Page 47 of Whisper of Surrender (Whisper Lake 2)

CHAPTER 14

Jess didn’t believe in fairytales, but if she did, she’d be sure that she was living one right now. The sound of the horse’s hooves hitting the ground as it pulled the carriage that carried her and the man of her dreams was not doing anything to dispel that fantasy.

Ethan’s arm was resting on the back of the seat, his thumb lazily making circles around her shoulder. Each pass was a powerful aphrodisiac. Who knew that such an innocent area could be an erogenous zone?

A shiver ran through her as the calloused pad of his thumb brushed a particularly sensitized portion of her bare skin. The next thing she knew, she was being covered with his jacket.

“Oh no, I’m okay.” She started to shrug out of it, but he held it in place.

Her first instinct was to push back and insist that she didn’t need it, but when the warmth of the garment and masculine scent enveloped her, she instead relaxed into it.

She took in a deep breath and tried to be as in the moment as possible as she looked out over the park. The entire night had been pure magic. Just like Ethan predicted they’d been seated immediately upon arriving at the restaurant. Carter’s aunt met them at the hostess stand and said that she’d set up something special for them, which turned out to be quite the understatement. They were seated in the outdoor garden area that was blanketed in twinkle lights and had soft music playing through hidden speakers.

She’d taken so many mental photographs tonight that she was going to need more ram in her brain to store them. She hadn’t stopped snapping them since the moment she opened the door of the bathroom. The look on Ethan’s face at that moment was one she never wanted to forget. He’d never looked at her that way before. It was a combination of wonder, awe, and raw desire. She’d been half-tempted to suggest skipping dinner altogether and seeing what look she could inspire if she’d just stripped out of her dress then and there.

But she was glad she hadn’t. Because if she had, she wouldn’t be experiencing this. She glanced to her side and saw the moonlight dancing over Ethan’s handsome face.

“Hey, there’s something that I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

He looked over at her.

“How did you know how old I was when I had my first kiss?”

Jess hadn’t told anyone about that day. It had felt like something special, something that she’d wanted to be just hers. She hadn’t even written it in the diary that she’d kept at the time. It was sacred.

Not like her first time having sex. As soon as Louis left, Jess had picked up her phone, called Ali, and the first words out of her mouth had been, “Well, that sucked.”

But not her kiss. No one knew.

“You guessed, right? There’s no way that you could’ve known that.”

The grin that spread on Ethan’s face made her even more curious.

“What?” Patience had never been a virtue she’d possessed, and she wasn’t about to get it now. “Just tell me,” she demanded.

“I was there.”

“What do you mean, you were there?” Jess shook her head back and forth. “You were on the beach or something?”

“No. I was on the pier.”

That didn’t make any sense.

“You were on the pier?” As she repeated what he’d said, goosebumps rose on her skin as the realization of what he was saying didn’t sink in slowly, it hit her like a Mack truck. “You were on the pier?” Her words came out in a breathless string.

He nodded.

Even though she knew that it was true, she still found herself shaking her head as she tried to remember every detail of that day. “No. There’s no way.”

She searched his eyes for the boy that had sat beside her. The boy that she’d shocked by leaning over and kissing. The boy that was, well, a boy. Ethan was a man.

Then a memory surfaced. The boy had said that his dad had just died. A lot of her childhood timelines were fuzzy, but she remembered that Daisy’s son had died that summer. She remembered hearing about it right before she left for California. A few days after her first kiss, her parents had gotten her on an experimental drug protocol that required her to stay at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for close to a year. Now that she thought about it, she did remember Ali mentioning Daisy’s grandson moving to town and that he was “so cute” during one of their weekly phone calls.

“You were the boy on the pier.” Tears began to fill her eyes and Jess made no move to wipe them away.

“Yep.”

“And you remembered…how did I not know…?”

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