She reached across the console of his sports car and rested her hand against his cheek. The tiny muscle tensed under her touch.
“I’m not going to beg, Ethan. I’m sitting here in a bikini, for heaven’s sake. There’s not a lot left to your imagination and yet you’re still resisting. I get the message.”
He captured her hand in his and pressed a kiss to her palm. “I don’t think you do, not if the message is that I’m rejecting you.”
“Isn’t that the bottom line?”
“I’m protecting you,” he insisted.
She shook her head. “You can keep right on telling yourself that if you want to, but I know better, Ethan. You’re protecting yourself.”
He looked momentarily startled, then sat back. He closed his eyes and fell silent. Samantha waited.
“Maybe I am,” he conceded eventually.
“You’ve taken a lot of risks in your life, Ethan. You put your life on the line when you served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let me know when you’re ready to take one more, okay?” She opened the door and got out of the car.
“Where are you going?” he asked, clearly caught off guard. “Get in here. I’ll take you home or back to your car, wherever you say.”
“No, thanks.” She pulled out her cell phone, which had barely squeezed into her bikini bottom. “Emily’s waiting for my call. She’ll come to get me. Go back to the party, Ethan.”
“I’m not leaving you here, all alone in the dark,” he said stubbornly. “Just let me take you back.”
Samantha had already dialed her sister, though. “Em, I’m in the parking lot at Ethan’s clinic. Come get me, okay?”
“Ten minutes,” Emily said tersely. “And if that man has done anything to upset you, I’m going to personally rip his heart out.”
Samantha grinned at the fierce declaration. “I might let you,” she said softly, trying to keep the tears that had gathered in her eyes from falling.
She disconnected the call. With her back to Ethan, she said, “She’s on her way. You can go.”
“I’ll leave when she gets here,” he countered, his tone unrelenting.
“She says she’s going to rip your heart out,” she said, glancing his way to judge his reaction. He merely smiled.
“Probably deserve it,” he said. “I’m still not leaving.”
Since it was clear he was going nowhere until her ride showed up, Samantha leaned against the car with her back to him to wait. Only when she saw the headlights of her sister’s car turning into the lot did she walk around to the driver’s side. Ethan rolled down his window, and before he could guess her intention, she leaned in and kissed him the way she’d been longing to since she’d first set eyes on him that day in her grandmother’s kitchen.
“Just a little something to remember tonight by,” she said breezily, walking away quickly and getting into Emily’s car.
Gabi was fanning her face in the front passenger seat. “That was not the sort of goodbye I was envisioning all the way over here,” she said.
“Me, either,” Emily concurred.
Samantha grinned. “Ethan wasn’t expecting it, either. You know what they say in show business? Always leave ’em wanting more. I imagine Ethan’s going to spend the rest of tonight wanting a whole lot more than that kiss.”
“Oh, boy,” Gabi said.
“What the devil went on tonight?” Emily asked.
“Not what you’re probably imagining,” Samantha told her. “No strippers at the party. No wild passion in the clinic parking lot. Just another standoff between two immovable objects.”
She had a hunch, though, that one of them was about to crumble. Her last glimpse of Ethan’s face as she’d walked away had revealed a man who was almost as fed up with being stoic as she was with trying fruitlessly to tempt him.
* * *
Ethan walked back onto the deck at Castle’s and poured himself a stiff drink. He turned to Greg, who was sipping club soda.
“You’re seeing to it that I get home,” he told his friend.
“Happy to oblige,” Greg said readily. “Especially if you’ll tell me what went on between you and the delectable Samantha. Speculation went wild around here till Boone reminded everyone they were talking about his future sister-in-law. That shut everyone down.”
“We fought,” Ethan told him. “Same as usual. And that is all I intend to say about that.”
“But you got her home?”
“Actually I got as far as the parking lot at the clinic, where I parked to have things out with her. Then she called her sister to pick her up.”
Greg stared at him incredulously. “Man, you are seriously out of practice at this whole dating thing.”
“I hadn’t planned on ever being adept at it again,” Ethan reminded him.
Greg studied him closely. “But you want to be, don’t you? Against all that better judgment you claim to possess, you want this woman.”
“Of course I want her. What man wouldn’t want Samantha? It hurts to breathe when I’m around her.”
“I’m talking about more than sex,” Greg said.
Ethan sighed. “So am I, if I’m being honest. She says I’m scared of taking a risk.”
“No question about it,” Greg said without hesitation.
“Thanks for being on my side.”
“I’m always on your side, but the truth is the truth. Until you get that stupid former fiancée out of your head, it will always be this way. You’ll edge right up to the dance floor, but you won’t step onto it.”
“I was on the dance floor just last night.”
Greg regarded him impatiently. “It was a metaphor.”
Ethan sighed. “I know that. I just hate admitting that anyone could possibly be right about me being a coward. I’m a decorated war hero. No one should be able to mention cowardice in the same breath with my name. Yet you’re the second person in the past half hour who’s made the comparison.”
“I don’t think anyone’s questioning your credentials in the hero department,” Greg said. “You aren’t the first man who’d rather face a bullet than put his heart on the line. I think it was easier falling in love the way I did, back when I was
