5. Ethan
Chapter 5
Ethan
W esson dances happily into the room, golden tail wagging enthusiastically. Denver’s luggage is already in the living area after being moved by staff, along with several designer shopping bags, heels, and clothes spilling over the rim.
“I shop when I’m bored,” she says, gesturing at the bags before heading to the small kitchenette. “Do you want a drink?”
I tuck my hands into my pockets. “Sure. Just water for me.”
I’m not sure why I’m here. Common sense tells me to avoid the woman I almost died with hours ago, but curiosity got the better of me. The few minutes we’d shared at the ambulance felt close to a nice conversation, and I wanted more.
“How come you’re not in a nicer suite?” I ask as Denver hands me a bottle of water. She tilts her head in question, and I nod at the overflowing shopping bags. “You have at least two pairs of shoes that equate to thousands of dollars, but you’re in one of the cheapest rooms.”
She raises her brows, her smile intrigued. “A detective vet. How weirdly sexy. I prefer somewhere I can easily walk Wesson. As you already know, he likes the pool. And how would you know the price of my shoes?”
“My business partner, Marissa,” I say. “She has the same kind, and once, a chihuahua threw up on them. She told the owner it was fine, then hid in the break room and whispered to me just how much they cost.”
Denver points at the ceiling. “Send one up for the ruined Jimmy Choos. Your business partner sounds sweet.” She drags out the title with a glowing smirk. “She hot?”
“Very.”
Her brows raise. “Are you shagging her, Ethan?”
Damn, she even sounds cute when she tries and fails to be British.
“Not even close.” I wish I liked Marissa more than I do. Beautiful, blonde, a vet, she’s a dream and, on paper, perfect for me. But she’s closer to a little sister than a love interest.
Denver slumps onto the sofa and twists the cap off her drink. “I don’t believe you, but fine.”
I sit beside her, and then silence falls.
What are we supposed to talk about? Our first interaction had been a full-blown argument; our second had been similar, and other than the dog, I don’t know what we have in common.
Denver seems to realize the same thing because she focuses entirely too much on her fire engine red nails. Wesson wanders into the room and slides onto the ground, sighing into the tiled floor and watching us as if experiencing secondhand embarrassment.
“You have dogs!” Denver declares, clearly excited that she’d found a topic to fill the painful silence. “Tell me about your dogs.”
Okay, that’s something I can talk about. “Three German Shepherds. Someone found them in a box underneath a bridge and brought them to the clinic, and I couldn’t stand the thought of giving them away.” I fish my phone out of my pocket.
“Are you about to be the guy who shows me endless photos of your dogs?”
“No,” I say, dragging out the word. “Videos, too.”
Denver grins and moves closer.
After I bombard her with snaps of the dogs, she does the same with videos of Wesson when he was a puppy. Wesson watches us, his tail banging lazily on the floor as if he knows he’s the topic of conversation.
Denver continues swiping through her photos when I spot something familiar. “Wait, go back.”
She does, and I stare at the photograph of a sunset, an orange sky broken up by silhouetted buildings.
“You live in San Francisco.”
She nods. “Yeah. It’s the view from my rooftop. Why?”
Placing my drink on the low coffee table, I search through my phone for the photo I know I still have. It’s a different angle, lower because I’d been out running when I took it, but it’s undoubtedly the same view.
Denver holds her phone beside mine, the colors in the photo almost identical, and she taps each screen to bring up the photo information.
“The dates are the same,” she says. Goosebumps warm my neck. She’s right. The dates are the same, the timing only minutes apart. Not only do we live in the same city, but we’re barely ten minutes away from each other. When Denver was standing on a rooftop and taking this photo, I had paused a jog and done the same. “That’s a little freaky,” she adds, grinning.
It is a little freaky. It feels like Denver careened into my life without warning, a tornado whipping up things I’d thought were nailed down, but she’d been close. Maybe we’d even walked by each other before.
She clears her throat. “Hungry?”
I nod quickly, taking in a breath as if being around her is akin to being submerged. “Sure.”
Thirty minutes later, Denver is trying to throw M&Ms into my mouth. “Would you rather…” She pops a blue chocolate into her mouth as she thinks. “…have to enter every room doing cartwheels, backflips, or dancing?”
“That’s tough,” I say, sitting up. “I give bad news sometimes. I can’t backflip into a room and tell someone their dog’s leg is broken.”
“Well, you can’t dance into a room and do it, either.”
I think for a minute. “I think cartwheels.”
“Cartwheels!” She shoves my shoulder. “You’re giving up the chance to be the amazing backflipping vet?”
I laugh, almost choking on the chocolate, and Denver grins.
“If you had to eat a color?” I ask, holding out an M&M. She sucks it out of my palm like a vacuum.
“Purple. You?”
“Red, every time. Biggest regret?”
She looks at me pointedly. “That’s too serious. Biggest ick?”
I hum thoughtfully. It’s been a long time since I’ve dated anyone long enough to have discovered an ick.
“Oh.” I click my fingers. “She held her fork in her right hand.”
Denver chokes on her laugh. “You’re not serious!”
“It was weird!” I say. “It made me think I’d been living my life backward. I stared at her the entire date, wondering what the hell was wrong with the picture, and then I realized.” Denver continues laughing, and the sound does something wonderful and fizzy in my chest. “How about you?”
She sighs contentedly. “He made me rate our sex out of ten every time we did it.”
I laugh loudly. “He didn’t.”
“He did. I’d barely have caught my breath from all the faking,” she says, and I laugh harder, “and he’d be like, ‘Denver, that was an eight, right?’” She wrinkles her nose. “It was never an eight.”
“That’s rough. Why didn’t you just break up with him?”
She shrugs, a small smile tugging on her lips, but her eyes portray something different. Longing. Maybe even guilt. “Because he used to text me goodnight.” My smile fades slightly. “Every night. Without fail. And we only dated for three months, but that’s nearly a hundred texts.” She plays with her fingers. “That’s a hundred times he thought of me.”
The armor around Denver Luxe is well-worn but sturdy, held together with witty remarks and her ability to silence people with a look. I’ve been in her presence very little, but I can see how she hides herself, how the easy questions matter more than the ones that tell her true character. But a crack forms from a seemingly innocent story, small enough to miss if I hadn’t been looking. But I am looking. And I see her through the metal and memories, and I’m starting to think I like what she’s hiding.
“You’re worth thinking about,” I say quietly, perhaps hoping she won’t hear. Denver meets my gaze.
She chews her lip, the pink flesh whitening beneath the pressure of her teeth. Her breathing slows to an almost complete stop, and the darkness of her pupils expands until the tarnished silver is a border of metal around a pit of night.
The silence doesn’t beg to be filled, so I let it stretch. I allow the twist in my stomach to become an unbearable thirst to kiss her, my heart thundering fast and free in my chest as my gaze drops to her lips.
We said no sex. Well, she said it, but she’s looking at me like she might regret drawing that line. Flashes of our gym encounter overwhelm my senses as potently as she does, and my heartbeat spreads until my entire body feels like it’s calling out to a woman I barely know.
So, I let my body take the lead, and I kiss her.
Molten lava pours through my veins, and if it burns me alive, then cest-la-fucking-vie. There’s no rhyme or reason why a woman I hardly know creates such a response—although death is a powerful aphrodisiac, so I imagine coming close to it had to aid in that department—but I run with it anyway. Every kiss with Denver Luxe feels like running full speed and blindfolded through unfamiliar land. It’s dangerous. It will likely hurt. Honestly, it’s fucking stupid.
But every step into that unknown has brought me something I’d never have on a familiar path—excitement, possibility, and feeling more alive than I ever have. My heart beats differently, and my blood feels thicker, hotter, more vital. So, I keep running in the dark and hope she won’t let me careen off the edge of a fucking cliff.
Denver parts her lips, and my tongue grazes hers, slow and warm. She tastes like chocolate, smells like vanilla, and her skin is hot when I run my palm up her arm, stopping at the side of her neck. She climbs into my lap, the kiss languid, lazy, like we have all the time in the world, like this night could last forever.
When the kiss ends, she rests her forehead against mine.
I pull her closer. “How was that? A nine?”
She laughs, and I hope to God I can live without hearing that sound every day of my life because I’m fairly sure, next time, one of those bullets will hit me.