Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
Ethan
Ethan stepped out from under the warm spray of water and reached for his fogged over glasses.
Normally he showered so fast they didn’t have time for condensation to build up, but after his…
encounter with Tressa, he’d needed a few extra minutes under the water.
No matter how ashamed he’d been about his unconscious advances, he couldn’t deny his body wanted her.
And his heart was starting to catch up. Thankfully, his brain had always been the one in charge of decision making, and any romantic entanglements were on pause until after the vamp was pushing up daisies.
Then he would be more than willing to spend all night fucking Tressa’s brains out.
Provided she still wanted him, of course.
It wasn’t like he had anything to offer a goddess like her, what with currently being homeless and jobless.
He stared into the mirror for a minute and evaluated his new physique.
His hair was in serious need of a trim. The strands he could usually control with a swipe of gel now hung down like a curtain over his face.
It had gotten to the point that he had to either tuck them behind his ears or walk around half blind.
Not to mention his normal chin scruff had grown to full on beard status.
But facial hair aside, his biggest concern was the new sharp angle to his cheeks and taper to his waist. He’d worked his ass off to fill out his frame with enough muscle to ensure his lab job wouldn’t turn him into a scrawny nerd, but alas, his lot in life seemed to find him anyway.
Well, maybe scrawny wasn’t the right word.
He shifted side to side, running his hands down his broad shoulders and the chest muscles that were now more lean than bulky.
Maybe it wasn’t so bad. When he hit thirty a couple years back, he’d started to question just why he spent so many nights at the gym to maintain the sculpted look.
He hadn’t been on a date in over a year, so really, who cared if he was ripped or not as long as he was healthy.
And Tressa hadn’t exactly seemed like she was repulsed by his physical appearance, so maybe…
Shaking his head, he grabbed the only towel hanging on the rack—a fluffy pink one—and wrapped it around his waist. He was starting to feel like a kid who just went through puberty and now wanted to do nothing but stare at his new body.
Stepping back into the bedroom, he paused his adolescent musings.
Well, shit.
He’d likely been sporting nothing but the highest hospital gown fashion when Tressa brought him to this place which meant…
Yup. He had exactly nothing to wear. A quick glance around showed him the starchy garment was nowhere to be found, and even the black shorts he’d left on the floor had been whisked off to who knows where.
Great. He upgraded from a hospital gown to a pink towel. A surprisingly large towel that hung well past his knees, but a towel nonetheless. Not exactly conducive to tracking down a vampire.
Although, if this really was a compound filled with hunters, one of them had to be a guy who was roughly Ethan’s size. He was a little taller than the average male at just over six feet, but he’d wear cut off jean shorts if it meant he could burn that disgusting hospital gown.
Seeing as he had no desire to wander the compound half naked looking for Tressa, he strolled around the room, taking in the unique art pieces that adorned the walls.
The space had a whole cozy vibe going on with mahogany furniture and a pair of plush beige recliners, but it was the explosions of color everywhere that turned the room from boring to exciting.
The paintings varied in style from expressionism to watercolor, and they were all landscapes from around the world, most of which Ethan didn’t immediately recognize.
One in particular, though, drew him in, and he stepped closer to analyze it.
“I painted that,” Tressa said, and Ethan leapt back so fast his towel slipped off his hips in the process.
“Fuck!” he screamed, and not a manly scream either. It was a ‘seven-year-old girl who just saw a spider’ type of high-pitched scream he would give anything to take back.
Snatching the towel off the floor with lightning reflexes he didn’t know he was capable of, he whipped around to take in Tressa’s smirking face.
The multiple sudden movements left him more than a little woozy, but he wasn’t about to dump fertilizer on the invasive weeds of his embarrassment by leaning against the wall for support.
Instead, he carefully secured the pink towel around his waist again, his toes gripping the plush carpet tightly.
“Oh, no need to get dressed on my account,” she said with eyes that sparkled in the light. “The others might prefer you in pants, but I’m more… flexible.”
Ethan’s face heated, but he wasn’t sure how to respond. He’d had his fair share of women hit on him before, though none had the ability to tie his tongue like the one standing before him.
The one holding a tray of croissants and orange juice.
Ethan let out a much more manly shout of joy that hopefully drowned out the loud grumbling from his stomach and dove for a pastry. In his haste to snatch up a flaky croissant, he nearly lost the damn towel a second time.
“Fuck me,” he moaned after sinking his teeth into the soft buttery treat. The garbage the hospital staff had the audacity to call food had done nothing to welcome him back to the land of the living.
Tressa raised an eyebrow, and his blush returned in full force.
“Uh, sorry,” he muttered. “I just meant this is really delicious.”
“Well, good to know the standard for pleasing you starts somewhere around tasty pastry. I look forward to seeing where we can go from there.” She gave him a wicked grin.
Holy shit, this woman was testing his resolve.
She must have seen the torment on his face because she just laughed and set the tray on the dresser before plopping onto the freshly made bed.
The level of bounce from the cushy mattress drew his eyes to the way her breasts jiggled in the tight lavender tank top she’d thrown on.
It was a step above her silk PJs in terms of temptation, but she’d paired it with a short, white tennis skirt that exposed far too much bronze skin for him to focus, so the outfit was more or less a lateral move.
“Relax, Science Boy,” she said, tucking her legs up underneath her. “I’m just teasing.”
“Science Boy?” he grumbled after swallowing another bite. “Not to be that guy, but you do know I have a Doctorate in Botany and a Masters in both Microbiology and Bioorganic Chemistry, right?”
Tressa tapped her chin for a second. “Hmm… Should I call you Doctor Science, then?”
Ethan groaned. “How about not?”
“I have to call you something,” she protested. Then her eyes positively lit up with mischief, and Ethan braced himself.
“I got it!” she shouted. “Your last name is Ambrose. Amb. Rose. You have a rose tattoo on your ass, and you’re literally a rose doctor! Dr. Rose is the perfect nickname for you!”
Despite how proud of herself Tressa seemed, Ethan couldn’t help but cringe at the reduction of his life’s work down to a silly moniker. “Or you could just call me Ethan, like the rest of the world does. Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks everyone needs a nickname?”
She shrugged. “Why not? I think they’re cute. And who doesn’t want a little fun to lighten up their day?”
He shoved the rest of the croissant in his mouth to buy time to formulate a response. He didn’t want her to think he was a complete stick in the mud, but he couldn’t deny the truth. “To be honest, that’s not a big part of my life.”
“Fun? You don’t do fun? Come on, Ethan,” she said, giving him a dubious look. “Life is too precious to be so miserable all the time.”
The last bit of pastry soured in his mouth, but he choked it down. “I guess I’ve just been through a lot in my life, and my ability to be so carefree vanished somewhere along the way.”
Tressa’s smile flickered, then reappeared with less sincerity.
“We’ve all been through a lot, Ethan,” she replied calmly, regarding him with rich brown eyes that were filled with the remnants of an old pain hidden but not forgotten.
“I’ve been through more than you could possibly know, and while I can’t change the past, I can choose how it affects my present.
I can crumble under the suckiness and let it define me, or I can give it the middle finger and choose happiness instead. ”
There was a strange hesitancy to her words, as if she’d said them many times but didn’t necessarily believe them herself.
“You do know it’s not that easy, right?” he said, trying and failing to keep the bite out of his tone. Just because she wanted to bury her trauma in a field of dandelions didn’t mean he had to indulge her. “Some of us can’t just choose to be happy.”
She studied him for a long moment. “Not right away, no,” she admitted, her perky persona fading away into something more honest and genuine.
“But eventually the wounds start to heal, and you decide how you want to move forward. You can let whatever you went through shape you into something dark and tormented, or you can step into the light and declare in a loud voice that you are more than the awful things that have happened to you.”
Her words drew him closer to the bed, and his hands gripped the towel tighter so he wouldn’t reach out and drag her into his arms. “I take it awful things have happened to you?”
“You have no idea, Ethan,” she said quietly, her gaze dropping to her lap where she absently picked at her cuticles.
“Was it also a vampire?”
Tressa flinched, then let out a sigh that carried far too much weight for someone as young as her. “Yes and no,” she replied. “I do have a vampire to thank for my place here at the compound, but my life was… difficult even before that.”