Chapter Fifty
Maggie
For a moment, Maggie wondered if he hadn’t heard her. Or if he’d mis heard her? Or changed his mind? Or maybe the offers hadn’t been offers? Maybe they’d been meant to tease or mock or annoy
or—
She hadn’t known a man could fly while lying down, but in the next moment, Ethan was springing on top of her, the long, heavy
line of his body pressing into hers as the too-cold room turned way too warm. It felt like all the air had left Maggie’s lungs
and, worse, she didn’t want it back. Because Ethan was looking down at her like she was the prize, the gift—the only thing
that mattered.
But when he moved next, it was slow and cautious—a careful, halting pace that seemed to ask Is this okay? and Are you sure? and Am I still dreaming? But if he was dreaming so was she.
And, suddenly, Maggie couldn’t wait anymore. She surged up and found his mouth with hers, and every cell in her body came
alive. She felt everything. She heard everything—from the crackling fire to the moaning wind and even the little voice that had spent the last year telling Maggie
she wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, or sexy enough to keep a man like Colin, so what kind of fool would she have to be
to think she might find somebody better?
But she had. Hadn’t she? She’d found Ethan. And Ethan was a million times more. But if she wasn’t good enough for Colin, then...
“Hey.” The lips were gone, and she missed them. She reached up and tried to draw them back, but he held her face in his hands.
“We don’t have to do this.”
“I want to do this. I’m sorry. I’m just not very... I want to.” And then she kissed him again, and he made a sound that
was low and dark and feral, and something inside of Maggie went silent. The words and worries went away. Like someone turning
the music down until Maggie, a world-class overthinker, wasn’t able to think at all.
Not about Colin and the first kiss he’d ever given her because that would have been like comparing a candle to a campfire.
Ethan’s hands moved from her face to the delicate skin of her neck, sliding lower. Slower. And Maggie changed her mind.
It would be like comparing a campfire to the sun.
Suddenly, she couldn’t silence all the sounds she wanted to make and she wanted to cringe with shame, but Ethan gave that
low growl again and whispered, “There you go, sweetheart. Let me know what you like.”
“I like you,” Maggie blurted and, instantly, he froze.
As in he didn’t move. At all.
No more kisses or wandering hands, just the heavy weight of him and she wondered for a split second if maybe he was a robot
and she’d said the emergency kill code that made him power down because Ethan was completely, utterly motionless until...
The head came up. And she watched him morph into an Ethan she’d never seen before, boyish charm mixed with lethal intensity
as he said, “ Finally. ”
And then he kissed her again, harder this time, taking her in his arms and rolling until she was on top, and for a moment
she pulled back to study the face that was too rugged to be pretty and too beautiful to be anything but gorgeous. Like an
angel who liked to bend the rules but was still, deep down, one of the good guys and everybody knew it.
A beam of moonlight sliced through the curtains and fell across his face like a spotlight, and a little voice inside of Maggie
whispered, Blue , as she looked into eyes that had been a different color almost every time she’d ever seen him—changing, morphing, blending—just
like the man himself.
But this was a color she’d seen before. A color she’d seen recently.
“Sweetheart?” Ethan’s hands were still and his gaze was burning as he looked at her through the dark. “We can stop. We don’t
have to—”
Blue. Something blue.
And Maggie remembered. “We have to search her office.”
“What?”
She was already climbing out of bed, looking for her shoes, and reaching for the flashlight. “We have to search her office.
Right now.”
“You searched it already. The notebook wasn’t in there.”
“Not for the notebook! The envelope!” Oh, she was almost giddy. It was the same way she felt right before a plot came together,
stars aligning and pieces clicking. “The blue envelope!” She gestured with one shoe and pushed her hair out of her face and
tried not to think about how—or why—it was suddenly wild and free. “The day we got here, James brought in the mail, remember?
There was a blue envelope in the stack. I just remembered it because it was the same color as...”
Oops. Maggie trailed off.
“As what?” Ethan asked, and she knew it was far too late to change the subject.
“Your eyes,” she admitted, and he gave her his cockiest grin.
“I’m going to tease you about that so hard later, but for now”—he threw off the covers—“let’s go.”