Page 56 of Enchanted

The full force of his emotions hit me. Anger. Hurt.

Betrayal.

“Ethan?” I rushed up to him, cupping his reddened face. “What happened?”

He stared up at me, blinking in confusion. “You’re still here.”

“Had to take a call,” I lied easily. “What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer me. “Are you sure you want to be my friend?”

Friend? I wanted to be his everything. “Yes. Of course.”

“Then take me away.” A shudder went through him. “Please, Rami. Just get me out of here.”

He didn’t need to ask me twice.

I opened the passenger side door and got behind the wheel.

Then I drove and drove and drove.

I didn’t have a plan. Not really. Just to get Ethan as far away from whoever was in that house as possible. From whatever had both sorrow and rage coming off him in waves.

Ethan didn’t seem to care where we were going. He stared silently out of the window, rubbing his thumb over his bottom lip.

How I wanted to pull his hand away. To press a kiss to his palm and promise to fix whatever was broken. To right however he’d been wronged.

I’d only asked Ethan one question, when we were on the outskirts of London. “Do you want to talk about it?”

The shake of his head had me falling silent again. Ethan would talk when he was ready, or he wouldn’t. Whatever he needed, whatever he wanted, I’d be here to give it to him.

I suspected I already knew what he’d walked in on. Didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. I tried not to focus on it though. If I did, I’d be turning the car around and removing Dave’s bones one at a time for daring to betray Ethan in such a way. How the fuck could he do that? Didn’t he realise how blessed he’d been to share his life with a man as wonderful as Ethan?

I didn’t think about what this might mean for me. I refused to let it even enter my mind. How could I even consider it when my mate was hurting?

Darkness was falling by the time Ethan finally shifted in his seat and peered owlishly through the windscreen. “Where are we?”

I glanced at the map on the centre console. “We’ve just passed Colchester.”

“Oh,” he said quietly. “I’ve never been here.”

“It has its plus sides. There’s a beautiful castle. And a zoo. I hear there’s a haunted hotel too. Most of it was razed to the ground by Boudica during Roman times.”

That had been a clusterfuck of a century. In fairness, I didn’t blame her. If they’d done to my children what they did to hers, I would’ve murdered everyone responsible too.

“The city itself is a bit rough around the edges these days,” I continued.

“Like Southampton?”

I glanced over at him. “Worse.”

“Blimey,” Ethan murmured. “Not the kind of place I should be walking around on my own at night, then.”

“You’d be okay,” I said. Because there was no fucking way I’d ever let anyone hurt him. Not like that, anyway. Because Ethan was currently hurting, and there hadn’t been a damned thing I could do to stop it. “Definitely nicer during the day.”

Ethan drummed his fingers on the door. “Where are we going?”

I shrugged. “I’m just driving.”