CHAPTER 14
Jess didn’t believe in fairytales, but if she did, she’d be sure that she was living one right now. The sound of the horse’s hooves hitting the ground as it pulled the carriage that carried her and the man of her dreams was not doing anything to dispel that fantasy.
Ethan’s arm was resting on the back of the seat, his thumb lazily making circles around her shoulder. Each pass was a powerful aphrodisiac. Who knew that such an innocent area could be an erogenous zone?
A shiver ran through her as the calloused pad of his thumb brushed a particularly sensitized portion of her bare skin. The next thing she knew, she was being covered with his jacket.
“Oh no, I’m okay.” She started to shrug out of it, but he held it in place.
Her first instinct was to push back and insist that she didn’t need it, but when the warmth of the garment and masculine scent enveloped her, she instead relaxed into it.
She took in a deep breath and tried to be as in the moment as possible as she looked out over the park. The entire night had been pure magic. Just like Ethan predicted they’d been seated immediately upon arriving at the restaurant. Carter’s aunt met them at the hostess stand and said that she’d set up something special for them, which turned out to be quite the understatement. They were seated in the outdoor garden area that was blanketed in twinkle lights and had soft music playing through hidden speakers.
She’d taken so many mental photographs tonight that she was going to need more ram in her brain to store them. She hadn’t stopped snapping them since the moment she opened the door of the bathroom. The look on Ethan’s face at that moment was one she never wanted to forget. He’d never looked at her that way before. It was a combination of wonder, awe, and raw desire. She’d been half-tempted to suggest skipping dinner altogether and seeing what look she could inspire if she’d just stripped out of her dress then and there.
But she was glad she hadn’t. Because if she had, she wouldn’t be experiencing this. She glanced to her side and saw the moonlight dancing over Ethan’s handsome face.
“Hey, there’s something that I’ve been wanting to ask you.”
He looked over at her.
“How did you know how old I was when I had my first kiss?”
Jess hadn’t told anyone about that day. It had felt like something special, something that she’d wanted to be just hers. She hadn’t even written it in the diary that she’d kept at the time. It was sacred.
Not like her first time having sex. As soon as Louis left, Jess had picked up her phone, called Ali, and the first words out of her mouth had been, “Well, that sucked.”
But not her kiss. No one knew.
“You guessed, right? There’s no way that you could’ve known that.”
The grin that spread on Ethan’s face made her even more curious.
“What?” Patience had never been a virtue she’d possessed, and she wasn’t about to get it now. “Just tell me,” she demanded.
“I was there.”
“What do you mean, you were there?” Jess shook her head back and forth. “You were on the beach or something?”
“No. I was on the pier.”
That didn’t make any sense.
“You were on the pier?” As she repeated what he’d said, goosebumps rose on her skin as the realization of what he was saying didn’t sink in slowly, it hit her like a Mack truck. “You were on the pier?” Her words came out in a breathless string.
He nodded.
Even though she knew that it was true, she still found herself shaking her head as she tried to remember every detail of that day. “No. There’s no way.”
She searched his eyes for the boy that had sat beside her. The boy that she’d shocked by leaning over and kissing. The boy that was, well, a boy. Ethan was a man.
Then a memory surfaced. The boy had said that his dad had just died. A lot of her childhood timelines were fuzzy, but she remembered that Daisy’s son had died that summer. She remembered hearing about it right before she left for California. A few days after her first kiss, her parents had gotten her on an experimental drug protocol that required her to stay at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for close to a year. Now that she thought about it, she did remember Ali mentioning Daisy’s grandson moving to town and that he was “so cute” during one of their weekly phone calls.
“You were the boy on the pier.” Tears began to fill her eyes and Jess made no move to wipe them away.
“And you remembered…how did I not know…?”
“It was a couple years before I saw you around town. I only noticed you because of the oxygen tank. And then it was years before we actually talked to each other. I probably looked a lot different at twelve than I did at seventeen.”
That made sense but, she still had another question. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“You didn’t seem that impressed by my skills.” He grinned. “Seriously, though. I thought about it, but what was I going to say? ‘Hey, remember that time you thought you were going to die and you kissed a boy, you know that was me, right?’”
She couldn’t help but laugh when he put it that way.
His smile faded. “Honestly, Jess, most of the time you seem like you can barely stand me, I didn’t want to give you any more reasons to dislike me.”
“I don’t dislike you, I just…” How could she possibly tell him that she’d held a grudge against him and had secretly been in love with him for years but hated herself and him for how impossible her feelings were? “It’s complicated.”
“I’m just glad I got to redeem myself.”
“Redeem yourself?” Her left brow rose.
“By the pool, at your parents’ house. You can’t tell me you felt the same way about our second kiss that you did our first.”
All of these years, Jess had never even considered what her response might’ve done to the boy that she’d ambushed for her first kiss. To her, playing it cool had always been a defense mechanism. She’d felt vulnerable after telling him that she was going to die, that she was scared for her parents, and then she planted a big one on him. She’d needed to gain some control back. That kiss had rocked her nine-year-old world. Just like the one at her parents’ house had rocked her twenty-eight-year-old world.
She was considering letting him know that when she noticed that his eyes had fallen to her mouth and he was staring with an intensity that she felt like a physical touch. Her tongue ran along the seam of her mouth as tingles danced over her lips.
“Or maybe I need another shot at redeeming myself,” his low voice growled as he leaned toward her.
She closed her eyes in anticipation for the heavenly sensation of his firm, yet soft lips touching hers, but before that happened, her body jerked forward. She opened her eyes and saw that the carriage had come to a stop.
“I hope you folks enjoyed your ride.”
“We did, thank you,” Jess said, but in her mind she was thinking that they would’ve enjoyed it a lot more if he could’ve taken one more lap around the park.
Ethan got out and helped her down and asked, “Do you mind if we walk a little?”
“Sure.”
As much as she was looking forward to what might happen when they got back to the hotel, she didn’t want this night to end.
Ever.
* * *
Ethan had no idea how long he and Jess had been walking around the city. After the carriage ride, he’d wanted to give her some time to process what he’d told her, and he’d thought a walk would be the perfect thing.
But he hadn’t planned on ending up here.
“Ethan?” Jess’s hand rested on Ethan’s forearm, and he turned to see a concerned look in her gorgeous baby blues.
“Sorry, I just…I didn’t realize where we were.”
She looked around, and he could see that she was trying to get a clue as to why this place would be significant to him. She’d never be able to figure it out.
“This was the alley my dad found me in.” He’d never spoken about his unusual start in life to anyone. Not even to the counselor his grandma had forced him to see after his dad was killed.
“The alley your dad found you in?” Jess repeated as if she must’ve heard it wrong.
“Yeah.” He nodded and started walking again, Jess kept pace with him, but he noticed she slowed slightly when he told her, “I’m adopted.”
“This was my dad’s beat when he was a rookie. It used to be a lot different around here before it was gentrified. These buildings were all abandoned. They were flophouses and crack dens. My dad was rolling through in his cruiser, and he said that he had no idea what made him pull into the alley. In the six months he’d been on patrol before that, he’d never gone down there. But that night he did. And something told him to get out of the car, so he did.
“As soon as he stepped out, he said he heard a baby crying. So he started sifting through a pile of boxes beside a dumpster and found me at the bottom, wrapped in a dirty white T-shirt. I was a couple of days old.”
He paused and took a breath. Hearing the words coming out of his own mouth was so different than hearing it from someone else.
“He took me to the hospital, and that’s where I spent the first few months of my life. I had some issues because of the drugs in my system. He came and visited me a lot and even got to name me. Then, when I was healthy enough, I was released and went into foster care. My dad kept tabs on me. Every month or so he’d check in with me. Then, when I was about four, he showed up one day without calling to schedule a visit. He saw the conditions I was living in and told me to get in the car. A few months later, he asked if I wanted to be his son. He used to always say that I was a superhero and that being found in an alley was my origin story.”
“He sounds like he was an amazing man.”
“He was. It’s so weird to think about the fact that he was three years younger than I am now when he adopted me,”
Jess spoke so quietly he could barely hear her. “I can’t believe I never…knew any of that. I mean, I knew your dad died but…”
“I never talk about it.” Ethan shook his head. “But, I’ll never forget that day. I walked out of school and saw my dad’s partner waiting for me. I knew that something was wrong from the look on his face. He told me he was taking me home. I kept asking where my dad was, but he wouldn’t answer me. He kept trying to make small talk about sports and other things. I was so mad by the time I got home I wasn’t even speaking to him. When I opened the door, my grandma was there, and I knew. My dad was gone. She was sitting on the couch, and she asked me to come join her.
“She told me what happened to my dad and said I was coming to live with her. She said she didn’t want anyone else to tell me because she didn’t want me to think, even for a second, that I was going to go back to foster care.”
“Wow.”
Ethan felt like a huge weight had been taken off his shoulders. He’d never bought into the philosophy that talking about things was healing, but he had to admit, saying the words out loud was cathartic. He hadn’t thought about his dad for a long time. Right after he lost him, it was just too painful, so he blocked it out. Then, as he got older, he’d think about him when he had milestones like his first touchdown, first girlfriend, graduation, but other than that, he did his best not to think about him.
His grandma never really talked about his dad, either. They’d have moments where they both knew the other one was thinking about him, but they rarely vocalized it. It was just too painful.
Jess and Ethan walked for a while in silence before she slipped her hand into his. He threaded his fingers through hers and finally knew that this was home. Wherever she was, be it in the city or in Whisper Lake, that was home.
“The day on the pier was my first day in Whisper Lake. I was walking along the lake, and I saw this girl sitting at the end of the pier. You looked so tiny. I was worried you were going to fall in. Then when I got close, I saw you were crying.”
“Most boys would have run the other way.”
“I saw the same sadness in your eyes that I was feeling but didn’t know how to talk about it.”
Jess nodded. “Yeah, that morning I’d overheard my parents talking after they got off the phone with my doctor. The stint that I had put in didn’t give them the results they’d hoped for. I knew that if the treatment didn’t work, I only had four to six weeks, tops.
“My dad held my mom as she cried and I slipped out the back door. I just needed to be alone and think. I was trying to figure out a way to make it okay for them that I was going to be gone.”
He stopped and turned to her. “I remember you telling me that you weren’t scared for you, you were scared for your parents. You were so brave. You amazed me.”
She let out a forced laugh. “I wasn’t brave. I was just tired. I’d been fighting all my life, and I was exhausted.” The corners of her eyes crinkled. “I always wondered what the boy on the dock thought of that day. Or if he thought about it at all. The day the crazy, dying girl kissed him.”
“I think about that day all the time. And I never thought you were crazy.” Ethan lifted his hand and brushed a strand back from her face. “It was brave. You are the bravest person I know.”
“Is that the real reason that you asked me to be your fake girlfriend?” she was joking, but he sensed a vulnerability in her question.
“No. The real reason was I wanted an excuse to kiss you again. I needed to redeem myself, after all.”
Her blue eyes twinkled in the moonlight. “And you think you have?”
That was a challenge if he’d ever heard one. He’d almost kissed her in the buggy, and as much as he wanted to do it now, he knew that a crowded street wasn’t the right place.
“Actually, I think I might need another crack at it.”
Thankfully, they were only about a block away from their hotel.