Addicted (Ethan Frost 2)

But it can’t last. Nothing does. And only a few minutes go by before my phone starts to buzz. There’s a part of me that wants to ignore it, to just let it go, to stay in the moment—and the headspace—that I am currently occupying. But there’s only one person who would be calling me now and he doesn’t deserve to be ignored.

I pick up the phone, am shocked to realize that it’s nearly three-thirty in the morning. That I really have been running for hours. And that I have already missed three calls from Ethan. Shit.

“I’m okay,” I tell him the second I pick up the phone.

There’s a couple of beats of silence, as if he’s trying to get a grip on his temper and himself. Then, “Where are you?” It’s clipped and stilted and calm, so calm that I know he’s absolutely furious.

“I’ve been running on the beach. I’m fine,” I tell him again.

“I’m on the beach and I don’t see you. Where. Are. You?”

“I don’t know. I ran pretty far.”

“I am aware of that—I’ve been looking for you for the last hour.”

Shit. His tone is perfectly modulated, perfectly polite—and lacking any and all warmth. He really is furious. I sit up, glance around the shadowed beach looking for something that will tell me where I am.

There are a couple of signs farther up the beach and I walk toward them, ignoring the cramps in my legs. One of the signs reads Coastal Preservation Project and suddenly I know exactly where I am.

“I’m over past Coastal Park,” I tell him. “Probably a couple of miles.”

He bites off a particularly vicious curse. “Are you telling me you ran over twenty miles tonight? Straight down the beach?”

“I guess. I wasn’t—”

“Is there anyone around you? Anyone hassling you?”

“No, it’s completely deserted. I’m the only one out here.”

He curses again. “I’m not sure if I should be grateful for that fact or upset. Look, don’t move, okay. Stay on the beach, preferably in the shadows, and answer your goddamned phone when I call. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

He clicks off without saying good-bye—more proof of how angry he is at me—and it’s not like I can really blame him. In my headlong flight I’ve gone well beyond the safe boundaries of La Jolla and while this area isn’t bad, it isn’t great, either.

Ethan really is going to kill me when he gets here.

I try to do what he asked, I really do, but after a few minutes of just waiting here I start to get antsy. And cold. Now that I’ve cooled down from the run, the cool breeze off the ocean is striking right through my thin tank top and yoga pants.

So I get up and start to walk back up the beach, the way I came. I don’t go up on the street—I’m not totally stupid—but I do try to walk the two miles to Coastal Park, so I have an actual landmark for Ethan to meet me at when he calls again.

I’ve just stepped foot in the parking lot when Ethan calls again to try to get a better location. I tell him where I am and he’s there in under three minutes. He jumps out of the car the second he sees me, and then he’s wrapping his arms around me, pulling me against his body.

“I’m fine,” I tell him, struggling against him.

“Can you just let me hold you for a minute, please? Let it sink in that you really are okay?” His voice is hoarse, the strain of the last few hours evident in it. The strain is also evident in the way he holds me so tightly and the fact that he’s in no rush, at all, to let me go.

“Look, I know it was stupid and I’m sorry. I meant to just run a couple of miles, but then I was in my head and I went a lot farther than I intended. I’m sorry. But nothing happened. I didn’t even see another person the whole time I was running.”

His grip finally loosens as he pulls back to look me in the face. “That’s because whole areas of San Diego are under curfew and other areas are being forced to evacuate. With the wind tonight, the forest fires have gotten much worse. You picked pretty much the worst possible time to disappear.”

“Oh, shit.” No won

der he was so worried. He wasn’t just being his normal overprotective self. He’d been worried about me running straight into a wildfire, something I could have done if I hadn’t made the unconscious decision to stay on the beach.

“Yeah, my sentiments exactly.” He ushers me into the car, and then we’re speeding through the streets as Ethan aims to get us back to his house—and to safety—as quickly as he possibly can.

“How close is the nearest fire?” I ask a few minutes later as we drive past La Jolla Cove.

“About four miles. They think we’ll be fine down here, but they’re evacuating Miramar all the way down to UTC and Torrey Pines all the way up to Del Mar.”