Ruined: An Ethan Frost Novel; A Loveswept New Adult Romance (2 page)

And yet there’s something familiar about him. And also something that intrigues me. That makes me want to yield to him when I don’t normally yield to anyone. For a moment, just a moment, I think about picking up that stupid purple shake and drinking it. I’m running out of time, after all, and the afternoon will drag by if I don’t eat something.

I could just walk away, grab a sandwich and some fruit from one of the coolers, and eat it on my way back to Building Three. But that feels too much like retreat, something that I suddenly realize would disappoint us both.

Which means we’re at a stalemate. Him insisting I try something new. Me insisting I’m fine with the tried and true. It’s a stupid fight to have, especially with a stranger, but the look in his eyes can’t be denied. We both know there’s more going on here than a battle over a stupid drink

I can’t believe I’m going to do it, can’t believe that after all this fuss I’m going to take a sip of that damn smoothie, but I am. I reach for it, am compelled to reach for it by the look in his eyes and the sudden tension in his body. But as my hand closes around the cup, my stomach growls. Loudly.

It breaks the spell and I flush in embarrassment. So much for first-day nerves. A tangle with the juice-bar guy and suddenly my appetite is back with a vengeance.

“You’re hungry,” he says. His voice is colored with a sudden regret I don’t understand.

“It’s lunchtime. That’s my lunch.”

The next thing I know, he’s back at the blender, loading it with cut-up bananas and an extra-large serving of strawberries—definitely more than seven. He adds a large scoop of protein powder, then sherbet and juice.

Moments later, an extra-large Hawaiian Sunrise smoothie appears in front of me.

I’m confused. Uncertain, suddenly, though I don’t know why. I like to win. It’s kind of an obsession with me, so I should be happy that he backed down so unexpectedly. Except I’m not, because winning like this feels strangely like losing.

Under his watchful gaze, I reach for my smoothie. But at the last second—don’t ask me why because I don’t have a clue—I grab his instead. Take a long sip. Then place the cup back down on the counter.

Then I gather up my smoothie and turn away without glancing at him again. I can’t. I’m too unsettled by what just happened. By what I just did and why I did it.

I’ve only gone a few steps, though, when he calls after me. “Hey!”

I turn back, even though I tell myself not to. “Yes?”

“What did you think? Of the Ethan Special?”

“Exactly what I thought I would. It’s disgusting.”

He rears back in surprise. “Disgusting? Really?”

“Really. I hate blueberries.”

He doesn’t say another word, but then again, neither do I. Still, the question hangs between us. If I really hate blueberries so much, why did I drink his smoothie when he’d already given me what I ordered?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but as I walk away, I can feel his eyes on me. And somehow I’m certain that until I do know, until I understand, things will never be the same for me again.

“H
ey, Chloe.” My roommate greets me without looking up from where she’s painting her toenails the ugliest cyanide green I’ve ever seen. “A package came for you about an hour ago. I put it on your bed.”

“A package?” The first thing I do after I close our apartment door behind me is to kick the ruby-red torture devices I’ve been wearing all day off my feet and halfway across the apartment. I watch with a demented kind of satisfaction as they bounce off the breakfast nook’s walls. It’s no way to treat a thousand-dollar pair of Christian Louboutins, but to be honest, at this point I don’t really give a damn. Never again will I wear those things to work. Never. Again. “I didn’t order anything.”

“The return address says Frost Industries. It’s pretty heavy, so maybe it’s a bunch of HR paperwork. You know, employee codes of conduct, stuff like that.”

“Maybe, but they emailed me all those things last week, made me sign a confidentiality agreement and a bunch of other stuff before they ever let me out of the HR offices.” I drop my purse on the table near the door, then gratefully shrug out of my jacket. I love this suit, I really do. But all I really want right now is to get the thing off of me. It’s definitely a yoga pants kind of night. “I doubt they’d send physical copies of the documents, too. Especially via UPS or FedEx. Not when they could have just given them to me when I was at work today.”

“How
was
work? Did you take the world of biomedical engineering by storm on your first day?”

“Not quite. But I managed to not humiliate myself, so that’s something.”

“I say it’s a definite win. And you know what that means—champagne for dinner!”

I glance at her, amused. “Don’t you mean
with
dinner?”

“Only if you want to be a party pooper.”

If those nine words don’t sum up my relationship with Tori, than I don’t know what does. She’s six months older than I, and ever since we were put together as roommates our freshman year at UCSD, she’s pretty much considered it her job in life to corrupt me—a position she has only grown more firm on since she turned twenty-one a few months ago.

For the sake of our friendship, some days I even let her think it’s working.

Curious about this strange and unexpected package, I head down the hall toward my bedroom. Having finally finished her last toe, Tori gets up to follow me. But since she’s worried about smudging the polish, she kind of waddles on her heels, toes in the air. With her hair dyed race-car yellow and cut short and spiky, she looks a little like a top-heavy duck. One that stuck its wing in an electric socket.

She’s actually a really pretty girl, with beautifully delicate features and the most haunting green eyes I’ve ever seen. But she’s got major issues with her looks, so she messes with herself all the time, changing her hair, her makeup, her clothes. She has multiple piercings, a few tattoos, has even experimented with scarification and branding on occasion. She says she’s just being young, trying to figure out who she really is. But I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been trying to
forget
who she is. To bury deep the sad little rich girl she still sees every time she looks in a mirror.

I’ve tried to talk to her about it on a few occasions—that’s what best friends are for—but every time I broach the subject, she shuts me down, hard. Maybe I should push it, but she’s fragile—a lot more fragile than she’d ever admit—and I’m terrified of breaking her with a careless word or too-vehement protest. So most days I just keep my mouth shut. That doesn’t mean I don’t worry, though.

“Well, open it,” she orders from my bedroom doorway, when I just stand there looking at what is, indeed, a very large box. It covers about a quarter of my double bed, and when I go to pick it up, I find that Tori didn’t exaggerate. It really is heavy. It’s also marked
FRAGILE
, with arrows pointing to the words
THIS END UP
.

Now I’m as curious as she is. Reaching into my nightstand, I pull out a pair of manicure scissors and start hacking at the tape on the box. It takes a couple minutes more than if I’d gone and gotten a knife from the kitchen, but eventually I get the box open. Once I do, though, I’m as confused as I was before I opened it. Because there are no HR manuals in the box. No new employee information. Just a four-hundred-dollar gourmet blender and a dozen pints of strawberries.

Immediately I think of him. Juice Guy. I know he’s the one who sent this to me—it’s the only thing that makes sense. But how did he get my address? And how does a guy who works in a juice bar afford to throw around this kind of cash? And even if he could afford it, why would he throw it toward me?

My heart is beating a little too fast, and while I try to convince myself it’s because I’m creeped out—it smacks of online stalkerdom that he managed to get my address so quickly—I know that it’s more than that.

He’s flitted through my mind all day, along with my very odd reaction to him. No matter how he did it, it’s nice to think that he’s been thinking of me, too. Provided, of course, he’s not a serial killer who wants to put my head in a box. Because I totally wouldn’t be okay with that. Strawberries and a blender I’m strangely fine with, despite their cost. My head in a box, not so much.

When I don’t do anything but stand there, peering at his gifts and contemplating what all this means, Tori creeps up behind me. Stares over my shoulder. “Strawberries? Who would send you strawberries?”

I don’t know where to begin, so in the end I don’t say anything. Just keep staring at the perfect red berries. The pint baskets they come in are stamped with the name of an organic strawberry farm about twenty miles up the freeway, which means he went to a lot of trouble to get this gift here so quickly.

The only question is why.

Tori takes my silence as ignorance and starts poking around in the box. “Is there a card?”

“I don’t see one.”

But when I reach in and pick up one of the baskets of strawberries, I notice the ivory business card that had slipped between the pints. It’s embossed, with Frost Industries name and logo on the front. But the name listed directly below the logo is all wrong. Not that I know Juice Guy’s name, but I’m pretty damn sure that the surf bum I met today isn’t Ethan Frost. Except when I turn the card over, there’s a phone number scrawled on the back in bold black writing.

“Ethan fucking Frost is sending you strawberries?” Tori demands incredulously. “How is that possible? He’s a legend. Not to mention the most eligible bachelor under thirty on the entire West Coast.”

“He’s not. Of course he’s not. They’re from…”

“Who?” She eyes me suspiciously.

“Some guy I met today.
Not
Ethan Frost.”

“You certain about that?” She grabs the basket out of my hands and whirls away. “Because it sure looks to me like he’s the one who sent these babies.”

“Hey!” Still confused, I follow her. “Where are you going with those?”

“Haven’t you ever seen
Pretty Woman
? Strawberries go awesome with champagne.”

“We can’t eat them!”

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Why not?”

“Because we don’t know where they came from!”

Tori snatches the card out of my hand, waves it in my face. “They came from Ethan fucking Frost. That’s good enough for me.”

“Well, it’s not good enough for me.
If
these even came from him—”

“Oh, they came from him. See the watermarks on this business card? Plus the embossing? That’s a lot of money to shell out for a fake card.”

“But why?” I ask again, appalled by the whininess that has taken over my normally cool tone. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

It makes perfect sense,
a little voice inside me whispers. If I put the puzzle pieces together, if I let myself go there, I know exactly what this all means.

“Well, the guy’s not known for being crazy. Brilliant? Yes. A little different? Sometimes. But out-and-out crazy? Not even close. Which means one of two things.” She uses a finger to tick off the first reason. “Either this is the same welcome-to-the-company gift he sends to everyone who comes to work for him…”

For a moment my world levels back out as I think about the viability of that option. He’s a generous guy, so maybe—

But before I can get any further than basic supposition, Tori continues, “But I’m pretty sure we both know that’s a bunch of bull. The other option—and personally, it’s the one I’m leaning toward,” she says while shooting me her version of the evil eye, “is that a lot more happened at work today than you told me about. If that’s the case, then you’re a bitch. And the only way I’ll be persuaded to forgive you is if you sit down right now with me—and these really delectable strawberries—and tell me everything.”

I know I don’t have much of a choice, not with the way she’s looking at me. So I do what she asks, starting with the moment I met Juice Guy and not stopping until I get to the part where he actually makes me my smoothie. I leave out the rest—about how I drank that noxious blueberry thing—because I still don’t know why I did it. Nor do I know how I feel about the fact that I did it.

Tori’s spellbound by my every word—but then she grew up in the most elite circles the West Coast has to offer, and as such is privy to all the inside gossip I don’t have a clue about. My family entered the world of the rich and notorious late, very late, and they did it in Boston, where it’s a whole different game. And since the only family member I bother talking to anymore is my brother, it’s not like I’m up on the gossip about the East Coast elite, either. Which is exactly how I like it.

“You know it was him, right?” Tori says as she pours herself a third glass of champagne. She tops mine off as well, but I’m still nursing my first glass and the look of disapproval she sends me tells me she’s noticed that fact. “It had to be.”

I hope not. God, I really hope not. Because if Juice Guy really is Ethan Frost…If he really is, then I’d spent my first day sparring with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. And none too politely. The thought boggles my mind—and yet it makes sense. I’d known there was something familiar about him, but I’d put it down to the fact that he looked like half the surfers in California. It had never occurred to me that it was because I had Googled him months ago when I’d applied for the internship, had seen pictures of him then.

Except Juice Guy looks nothing like the Ethan Frost I remember seeing in those photos. I mean, yes, he has blue eyes and dark hair, but…oh, shit. It really
could
be him.

“There’s one way to find out for sure.” Tori, who seems determined to make me lose it, picks up her tablet from the coffee table where she abandoned it earlier.

Two minutes later I’m staring at an array of Google images, nearly all of which are paparazzi shots of Ethan Frost. Who is very definitely
also
Juice Guy. Only he looks nothing like the surf bum I met earlier today. In most of the pictures he’s dressed in expensive suits or tuxedos, his black hair neatly styled and his tattoo completely covered. In others he looks more casual—dress pants and an open-collared shirt, or designer jeans and sweaters with rugged, expensive boots.

It’s obviously him, though. Same intense indigo eyes. Same sculpted cheekbones and chiseled jaw. Same broad shoulders and narrow hips. Even the crazy long eyelashes are the same.

And still I don’t want to believe it. Because if it is him, then I am totally, utterly screwed.

I spend the next hour searching through dozens of pages, thousands of images—some of them show him with beautiful models and Hollywood starlets, while others show him giving speeches or getting awards—before I find what I’m looking for. A picture of him at the beach in board shorts, carrying a surfboard under one arm. He’s bare-chested, his chiseled abs (can anyone say eight-pack?) dripping with seawater, the blue-and-black shoulder tattoo of tribal waves I only saw hints of earlier on glorious display. His hair is messed up, his too-long bangs covering his forehead and part of his face—and he’s smiling. A real smile, not like the one he wears in so many of the pap pictures. It’s the same smile I saw from him today when he was messing with me, wide and happy-looking with his eyes crinkled up at the corners, and it convinces me that my suspicions aren’t wrong.

Juice Guy, this surf bum, and the visionary CEO of Frost Industries are all the same guy. My boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. Awesome. No wonder the other guy working the juice bar had nearly swallowed his tongue. I’d feel bad for bringing him so close to cardiac arrest, except it would have been nice if he’d actually
said something
. He didn’t have to do a lot. He could have just called him by name and I would have gotten the hint instead of continuing to stand there and humiliate myself.

“What’s wrong?” Tori asks when she finally looks up from the screen and sees my face.

“What’s wrong? Are you kidding me? It’s a miracle he didn’t fire me this afternoon!”

“Fire you? For what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Insubordination, maybe.” On the brink of hyperventilating—or at least freaking out—I rest my head on the arm of the sofa and try to figure out what I’m supposed to do. Do I make an appointment so I can apologize for being a bitch? Or do I just pretend it never happened? I could send him an apology letter, maybe. Or—

My roommate interrupts my frantic musing with a snort. “Give me a break. It wasn’t insubordination if you didn’t know who he was—which, clearly, you didn’t. Besides, he obviously wasn’t angry with you or you would have gotten a letter canceling your internship instead of that awesome blender. And these strawberries.” She pops another one into her mouth, chews enthusiastically.

Just the thought of my internship being canceled makes me freak out more. I need this internship. I have to have it. It’ll help me get into law school, help me get a scholarship, give me the references I need to put the next phase of my life plan into action.

And, most important, it will keep me from having to ask my parents for anything. They offer—through my brother, through emails that I don’t answer, in phone messages that I don’t return—but I don’t want their guilt money. I don’t want anything from them. And this internship is one of the stepping-stones, one of the keys, that will ensure I never have to take anything from them again.