“I think I’ve developed deep feelings for you,” I say, chickening out.
“This from the woman who marched across the mess hall and mauled me today,” he drawls with all the arrogance of a lion.
“I didn’t maul you!”
“Just say it and put me out of my misery. I know how much you hated me, now tell me how much you love me.”
“Okay. I really, really lo…ok forward to continuing to work on your crew. It’s been a great experience.”
“Try again.”
“I really lo…se myself in your eyes. They’re really pretty. Like chocolate, or poop.”
He laughs and tosses me down onto the bed then crawls up over me.
He gives my hip a little love bite and I squeal.
“I’ve never heard such overtures of love before. I’m going to swoon.”
He’s working my t-shirt up and over my bra. Soon, it’s yanked over my head.
“I really—ah!” I yelp when he unbuttons my jeans and tugs them roughly down my thighs. “Well I don’t love you when you’re doing that!” I tease, glaring down at him.
Then he tosses my jeans off the bed and settles his chest between my thighs so his mouth drops easily to my stomach, kissing the sensitive skin just below my navel, swirling soft circles just above the hem of my panties with his finger.
I’m sorry, what were we talking about…?
“It’s fine,” he says confidently. “You’re not ready to say it…but I can be persuasive.”
“Oh, really?”
He lowers his lips to my skin. “I made you a bed today,” he says, as if that was part of his persuasion strategy.
I squint an eye skeptically. “Technically, you dismantled a bed today.”
“I let you have half my cookie at lunch.”
“You traded me your cookie for half my sandwich, and like I said, that trade is always available in the future, especially when the caterers do those white chocolate ones and when they’re straight out of the oven and the chocolate’s still kind of melted…”
He laughs against my skin then reins me back in to the topic at hand, tacking on one more reason for me to love him. “All right, how about this? I didn’t take that kiss in the mess hall any further even though I was tempted to.”
My eyes widen. “I would have killed you.”
His brow arches and his fingers grip my panties just below my hips. He starts to tug them down and goose bumps bloom across my skin. “Would you have?”
I watch his every movement as he draws the silk down my thighs. His gaze falls heavy between my legs and my first instinct is to hide myself before I realize it’s Ethan looking at me like that. Ethan.
None of it makes sense and yet…it all does.
Fate has such a funny way of conducting business sometimes. I would have appreciated a simple meet cute. Maybe he could have just offered to buy me a beer at that bar and we would have got to talking. Through polite conversation, he would have come to find out about my predicament and offered me a job here on his crew.
Instead, I stole his wallet.
And well…as much as it pains me to think something as cliché as this, the fact is, Ethan was the real thief in the end.
“Ethan?” I say, drawing his attention back up to my face.
I reach down and drag my hands through his hair, knowing there’s definitely a better time to say this. We’re half-naked and he’s about to go down on me. It’s not exactly roses and champagne in front of the Eiffel Tower, but I don’t want to wait another second before telling him the last piece of truth I’ve been keeping locked away.
“I love you. I think I started falling for you the first night in that bar, which is why I got so carried away in the weeks that followed. We really let each other have it.”
He smiles then, and the way it lights up his face makes my insides flip upside down.
“It does feel like we’ve been through a war.”
No kidding.
“Truce?”
I hold up my hand for him to shake, and instead, he grabs my palm, turns it face up, and plants a kiss directly in the center.
“Truce.”
Epilogue
Taylor
Six years later
“Taylor Larson Stone.”
The announcer’s voice rings out over the loudspeaker in the arena and I stand frozen for a millisecond before my brain screams, That’s you! GO!
With shaking limbs, I start to cross the stage, knowing I have a little fan club somewhere watching. I kept thinking I’d be able to listen for them