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He gripped her hips as she sank down onto him, already wet and surprisingly ready from the thrill of what they were doing. The possibility of being seen was a rush she hadn’t anticipated, but it was the look in his eyes that drove her higher. He was watching her like she was every bit as much of a surprise to him as she was to herself. Like he had reached out a hand and caught a golden sunbeam in his fist. Awed and terrified all at once.
“Eloise …” Something flashed across his features, gone before she could decipher it. For a moment she thought it might have been regret, but he pulled her in and kissed her until it made her head spin and her heart flutter.
He held her as she shattered around him and dragged him over his own peak moments later, and if he was quieter and more serious than usual as she curled against his chest, she tried not to worry about it. Tried not to wonder about that look or what it could mean.
Whatever it had been, she was sure it was nothing that could hurt her. He had earned her trust and she was afraid her heart would not be far behind.
Fourteen
Ethan’s favorite place was mostly empty at three o’clock on a weekday, which made it a decent enough place to have the meeting with Dylan that he’d been putting off. Public enough they’d both be forced to keep their voices down and their tempers in check but private enough that no one was likely to overhear anything they shouldn’t.
Paula never looked less pleased to see him than when she realized he’d brought Dylan along. She still smiled at him when he brought Myles—and slipped the kid a desert on the house more often than not—but her entire demeanor shifted when she was forced to deal with Dylan. She was still highly efficient and ruthlessly polite, but with Dylan she made her dislike known through the tension at the corners of her mouth and the absence of her laughter.
Most of the community feared Dylan on his father’s reputation alone—a suspicion that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree no matter how hard he tried to hide his true nature—but it seemed that Paula was able to see right through to the heart of him. Whatever she found there had soured her on his existence faster than she could blink one heavily mascaraed eye.
After knowing Dylan more than half his life, with all of those years spent feeling like he owed the man a debt he’d never be able to repay, Ethan sat in the restaurant where he’d taken Eloise on their first date and began to wonder if maybe their hostess had a point.
Sometimes Dylan was an unbearable asshole.
Things had cooled off between them after Ethan’s injury, mostly because he’d stopped pushing so hard for information from Eloise. But Dylan couldn’t seem to resist the urge to make comments about Ethan’s forced time off or how he was spending his time while he was away from the bar. It rankled, each petty jab giving Ethan a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“You’re spending too much time with that neighbor.” Dylan reached for a slice of pizza before Paula had finished putting it on the table and missed the look she shot him from beneath her lashes before she walked away. “You still haven’t been coming around the bar and we need you.”
“Need me for what? I told you already I’ll be back once I’m totally healed up. It wouldn’t do you any good for me to come around and have people start asking questions about what happened. The news is still running stories about it. They say the cops are still looking for the suspects. That’s us, remember?”
It was an excuse to avoid the bar, but it was mostly true. Staying away for a while after that last job had gone unexpectedly sideways had been Dylan’s idea in the first place but they both knew he’d been pretty well-healed for over a week, and he still hadn’t gone back. Ethan had spent more time in that bar than he had anywhere else in his life and the damn thing wouldn’t fall apart if he spent some time with a beautiful woman before Dylan dragged him back in.
“Got a lead on a job,” Dylan said cryptically. “Been cooking it up since the night you got shot. Ran into some good luck for a change.”
Usually the idea of a new job was energizing, full of tantalizing possibilities, but this time it just caused a restless and uncomfortable itch beneath his skin. He was getting too old for this shit, he decided, and ruthlessly pushed the thought of Eloise out of his mind. He was having a good time with her, but he couldn’t let it be more than that.
“Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
“Like I said, you haven’t been coming around. I was starting to think you’d lost interest, maybe started having fantasies about a wife and kids, golden retriever and all.”
“I have the house for it now, don’t I?” Ethan let the words roll off his tongue, testing not just Dylan’s reaction to the thought of it, but his own. He’d never entertained such ideas before. His memories of family were not much more than loss and conflict—the kind of shit he thought would haunt him for the rest of his life—but Eloise had a way of making him forget. The house where he’d come to blows with his grandfather, where he’d been dragged out in handcuffs and tossed into juvie, hadn’t been a place he’d really wanted to return to, but it was different when she was there.
Eloise was nothing like his mother, organized and prim where his mom had been wild and rebellious, but there was a kindness to her smile that made him remember what family was like when it was good, what home was like when it was safe, and it was more appealing than he’d expected.
“Is that what you want?” Dylan had gone still and dangerous, watching Ethan with a measuring gleam in his eye. “You want out now? After everything?”
“Of course not.” If he did, what would Dylan do to him? To Eloise? If he did, that was something he would need to think about, to plan for. It wasn’t something he could toss out over pizza and expect to walk away from unscathed. “You know better than anyone how much damage family can do to a man. Eloise is nothing more than a pretty distraction while I get back on my feet.”
Dylan was still watching him, but his body relaxed. He flashed a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes as he nodded. “I didn’t think so.”
“I’ll come by the bar as soon as I can.”
“Of course, you will.” Dylan returned his attention to his pizza, point apparently made. “The place just isn’t the same without you.”
Fifteen
“You don’t really have to go back to the office on a Saturday night, do you?” Jackson pouted, his long body draped elegantly in the corner chair as he sipped lemonade and watched storm clouds roll in to cover the blue late afternoon sky.
“Don’t go,” David pleaded. He’d risen from his spot on the couch to wrap both of her hands in his larger ones. “You haven’t been to dinner at our house in ages and you finally get a free evening when Ethan is busy, and you run off to work instead.”
“I wish I didn’t have to.” She meant it. The last thing she wanted to do on a Saturday was go back into the office. “I’d put it off if I could, but I forgot to send a paper over to Sarah’s department and she called a few minutes ago, just completely irate. Nearly took my head clean off over the phone.”
“Short temper.” Jackson clucked his tongue, face full of judgment. “Work is important, obviously, but is that any way to treat a friend?”
