Ethan (California Dreamy) Read online

  The ride was so intense Shae would not have been surprised to open her eyes and see that she was on the moon. Damn, the man had mouth music down to an exquisite art.

  He was still lapping up her juice as she slowly wafted back to earth. Her body was happily sated, her legs pliant as they draped over his shoulders. Slowly, the tension in his body seeped into her and she shifted up on her elbows.

  “I think you’re finished down there,” she said.

  But he shook his head. “I’ve only just begun.” His voice was smoky and full of promises, but Shae pulled against his hold and came up on her knees. She took a peek over the side of the bed. He was rock hard and flushed crimson.

  “You need me.”

  “Always,” he returned.

  “So let me—”

  “Blow me? No. That’s not the way this is going down tonight.”

  “You liked it before.”

  “Loved it,” he corrected. “But there’s something I want more.”

  Shae thought about that. Was he asking for something unusual? She was open to suggestions. “What exactly?”

  He chuckled and rose to sit beside her in bed. “Nothing kinky,” he promised. He lifted her hand and placed an open kiss on her wrist. His tongue played along her veins as he turned her arm and then began to trail his lips along the sensitive flesh all the way up to her neck and that spot behind her ear.

  “I want you to come, Shae. Multiple times, multiple ways.” Arousal hooded his eyes, thickened his voice.

  “What ways?”

  The question must have ignited his imagination. She watched the fire leap in his eyes and his hand curled around his dick and applied a steady pressure.

  “I should probably slide into you missionary right now because I’m not going to last long enough to enjoy anything else.”

  She liked that the talk was undoing him. She wanted him to come. And she’d take it from him if she needed to.

  “You want to take me from behind?” She knew men favored the position. And she knew her voice was a teasing invitation.

  His chest lifted, but he managed only a shallow breath. “Definitely, but first I want you to take me for a ride.”

  Before he could place further rules or restrictions on how the night would unfold, Shae planted her hand firmly on his shoulder and pushed him backward. She straddled his hips and reached for the condom packet he’d left on the bed. She peeled back the foil and regarded him over the prophylactic.

  “I want to be an active participant, in whatever you have planned. And I have a few of my own ideas,” she informed him. “I promised you won’t be disappointed.

  “I never thought I would be.”

  She scooted back onto his thighs and before she rolled the rubber down his shaft, she followed the line from his head to base with her tongue. He shuddered in response, his body coiled with tension, and his breath became a raspy throttle in his throat.

  “Don’t play with me, Shae, or there’ll be no need for that rubber.”

  She stared at his cock. It was really quite beautiful, thick and flushed with a head that was perfectly crowned. He was right. She really wanted to blow him.

  He shook his head. “Not now. I won’t last a minute.”

  “You’ll last longer inside me?”

  He captured her hands in his, twining their fingers, and gave her a small tug so that she hooked her eyes with his.

  “I need to be inside you. Don’t know how long I’ll last, but I want that connection.”

  His honesty peeled through layers of passion and hit her in the heart. She understood that need; she felt the same way.

  “Then you’ll be inside me.”

  She mounted him then. She braced her hands on his chest and lifted her hips over his and slowly sank down on his shaft.

  He didn’t watch their joining, but kept her gaze and said, “Stay with me,” when she would have looked away.

  And in that moment she felt him stamped on her heart in a way that was both breathless and enduring.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ethan watched Shae from the doorway. Her hair was caught up in a pony tail, revealing the tender skin at her nape, and a frown pleated the skin between her eyebrows. Beside her on the desk was her yellow pad where she scribbled notes she would later discuss with Ethan. She was scrolling through an article on her lap top rather than reading through his screenplay on his Tablet. She was engrossed and hadn’t noticed him yet, not even when she paused to jot a note to herself.

  His plan had worked, and better than he’d hoped. Shae had given him insight and he had applied it and already he felt like he’d moved mountains in understanding himself, Tina and the travesty of their marriage.

  And Shae was still here.

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned a shoulder against the door frame. His breath came easier. He’d awoken minutes ago, after making love to Shae several times during the night and still feeling the imprint of her softer body against his own, and found the bed empty and the sheets where she’d lain cold. In that first moment, panic seized him—he’d thought she’d left. That she was long gone, on her way to San Francisco, her family and the baby she craved. But that wasn’t her way, and Ethan appreciated that. Shae was honest. She gave her word and kept it. And she had the strength of character to look him in the eye, through vulnerability and uncertainty, and stand her ground.

  Shae must have felt his presence because she looked up. The frown faded quickly and he

  liked that. Not quite a smile—not the full brilliance of her usual greeting—but a sweet curving of her lips that made him want to kiss her.

  He pushed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and smiled at her. He let his eyes roam from the tips of her painted toes, over her shapely legs and her sweet ass covered by her cut-off shorts. He paused long enough on her breasts to make her squirm, then moved onto the bow of her lips, still plump from his kisses, then the soft curve of her cheek, before falling into the deep blue of her eyes.

  “Did you have breakfast?”

  His voice was still rough from sleep.

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll make it,” he offered. “Huevos Rancheros?”

  She nodded. “With the spicy salsa.”

  “Feeling hot?”

  “And hungry,” she agreed. Heat rose to her cheeks when his gaze again stayed too long. “Are we going to talk like this all day?”

  “In double entendres?” He nodded. “I think so. We both know you’re leaving. I mean, we know it on a primal level, too. It’ll be a few days—”

  “Four,” she corrected.

  “You’re not coming back until Monday?” He had thought Saturday or Sunday. How long does a doctor’s appointment take? His mind shied away from naming exactly what would be going on during that office visit, but he felt the rolling thunder of dread build in him anyway. It made everything he looked at, every thought he had, darken.

  “I’m going to look at a few houses when I’m in the area,” she told him. She pushed back from the lap top and picked up her notebook. “Want to know what I figured out this morning?”

  Reluctance made his jaw tense but he managed an easy tone, “We don’t have to do this today.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  He nodded. “The faster we peel through this the sooner you’re released?”

  She shook her head. “No. Well, yes, but that’s just one benefit. The faster we plow through this material the sooner you’ll be released.”

  The years following Tina’s death had been a kind of prison for him. But the past few days he’d felt like a man on leave.

  “You blame yourself for Tina’s death.”

  “No, I don’t. Tina took her life, not because of anything I did, but because of what she did.”

  “The affair,” Shae stated.

  “Exactly. She didn’t even try to claim the baby was mine. There’d been no point. I was gone nine months and she was five months along.” He shrugged and paced to
the windows. “When I returned home from deployment she’d been waiting for me. She opened her arms, showed me her belly, and announced that she was leaving me.”

  “And you didn’t stop her.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He turned to her. “I just about ran out the door.”

  “Really?” she challenged. “There must have been words spoken. Tears shed. Explanations and accusations.”

  He turned back to the windows overlooking the pool. The sun was already firmly in the sky, its brilliant rays reflecting off the palm fronds. He forced himself back into that moment, when he had come home from that tour of duty, expecting Tina to meet him at the base, but was instead greeted by silence. He took a lift from a buddy and walked into a house he barely recognized—he’d spent so little time in it. Tina had been waiting in the living room. She’d stood and made her grand announcement, after which he had methodically gone through their things, separating his and hers, packing what he could into the boxes piled in the garage and leaving the rest for her to take care of.

  “I was gone nearly a year. That’s too much to ask of a woman.”

  “Bull,” Shae returned. “You short change a lot of women with that sentiment.”

  He turned to her, his face somber. “You’re right. There are plenty of good women who do the time, no complaint.” He’d known several personally.

  “Tina wasn’t the woman you thought you’d married.”

  “And that was my fault.”

  “It was. And hers, too. You were both young. Idealistic, in many regards.”

  He snorted a cynical laughter that sounded tinny and empty. “You think?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Shae argued. “With maturity, idealism turns into affirmative action.”

  There was truth in that. Ethan was doing his best to flesh that out in the indie movies he backed and the docu-dramas he directed. It even seeped into his action films.

  “What did you do?”

  “I packed.”

  “And what did she do?”

  “Cried. She told me all the reasons why she had to turn to another man. Most of them were directly connected to my inability to fulfill her needs.”

  “From seven thousand miles away?”

  “Yes.” He gazed at her. “She didn’t want that kind of life. Not anymore.”

  “Did you offer to put in for a stateside post?”

  “It was a done deal, Shae. She was pregnant. By another man. And while you seem to think nothing of that for yourself, it mattered to me.”

  “Of course it did.”

  “I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t give her what she wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “Another chance.”

  “She asked for that?”

  “Yes. A few days later. She came to the base, tearful. Full of regret. But I didn’t care. I’d already put in for another tour. We were needed over there and I got my wish.”

  “But she didn’t get hers?”

  “No.”

  “And so you think it was what you didn’t do that pushed her in front of that train?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe.” His eyes became heated. “The truth is, she’d probably still be alive, that baby would have had a chance, if I’d just sucked it up and manned-up.”

  “By manning up, do you mean taken her back and raised the child as your own?”

  “Other guys have done it.” He tapped his knuckles against the pane. Damn he was feeling edgy. “And I wasn’t exactly innocent in all this, Shae. I married her and, for all intents and purposes, left her.”

  “She married you knowing you were military,” she pointed out but then took the offensive, “So why didn’t you take her back?”

  “I didn’t love her. I didn’t love her long before she had the affair.”

  And Ethan knew they were finally at the heart of the matter. His big failure. “And she knew it.”

  “That’s why her letters stopped,” Shae posed.

  “I stopped writing first.” He looked at her then, letting his shame show on his face. “We grew apart. The last few times I was home on leave, I felt like I didn’t even know her. I tried, but I finally ran out of. . .want.”

  “And that’s it, isn’t it? You stopped loving her and have a hard time forgiving yourself for it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you thought about the timing? That maybe every time you returned from a combat situation you were less able to love? You read the blogs, Ethan. You know the condition wasn’t singular, that it’s a common situation returning troops confront.”

  She stood and joined him at the windows. He felt her beside him, the warmth of her body seeping into his.

  “Maybe,” she said, “amidst all of that you couldn’t love her.”

  He hadn’t connected to two, maybe because he was too close to the situation, living it and breathing it and unable to peel himself off the hook and take a look as an objective observer.

  The personal stories she had found and shared with him had felt familiar, he had found himself in the words of other servicemen, but could it be that easy? Blame it on battle? That didn’t feel right.

  “So, what are you going to do about it?” she pressed.

  “I don’t know.”

  Shae nodded. “I’ll be back Monday.”

  He reached out to her as she walked past him, his fingers trailing down her arm and tangling in her fingers. They gazes locked and he said, “I’ll be waiting, Shae.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The clinic was sandwiched between a book store and a pizzeria on Van Ness Avenue. From the time Shae walked through the double glass doors until she exited, took twenty-five minutes. She gave the nurse her ovulation charts, then sat with the doctor while she discussed her donor choice.

  “You’re hoping the child will have similar coloring to you?” he probed.

  “That would be good,” she agreed. Maybe less questions about the father.

  “There’s no guarantee,” the doctor pointed out. “Your selected donor could have received a double recessive gene establishing him as a fair individual, but have dominant genes that could give your child dark hair, brown eyes, for example.”

  “I understand that,” Shae assured him. She knew it was a crap shoot, but that was pretty much true when conceiving the natural way.

  “Okay, then,” he moved on, “Have you thought about gender?”

  She’d read about selective sex in the pamphlet, but found it impossible to make a decision. When she thought about holding her baby in her arms, her heart melted and she became soft and pliable inside. But that had nothing to do with whether or not the baby was swaddled in pink or blue. In fact, whatever the gender of her child, she would not be following in the traditional culture when assigning colors or encouraging interests. She’d already bought a few things for the baby, all in purple and sage and powder blue. When she pictured the nursery, it was in earth colors, with a mural of rolling hills and autumn leaves. When she thought about him or her school-aged, she caught glimpses of blond hair and chess matches or surf boards.

  Gender didn’t matter to her.

  “I can’t decide,” she admitted.

  “Should we let nature do it, then?”

  Shae nodded. They talked about maximizing her chances of conceiving and Shae decided that three donor injections this cycle should do it.

  The talk was all very clinical and it made Shae feel. . .sad. She’d long since stopped dreaming about the intimate conversations she would have with her lover about the conception and birth of their child. Shae knew this was all personal to her, but a matter of course for the doctor and his staff, who helped many women like Shae every day.

  But her affair with Ethan had softened her. Made her think of other possibilities.

  So every time Ethan charged into her mind, flashing his boyish grin, or with that wickedly sexy gleam in his eyes, she pushed him away. And though she was assailed by images of a baby with pale blond hair and green ey
es, and felt her heart beat flutter in her throat as she handed over her donor selection card, she was resolute in her choice.

  Ethan was present tense. They had no future because he had no future—that was what he believed, anyway. She’d left him pondering what he was going to do about it. But there were no guarantees.

  He’d given her no promises and she had asked for none.

  But she hoped he followed the lead she’d given him—the whole military concept of standing ready for battle and the havoc it played on a Marine’s re-entry into what should be his

  normal life.

  Only nothing was normal. Everything was always in flux, changing. Marines returned home to children who had grown noticeably older, parents who had aged and, sometimes, wives who had strayed.

  And it wasn’t necessarily that Ethan had stopped loving Tina; maybe, as time went on—time he’d spent in horrific conditions with unreasonable expectations—he’d had trouble transitioning from a combat mentality to that of a loving husband. It was totally possible, especially given Ethan’s natural inclination to care for others, that he had pressed that disconnect button when in the field and then had trouble finding it when he returned home.

  Of course, the affair, the baby, put a whole other spin on things—something like that often put an end to even the most stable relationships.

  Shae signed and shrugged into her clothes. She picked up her purse and made her way to the front of the clinic. She couldn’t quite put Ethan out of her mind. That was something that would take time.

  For sure, once Shae took that step, once she pulled a positive pregnancy test, anything she hoped to have with Ethan would be lost.

  But then, it was lost already, right?

  She slid behind the wheel of her rental and checked the time on her cell phone. She had thirty minutes before she met the realtor at the first home she would be looking at. It was located two blocks from her sister Kara and less than a mile from her parents. She started the car and pulled into traffic. She hadn’t seen her sister in four months. Other than a move home, Kara had no idea that Shae was planning other changes. Ethan was the only one she’d confided in.