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“You said we had to be clean and now we’re clean.” There was a little bit of the devil in the wicked smile he gave her. “Let me touch you.”
She was helpless to resist him, and he lifted her easily, one hand at her waist and the other cupping one cheek of her behind when she wrapped her legs around him. She thought he might pin her against the shower wall—he’d done that before and she’d had no complaints—but he stepped out and carried her dripping across the floor until he could follow her down onto the bed.
They were still soaked, and she knew they were going to regret this when it was time to sleep and all their blankets were wet, but it was hard to focus on some nebulous and far away consequence when he was kissing his way down her body, and she could already feel the heat building between her thighs.
Tonight, he was ruthless, his mouth and hands moving over with one purpose. He knew every place on her body that made her tremble with pleasure and he exploited them without mercy. She was a quivering mess of need before he ever parted her legs to use his tongue on her most sensitive parts.
He drove her to one peak with only his mouth, and then another when he started to slowly pump his fingers inside her. She was wet enough that the room was quickly filled with obscene noises, but he didn’t seem to mind that any more than he cared about the cries he managed to pull from her. Before him, she’d always been shy and ashamed.
He seemed determined to drive that shame out of her.
She was beyond ready for him when he finally relented and settled himself over her. The taste of her arousal still lingered on his tongue, and he kissed her deeply as he slid into her slightly before pulling back out. No amount of pleading seemed to affect him, and each thrust was only marginally deeper than the last. By the time he was fully inside her, she was desperate and halfway to another orgasm.
He decided to take pity on her then and the bed frame shook beneath the force of his thrusts. It was exactly what she needed, and she clung to him, her fingers clutching his back and her legs locked around his hips. A pair of wild horses couldn’t have pried him from her grasp and her third peak had white sparks going off behind her eyelids and fireworks shooting through her veins.
She was nearly certain she had resorted to insensible babbling, but she shut her lips tight against the most traitorous thought that crossed her mind. It was fine to tell him she wanted him, that she needed him, that she’d do anything he wanted if only he never stopped touching her.
But she wasn’t going to tell him that.
Some four-letter words were better kept to oneself.
He was asleep almost as soon as he’d rolled over and wrapped an arm around her and she was grateful that he couldn’t see her face. She’d been so close to saying something she couldn’t take back. They needed to talk about what was happening between them, but blurting out her feelings during sex, before she’d had a chance to fully decide what she wanted to do about it, was not the way she wanted to start that conversation.
She thanked God and all her lucky stars that she’d come to her senses just in the nick of time.
Adrenaline was still pumping, keeping her up and restless, so she wiggled out from under his arm and, remembering the last time she’d tried to sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night, quietly indicated to a curious Winston that he should stay put. He glared at her reproachfully, but the puppy classes she’d insisted Ethan enroll him in had taught him manners and he stayed in his bed.
A cold glass of water calmed her nerves and soothed her anxious stomach but by the time she crept back up the stairs and tried to squeeze her way back into bed, Ethan had sprawled fully across the mattress. He was face down in the center of the bed, arms spread wide from side to side.
“You can’t be serious,” she grumbled. He was a heavy sleeper, and it was difficult to move him once he’d settled in. She’d have better luck grabbing a blanket from the closet and sleeping on the couch, but her pride didn’t like the idea of letting a giant golden retriever of a man push her out of her own bed.
“Move over.” She gave him a good shove, grunting with the effort, but he refused to budge. There was clearly not enough room for her to get comfortable, even if she was able to wedge herself in on one side of him, and she was standing beside him, unfocused gaze idly taking in his tattoos as she pondered her predicament, when it hit her.
The Tough Break logo wasn’t only familiar to her because of its permanent position on his back. She had seen it somewhere else. And thought she knew exactly where that had been.
Winston rolled over to huff at her when she backed away from the bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. She closed the door with a soft click, wincing at how loud it sounded in the silent house. The last five minutes had proved how difficult it was to wake Ethan, but that didn’t stop her heart from pounding as she locked the door and started rummaging in the little bathroom trash can.
Pushing aside used tissues and empty toilet paper rolls, she found what she was looking for near the bottom. The pack of cigarettes she had taken from beside Kim’s body, with a black matchbook tucked into the front.
A black matchbook with a familiar logo.
There was no name on it, but the design was identical to the one she’d just been looking at. It was unique, Ethan had designed the image himself. There was no mistaking it, no way to convince herself that it must be a mistake or a coincidence.
Kim had been at Dylan’s bar before she died.
And Ethan had never mentioned it.
It was possible he hadn’t known, since he’d been away from the bar for so long, but what were the odds that Kim had ended up in that exact bar? It was all the way across town and Eloise’s relationship with Ethan was the only connection between her friends and his.
She carried it back downstairs and tucked it into her purse before spending the rest of the night trying to sleep on the couch as a thousand questions ran in a loop through her mind. None of the explanations she came up with made sense as an answer to all of them and a horrible suspicion began to grow inside her.
Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky when she got dressed and left Ethan a note about him being a horrible bed hog before slipping out the door. She couldn’t face him without some space to think, afraid that she might accuse him of something that she couldn’t take back.
There were other people she needed to talk to, questions she needed to ask before she could form an opinion about anything, so she sat in her car and waited for Sarah to pull into the parking lot at work.
“Hey! Sarah! Do you have a minute?”
“Eloise!” Sarah’s hand flew up to cover her heart, the coffee she had clutched in the other sloshing in its cup. “You scared me.”
