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She wasn’t sure if it was him that slid under her skin to carve the ache in her chest or the beautiful miracle that she wasn’t lying dead and sightless on a rainy sidewalk, but suddenly she was no longer tired. Her body was a great gasping void, a hungry and energetic thing that needed to feast and fill itself with the experiences of living.
“Ethan.”
She turned to him in the dark, seeking sex but somehow so much more, and finding an affirmation of her humanity, her existence, her desirability despite what she’d seen and the scars she’d now carry.
He gave her everything. Mouth hot and roving over her flesh as though he, too, was driven to consume. His hands were brands on the soft skin of her thighs as she bucked against the onslaught of his tongue.
They rolled, tangled in the sheets and each other as each of them became lost and insensible to everything else. She was drowning in him. His teeth on her shoulder. His fingers tangled in her hair. His hips pressing into her, sharp and bruisingly hard when he drove into her again and again. She took the pleasure and the edge of tingling pain, affirmations that she was here, and no one had managed to take that away from her.
Not now.
Not today.
With that thought, she let him take her under.
She woke sometime later, floating near the surface of her mind with a vague sense that something was wrong, until memory snapped back into place and with it the knowledge that Kim was gone.
It still didn’t seem real, like a nightmare that she should be able to break free from. When she opened her eyes, her life should be the same as it was before, but somehow the opposite was true. It was only in sleep that the horror of what had happened could disappear for a short while and waking brought the return of the terrible reality and the hole in her heart.
Ethan was asleep, wrapped around her protectively with one arm thrown over her hip to hold her in place, and she struggled for a moment against the weight of him before she was able to wriggle free. She hadn’t had anything to drink besides wine since that afternoon and thirst drove her downstairs, padding down the steps in Ethan’s shirt and bare feet with a puzzled Winston following closely at her heels.
He was a sound sleeper, but he had woken the moment her feet touched the floor and flopped down with a yawn on the rug in front of the couch as he watched her grab a glass from the cabinet and fill it with cold water from the door of the refrigerator.
“What’s the matter, boy? Did I drag you downstairs in the middle of your best sleep?”
He blinked at her in the darkness, unimpressed with her questions and their midnight excursions.
“Come on, then, let’s go back upstai?—”
A low rumbling growl cut her off as Winston jumped to his feet, ears cocked and head tipped as though listening closely to something that she couldn’t hear.
“Winston?”
He barked, by far the loudest sound Eloise had ever heard him make, and sprang from his spot on the rug to the window nearest the front door. The glass rattled in its frame as he whined and scratched, furiously trying everything in his power to get to whatever he saw on the other side.
“No,” Eloise scolded, certain he had caught the sound of a cat sneaking across the porch or a raccoon on its nightly search for accessible trash cans. “You’re going to pull down my curtains.”
She reached for his collar, her fingers going stiff as she looked out the window and caught the shape of a man scrambling down her front porch steps into the darkness. Her heart leapt into her throat, and she dropped Winston’s collar and slapped blindly for the front porch light. Whoever had been out there, she wanted them to know that there was more awake in her house than just a yapping puppy.
“Ethan!” She backed away from the door, glancing at it quickly to confirm the deadbolt was still locked safely in place. Before she could call up the stairs for him again, she heard him coming, running at full speed down the hall until he crested the top of the stairs and found her frozen at the bottom. “Someone was trying to get in.”
She yelped when he cleared the last few steps in one jump and sped past her to pull back the curtains on the window Winston was still stubbornly trying to escape from.
“Hush,” he said, the single word causing the dog to lapse into nervous but silent pacing as he watched Ethan double check the lock on the door.
Eloise glared at the pup for obeying so quickly when he’d ignored her entirely only a minute before. Clearly, they needed to have a conversation about loyalties and which of the pair of them was willing to slip him the occasional slice of bacon under the table.
“Did you see someone, or do you just think there was someone out there because of Winston?”
“I saw him.” She shrank back away from the door, out of the line of sight of the window. “I came down for a glass of water and Winston started barking. I went to the window to grab him so I could take him back upstairs before he woke the whole neighborhood and there was someone on the porch.”
“Could it have been a neighbor or?—”
“No,” Eloise interrupted, already shaking her head as she tried to picture what she remembered from the quick glimpse she’d gotten of him. “I know my neighbors and?—”
“Wait here and keep Winston with you,” he said briskly, cutting her off and bounding back up the stairs. When he came back a moment later he was wearing a black T-shirt and tucking a small handgun into the waistband of his pajama pants.
“Jesus, Ethan, is that a gun? In my house?”
