Ruined: An Ethan Frost Novel; A Loveswept New Adult Romance by Tracy Wolff

threatened. Don’t feel like he’ll take any more than I want to give. Maybe it’s a pipe dream. Maybe I’m just as foolish as every other girl caught in the throes of sexual attraction for a powerful man.
    I shake my head, look away. There’s no maybe about it. Ethan wouldn’t have built the company he has if he was willing to settle for crumbs and half measures. He wouldn’t be where he is if he couldn’t look below the surface to what lies underneath and figure out how to get it. If he can do that in business, what makes me think for a second that he won’t also be able to do the same with me?
    I don’t. Standing here, looking into those cerulean eyes, I come to understand the truth. That Ethan Frost is a man who will accept everything I have to give and demand more. Demand everything. And then keep searching for whatever lies beyond even that.
    Just the thought should terrify me. And maybe it would—maybe it does. But not enough to send me running from this room, running from him. Because along with the need, along with the demands, I can also see the tenderness. Ethan may want everything from me, but he won’t take more than either of us is willing to give.
    I don’t know how I know that, but I do. And still I hold back. Still I refuse to yield. How can I not when everything inside me screams that this—whatever this is—can’t end any way but badly?
    “Where’d you go?” he murmurs softly, his mouth centimeters from my ear. My cheek.
    My breath catches in my throat. How can it not? There’s an electricity between us, a knowledge and a need that throbs in the very oxygen we breathe. It’s there when I suck in a gulp of air, sizzling its way down my windpipe and into my desperate lungs. It’s there when I try to look away, stopping my head from turning, keeping my eyes pinned to Ethan’s. And it’s there working its way inside me with every second that passes until I don’t—I can’t—remember what I felt like without it.
    “I’m still here.” I shouldn’t be, but I am.
    “I want you, Chloe.” His mouth skims across my cheek, down my jaw. “And I think you want me, too.”
    I shake my head, but it’s more acknowledgment than denial, and we both know it. “Ethan—”
    He pulls back, smiles, and it’s the happiest look I’ve seen from him yet. “You said my name again. That’s progress.”
    Progress? Was it only just this morning that I insisted on calling him Mr. Frost? It seems so strange, when he’s been Ethan to me all along. Well, Juice Guy and then Ethan. Only when I was determined to defy him was he ever Mr. Frost.
    “Most guys wouldn’t consider that progress.”
    “I’m not most guys.”
    I raise my eyebrows at him. “Yeah, right. I’ve heard that before.” I’m teasing him, actually teasing him. It’s kind of hard to imagine.
    He laughs. “That didn’t sound nearly as clichéd in my head.”
    “Really?”
    “Or maybe I just didn’t think it through well enough.”
    “Yeah, maybe not.”
    “Since we’re on the subject of clichés, we could try another one.” This time he’s the one who lifts a brow questioningly.
    “I have to admit, I’m a little jealous. I’ve always wanted to know how to do that.”
    “What?” He looks baffled.
    I reach out and touch the eyebrow he just raised, smooth my fingers over it. He grows still. Serious. But I keep talking, not wanting to let this moment go. Not the sweetness nor the easiness of it. In my life, there’s been too little of both. “That whole one-eyebrow thing. It’s a lot harder than it looks.”
    “Oh, yeah? Maybe I’ll teach you someday.”
    “I’d like that.”
    We’re close now, even closer than we were just a minute ago, and I didn’t think that was possible. But with each sentence, each word we exchange, we move inexorably closer. Like magnets, drawn together by a natural chemistry over which we have no control.
    Again, it occurs to me that I should be frightened—that I am frightened—but