The Promise of Paradise (13 page)

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.”

Ash slept late the next
day. She pushed her face under the pillows, trying to ignore the
morning sun that streamed through her curtains. Finally, sometime
around noon, Jen knocked on her door.

“Ash? You alive in
there?”

Alive…

She rolled over. One
hand came up to her throat, and she wondered whether Eddie’s mouth
had left a mark there, a deep strawberry of passion that she could
still feel clear down to her toes.

I don’t know the
last time I felt this alive.

“Yeah,” she
croaked. “Come on in.”

Jen pushed open the
door and eased inside. Damp hair swung against her cheeks, and she
smelled like soap and shampoo. Her eyes gleamed as she leaned against
Ash’s dresser.

“So,” she began.

Ash pushed herself up.
She felt tired, pressed flat, ironed down to little bits of nothing.
Though she’d slept for nearly nine hours, her dreams had bounced
around, little flickers of Eddie and Colin and her father on the
edges of her subconscious. She yawned and drew her hair back from her
face.

“Does he kiss as well
as he pours tequila shots?”

Her cheeks flamed
again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why the hell not?”

Ash shrugged and picked
at the covers. Because everything else in her life was a total mess
right now. Because she couldn't get involved when she'd be leaving
town in a couple of months. But mostly because it scared her, the way
she felt around Eddie.

“Colin called me the
other night,” she said instead of answering.

“You’re kidding.”

“Do I look like I’m
kidding?”

“What did he want?”

Ash reached for the
bottle of water beside her bed. “I guess to apologize.”

“Screw him.” Jen
narrowed her gaze. “Did you hang up on him? Tell him to go to
hell?”

But it wasn’t that
easy. Ash couldn’t just say goodbye to all that. Colin had been her
life for three years. She thought he’d be her future, too.

“Ash, don’t even
tell me you’re thinking about taking him back.”

“I’m not,” she
lied.

Jen narrowed her eyes.
“Listen, I’ve got to catch the train. I’ll call you later
tonight, okay? And we’ll talk about it.” She gave Ash a quick hug
and turned to go. “But let me just say, for the record, that Eddie
West is more of a man than Colin will ever be. Screw the pedigree and
the money and whatever else you think Colin has to offer you. A
hundred of him wouldn’t add up to half the personality of that guy
living downstairs.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ash
said to the door that closed behind her friend. That was part of the
problem.

* * *

Ash finished wiping the
last dish and set it in the strainer. After a late lunch of leftover
pizza, her stomach had finally calmed down a little. She tuned the
radio to a local jazz station and made her way into the living room.
Eddie had left one message on her voicemail about an hour ago. She
hadn’t called him back yet.

What do I say? Do I
act like nothing happened? Do I pretend it didn’t change anything?
Should she call him back? Invite him up? And if she did, what
happened when—or if—he kissed her again? Without Jen to interrupt
them, Ash wasn’t sure she could trust herself to stop what had
started last night.

She shook her head as
another thought snuck its way in. What if it didn’t mean anything
to him? Her fingers tightened around the arm of the couch. She knew
as well as anyone how much Eddie liked women. Maybe kissing to him
was as natural as breathing. Maybe he’d been swept away by the late
hour and too much to drink. Maybe he’d simply wanted to see how she
tasted, so he could add her to his list and keep on moving.

Ash tried to quiet the
buzzing inside her skull. Pulling a notebook from the end table, she
tucked her legs beneath her, meaning to work out a plan. That was how
she’d always tackled the tough problems, back in school. Lay
everything out on paper, and then sort out a solution.

She found a pencil and
made two columns. She wrote “Eddie” on top of one and “Colin”
headed the other. A solid line split the two in half.
Now just be
objective. Just come up with a list, something measurable, so you can
balance one against the other and—

Someone knocked on her
door.

The pencil dropped from
her fingers and rolled beneath the couch.

“Ash?”

Eddie.
Desire
sang inside her veins. “Just a minute.” She stuffed the notebook
between two cushions and went to the door. Opening it, she blurted a
breathless, “Hi.”

The way he looked down
at her, with sleep-wrinkles lining the edge of his face and a
toothpaste smile, sent her mind reeling all over again. “Hi,
yourself.”

He didn’t try to kiss
her, or even touch her. He just stood there and looked, the way he
had the very first day he moved in. “You feeling okay?”

She wasn’t sure how
to answer that. “Sure. You?”

He leaned in the
doorway. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

She went cold. “That
doesn’t sound good.”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.” She pushed
the door wider, certain by his serious tone that he meant to set the
record straight. He’d say last night had been a mistake. He’d
tell her he was involved with someone else. Or that he was getting
back together with Cass.

Ash bit her bottom lip
and sat down on the couch. Stuffing her hands beneath her thighs, so
they wouldn’t betray her by reaching over to touch him, she waited.

“I know we’ve only
been living here a few weeks.”

True.

“And I know you think
I’m the kind of guy who sleeps around, or who flirts with lots of
women, but doesn’t mean anything by it.”