Hidden Sins

by Selena Montgomery

  So, he reminded himself, forcing his eyes to Mara’s once beloved face, he would give her until Friday to recoup, and then she would be gone again. This time, though, he swore, he would be ready for good-bye.

  Mara rolled closer to him, and when she bumped against his thigh, she twisted to rest her head against the hard length of it, her hand curling over tensed muscle. Immediately, his body betrayed him in reaction.

  How could it be that years later, in spite of everything, he could taste her, remember the way she fit against him? How could it be that he wanted her nonetheless, when he hated her? When he had finally found another woman he could care for?

  Ethan attempted to summon the fierce pain that had been his talisman against love for so long, but the picture morphed into an impish Mara on their last night together.

  A million stars had flickered above them as they lay on the roof of his apartment. She had wanted a midnight picnic, so they brought crackers and cheese and cheap red wine to the only place they could be alone. A few hours later Mara would climb down the fire escape and make her way back to the ramshackle two-story house on the outskirts of town, where her father would be waiting. He hated that Mara continued to put herself in danger to see him, but he couldn’t make her stay away. He didn’t want to.

  “I love you, Mara.” He said the words quietly. Simply.

  She turned her face up to him then, her smile dazzling, and had he bothered to see it, edged with an eloquent sadness. “I know.” She lifted his hand to her mouth, pressed a fervent kiss to his palm. “I don’t understand why, but I know you do.”

  He tried not to notice that she hadn’t responded with her own declaration, but he was willing to wait. Although she refused to give him the words, she’d given him everything else. Her body, her mind, her trust. It was evident in the way she curled against him on the blanket, her head tucked beneath his chin.

  “Tell me about the future,” Mara whispered.

  Ethan smiled. It was a favorite game of theirs. Two changelings who dreamed of escape. “We’ll live in New York. You’ll be an artist, with showings in every gallery in the city. In the mornings, you’ll paint whatever your eyes see. And at night we’ll see plays and eat dinner in the best restaurants.”

  “Yes,” she added, “and you’ll spend the mornings with your patients. You’ll be the most famous doctor in the country. Presidents and movie stars will want you as their personal physician, but you’ll politely decline.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have to save all the children, of course. Dr. Ethan Stuart will spend his afternoons running a free clinic for the poor and downtrodden.” Mara laughed lightly, the sound haunted. “I’ll be your first patient.”

  Pulling her closer, Ethan played along with the fantasy, eager to banish the shadows. “And how are we funding this haven of medical good?”

  “With the Reed treasure, of course. I’ll find the gold my grandfather stole, and we’ll use it to save lives.”

  Ethan sighed so lightly it barely escaped. The legend of Micah Reed and his stolen bounty had fueled a thousand fantasies for Mara, and Ethan never had the heart to disagree. Satchels of Spanish gold, hidden somewhere in the Texas Hill Country, had been only one of the scandals tied to the Reed name.

  To Ethan’s mind, an impossible treasure had been more palatable than the darker, less romantic stories told of the Reed men who lived on the edge of Kiev. Men like Obadiah Reed, Mara’s bastard of a father. Evangelist and asshole, to Ethan’s way of thinking. The hollow-eyed parishioners who stayed on the Reed compound gave him the shivers, and he hated the fact that Mara had to return to their fold every night. But this would be the last time, he had sworn silently. If all went well tomorrow, she’d never have to go back to those lunatics.

  He hadn’t told her about his plans then, or the letter he was expecting in the mail soon. Their ticket out of Kiev and to that dream Mara loved to spin.

  He’d pressed a kiss to her temple. “Will you live with me, angel?” he had asked.

  “Where else would I be?” Mara answered quietly.

  In the years since, Ethan had realized she hadn’t answered him at all.

  Instead, she’d turned in his arms and lifted her mouth to his. They’d sunk down onto the bright picnic blanket and loved each other under the stars. Afterward, they finished the bottle of wine, with him drinking the lion’s share because the next day was Sunday and he didn’t have to work at the plant. They’d dozed off beneath the September night, their bodies sated, their limbs entwined.

  And in the morning the clothes she’d left in his place had been tucked inside his army duffel bag, and the $2,854 they’d saved had vanished from the bureau drawer.

  Mara had loved him and left him, and now, when his life was finally his own and he was about to have everything he’d ever dreamed of, she had come home.

  Chapter 3

  Mara awoke with a start.

  In a rush, memory returned, bringing a febrile apprehension. Rabbe and Guffin had chased her down a passageway, and Ethan appeared out of nowhere to pull her to safety. Images of a scalpel and dead bodies danced in her still fuzzy mind. She couldn’t make sense of the pictures, could recall only the clasp of Ethan’s strong hand to her arm and sinking into unconsciousness from the pain and adrenaline. The sensation of floating and being cared for.

  She should have known that she’d finally get her one wish—to be in Ethan’s arms again—only to faint dead away when it happened. In her dreams, her lovely, impossible dreams, Ethan embraced her and told her all was forgiven. He didn’t save her from an angry thug and patch up her bullet wound.

  Awake and aching, Mara lifted a tentative hand to her upper arm and felt the delicate gauze that covered her wound. Her hand dropped lower and she abruptly realized that her top was gone.

  She’d missed that part of the treatment.

  A quick peek beneath the single sheet draped over her revealed that her pants had vanished too. Man, she had been really out, to have not noticed being stripped naked by the only man she’d ever loved. But there was no denying the evidence. Like her arm, her scarred leg sported a strip of gauze and neatly squared tape that bound the cut. At her feet, the ruined clothes had been folded neatly. Out of habit, she touched the pattern scarred into her hip. A reminder of who she was and who she could never become.

  Not that she had to worry about Ethan ever trying to take advantage of her, not in this lifetime. Heck, she had to admit she was surprised he deigned to touch her at all. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d left her crumpled on the floor of the warehouse, which she assumed was below her. Vaguely, she remembered a syringe and soft words of comfort, and she grudgingly relaxed. Though she’d never been shot before, she knew the drill. Bed rest for a couple of days, then she’d be on her way. Out of Ethan’s life again.

  Still, she thought, there was nothing to prevent her from taking a peek at what she’d given up. From her half-sprawled position, Mara scanned the area. Her first discovery was that Ethan lived in a spacious studio with one way out. The door, she noted with a grim laugh, had been bolted shut with a second lock, and it was on the opposite end of the wide area. She wondered whether the locks were to keep intruders out or her inside.

  Between her and the doorway were a series of obstacles, but nothing insurmountable. Gingerly, she angled her head to look around. A nickel-plated nightstand with glass shelves was stacked high with books, each with a bookmark trailing from some midpoint. Titles she didn’t recognize mixed indiscriminately with pulp fiction. Other than books, the remaining items were obviously for her. A glass of water, two orange pills and a large ivory pill sat on a napkin. Recognizing the pain reliever and the antibiotic, she propped herself up using her good arm and downed the pills.

  Beyond the nightstand, Roman shades blocked tall windows that flanked the bed. Glancing down, Mara corrected herself. She was on a futon, not a bed. She firmly believed there was a difference. No one who could afford a good box-spring mattress
and feather top would ever voluntarily choose to sleep on an anemic padding of foam and cotton tossed onto a platform of sticks.

  Continuing her survey, she noted that the closed door directly opposite the bed had to be the bathroom. Good to know, she decided, shifting a bit. Along the same wall was another table, this one holding a thirteen-inch television and a slightly larger stereo system. Like the books on the nightstand, compact discs stood in precise, military order. Straight and true, like her Ethan.

  No, Mara chided herself. Not her Ethan. Not anymore. The sooner she remembered that, the better.

  She skimmed over the makeshift entertainment center and took in the second largest piece of furniture in the studio. A black laminate bookcase leaned almost drunkenly against the far wall, its shelves laden with heavy tomes and inches-thick binders. In the center of the structure, suspended between the two columns, a desktop jutted out into the room. The laptop computer on its surface whirred almost silently as colored lines danced and bounced across a darkened screen. Next to the silver casing of the computer, Mara noticed a pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Told him he’d go blind,” she murmured. She used to chide him about reading in the dim light of the single lamp in his apartment. Ethan would respond simply by kissing her into silence, pulling her close and reading to her from his book of the moment.

  When she found her hand drifting to her mouth, Mara snatched her fingers away and lightly touched her arm above the bandage. Ethan’s kisses were part of the past. A bullet hole and two very angry men had to have her attention now. All of it. In fact, if she cared about Ethan at all, she’d get out of his house before Rabbe returned with reinforcements.

  Her plans hadn’t included a reunion with her former lover, and she’d made her choices a long time ago. To her, the past was a four letter word, and about as helpful.

  Time to move. Levering out of bed, she swayed drunkenly, then righted herself. Okay, she accepted, easier said than done. Determinedly, she wrapped the sheet more tightly around her and stumbled over to the bathroom. The door opened easily. Later she would blame her reaction on trauma and lowered resistance. There could be no other reason that the smell of soap and sandalwood would nearly buckle her knees. Looking around, she cursed the familiar longing. A bathroom littered with books bloated from steam shouldn’t tug at her jaded heart.

  “Always ruined perfectly good books,” she muttered. Ethan had a penchant for returning books that had fallen into the creek or been stained with some mysterious substance. Then, the poor victims had been hard-boiled spy novels or slim collections of poetry. Not, she thought, reading the title engraved along the glossy spine, Symbology and Modern Man: A Quest to Understand Nature’s Dimensions.

  Like the dead bodies she’d imagined downstairs, Ethan’s new reading material had nothing to do with her. She was grateful for the rescue, but she needed to move on. Which included getting out of his bathroom and his life. She swung the bathroom door open just as a shadow crossed the room.

  “Crickets and rain!” Mara yelped, heart in her throat. When she could breathe again, she saw that Ethan stood framed in the doorway, swathed in the half-light. Realizing she sounded like a nervous schoolgirl in a haunted house, she forced a shaky chuckle. “Sorry for screaming. Thought you were a ghost.”

  “You’re not that lucky, Mara.” He briskly moved to the kitchen island. “I’m very much alive. Which is more than could have been said for you if I hadn’t been up early yesterday.”

  Since she couldn’t argue with the truth, she leaned against the door frame, as much for support as effect, content to watch him moving about the galley-style kitchen. Like her initial, hazy impressions, Ethan had indeed filled out. The romantic male beauty of his youth had hardened into planes and angles that demanded attention. And reaction. Forced to fill the silence, she hitched up the sliding sheet and offered, “Um, thanks. For the bandages and stuff. And for, uh, pulling me inside.”

  Ethan thought about what would have happened if he hadn’t made it downstairs in time. Shell casings had littered the alleyway when he checked outside. Then, as now, terror, like a tidal wave, crashed into him again and he resented the hell out of the feeling. Coolly, he retorted, “I have first dibs on wringing your pretty neck, Mara. I couldn’t very well let them kill you.” Taking his mind off the dents he’d examined in the steel door, he lifted a can of vegetable soup. “This work for you?”

  “Fine.” Mara didn’t dare leave her post at the door, which was doing a fine job of keeping her upright.

  “Problem?”

  “No.” He’d probably poison the soup, she thought, but she’d take her chances. “I’m fine.”

  With a short nod, he reached inside a drawer—perhaps for a knife, Mara imagined fatalistically. When he came up holding a can opener, his expression bland, she exhaled softly. “How long was I out?”

  “You’ve been in and out for an entire day.” Interminable hours while he sat at her side like a lovesick fool. But he wasn’t. “Your fever broke and I went downstairs to work.”

  Mara tried not to pitch forward, hoping she’d make it to the bed before her legs gave out. Ethan had seen her weak and pitiful. She wouldn’t offer him a second showing. Instead, she locked her knees and evened her voice over the cascade of nerves. “You did a nice job patching me up. Barely hurts.”

  “Liar.”

  She chuckled ruefully. “Okay, it burns like the devil. But I’ve had worse.”

  “Get shot often?” Damned crazy conversation, he thought. Chatting about bullet wounds when all he wanted to know was why she left him. But they were playing polite, so he queried, “Occupational hazard?”

  “Now and again.”

  At the offhand response, Ethan wanted to snap. He’d forgotten how cavalier she was about her safety. He’d been the one who kept them out of trouble or talked her out of foolhardy escapades. Safe, dependable Ethan to her wild, capricious Mara. His temper, usually mild and unruffled, threatened to erupt, but he held it in check. With effort. No way he’d let her drag him back to before, when she was all that mattered and his role was to save her. Yet a concern he couldn’t quell had him asking, “When did you last eat?”

  Mara shrugged. “Don’t remember.” She pushed away from the door and carefully began to make her way to the bed. “If you’ll let me fuel up, I’ll be out of your way soon.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Mara. From the way you’re swaying, I doubt you’d make it down the stairs.”

  She didn’t disagree. Lowering herself tentatively, she commented, “I figured you’d want me out as soon as I was mobile.”

  “I’m not an ogre, Mara.” He gave her a long, patient look. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have pulled you in.”

  “Why did you save me? You don’t owe me anything.”

  Because the only answer he’d found during the night disturbed him deeply, he merely shrugged. “Old habits, I suppose.”

  “You’ve always been good at that. Saving me,” she agreed dryly. “How are you?”

  “Don’t pretend to care.” The cold flash in the dark brown eyes as Ethan looked up should have warned her. “Let’s agree to not make small talk, okay? I’ll feed you, give you time to recuperate, and then you can be on your way. Deal?”

  Mara nodded. At a loss for words other than pleas for forgiveness—a rare occurrence for her—she was fine not having to cast about for what to say next. Sorry about stealing everything you worked for. Didn’t mean to break your heart. She couldn’t imagine that he wanted to hear that from her. That he’d believe it. So she’d do as he asked and keep her mouth shut. At least that was the plan until she felt her sheet slip again.

  “Do you have clothes I could borrow? I don’t mind the toga look, but my arm’s getting tired and I can’t use the other one.” She wagged her left arm and shrieked at the surge of pain.

  In seconds Ethan had rounded the island and was at her side. “For Pete’s sake, Mara, you’ve got a freak in’ hole in your arm. I’m doing
my damnedest to avoid taking you to the hospital, but you open up that wound and that’s where we’re headed.” He nudged her to the futon and lightly pressed her down. “I’ll get you a T-shirt and shorts. Just sit still.”

  He rummaged through the closet that opened up next to the head of the bed. Passing her the red shirt and plaid boxers, he glared at her. “Do you need help?”

  Not if my arm falls off, she thought snippishly. Aloud, she answered, “I think I can manage.” When Ethan continued to stare at her, she arched a brow. “A little privacy, please?”

  With a grunt, Ethan turned away, but remained in place. Mara rolled her eyes at his broad back and let go of the sheet. The brushed cotton pooled in her lap and she bunched up the T-shirt in her right hand. She slipped the opening over her head and angled down to slide her right arm through the sleeve. Easing her left arm through by laying the shirt flat, she made it all the way to her elbow. Then she had to crook her injured bicep.

  “Hexagonal hell!” she squealed. “Pas de deux!”

  Ethan spun around and found her tangled in the shirt. One arm flailed uselessly, while the oversized red shirt bunched high above her naked breasts, the soft brown curves tipped by deeper peaks. In traitorous fashion, his body reacted like he hadn’t seen a woman naked in years. But it was this woman, this body, that had tormented him for a decade. The more she struggled, the more she cursed and the more knotted the shirt became. Amusement warred with grim desire, and Ethan forced himself to push desire aside.

  “Stop struggling, Mara,” he cautioned, “You’re just getting more tangled. Let me help.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she huffed from beneath the shirt. More determined than before, she bent her arm to yank at the fabric. “Rat’s toenails!”

  Unable to stop himself, Ethan chuckled. What amused him more than the flailing was the variety of nonvulgar imprecations she chose. He’d forgotten that Mara rarely took the Lord’s name in vain or preferred her own form of cursing to the four-letter words so common in modern speech. The commandments she could break, he thought, but cursing was more than even her flexible morals could stand.