41. Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-One
H e stands there, just out of reach, looking too handsome to be a real flesh and blood man, a billionaire known far and wide, who has the power of many, while I have the power of just me. The only reason I’m on solid ground with Ethan at all right now is that the wall behind me holds me there. My fingers curl into my palms, nails scraping the skin. “I really know you’re trying to protect me, Ethan, but it feels like manipulation.”
“If you know I’m protecting you, you know I’m not manipulating you.” His tone is unreadable, the sunshine splaying through the open curtain, burning amber through the sea blue of his expectant stare.
But if he wants me to simply say he’s right and I’m wrong, that’s not where this is headed. “Do I?” I challenge. “Because I feel like I can’t win right now.”
“And yet, you can,” he argues, his tone somehow calculated but not cold. Not even a little cold. I have a sense that he’s as emotionally invested in my answers as I am his, and the idea would have been unfathomable only days before. “You can have everything you want, Sofia,” he continues, “but you are choosing otherwise. It’s almost as if you’re afraid of success. I will not be your excuse to let fear win.”
I bristle and push off the wall, poking at the air in a downward motion. “I’m not afraid of success.”
His brow quirks ever so slightly. “Aren’t you?”
“I told you—”
“I know what you told me.” His tone is sharper now, full of demand. “ Decide, Sofia.”
I draw in a sharp breath, my mind as chaotic as my lust for this man. And what if that’s all this is? Lust. Mine. His. All the lust. It’s an obsession, and obsession is dangerous. An obsession can be a destructive emotion when it’s allowed to make our decisions for us. And yet, what if this, whatever this is between us, is not “just” lust but something special, something we don’t want to lose? Does that mean I walk away from one thing to save the other? Or do I really dare believe I could have both? I hate that he’s doing this to me. I hate it so much. “What happens when we keep going, keep doing this thing we’re doing together, and we don’t work out?”
“Nothing changes, Sofia. You and your work are not me and you.”
My heart is sputtering about—a reaction to what I believe might just be fear. I’m afraid—of pretty much everything happening right now being too good to be true. And that means I’m guilty as he’s charged, but not ready to jump off the ledge and into his arms just yet. “What happens when something triggers you, like an encounter with your brother and Anna, and you think I’m after your money?”
His brows slash downward, his mood palpably darker, his question laced with accusation and caution. “Is that what you think happened today?”
“No,” I say without hesitation. “Not at all. But I think it could.”
He closes the space between us with one long, athletic stride, the sun seeming to follow him, just another of his admirers casting us in its unforgivingly hot beam that doesn’t even come close to competing with the scorching heat waving between us. And yet, Ethan doesn’t touch me. He stands in front of me, the scent of vanilla and musk teasing my nostrils and sending a spiral of wants and needs through every inch of me.
And therein lies why I should be afraid of him over all else.
No one man should have this much power to affect another human being, and yet he does me.
“You don’t know me well enough to make that statement, and you never will if you walk away.”
It takes me a drugged moment to process what he’s replying to, to remember I’ve suggested that one day he could come up for air and be persuaded by all life has taught him—that I’m here for his money, or at least what he can do for me and my career.
“I’m scared,” I whisper.
Approval is ripe in his piercing stare. “That’s good. Because it’s an honest emotion, and it means you’re invested. Decide. ”
“I want both, but after what Harper said—”
His hands, those amazingly skilled hands, catch my waist, and he pulls me to him, demand both in the deep rumble of his voice as well as heat radiating from his palms and scorching me through my dress. “Tell me again. What did she say?”
My hands cover his hands in a useless effort to garner some form of control when he owns it all. “I didn’t let her tell me much. She started to talk about Anna, and I stopped her, which was perhaps a mistake since I read between the lines and filled in my own blanks. I made assumptions, but I didn’t want her to tell me about Anna. It’s your story, she’s your story. It’s your right and—”
“She is not my story, Sofia. She was never part of my story. She was never for me.”
“Harper said that. And that—”
“And what?”
“She wanted what you could give her. That’s what you’re going to think of me.”
“You are nothing like her. Not even a fragment of you is like her. And there was never one moment when she was in my life that I obsessed over her when she wasn’t with me. All I do is obsess over you, Sofia.”
He obsesses over me? The insecure part of me rejects the possibility that this powerful, beautiful man could be as into me as I am him. But even as I think it, my hand presses to his face, and I whisper, “I obsess over you, too, but I don’t think I should be happy about that. It’s not healthy. It’s not the right thing to feel.”
His hand slides up my back, his fingers splaying between my shoulder blades, his mouth so temptingly close to mine that I can all but taste him when he says, “It feels pretty fucking right to me, and I dare anyone to try to take you from me.”
It’s the most possessive, scary, and arousing thing anyone has ever said to me.