exceedingly friendly, and by the time the three of us get out the door, he’s received a phone number from a cute redhead at the bar, bought a drink for a man wearing a Vikings T-shirt, and high-fived about forty strangers.
He babbles sweetly on the drive home—about his childhood dog, Lucy; about how much he loves to kayak in the Boundary Waters and hasn’t been in too long; and about whether I’ve ever had dill pickle popcorn (the answer is hell yes)—and by the time we get back to the hotel, he’s still drunk off his ass, but slightly more collected. We make it through the lobby with only a few more stops so Ethan can make new friends with strangers.
He stops to give a hug to one of the valet attendants who helped us check in. I give an apologetic smile over Ethan’s shoulder and check his name tag: Chris.
“Looks like the honeymooners are having a good time,” Chris says.
“Maybe too good.” I lean toward escape—I mean, the path to the elevator. “Just taking this one upstairs.”
Ethan lifts a finger and beckons Chris closer. “Do you want to know a secret?”
Uhhhh . . .
Amused, Chris leans in. “Sure?”
“I like her.”
“I would hope so,” Chris whispers back. “She’s your wife.”
And boom goes my heart. He’s drunk, I tell myself. This isn’t a thing he’s saying, just drunk words.
Safely in the suite, I can’t help but let Ethan collapse on the enormous bed for the night. He’s going to be rocking a pretty serious headache in the morning.
“God, I’m so tired,” he moans.
“Rough day of sightseeing and drinking?”
He laughs, one hand reaching up and coming in for a heavy landing on my forearm. “That isn’t what I mean.”
His hair has fallen over one eye, and I’m so tempted to move it aside. For comfort, of course.
I reach out, carefully sweeping the hair across his forehead, and he looks up at me with such intensity that I freeze with my fingers near his temple.
“What do you mean, then?” I ask quietly.
He doesn’t break eye contact. Not even for a breath. “It’s so exhausting pretending to hate you.”
This pulls me up short, and—even though I know it now, the truth of it still blows through me—I ask, “So you don’t hate me?”
“Nope.” He shakes his head dramatically. “Never did.”
Never? “You sure seemed to.”
“You were so mean.”
“I was mean?” I ask, confused. I scrabble back through the mental history, trying now to see it from his perspective. Was I mean?
“I don’t know what I did.” He frowns. “But it didn’t matter anyway, because Dane told me not to.”
I am so lost. “He told you not to what?”
His words are a quiet slur: “He said, ‘Hell no.’ ”
I’m starting to understand what he’s telling me, but I repeat it again anyway: “Hell no to what?”
Ethan looks up at me, gaze swimming, and reaches up to cup the back of my neck. His fingers play with my braid for a contemplative beat, and then he pulls me down with a surprisingly careful hand. I don’t even resist; it’s almost as if, in hindsight, I’ve known this moment was coming forever.
My heart vaults into my throat as we move together; a few short, exploratory kisses followed by the unbinding relief of something deeper, with tiny sounds of surprise and hunger coming from both of us. He tastes like cheap alcohol and contradictions, but it is still hands-down the best kiss of my life.
Pulling back, he blinks up at me, saying, “That.”
I’ll need to see if there is a doctor in the hotel tomorrow. Something is definitely wrong with my heart: it’s pounding too hard, so tight.
Ethan’s eyes roll closed, and he pulls me down beside him on the bed, curling his long body around mine. I can’t move, can barely think. His breathing evens out, and he succumbs to a drunken slumber. Mine follows much later, under the perfect, heavy weight of his arm.
chapter eleven
I open the door to our suite as quietly as I can. Ethan wasn’t awake yet when I finally gave up on waiting for him and went to get something to eat, but he is now. He’s sitting on the couch in nothing but boxers. There’s so much tan skin to take in—it sends my pulse skyrocketing. We’ll have to talk about what happened last night—the kissing, and the fact that we slept together all night, curled in a matching set of parentheses—but it would probably be much easier if we could