Page 109 of Brewbies
He’d like to have thought the earth moved, but Darby’s foot must have slipped off the brake, because the Airstream nudged into him before halting again. Deciding against tempting fate further, Ethan circled around to her driver’s window, which was already rolled down.
She smelled fantastic and looked even better. Her presence, once a thorn in his side, was an instant balm. His muscles and guts unclenched. His heart gave up ten beats a second, though the rhythm became the syllables of her name.
“Hi,” he said, thoroughly enjoying the expression on her face, somewhere between thunderstruck and antagonized. “I love you.”
She grappled with her seatbelt and, after an adorable struggle, was finally victorious.
When he thought she’d open the door, she rolled out of the captain’s chair and disappeared into the bowels of her trailer.
In the middle of the road.
Looking down the tree tunnel, Ethan noted McGarvey had already started setting up traffic cones at the back of the Airstream.
“She’s mad enough to park in the middle of the road? She’s mad enough to be here a while,” the deputy called sagely.
Ethan thanked him with a nod before turning back to the crashing and clanging from behind the serving window.
“I should have pressed the issue sooner,” he said loudly to the tempered glass. “But I was giving you some space. I was figuring out how to disentangle myself from who I thought I should be so I can become who I am. We can talk about that… not in the middle of a highway,” he offered carefully. “I love you.”
Finally, the service window slid open with a protest and Darby appeared, her pretty lips pursed into a perfectly peachy-glossed slash of feminine fury.
Damned if she didn’t look exactly like she did that first day at Raven Creek.
“I don’t have the words, Ethan,” she gritted out. “What do I even say to that?”
“I’ll talk, then,” he offered. “I know that I haven’t—”
“When?” she exploded, shaking some words out of her pocket lint, apparently. “Whendid you fall in love with me? When haven’t we been in the same room that we weren’t fighting or fucking?”
Ethan didn’t even need to think about his answer.
“It was the second you tore up that paperwork I served you into fuck-you confetti. You amused, confounded, transfixed, and infuriated me all at once. Most women can only produce two emotions at a time.Tops.”
“Bullshit,” she growled, her eyebrows meeting in consternation. “You’re in love with the sex we can’t stop having.”
He shook his head, placing his hands palms up on her counter, begging her silently to take them. “You and I aren’t strangers to one-night stands. To the amnesia that can accompany them,” he said, ignoring her sharp look. “But since that exact moment you swiveled around to speak to me in Canada, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”
“Yeah,” she said, her fury melting into a watery skein of hurt in her eyes that threatened to shatter his heart. “Yeah, you thought about me so much you made it your personal mission to kick me out of your entire town.”
Ethan inhaled, reached deep for strength and courage, and hoped that he could get through this without bungling every word of the truth he’d kept hidden, even from himself.
“That’s where I went wrong. It’s where I should have stopped and taken a good look at what was really important, rather than what I’d allowed others to assign importance to.”
He was getting through. Probably. It was all but impossible to tell.
“A part of me knew—” He had to clear a gather of nerves and emotion from his throat before he could try again. “I knew you were trouble with a capital T. That you were going to change Townsend Harbor—changeme—irreparably.”
She planted her elbows on the counter, resting her chin in one palm as she listened intently, her expression giving away nothing. No encouragement. No disincentive.
Well, good. He had more groveling to do.
“I hate change,” he confessed, surprising exactly no one. “In my life, change has always meant loss. It’s always torn down everything I thought I knew, and then left me with the lone responsibility to rebuild. I don’t know what to expect from strangers anymore. I don’t know what my country will look like tomorrow. What the geopolitical landscape will do at any given moment. There are dangers too big to comprehend and too small to see. When I look at this world, how it changes so fast, I don’t have time to get used to the last seismic shift before the next one hits…and, ultimately, that’s what you were, Darby.”
“An earthquake?”
“A force of fuckingnature.” Forgetting himself, he reached in and covered her free hand with his, craving the feel of her. Loving that he’d identify the specific silk of her skin even blindfolded. “If the last several years have taught us anything? It’s that we all know less than we think, and we control less than we want. But I do know something, Darby. I can’t stop thinking about you. I willneverstop thinking about you. Worrying about you. Caring about you. Being curious about you. Marveling at you—”
“What are you doing? What do you want from me, Ethan?” The questions escaped barely above a strangled whisper as, even though she stubbornly refused to blink, the well of her tears overflowed her spiked lashes and spilled down her cheek.
