“Heaven? Yeah, I’m sure. Shut up and kiss me.”
So he did. It was not easy peeling off their remaining soaked clothes, but they managed it, and then they were there, on a tree-lined riverbank, skin to skin, every part of them touching, and then closer still. Her breath whispered from her lungs and something caught fire in her soul as she held and kissed and loved him with every cell in her body, right there on the riverbank.
Afterward, she lay atop him. He was stroking her back with his big hands. He hadn’t said a word and she didn’t know what to say.
And then someone shouted, “Hey!” From the bridge, twenty yards upstream. “Bubba! Lily, are you down there?”
“Willow,” Ethan said softly.
Lily rolled off him and re-dressed in her soaked clothes with no small effort. It took her about twenty tug-and-hops to get her wet jeans up far enough to zip them. The top was easier. Ethan was dressed again by the time she was pulling on her shoes.
The beam of Willow’s flashlight swept closer from above.
“Right ’chere, Ethan called, and the beam found him.
“What the heck are you doin’ down there?”
“Semi thundered through while we were crossin’ the bridge,” Ethan called. “Had to jump for it.” He reached back for Lily, and their eyes locked.
Realization hit her like a freight train.
Oh, no. She loved him.
His hand closed around hers and he pulled her along, angling up the steep bank to the road. It was cold now that she wasn’t in his arms. She shivered, and he put an arm around her shoulders as they ascended the steep bank. He kept looking down at her, his eyes full of questions, obviously aware that something momentous had just happened.
They made it to the road and Willow, who’d returned in her Quinn County Sheriff’s Department SUV, handed them each a blanket from the back. “You guys hurt? Anything broken?”
“We’re fine,” Lily said, and she took off her soaked flannel. “The river broke our fall.”
“Blouse too,” Willow said. “Turn your back, Ethan.” She made a circular motion with her finger and Ethan, who’d barely taken his eyes off Lily, turned his back.
She peeled off her blouse and noticed there were some stray leaves and twigs stuck to her belly. Probably more on her back. She wrapped the blanket around her and hugged it close.
“All this for nothin’,” Willow said. “I didn’t get a clean set of prints off anything in there.”
“You checked already?”
“Yeah. Texted you I was back a while ago.” She frowned from one of them to the other, and reaching out, plucked a twig from Ethan’s hair. Then she said, “Come on, Lily, take the front seat, you’re shiverin’.” She opened the SUV’s door and reached in to turn on the seat warmer before letting Lily climb inside, then she closed the door.
Lily searched the dashboard, found the heat and turned it on, settling deeper into the seat, huddling in her blanket and still shivering. She was hyper-sensitized, feeling everything, the car’s warm air on her legs and face, the brush of the blanket against her skin, the soft seat that cushioned her.
She’d have liked to take off the wet jeans, too. She was probably getting the seat all wet.
What did all this mean? she wondered. Where did things stand between her and Ethan now? Had they started a relationship? Or had they just made a misstep on their platonic path? How was he going to play this?
Motion drew her eye, and she noticed Willow and Ethan had moved further away from the truck, and Willow was speaking to him pretty emphatically. Had she seen them all wrapped up in each other’s arms? She couldn’t have, not in the dark from so far away.
The memory of their lovemaking washed over her, and she closed her eyes and relished it. This thing between her and Ethan was more than she’d realized.
Maybe it was everything.
Back at the ranch, Lily stood in a hot shower long enough to finally get warm again after her icy plunge…and the absence of Ethan’s arms around her, too, she supposed. She closed her eyes, and wished she knew what he was thinking.
She turned off the water, toweled down, and wished she’d brought her thick, fluffy robe into the bathroom with her. Wrapping herself in a towel, she opened the bathroom door just as a soft knock came from outside the bedroom. And then the door opened, and a female hand poked through holding a robe. Her robe. And that looked like Chelsea’s hand.
“I heated it up in the dryer,” Ethan’s aunt called.
Lily hurried to take the robe from the hand—oh, it was warm! She pulled it around her and opened the door wider at the same time. “Oooh, that’s so nice.” She rubbed her hands up and down the sleeves. “What a thoughtful thing to do. Thank you.”
