Addicted (Ethan Frost #2)(18)
The pain intensifies until it feels like there’s a fist around my diaphragm, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. I know I need to pull away, but I can’t. Not when Ethan is pressing soft, sweet, tender kisses across my palm.
My breath hitches in my throat at the feel of him and Ethan smiles a little at the sound. Then it’s his turn to brush a thumb across my lips, his turn to shudder when I press a kiss to the tip of it.
“Chloe.” My name is soft on his lips, reverent, as he slowly lowers his head, giving me plenty of hints as to his intention … and plenty of time to move away if that’s what I want to do.
It isn’t.
It should be. A little while ago, it was. But right here, right now, there is nothing I want more than for Ethan Frost to kiss me.
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The first touch of his lips on mine is tentative, sweet, like he’s asking permission or forgiveness or both. It’s gentle and lovely and so not what I want from him that I can’t resist pushing to my tippy toes, can’t resist wrapping my arms around his neck and pulling him into the kind of kiss we’re both craving.
It’s hot and heavy and carnal, tongues sliding against and around, over and under, each other. It’s teeth nipping at lower lips and mouths mashing against one another. It’s murmured whispers and violent heat, terrible pleasure and even more terrible pain. It’s everything a kiss with Ethan is meant to be, everything it always has been and everything I’m terrified it will never be again. It’s sex and seduction, lust and love, and I can’t get enough of it. Enough of him. This man who has given me more in a few weeks than anyone in my life has given me ever.
Maybe that’s why I cling to him, arms wrapping around his shoulders, fingers digging into the nape of his neck, mouth sucking desperately at his own.
He tastes like the ocean and feels like it, too. Powerful, violent, infinite. I want to immerse myself in him, to drown in him. And I want this kiss—this feeling—to go on forever.
But even as I cling to him, even as I stroke my tongue against the warm roughness of Ethan’s, I can feel the magic fading. Can feel the horror creeping back in until the heat fades and all I’m left with is the frigid, terrible cold that has taken up residence deep inside me.
“Chloe.”
He bends his head to kiss me again and I let him because I am weak and he is not and I can’t believe this is happening. I don’t want to believe it.
His fingers skim my waist, burrowing under my blouse and the fitted waistband of my suit. He strokes my stomach, my hips, my lower back and I know he wants to fasten the belly chain around me, I can feel his need to reclaim me, to mark me as his, throbbing in the air around us.
But when he takes the chain from my hand and slides it around my waist, every alarm bell I’ve got inside of me starts to shriek. Letting him do this will break both of us. Already I can feel the jagged pieces inside of me shifting around, trying to make room for this new reality. But there is no room. There is nothing but horror and fear and emptiness, so much of it that I can’t feel anything else now that he is no longer kissing me.
“Chloe, please,” he says in the husky voice that has sent shivers down my spine from the first time I heard it all those weeks ago.
“No,” I tell him, pulling the offending chain from around my waist with a definite air of determination. It makes me sad in a way I’m not expecting. After everything that’s happened between us, after everything he’s given me, I never thought I’d be able to deny Ethan anything. But for both our sakes, I have to deny him this.
“I can’t be with you, Ethan. I can’t. It will ruin me. Undeniably. Irrevocably. Being with you now will destroy me in a way that Brandon didn’t come close to.”
“You don’t know that,” he tells me even as the light dies in his eyes. His beautiful blue eyes that suddenly look so much like the ones in my nightmares. The ones that have haunted me for five long years.
“I do know it.”
“How?” he demands, and for once he sounds as impatient and confused and hurt as I do. “How can you be so sure without even trying?”
“Because,” I tell him, my voice breaking on the truth I can’t hold back any longer, the truth I never wanted to say out loud—for either of our sakes. “Because now, when I look in your eyes, all I see is him.”
Ethan reels back like I’ve struck him and I want to take the words back, I do. But I can’t, because they are my deep, dark truth. They are the insurmountable obstacle standing between us, and they always will be.
“I have to go,” I tell him, fumbling my car door open and climbing inside.
This time he doesn’t try to stop me.
Chapter Six
“That’s it! I can’t take it anymore!” Tori says, making an abrupt right turn into the parking lot of University Towne Center.
“Take what?” I ask, absently staring out the window at the passing traffic. UTC is one of the biggest and busiest malls in San Diego and it’s also Tori’s personal nirvana. Well, next to Paris and Rodeo Drive, that is.
“The moping! Always with the moping.” She brings the car to a stop at the valet parking stand, then all but drags me from the passenger seat. “You’ve been miserable for two weeks and I can’t take it anymore.”
She’s not wrong—I have been miserable for the last two weeks, ever since I left Ethan standing in the parking lot at work, tears in his eyes and his heart on his sleeve. But I can feel myself getting defensive anyway. I don’t know what she’s complaining about. I’ve gone out of my way to make sure my misery doesn’t spill over onto her or anyone else.