The Promise of Paradise

Chapter Fifteen


Ash tied the last bag of garbage and set it near the door. “There. Done.”

The clock read after two in the morning. She felt as though she’d been run over by fatigue, but at least the place was clean. The last thing she wanted to do was wake up in an apartment that reeked of stale beer or find a half-naked couple lounging on her living room floor.

Frank and his wife had been the last to leave, about a half-hour ago. She could hear Jen fussing in the bathroom, and she guessed Eddie was somewhere downstairs, hauling boxes of empties onto the porch.

She sank onto the loveseat and let it cradle her. She’d switched shifts with one of the other waitresses at the restaurant, so at least she didn’t have to work until the following day. She stretched, and a yawn split her mouth wide. “Think I’ll sleep ‘til about noon,” she said aloud. “Maybe even later.”

“Sounds like a good idea.” The familiar voice buzzed through her, and she opened her eyes again. She hadn’t heard him come in, but there Eddie stood in the doorway, smiling at her. Her heart jumped a little, sending shots of adrenaline into all the wrong places. She’d managed to avoid being alone with him for most of the night, not trusting the tingling in her hands and toes after their dance. But now it sounded like Jen had made her way into the spare bedroom, and nothing stood between Ash and Eddie but a few feet of hardwood.

“Thanks for taking everything downstairs.”

“No problem.” He sat on the arm of the loveseat. “You need anything else?”

She pretended not to hear the double meaning in his words. Instead, she lifted a hand toward the roof. “Still have to take down the tables and chairs out there. But I guess that can wait until tomorrow.”

“I’ll do it. Only take a few minutes.”

“No, Eddie, really. It can wait.”

But he’d already crossed the room and crawled through the window. Ash sighed and followed. She’d much rather wait until she had about ten or twelve hours of sleep, but if he was going to tackle the last of the cleanup, she couldn’t very well sit there and watch him.

By the time she made it outside, he’d already collapsed most of the chairs and folded them into stacks of three and four. Two tables still stood, and as Eddie yanked on the legs of one, she found herself watching the way his shirt pulled across his back, the way his hair fell into his eyes, the way his arms flexed and deft hands put things back where they belonged.

Ash made herself look away. Struggling with a few of the chairs, she pulled them toward the window. But the effort exhausted her, and after a minute she leaned against the side of the house to catch her breath.

“You okay?” Eddie glanced over his shoulder.

“Yeah. Just resting.” She reached for another chair, but this one sprung open when she touched it, and the next thing she knew, it had pinched her finger in its hinge. Hard.

“Ow! Dammit.” Yanking the finger free, she blinked back tears. “That hurt.” A blood blister welled up immediately, and she put it to her mouth to try and suck away the pain.

In an instant Eddie was there. He reached for her hand and held it under the weak light that shone out from the kitchen. “Ouch. That’s gonna sting for a while.”

“No kidding.”

He looked at her, concern in his eyes, and suddenly Ash knew she was in trouble. Big, huge, complicated trouble. She felt as if someone had pushed her out of a plane from about a million miles up, and in that moment on the roof, when Eddie held her hand in his, she fell and kept falling, past the point where she knew whether it was right or wrong, to some bottomless, buoyant space where all she wanted to do was stay in his gaze forever.

“Ash? You okay? You want some ice?”

God, she loved the way the words sounded in his mouth. She loved the way he took her nickname and made it sound like no one else ever had. Even the pinpricks of desire Colin had once stirred now seemed like long-dead embers.

“No, I think it’s—” She couldn’t finish the thought, not with his eyes on her like that. She wanted to pull her hand away, to run the finger under cold water and make the sting go away. But she couldn’t move. Eddie’s gaze traveled from her hand to her face, and in the next instant there was no more space between them: no floor, no rooftop, barely any air at all.

* * *

Eddie gave up. He couldn’t stand there any longer, holding onto Ash’s hand and pretending not to notice the desire that rippled back and forth between them like a damn tidal wave. One arm slipped around her, meaning to comfort, but before he knew it, his lips sought out hers. He needed to taste her, to feel her, to fill her with half of what swept through him. For an instant, she hesitated. Then her lips parted, with a sigh that turned into a purr, filling his mouth with want and the promise of things he had no right to even ask.

He pushed Ash’s hair from her face and nipped at her lips, her earlobes, the skin at the base of her neck. She jumped a little beneath him, a sizzling electrical wire. His hands moved to her waist, to her hips, to the pliant places along the small of her back. His thumbs moved in circles, stroking tender skin in the spaces where her shirt pulled away from her shorts. He grew hard and pulled her to him, letting her know what she did to him, how she turned him inside out.

“Eddie,” she breathed, and in that moment he wanted every part of her, there on the rooftop, beneath the sky. He drank her in, tasting her, pleading, licking, as she melted under his touch. Her hands came up to the back of his neck, nails digging into him. Eddie pulled back long enough to glimpse dark desire in her eyes.

His mouth found her ear, his words a ragged whisper. “God, I want you.”

Her response was a lifting of her hips, a pressing against him, heat matching heat. Her tongue wound around his, with quick little pants that made him loose in the knees. Hell, he’d wanted her since the first day he’d run up those stairs and stood in her doorway. He wanted her on the days they argued, on the days he came home too tired to breathe, on the complicated days when one woman or another let herself out of Eddie’s apartment. None of them mattered now. He couldn’t believe any of them ever had.

Ash was different from any other woman he’d ever met. More intelligent, more secretive, more sensual in the way she moved across a room. More heartbroken, too, though he didn’t yet know exactly what or who had devastated her. More confusing, more temperamental, more fragile some days. Was that why she turned him upside down with desire? That crazy combination that he’d never before run across in a woman? Because more than anything, he wanted to wind this amazing creature inside him, possess her, melt into her and lose a little of himself before coming up for air.

“Ash? Are you and Eddie still—oh...”

At Jen’s voice in the kitchen, Ash pulled away from him. Through the window, Eddie could see the blonde fishing around in the refrigerator. She held up a hand, as if to block her view. “Sorry. Pretend I was never here, okay?”

But it was too late. One inch between them turned to two and then six. Ash looked up at Eddie, a thousand questions in her eyes that he knew he couldn’t answer. I don’t know, he wanted to say. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what tomorrow brings. All I know is—

“Stay with me tonight,” he whispered. God, if she didn’t say yes, he was going to take her right here, neighbors be damned.

She shook her head. One hand lingered on his cheek, on his deepest scar, as she looked from him to Jen and back again. “Eddie, there’s so much—”

“Don’t.” He raised a finger to her lips. “Don’t explain. Don’t make excuses.” He ran a hand through his hair and tried to calm his pounding heart.

“It’s just that—”

He kissed her before she could finish, and his last words escaped inside her mouth. “I’ll wait, Ash. Okay? For you, I’ll wait.”