Addicted(59)

“Because I love you,” he mutters, eyes and voice darker than I’ve seen them in a long time. Maybe ever. “I thought maybe your brother had convinced you that I wasn’t worth it.”

“Ethan, baby, that wasn’t ever in the cards.”

He cups my cheeks then, tilts my face up to his. “You sure about that? I know being with me comes with an awful lot of shit.”

I press against him, the scrape of his clothes against my too-sensitive body setting off all kinds of sensory alarms, alarms that only underscore the ones going off deep inside me because of Ethan’s words.

He’s never insecure, never unsure. He might be vulnerable sometimes, might open himself up to me in a way he doesn’t anyone else, but he always knows what he’s doing. Always knows what’s going to happen. The fact that he doesn’t now, the fact that the two weeks we spent apart managed to shake him so completely, wound me like nothing else could have.

Yes, I have doubts. Yes, I’m concerned about this addiction we have for each other, if it’s healthy and where we’re going to end up when everything is said and done, but I don’t want him to have the same doubts. Don’t want him to hurt as I do.

“I love you,” I tell him as I once again press my lips to his. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

It’s what he needs to hear, I think, because suddenly he’s turning me around, pressing my face and breasts and hands against the cool wall even as he cants my hips back.

He shoves a jean-covered leg between my own, spreads me open all over again. There’s the rasp of his zipper, the rustle of his clothing. And then he’s inside me, no condom, no prelude to make sure I’m still ready, nothing but the single, hard thrust that seats him all the way to the hilt.

His mouth is on my shoulder, sucking my bruises—more love bites—and then he’s moving, each thrust rocking me up on my toes, rubbing my oversensitive nipples against the roughly textured wall until I want to scream.

There’s something incredibly decadent about this moment, something incredibly powerful about being naked while Ethan is clothed, about being open and giving when he is being so forceful. When he’s taking what he wants, his hips pistoning against mine again and again and again.

He murmurs nonsense as he f*cks me, words of love and sex, passion and need. And while none of them make sense on their own, together they make the most beautiful cacophony. They take me higher and higher, my body spiraling out of my control yet again.

And as Ethan stiffens, emptying himself inside me with a shout and a twist of his hips that pushes me right up to the edge all over again, I realize something that I never have before.

I belong to Ethan Frost. He owns me in a way no one else ever has, in a way no one else ever will. Heart, soul and body.

With my past, it’s actually the last of those that scares me the most, that has me pulling into myself, my need to come retreating under the emotional onslaught of too much. Much too much.

Except Ethan knows. He always knows, and he slips a hand between me and the wall and strokes my clit, once, twice, then again and again.

And though I’m afraid, though I’m awed and overwhelmed and absolutely terrified, I’m no match for his touch, no match for the love that I feel pouring out of him and into me. And then he’s biting my shoulder, his sharp teeth pinning me in place in what is sure to leave the mother of all bruises.

And I don’t even care, because he’s f*cking me and f*cking me and f*cking me. Harder and harder, his hips pounding me into the wall. Pounding me into oblivion. Until there is no Chloe. No Ethan. No past. No future. There is only us, together. There is only now.

As I go careening into climax, my body no longer—my body never again—my own, it doesn’t even matter.

Nothing does but Ethan and the way he makes me feel.





Chapter Fifteen


“Hey, what are we doing sitting way over here today?” I ask my friend Austin as I slide my tray onto the cafeteria table.

We met my first week at Frost Industries—he and my other friends, Romeo (use his full name and suffer the consequences) and Zayn, are interns over in the lab while I’m in intellectual property. They were cool enough to let me sit with them the first week when the intellectual property interns were treating me like shit—an ongoing thing courtesy of Rick and his minions—because of my relationship with Ethan. During that time, the four of us really hit it off and we’ve spent pretty much every lunch hour together since. Except we usually do it on the other side of the cafeteria, where we have some small semblance of privacy.