calm. It hammers like it’s chasing something I haven’t touched yet.
Her voice, her silence, that lie she tried to tuck behind a tight breath, it all loops in my head like a bad refrain.
It isn’t in me to drive away, so I circle the block once, passing the same row of sycamores rising like old bones from the concrete, their leaves rustling low over the sidewalk.
A second lap, slower. The air smells like damp pavement and winter rain, sharp and clean, but it does nothing to clear the need sitting in my gut.
I catch a glimpse of her rental again. The porch light is on now.
Golden behind the thin veil of her curtains.
Her shadow moves through the living room.
Her hair’s down again, loose around her shoulders.
She’s barefoot. She always used to be barefoot when she was trying to breathe.
By the third loop, I know I can’t abandon Ivy.
I park at the curb, headlights off, engine ticking quietly in the hush between street lamps.
I can’t stop seeing her in that ER bed, pale against the sheets, trying to pretend she wasn’t terrified.
I can’t stop thinking about her mouth, trembling before she steadied it just enough to lie through her teeth.
I see the way she looked away when I said I was taking her home. The way she wanted me to go but didn’t say it like she meant it. She’s always done that, spoken in defense but never offense. She doesn’t know how to hurt people. She only knows how to survive them.
And I want her. God, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
I want to drag her against the wall of that perfect little guesthouse, push up that soft cotton dress she wears like armor, and remind her what it feels like to come undone in the hands of someone who sees her.
I want her breath in my mouth and my name on her lips, want to fuck her until there’s no space left in her body for fear, until she forgets every reason she ever thought she had to lie to me.
I want her pregnant and moaning and mine .
My hands tighten around the steering wheel, every muscle coiled with restraint I’m about ready to stop showing. She’s hiding something, and she’s doing it to protect me. That’s the part that wrecks me the most.
Because if she just told me, if she gave me even a fraction of the truth, I’d burn the entire damn city to keep her safe.
I’d walk into the offender's boardroom and bleed him dry with a smile. I’d rip up every contract, every name he thinks he owns, until there’s nothing left of his empire but smoke.
So I pull into the shadowed mouth of a side street, kill the headlights, and sit there, watching the upper window of her apartment through the windshield.
If she’s in danger, I’ll know. If someone comes for her, I’ll be here.
My mind runs through every possible scenario.
Every man who’s ever looked at her too long, and among them, one name keeps coming up.
Daniel Holt, the man she dated right before she fled town.
Every whisper I’ve heard in hospital corridors about the Holt family’s reach.
Every time I’ve seen her flinch when someone mentions her past.
Whatever she’s hiding, I’m going to find out.