Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
L ily gathered her jacket and purse and went to wait for Ethan outside.
She stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down the small town’s main thoroughfare.
It was late, nearly midnight. Most everything was closed.
There was a Denny’s up a little ways, and the gas stations were mostly open all night.
And the bars. That was it. Every other business was closed up tight.
She breathed deep, let the night air clear her head a little. It had been smoky in there. Not all of it tobacco. But she couldn’t really blame her bold moves on that. Maybe she was feeling desperate. And that was dumb. Her mom used to say that a girl should never love a man more than he loved her.
Not that she loved Ethan Brand. It would be self-destructive to fall in love with him. But she liked him a lot. And she wanted him a lot. And she was convinced they belonged together.
He came out the door with a bottle of water in his hand, which he offered her.
She took it, twisted off the cap and took a long drink. “Thanks. Again, I’m sorry?—”
“Stop apologizing, Lily. I…I wanna add you to my body count too. It’s just…”
“I’m family,” she said. “I know. I don’t want to mess up the family dynamic any more than you do, you know. My dad and brother are all I have, and Maria’s more than just a sister-in-law.”
“She’s my best friend,” Ethan said. “Has been our whole lives.”
They’d started walking back toward the cantina, going slow so they wouldn’t arrive too far ahead of Willow and tick her off.
When they’d gone far enough that most of the lights were behind them, Lily started hearing the whir of nighttime insects again, a constant, ever-shifting hum that was the backing soundtrack to every West Texas night.
Warm night air on her face, big, hot cowboy by her side.
She didn’t think life could get much better.
As they crossed the bridge, she sighed a dreamy sigh, then felt a rumble beneath her feet and looked up as a semi sped their way, faster than was smart. Just as the truck reached the bridge, Lily said, “He doesn’t see us.”
“Run!” Ethan grabbed her arm and ran, but they were not fast enough. The grill of the semi was bearing down. Just before contact, Ethan tugged her with him right over the side. They dropped twenty feet and splashed into the cold water, sinking straight to the bottom.
She panicked, but as soon as she started flailing, she felt solid ground under her feet, and pushed herself upright, breaking the surface in the shallow river only to fall down again.
“Lily!”
Ethan reached her and grabbed her under her arms to pull her up, but the current was fast and the water chest-high. As soon as they rose and moved two steps toward shore, it knocked them down again and swept them further downstream.
He got his footing eventually, and helped her get hers, and then they stumbled onto the shore arm-in-arm, soaked and spluttering. They fell together with their feet still in the water, panting, lying on their sides, face-to-face, legs entangled, arms clinging.
So close. His breath on her lips. His warmth penetrating her chill.
“I can’t…” he whispered.
Lily closed her eyes in disappointment.
“…resist you, Lily Ellen Hyde.” His lips met hers and her heart sprouted wings. Hummingbird wings, it felt like.
She kissed him back, and they wrapped themselves in each other there on the pebbled shore. He rolled over, pulling her on top of him, one hand in her hair, the other on her backside as he fed from her mouth and then her neck, pushing her blouse aside as he went.
Lily pushed his shirt off too, then shucked her jeans and got to work on his.
Ethan lifted his head. “Are you sure this is?—”
“Heaven? Yeah, I’m sure. Shut up and kiss me.”
So he did. It was not easy peeling off their remaining soaked clothes, but they managed it, and then they were there, on a tree-lined riverbank, skin to skin, every part of them touching, and then closer still.
Her breath whispered from her lungs and something caught fire in her soul as she held and kissed and loved him with every cell in her body, right there on the riverbank.
Afterward, she lay atop him. He was stroking her back with his big hands. He hadn’t said a word and she didn’t know what to say.
And then someone shouted, “Hey!” From the bridge, twenty yards upstream. “Bubba! Lily, are you down there?”
“Willow,” Ethan said softly.
Lily rolled off him and re-dressed in her soaked clothes with no small effort. It took her about twenty tug-and-hops to get her wet jeans up far enough to zip them. The top was easier. Ethan was dressed again by the time she was pulling on her shoes.
The beam of Willow’s flashlight swept closer from above.
“Right ’chere, Ethan called, and the beam found him.
“What the heck are you doin’ down there?”
“Semi thundered through while we were crossin’ the bridge,” Ethan called. “Had to jump for it.” He reached back for Lily, and their eyes locked.
Realization hit her like a freight train.
Oh, no. She loved him.
His hand closed around hers and he pulled her along, angling up the steep bank to the road.
It was cold now that she wasn’t in his arms. She shivered, and he put an arm around her shoulders as they ascended the steep bank.
He kept looking down at her, his eyes full of questions, obviously aware that something momentous had just happened.
They made it to the road and Willow, who’d returned in her Quinn County Sheriff’s Department SUV, handed them each a blanket from the back. “You guys hurt? Anything broken?”
“We’re fine,” Lily said, and she took off her soaked flannel. “The river broke our fall.”
“Blouse too,” Willow said. “Turn your back, Ethan.” She made a circular motion with her finger and Ethan, who’d barely taken his eyes off Lily, turned his back.
She peeled off her blouse and noticed there were some stray leaves and twigs stuck to her belly. Probably more on her back. She wrapped the blanket around her and hugged it close.
“All this for nothin’,” Willow said. “I didn’t get a clean set of prints off anything in there.”
“You checked already?”
“Yeah. Texted you I was back a while ago.” She frowned from one of them to the other, and reaching out, plucked a twig from Ethan’s hair.
Then she said, “Come on, Lily, take the front seat, you’re shiverin’.
” She opened the SUV’s door and reached in to turn on the seat warmer before letting Lily climb inside, then she closed the door.
Lily searched the dashboard, found the heat and turned it on, settling deeper into the seat, huddling in her blanket and still shivering.
She was hyper-sensitized, feeling everything, the car’s warm air on her legs and face, the brush of the blanket against her skin, the soft seat that cushioned her.
She’d have liked to take off the wet jeans, too. She was probably getting the seat all wet.
What did all this mean? she wondered. Where did things stand between her and Ethan now? Had they started a relationship? Or had they just made a misstep on their platonic path? How was he going to play this?
Motion drew her eye, and she noticed Willow and Ethan had moved further away from the truck, and Willow was speaking to him pretty emphatically. Had she seen them all wrapped up in each other’s arms? She couldn’t have, not in the dark from so far away.
The memory of their lovemaking washed over her, and she closed her eyes and relished it. This thing between her and Ethan was more than she’d realized.
Maybe it was everything.
Back at the ranch, Lily stood in a hot shower long enough to finally get warm again after her icy plunge…and the absence of Ethan’s arms around her, too, she supposed. She closed her eyes, and wished she knew what he was thinking.
She turned off the water, toweled down, and wished she’d brought her thick, fluffy robe into the bathroom with her.
Wrapping herself in a towel, she opened the bathroom door just as a soft knock came from outside the bedroom.
And then the door opened, and a female hand poked through holding a robe.
Her robe. And that looked like Chelsea’s hand.
“I heated it up in the dryer,” Ethan’s aunt called.
Lily hurried to take the robe from the hand—oh, it was warm! She pulled it around her and opened the door wider at the same time. “Oooh, that’s so nice.” She rubbed her hands up and down the sleeves. “What a thoughtful thing to do. Thank you.”
Chelsea was always kind, unless someone hurt her family, but this was above and beyond. “And chamomile tea,” she said, taking two cups and saucers from the stand in the hallway just outside Lily’s door.
Her good china, Lily noticed, with the pink roses and gold rims. That seemed rather…special. She looked at Chelsea more closely, suddenly wondering if Willow had seen her and Ethan after all and had said something.
Chelsea was a beautiful woman. She was letting her hair age naturally, and it was coming in light silver. She had big, brown eyes, a smile that could light up a room, and Lily thought she was one of the smartest people she knew.
She carried the tea to the nightstand, set one cup down, and took the other with her to the rocking chair near the window. “I was thinking,” she said, “about when I first came to Texas, and right into this house. How confusing it all was, and how much I wished for my mother, just…to talk to.”
“Your mom died young, too?”
“My mom died the same way my sister did.”
“Your sister…Ethan’s birth mother?”
She nodded. “My father…he beat my mother their whole marriage. One day he went too far.”
“Oh my God. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry, Chelsea.”
Chelsea smiled sadly, then nodded toward the second window seat, a small, overstuffed chair in pale blue. “Sit with me a while?”