“Mink? You’re joking, right? How much did that thing cost?” He struggled to keep his anger in check. “You know what? Never mind, the cost isn’t the issue. Killing an animal for a coat no one needs is one thing, but to slaughter a living animal to make its pelt into a toy animal is absolutely ridiculous!”
The adults in the room looked at him as if he had indeed turned purple and grown that extra head. “What?”
Stephanie hugged the bear tighter. “It’s recycled from vintage furs. What were they supposed to do, throw the coat away? At least now it’s art.”
She pouted, and damn if she didn’t look adorable when she did that. He crossed his arms over his chest as she offered him the bear. Great, their first fight, and it would be in front of an audience. Keep her happy. Yeah, that was his new mantra.
He accepted the bear and squeezed. “It is soft. I’m sure Pete will love it. Eventually. Don’t you think the buttons are too small for him right now?”
“I didn’t think of that. I guess I have a lot to learn,” she said as she pulled the milk out of the fridge and took a swig straight from the jug leaving a smear of lipstick on the rim.
The red lipstick glowed like a hot ember, burning his stomach. “And for the love of God, would you please use a glass? You’re not the only one who lives here anymore.” The chorus from years ago rang in his head. “I am not a loser. Not anymore!” Well, hell, judging from the confused looks, he’d grown a third head.
Stephanie set the milk back in the fridge and crossed over to him. Her arms twined around his waist as she leaned in for a kiss. Her tongue, bold and demanding, found its way to his. As suddenly as the attack had started, it was over. She pulled back, grabbed a napkin off the counter, and wiped her lipstick from his mouth, waving the napkin in front of his face. “I fail to see the difference.”
Still reeling from the kiss, the chant in his head faded into silence. Her lips on the milk. Her tongue down his throat. Swapping fluids. There had to be some difference, but Ethan was at a loss for words. And for a man who argued professionally, that was a problem. The Stephanie problem.
Uncle Brian’s deep laugh filled the room. “Resistance is futile, my friend. Deb’s outnumbered six to one, but we live by the code ‘If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.’ Sooner or later you realize it’s easier to go with the flow. In the end, it’s cheaper than a divorce.”
A divorce. Ethan nodded. He’d have one of those soon enough. Whether he wanted it or not.
CHAPTER 31
STEPHANIE SLAMMED THE door behind her, stomped into the kitchen, and claimed a chair at the breakfast bar as if she was storming a castle. Can you storm your own castle? She couldn’t muster the strength to answer that. All she wanted was the refuge her home had always provided.
Why didn’t she feel safe and secure at the office? After all, it was her company. Her father and grandfather had ruled with absolute impunity; why was she getting so much pushback from her board of directors? Oh, yeah, boobs and a vagina. If not for Uncle Brian, the backseat of her car would be crammed with the personal items from her office. The relics simply didn’t have the votes to unseat her. Yet.
Yeah, it was her company, but right now, she felt like an unpaid intern instead of the woman with her name on the building. She let her briefcase slip from her fingers onto the floor, and damn if the thing didn’t split open and spill everything all over the place.
The perfect metaphor for the way her day had gone.
Ethan turned off the burner and slid a pan off to the side. “Rough day at the office, dear?”
She collapsed onto the breakfast bar burying her head in her arms. “You have no idea. Please remind me that murder is illegal and that I don’t look good in orange.”
His footsteps echoed off the natural stone tile floor her mother had picked for the kitchen renovation she hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy. A fresh wave of grief washed over Stephanie. If ever there was a time a girl needed her mom, this was it. But then, if her mother was still here, her father would be too, and she wouldn’t be battling his “friends” at the office.
Ethan stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. Heat radiated from him as he bent down to kiss the top of her head. “You would look good in anything, but, yeah, let’s try to avoid that orange jumpsuit if at all possible. It would make Mother’s Day awkward.”
She smiled into her arm. His sense of humor gave Uncle Brian’s comedic genius a serious run for its money. Why had Ethan chosen to keep this side of himself hidden? If he would let it out once in a while, fewer people would hate him. “You’re right. It’s nearly impossible to breastfeed through bars.”
Bliss blanketed her as Ethan’s hands dug into her knotted shoulder muscles. She moaned as he kissed her ear.
His hands moved up to her neck gently kneading away the tension. “You like that? I think I know something you’ll like even better, but first, tell me about your day over dinner.”
Tell me about your day. The five simple words exploded over her. He cared about her day. Cared about her problems. Could that mean he cared about her? She let the possibility burrow into her heart.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
His huge hands moved to her head, massaging her skull the way he had with that sensuous shampoo their first morning together in Las Vegas. “No big deal, honey-lime-glazed salmon steaks with citrus olive couscous and tahini roasted broccoli.”
“No big deal? Are you kidding me? You were scheduled to be in court all day. Did your case get postponed?”
He ran his fingers through her hair. “No, we argued motions right up to the end. This one’s going to be a bone-crusher.”
“And you still stopped at the grocery store to shop, came home, and started dinner. Are you Superman?”
“Nah, I never could pull off the mild-mannered part, but thanks for the vote of confidence. I text my order to a seafood market near my office. Someone brings it out, and I’m on my way in a few minutes. I usually answer emails or return calls while I wait. The hardest part of my day was convincing Aunt Sandy to give me Pete when I was done with Judge Mulligan.”
She sat up. “Where is Pete?”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “Would you believe Sandy and Deb took him out for dinner? They called rideshare because they couldn’t agree on whose car they should take. I swear one of them is going to end up killing the other to get sole custody of their grandchild.”
She snorted. “My money is on Aunt Deb. Raising five boys toughened her up.”
“True, but you’ve never seen Sandy in action. She scares me.”
Ethan’s wide eyes and silent scream hit her funny bone like a sledgehammer. The day’s anger, frustration, and tension bubbled up from deep inside, rushing to escape from the stranglehold she’d wrapped them in. Like a minuscule crack in a dam, a chortle escaped and grew until the dam broke. The day’s pain rushed out of her in a torrent of merriment.
Ethan trembled in mock terror, his eyes wider, his scream more exaggerated. “Now you’re scaring me.” He pulled her to her feet and into his arms. “Are you okay?”
She couldn’t answer him. Couldn’t breathe either. Her eyes watered, her sides hurt as she struggled to draw in breaths around the convulsive laughter pouring out of her.
Ethan tightened his hold, slowly rocking her from side to side. “Let it out, baby; you’re protected here. Anyone who wants to hurt you will have to go through me.”
How had he known that today hadn’t been a garden variety bad day? That she was feeling threatened? Could he read her mind? Or had they developed a deeper connection? Those silky web threads she’d first noticed in Aunt Sandy’s chambers spun around her, binding her more securely to him.
She pulled back from him. “I can handle this myself,” she protested. It was a token protest, but one she felt compelled to make.
He kissed the tip of her nose. “I know you can, but isn’t it nice to know you don’t have to?”
Bingo.
> “Now why don’t you go rest while I finish dinner? It’ll be ready in about ten minutes,” he said.
STEPHANIE FOLDED HER napkin and set it aside. “That was worthy of a five-star restaurant. You should open your own place.”
“Nah, too much work. I enjoy cooking. It’s relaxing after a long day slaving over law books. Doing it for a living would kill the joy.”
“Tell me about him, the professional asshole. How are you able to call up such fury? I’ve felt his wrath.”
Ethan nodded. “You mean this?”
A deep chill wrapped itself around her as she watched him morph into character. The muscles in his face relaxed, then, in a flash, hardened into a stone façade, but the most frightening was the way his eyes turned to ice. In the comfort of her own dining room, fear wrapped around her spine. Her stomach tightened and her throat closed.
Then, as suddenly as he had adopted his persona, he dropped it.
“It’s something I’ve always been able to do. Kind of like a defense mechanism. A skunk has its musk; I have my angry serial killer face. Some of our foster homes were in neighborhoods the cops tried to avoid if they could, but nobody messed with the kid, or his sister, who looked like he could slit your throat then finish his Kool-Aid without missing a beat.”
She could only imagine how another frightened, angry child would react to the danger signals rolling off him in waves. “But your voice, your demeanor, you were so... so cold and terrifying. How did you manage that?”
He morphed back into character, his posture stiffened, and his voice hardened, “Acting lessons, Stanislavski. It uses emotional memory to fuel a character. Ethan Webb, Esquire is a character I play. My office is my set. The expensive, custom-made suits are my costumes. But Just Plain Ethan has issues: abandonment, feelings of worthlessness, anger, hurt. I have a lot to work with.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
Ethan’s eyes shuttered as he stared at the wall behind her. “A friend suggested I learn how to cook—in her words, properly—so I took a few lessons. I like good food. It makes up for...”
His gaze shifted to his plate; he pushed around the last of his broccoli with his fork.
“Tell me about it,” she probed.
He lifted his head to meet hers. Ethan’s eyes totally defocused, his stare blank. All traces of the man she knew fell away, leaving the shell of the boy he’d been all those years ago. Of all the emotions Stephanie had seen him display, the empty look shattered her, but not as much as the flat, lifeless tone of his barely audible voice.
“Some of the crap they fed us would make a dog puke. As bad as it was, there was never enough. Normal teenage boys can eat their weight in groceries on a daily basis, but a hulk like me, I was always hungry. After a while, you start to think you don’t deserve to be loved. That you’re worthless.”
Stephanie’s heart broke for him. “You do deserve to be loved. You are not worthless. You’re smart and successful. Kind and generous. You’re moral and decent. I could go on and on.”
The sparkle returned to his eyes. “You forgot drop-dead gorgeous and outrageously well-endowed,” he teased.
“Well, yeah, there’s that, and don’t forget a great sense of humor and deep humility. But abandonment I get, anger, and hurt, too. But never worthless.”
“You don’t understand. Two healthy, adorable kids bounced around the system and no one wanted them. No one wanted us. Why? What was wrong with us? Maybe because I was a freak. My clothes never fit; my shoes were always too small. Hell, I wore shorts most of the year because it was better than having jeans that stopped at mid-calf. I wore flip flops as soon as I could in the spring and as late as I could in the fall without freezing my toes off because shoes my size cost too much. All of my clothes were hand-me-downs. That’s why I get everything custom made now. My clothes are all mine and only mine, and they fit. So, yeah, worthlessness is...”
Stephanie stood and bent to cut off his sentence with a kiss. “Shhh, no baby, not worthless. Never worthless. I know you’ve lived through things I’ll never be able to wrap my head around but wrap your head around this: you are the most worthwhile person I’ve ever met. Please, please, don’t think of yourself as worthless.”
He stood, cupped her face in his hands, and kissed the breath out of her. His tongue, aggressive and demanding, invaded her mouth like a man surging to find shelter with his last ounce of strength.
She met his assault with meek acceptance. Let him have his conquest. Let him flex his power. Let him know he was worthy.
She pulled away gasping for air. “I don’t let worthless men make love to me.” Yeah, they weren’t going to have sex. They were going to make love.
At least she was.
CHAPTER 32
MEGAN’S BODY STIFFENED. She jerked her hand away from his. Her eyes darted around her bed, searching. Exasperated, she grabbed her pillow and started wailing on him. “You. Did. What?”
Each soft thump jolted through him. She might as well have been using a baseball bat. Nothing had ever hurt this much. Her face crimson with anger, her kaleidoscope eyes, so much like his, burning with the intense heat of a flame, sweat building from her efforts. Ethan almost didn’t recognize the woman assaulting him. He hung his head and let her swing away.
“Be fair,” he said softly. It’s what they’d always said to each other at times like this. Translation: your temper is out of control. Reign it in. Be logical. Think this through. Megan had said it to him as often as he had said it to her.
Panting, she hugged the pillow close to her chest. “I don’t want to be fair! I want Smitty back! I want our son, and I want her far away from my baby. How could you do this to me?” She launched another barrage.
Ethan didn’t move. “Megs, be fair.” It usually took about three times. Today, it might take more. Or today might be the day it stopped working altogether. Everything else had changed, why not this? He had betrayed her. The one woman, the one person who had always had his back. Who had always loved him. Who had never deserted him.
She launched the pillow across the room, buried her head in her hands, and sobbed. He pulled her into a hug and held her while she cried.
“Megan, please be fair. This isn’t Stephanie’s fault. This is all Smitty’s doing. He’s the villain. Stephanie has been hurt as much as you. He married her first. She’s his widow. He cheated on her —with you. You’re the other woman, not her. He may have left everything to you, but she could have contested his will and kept his estate tied up for years. I made the best deal I could for you. For Pete.”
She sobbed harder.
He stroked her hair, the way he’d done so many times, as much for his comfort as for hers. The seventeen foster homes, a different school each year, new faces, new dangers, the times he’d protected her smaller body with his, through all of it, they had only had each other. Until Smitty and now Stephanie. “You know that everything I do is for you. You have always come first. I love you, baby sister.”
“Don’t call me that.” She slugged his arm.
He stifled a sigh of relief. She’s back. He relaxed his hold on her with a smile. Tempest fugit. Their own private joke. Time flies, but so does the tempest. The anger, the storm. The angst of this situation would pass too.
“The judge refused to let me have custody of Pete. I had two choices. The first one was to let him stay in foster care until all of this is over. I couldn’t let that happen. Do you see why I had to take the second option? I had forty-eight hours to get married. You know it takes seventy-two hours to get a license here. The judge was setting me up to fail. And I don’t like to lose.”
She grabbed a tissue and waved it in the air. “You could have married someone else.” She blew her nose. “Anyone else.”
The sad part of it was, she thought it would have been that easy for him. That he had a secret stable of lovers at his beck and call. Had she forgotten all those nights he had bid her sweet dreams as she’d trundled off to bed? The nights he�
��d sat in his office pouring over depositions and case law before retreating to his own solitary bed? “Who else do I know?”
“Nicole would have married you.”
Yeah, about that... “Princess Pain? I don’t think so. I’ve tasted enough leather, thank you very much. The idea of considering it foreplay...” He made a silly face, but his back throbbed with the memories.
She snorted. “Yeah, there is that.”
It worked. And it had only cost him a drop of his hard-won amnesia. “It’s only until you’re strong enough. It’s not permanent. We agreed that we’d end it once you got custody back.”
At least that’s what he’d let her think. All he had to do was keep the aunts from forcing him and Stephanie into a church wedding. If he could hold them off until Pete was safely back in Megan’s arms, he could ease out of this whole mess with minimal damage.
“Honestly, I don’t think she much cares Smitty married you. I think she only cares he had a baby with you.”
Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “She wants Pete?”
Damn. “No, she wants her own baby. So I agreed...”
“You’re having sex with her?”
Why did that sound so... so dirty? He felt compelled to defend Stephanie. “She is my wife. Besides, men have sex with women we don’t love all the time. We’re assholes like that.” It was worth a shot, but he could tell Megan wasn’t buying it. She never had.
“Not you. You aren’t like most men. You might be able to fool everyone else, even yourself, but you can’t fool me. You want commitment. You want the white picket fence and the two-point-four kids. Whether you admit it or not, I know the truth. You are the standard I’ve judged all my dates by.”
He looked down at her with raised eyebrows, not sure whether to laugh or smack her upside the head. “And you came up with Smitty as my doppelganger? Gee, thanks,” he said dryly.
She grabbed another tissue and ripped it into long strips. “That’s not the point. The point is, for all the tough-guy bullshit, you’re a freaking marshmallow inside.”
For Pete's Sake: An Enemies to Lovers Marriage of Convenience Standalone Romance Novel (Tobin Tribe Book 1) Page 16
