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“No.” She held up a hand to stop him when he tried to get closer. “You listen. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I want an explanation. Where were you the night she was killed? Hmm?”
“Sweetheart, I know you’re upset, and I think you’re a little bit drunk?—”
“That’s true but very much beside the point. Where were you, Ethan?”
“You can’t actually think I had something to do with this just because she was at a bar that I happen to go to? That’s insane.”
She tipped her chin up stubbornly. “Oh, yeah? Well, you don’t ‘just happen’ to go there. Your friend ‘just happens’ to own it. You ‘just happen’ to spend a lot of time there. You ‘just happened’ to not mention to me that she was there.”
He pushed a frustrated hand through his hair, voice rising as he lost his temper. “I didn’t know she’d been there!”
“Don’t. You. Yell. At. Me.” She enunciated each word clearly and with increasing volume. “Just tell me where you were. Give me an explanation I can believe about how my friend ended up at Dylan’s bar and then ended up dead.”
“I don’t know, but I promise I had nothing to do with it.”
“Where were you, Ethan?” Her mind was stuck on that point. If he could give her something, anything to cling to. “Where were you when she died? You weren’t home and you weren’t going to the bar. So, where were you?”
“I don’t remember where I was.”
“That’s a lie.” She knew it, could feel it in her bones, see it in the slightly panicked look in his eyes. “You’re lying to me.”
“Not about Kim. I swear to you, I would not hurt her.” He said each word slowly, emphasizing it clearly as though it would help make his point through the alcohol clouding her thoughts.
“And what about Dylan? Would he? Did you set her up?”
“No! Damn it, Eloise?—”
“You need to go.” She shoved past him and threw the front door open. “I can’t look at you right now.”
“I would never hurt you.” He stopped at the doorway, eyes pleading as he reached for her cheek with his free hand. “Don’t you know that?”
“I thought I did.” She leaned into his hand for a moment, closed her eyes and let his warmth soothe her before the doubts crowded in again. “I wanted tonight to try and think, to figure it out, but then you were here, and I didn’t know what to say. I can’t think straight, and I don’t know what to believe.”
“Eloise, I?—”
She pulled her face away, heart breaking with the loss of his touch. “Please just go.” He went without another word and she sank down in front of the door and sobbed.
Twenty-Eight
Losing Eloise was not something that Ethan had expected to happen when he’d walked into her house that evening. He stood outside her door, hand on the doorknob and heart in his throat as he listened to her cry. She’d made it clear she didn’t want him with her, but there was nowhere else he wanted to be.
He knew she was upset and that at least some of the reason she’d lit into him so strongly was because the wine had loosened her usually tight grip on her feelings, but he wasn’t blameless in what she was going through. He hadn’t been honest with her, and because he’d tried to hide the parts of himself that he thought she wouldn’t accept, she’d been unable to fall back on her trust when his character had been called into question.
He’d wanted her to see him as a good man, but he’d tried to fulfill that goal by pretending to be something he wasn’t instead of trying to become the person he wanted her to see in him.
And all of that was beside the very obvious point that she had clearly found the missing piece of their puzzle. From what he’d understood of Eloise’s drunken accusations, it sounded like at some point her friends had been at the bar—at least Kim had—and that was a red flag that set off all his instincts. He remembered now that conversation he’d had with Dylan at Paula’s, about how he had a job for them when Ethan came back. It had been pushed to the back burner, with Dylan making up some lame excuse about the contact falling through.
But if Dylan had somehow gotten in with Eloise’s friends and talked them into his plans to try to get his hands on the bank’s money with their knowledge … Then it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility that he could be behind what had happened to Kim.
Ethan didn’t want to admit that, even to himself, but now that Eloise’s life was on the line, he was forced to look at his friend without the blinders of his own loyalty. Dylan was a scary man. Selfish, cruel, and dangerous.
Myles was right. He should never have brought Eloise around him and as much as he wanted to open that door and try to convince her that he was the man she needed and he would never hurt her … The simple fact was that he wasn’t that man.
Not yet.
But he was going to be.
First, he needed to untangle his life and his finances from Dylan as much as he could and that would mean transferring a whole lot of money and cutting his losses on some of their shadier investments.
