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We lay there, facing each other. My face was hot, and pressure was building up in my chest. Too much feeling. I just didn’t have the voltage to handle it anymore.
Ethan rolled over, snapped his fingers, and a rosy light turned on next to the bed.
“I prefer the dark,” I said.
“But you’re so beautiful,” he said.
“You’re throwing your weight around,” I told him.
He looked over at me. “Sorry,” he said, clicking the light off.
I immediately regretted that I could no longer see his gorgeous face. “I’m sorry I’m such a basket case,” I said. “I know I’m not easy to deal with.”
“No, not easy, definitely. But oh God, so worth it.”
That made tears spring into my eyes, and I was desperately grateful that he had turned off the light. “Thanks.” My voice sounded soggy.
Ethan reached out, and brushed away my tears with his finger, as if he could see in the dark. “I’m not easy, either,” he admitted.
I laughed, under my breath. “Well, duh! Hot billionaires aren’t expected to be easy. They’re expected to be arrogant and spoiled and self-involved. And eccentric.”
“And am I?”
“Arrogant, yes,” I said.
“My sister gives me no end of shit about how controlling I am,” he said.
“Yes, controlling, too,” she said. “But people expect it of you, I bet. They don’t expect it from blondes, whose job it is to be sweet and nice and accommodating. But somehow, I never got that memo. So I end up, well. Surprising people.”
“You were exactly the person to be with me in that elevator, or I’d be dead.”
“You might have taken them,” I said.
I sensed his shrug in the darkness. “Maybe, but they would have gotten in a whole lot more licks. It’s unlikely I would have gotten through that without you.”
I felt absurdly pleased. “Well. Then I’m glad I was there. I guess that’s why you’re putting up with how weirdly defensive I am. My encounters usually don’t last long enough for conversations like these. I make sure of that.”
“I get it,” he said. “You’re that way because you have to be. It can’t be undone by flipping a switch.”
I went tense. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” I told him.
“Not the details,” he said. “But the size of the scar, that can be measured.”
“Don’t lay any pop psychology bullshit on me,” I warned him. “It bugs me.”
He reached out, but I jerked away. “I’m not,” he assured me. “And it’s not pop psychology. It’s just personal experience. Of a kind I wish I didn’t have.”
I gazed into the shadow that hid his eyes, suspicious. “What experience?”
“Long story,” he said.
“You started it,” I reminded him. “Let’s hear it.”
Ethan rolled onto his back again, stretching his arms behind his head. “It’s actually more a story of what happened to Frey, my sister,” he said.
“Yeah? What happened?”
He let out a sigh I could barely hear. “Okay, some background. My parents died in a car crash when I was sixteen. Drunk driver T-boned them on a country road at night.”
