by Lara Adrian
17
Ethan pulled the van inside the open barn, amazed to see the place had hardly changed since he’d last been there. It was time-worn and brittle though, suffering from an obvious, prolonged dereliction and neglect.
Rather like his father.
Ethan glanced at the old man who waited inside the barn with him. He looked worse than unhealthy.
The strong, rangy, combative drunk who used to simmer with explosive rages had become a stooped, jaundiced shadow of the terror he once had been.
And Ethan had been shocked not to detect the sickly sweet, ever-present whiff of whiskey on his father the instant he got close to him.
“You been on the road for long?” the old man asked as Ethan got out and shut the driver’s side door.
“Not long.”
His father grunted. “Where’d you say you were headed again?”
“I didn’t.”
Another grunt, this time with an edge of annoyance to it. “Gotta tell you, boy, figured I’d be dead and dust before I ever saw you around here again.”
Ethan swung an indifferent look toward him. “Yeah, that makes two of us.”
“You in trouble of some sort?”
Jesus, was that a flicker of genuine concern in those cataract-clotted eyes, or was he imagining things?
Ethan wasn’t about to trust that idea at face value.
His father considered him for a long moment. “Yeah, you must be mixed up in something bad. I’m thinking you gotta be in some kinda dire straits, to come running back home to me.”
“This isn’t home,” Ethan said sharply. “You don’t even know the meaning.”
“Yet here you are.”
Ethan wheeled on him. To his shock, the old man shrank back, cowering from him. “Don’t think for a second I’d be here unless I had no other place to go. If it was just me, I’d sleep on the street before I asked you for a fucking thing.”
But he had to think about Tori, about her comfort and safety. He wouldn’t risk them sleeping unsecured in the van. And with a hired killer behind him somewhere, they couldn’t chance staying at a motel or other public place where they might be seen by the assassin or anyone else.
They had to lie low, and hope the danger either passed them by, or gave Ethan the chance to eliminate it permanently.
Right now, he needed to keep his head down and come up with a plan. A roadmap for where they should go, where they might be safe for a while.
He glanced at his father, who had gone quiet, recoiled from Ethan’s fury. “I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t even want to be standing here talking with you right now. I’m just passing through. Like I said, we’ll be gone in the morning. Then you can carry on with your life and I’ll carry on with mine.”
“Carry on, you say.” His thin mouth pressed flatter and he clucked his tongue. “Did you know I stopped drinking?” When Ethan didn’t respond, his father went on. “Naw, you couldn’t know that. You’ve been away for too long. Well, I did. Two and half years now, not a single drop.”
Ethan blew out a sharp sigh. “Better late than never.”
“Late is right.” The old man chuckled, and the wet, scraping sound of it echoed in the quiet barn. “Too fucking late for me. I’m not well, as you might’ve guessed. Cirrhosis. Terminal, so they tell me. I’ve had one foot in the grave for the past eight months.”
“That’s too bad.” Ethan knew it sounded cold, unfeeling. But there wasn’t much emotion in him when he looked at the man who had terrorized him so often and driven his mother away.
“You hold a grudge, just like she always did,” his father remarked tonelessly. “Well, I suppose it’s no use apologizing now. What’s done is done.”
Ethan scoffed. The old man was true to form, he’d give him that. He might be dying. He might even be wrestling with some personal regrets. But damn if he was going to accept any blame for his past sins.
And truly, Ethan had no need to hear it from him either. “Don’t worry. I’m not looking for sorry from you. I’m long past that.”
His father stared at him. “Where you been all this time, anyway?”
Ethan shrugged. “Around. Here and there.”
“Been gone what, almost twenty years?”
“Seventeen,” Ethan replied. “Didn’t expect you to be keeping track.”
“I heard you joined the military,” his father pressed. “That true?”
Jesus. Ethan started to bristle at all of the questions. “What do you care?”
Those filmy gray eyes that used to instill so much dread in him when he was a kid now narrowed with a spark of animosity in them.
This was the man Ethan recalled. Not the bent, apparently sober, dead man walking who’d assumed he could prod for answers and poke around for sympathy just because he’d gone a couple of years without a drink and a couple of decades without punching his kid.
The old man crossed his withered, tattooed arms over his tattered undershirt. “I hope for your sake you did join the service. God knows, you needed the discipline. Needed someone to put you in your place.”
“I thought that was your job,” Ethan muttered.
“Your mother made you soft. She made you arrogant, all those books she put under your nose, letting you sit in front of that computer for hours. You were so smart, always acting like you were better than me, better than the life I provided for you.” He scowled at Ethan. “You and your mother, you never appreciated what I did.”
Ethan met the accusing gaze leveled on him now with one of his own. “Guess you showed us both real good, huh, Dad?”
He expected his father to bellow back in fury, or lash out with flying fists. But he did neither.
He got quiet, contemplative. He stared at Ethan, studying the unswaying glare he’d never seen directed at him before in his life.
He looked down at his scuffed work boots, then glanced vaguely back toward the house where Tori had gone a few minutes ago. “You gonna tell me about the girl?”
“She’s with me,” Ethan said firmly. “She’s mine. That’s all you need to know.”
“Yours,” the old man mused. A slow smile played at the edges of his mouth. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. Did you go off and fall in love, boy?”
He tensed with a spike of fierce protectiveness. “I’m not a boy anymore, and you need to know that woman means everything to me. Anyone touches her, I will kill him. Anyone.”
His father shook his head. “What do you think, I’m gonna hurt either one of you? Look at me, son. I’m not the same person I was back then. I’m sober. I’m also old. And I’m dying.”
“I hope you’re not looking for sympathy from me.”
“No, son…I’m not.” He paused for a long moment, his hard eyes going distant. The lines of his face seemed to deepen with what looked astonishingly like regret. It was there and gone, dismissed by the rattled clearing of his throat. “If you have anything to bring inside, go on and gather it up. We can close up the barn when you’re ready.”
His father didn’t wait for a reply, just shuffled outside and left Ethan standing there behind him. Tori passed him on the way out of the house. He gave her a nod, but kept walking, his gait hitching, humbled by age and disease.
“Fuck.” Ethan raked a hand over his scalp. He didn’t want to feel even a twinge of forgiveness for the son of a bitch. He wanted to hate him.
He still did, in fact. Part of him probably always would.
But as he watched Tori approach, he couldn’t deny the sense of gratitude that overcame him. William Davis might be the sorriest excuse for a father, but for all his faults, he was still willing to shelter Ethan and Tori from the even bigger terror that was still breathing down their necks.
A terror that Ethan felt certain would not relent until one of them was dead.
18
Hours later, after a quiet, awkwardly hospitable dinner with Ethan’s father, Tori found herself in the attic bedroom that was to be their lodging for the night.
She’
d gone up alone. Ethan had decided to take a shower after he and Tori cleared the table and washed the dishes.
She had only planned to change out of her shorts into the pair of yoga pants she’d stuffed into her purse when she left Hoshi’s place, but once she was inside the cramped little room, she couldn’t help lingering over the artifacts of Ethan’s childhood.
Opposite the wall with the sole window in the room sat a narrow twin bed with a bookcase headboard, crammed with paperbacks, all sporting aged, barely legible spines.
A wheeled chair and battered particle board desk stood across the small space, its veneer faded and filmed with dust in some areas, scarred and peeling away in others.
Wall-mounted pine shelves served as displays for a collection of model aircraft, rockets, and sports cars.
There was something heartbreaking about the normalcy of Ethan’s room. How it bore no signs of the trauma he’d suffered in this house, under his father’s alcohol-fueled fury and his mother’s eventual abandonment.
Then again, maybe it did.
She drifted over to the bed and sat down, looking at Ethan’s boyhood library. There were easily close to a hundred books on the shelf. So many, they were packed in like sardines, some standing up and others filed on their sides. A veritable hoard, collected by a boy with a sharp, intellectual mind and a hidden gift that made him all the more extraordinary.
But he was also a child living in a private hell.
Each book on Ethan’s shelf, every last one, was a story about magical lands and faraway adventures. Each crumbling spine and bleached out title spoke of escape.
She glanced at the models he had clearly built with his own hands. High-speed jets. Spaceships. Fast cars.
His yearning to get away from his upbringing couldn’t have been more obvious to anyone inclined to take a closer look.
Tori’s mouth went dry with heartbreak as she absorbed the reality of Ethan’s past. She pulled one of the old paperbacks off the headboard bookcase and carefully opened it, the knot in her throat burning even more as her eyes lit on the scrawled handwriting penciled onto the title page.
Property of Ethan Michael Davis.
She touched the juvenile letters, feeling a connection to him now that could never be broken. He had trusted her with this part of himself, of his past.
He had, at last, shown her his whole truth.
And she had never loved him more.
Tori glanced up at the sudden, soft creak of the attic bedroom door.
Ethan’s hazel eyes found her on the bed and he smiled as he stepped in and closed the door behind him. “I should warn you, those books are rare literary treasures. There’s a steep fine if you’re late returning any of them.”
She grinned despite the weight of her emotions. “Well, that could pose a problem, since I don’t have a lot of cash on me right now. Maybe we can take it out in trade?”
Barefoot, dressed only in the jeans he had in his backpack, he strode over to sit beside her on the bed.
“What are you reading?” He took the paperback out of her hands and chuckled lightly. “I must’ve read this one a dozen times. All of them, more than likely.”
As he reached around her to put the book back on the shelf, Tori let her gaze soak him, from his handsome, now clean-shaven face, to his broad shoulders and the stitched, healing stab wound from yesterday. Her heart was so full of love when she looked at him, it felt on the verge of bursting inside her breast.
She pulled him into her arms and kissed him, slowly, deeply. He encircled her in his embrace too, returning her kiss with the same tender fervor.
“What’s this for?” he murmured against her mouth.
“For trusting me,” she whispered. “With this. With your life. With who you really are.”
He said nothing, just looked into her eyes with an intensity that stole her breath. When his mouth met hers again, it was achingly sweet.
Raw and honest.
And much too brief for her liking.
“Where’s your dad now?” she asked, still holding Ethan close.
“He was just going to bed downstairs when I came up.” Ethan exhaled a sigh. “Is it wrong that seeing him now, I feel more pity for the son of a bitch than hate?”
She stroked his smooth cheek, the hard plane and firm jaw. “No. You lived it, Ethan. You feel what you feel.”
“I pity him for all the things his addiction and his rage cost him. My mom loved him once. I did too. He destroyed all of that.”
Ethan brought his hand up to her face now, his strong fingers ghosting over her skin, making her tremble. His gaze searched hers, as tender as his touch. “For so long, I worried that I had destroyed anything you might’ve felt for me. I thought you’d hate me too.”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t hate. It was hurt. And that’s a much different thing.”
He cursed quietly. “I didn’t want to leave you, Tori. It about killed me to walk away that day.”
“You had to do what you did, how you did it. I understand that now.”
He shook his head. “It’s not over yet. I could be on the run for a long time. Maybe the rest of my life. I don’t want to wreck your life because of the way I have to live mine now.”
“I’m right where I want to be—with you. I waited three years for you, Ethan. I would’ve waited longer.” She brushed her fingers into his damp hair. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to see other parts of the country. Or the world, if that’s where we end up.”
He laughed ruefully. “Preferably not with a target on your back.”
“What kind of life would you expect me to have somewhere else without you, knowing that you had a target on your back? I need to be with you, Ethan. I don’t care where that is, or under what circumstances it will have to be—”
“You didn’t choose this kind of life,” he argued, frowning. “It’s not fair for me to ask you to sacrifice your job, your home, your friends—your entire way of living—just to risk your neck with me.”
“You haven’t asked,” she pointed out.
“And I won’t.” He drew back now, withdrawing from the conversation and from her. “I don’t want you to regret it, Tori. I don’t want you to regret me.”
Anger spiked through the softer feelings she’d been having in Ethan’s arms. “Regret you? Regret what we have right now?” She shook her head. “The biggest regret I could ever have is not being with you. If you don’t realize by now that I am in love with you, then maybe you’re not as brilliant as I thought.”
He stared for a long moment, his expression unreadable. “In love with me?”
“Head over heels, Professor Jones.” He was still staring, but now a tendon had begun to tick rapidly in his cheek. “I think I’ve been totally, irrevocably in love with you since St. Patrick’s Day four years ago.”
Ethan said nothing, but then he grabbed her on a fierce growl and drew her into a fevered, heart-stopping kiss. Yet for all his fire and passion, his hands were tender, reverent on her face and in her short hair.
When he finally released her, Tori laughed breathlessly. “This is traditionally the part where you say you love me too.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s not a strong enough word for what I feel about you. When you said I’d been alone all my life, you were right. I made sure I never had to rely on anyone. I never let myself trust anyone. Letting myself love someone?” He exhaled a sharp gust of breath. “I didn’t even know what that meant. Not until you, and the year we had together.”
“Ethan…” she whispered, hardly able to form words for the joy that had taken up residence in her breast.
“You mean everything to me, Tori. You are the only love I’ve ever known. The only one I’ve ever needed.” His long fingers were still caressing her cheek, his thumb stroking her jawline and throat. “I used to lie awake in this room, wishing, waiting for my first chance to get away. This house has always been nothing but bad memories. Not now. Tomorrow, I’m going to leave here wit
h another memory. This memory—right here and now.”
Tori bent toward him on a soft cry and kissed him.
“Damn, woman,” he uttered against her lips. “This is torture, having you here on my bed, kissing me like that, telling me you love me…looking so beautiful and sexy, I can hardly keep from tearing your clothes off.”
“Who’s stopping you?”
He drew back and held her in a hooded, dark gaze. Tori didn’t wait for him to object or have any sudden attacks of honor.
With deft movements, she took off her tank top and shimmied out of her shorts. She sat before him on her knees in just her bra and panties.
Ethan swore, but it sounded like a prayer. “Tori Connors, you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t control myself around you for a fucking second.”
He reached out to her, caressed her breasts over the satin of her bra. She sighed at his touch, wanted more of it. Wanted to feel it all over her.
Ethan rasped a low curse. “My thirteen-year-old self would explode on the spot to see you now, like this, in a bedroom that has never known any action, other than the nights it was just me and my hand and a head full of horny teenage fantasies.”
Tori grinned. “Then brace yourself, because this bedroom’s cherry is about to get popped.”
19
She stripped him naked in mere seconds. His jeans and boxers hit the floor, then Tori went straight for his jutting cock.
“I don’t have protection,” he murmured, the words thick, difficult to spit out.
She sent a heated glance up at him. “I don’t care. Not tonight.”
“Thank God.” Ethan let his head fall back on his shoulders, sucking in a sharp breath as she licked him slowly from root to tip.
Her lips were soft and wet, her tongue scorching as she closed her mouth around the crown of his cock and slid down his length. Her enthusiastic moans as she swallowed him up vibrated through him straight to his balls, turning his already aching need into something fierce and primal.
She was his woman.
The only person he needed, and the only one he would ever want.
