“I must not have done too badly because he was accepted into the University of Chicago. He didn’t graduate with honors…not by a long shot. But he finished on time from a prestigious school. He’s grown into a fine man, if I do say so myself.”
Maternal pride radiated from Eugenie over the man Ethan had become. Not the grades. Not even his job. But the person. Kelly loved her parents, yet couldn’t help but hope she would be able to model this woman’s parenting style. Someday.
What kind of father would Ethan make?
Images of him building forts with children in the middle of the sculptured garden filled her mind. Sounds of their laughter echoed.
She shut those thoughts down before they could grow roots in her brain. Kelly peered in the mirror at her alien image covered in plastic wrap and hair solutions for a bracing reality check. “You should be proud.”
“I am.”
“I would imagine it’s a comfort that he decided to stay on here living with you.”
Eugenie peeked out of one eye at Kelly. “Dear, you misunderstand. He chose to let me stay. Everything became his once he turned twenty-one. Up until then, I was simply the executor.”
And he lived above the garage? Her interrogation gig took a surprise turn—not necessarily for the better.
She leaned back and half listened as Eugenie rolled out another story of Ethan the Neighborhood Menace. She didn’t know what to do with all these new images of Ethan. Stories and vulnerabilities—and yes, imperfections—that made him all the more human. Not some bad-boy Adonis dazzling her before he blew out of town again.
This was a man.
And damned if he wasn’t even more appealing in a way that made her envision rings and babies and all those things Ethan insisted weren’t in his plans.
Yet, she couldn’t stop herself from listening.
And dreaming.
Ethan roared into the garage, sliding his Jag in beside Cook’s Beetle and the wall, his aunt’s empty space gaping two cars down. Shutting off the engine, he worked the peppermint stick to the side of his mouth, flipping a second one between two fingers, leftovers from his and Kelly’s day in North Carolina.
Frustration itched through him, thanks to too much unfinished business, first with Kelly, then Hatch’s bizarre references to Aunt Eugenie.
At least Hatch had already reassured him Kelly’s old professor was currently ensconced in an alcohol rehab, so he couldn’t have been responsible. But who was?
Tension stretched within Ethan. Something had to give.
Just as he reached for his keys, the garage door hummed to life, cranking open again. His aunt’s Mercedes pulled into the empty spot.
The passenger door swung open, two very feminine legs swinging out. Brown leather thigh boots wreaked hell on his libido.
Kelly had obviously found her own mark to place on Aunt Eugenie’s fashion advice. She never wore heels, always opting for flats, but in a way that brought a new flash to her clothes. Boots skimmed up slim legs to a dress hem that hiked well above the knee as she scooched out of the car. Kelly stood, her wool coat swinging around her hips.
Why the hell did it take a grown woman so long to stand and shake her dress back down to a decent length? Kelly swept her hand down the loose-fitting slinky sweater dress. Nothing fancy, but the brown dress had hints of gold shimmering in the fabric when she moved.
And she was moving too much.
Her hair glided with each turn of her head like some shampoo commercial and it made him crazy. All of it. The whole package. The whole woman. There wasn’t anything he hadn’t already noticed before the accessories, but the confidence in the tilt of her chin…
That was new.
Sexy as hell.
And he’d found her mighty hot before. Never would he forget the scents and sounds of her pleasure in the mine. He sat in his car and watched her and wanted her and couldn’t decide if his decision to stay put was born of selflessness or cowardice.
He didn’t need his window down to hear. And he listened. Couldn’t make himself stop eavesdropping just for the pleasure of hearing Kelly’s voice.
Another damned blot on his already freaking opaque character. Ethan clicked the peppermint stick to the other side of his mouth.
His aunt stepped from the driver’s side, no chauffeur for her today. “Then there was the summer he learned to hot-wire the neighborhood security systems so he could slip into garages.”
Gee, thanks, Aunt Eugenie. He slouched in his seat like the guilty adolescent he’d been all those years ago.
Kelly shuffled shopping bags in her hands. “Oh, no, please don’t say he—”
“Of course not.” Eugenie slammed the door. “He couldn’t drive yet. He was only twelve.”
“So what was he doing?”
“Shoving bananas in tailpipes. The auto club made a fortune that day on all those stalled $100,000 vehicles.”
Kelly’s laughter bubbled free like French champagne. Sitting in his car, Ethan let it pour over him until it made him drunk with wanting her.
Her laughter dissipated, not that his desire for her faded in the least. His aunt stopped at the door. “Kelly, run on in without me. I left something in the car.”
“Let me help.”
Eugenie waved her away with a jeweled hand. “No need to wait for me. You go on inside.”
“Okay, then. See you in a bit.” The door clicked shut after her.
“Ethan,” Eugenie called without the least question in her commanding tone.
Busted. He opened the door. “Yeah, Aunt Eugenie.”
“You can come out of the car now.”
Hatch should sign her on. Ethan stepped out. He never could run a damn thing past her. Thank God she hadn’t been the rigid sort or he’d have been packed up and sent off to boarding school by seven.
He swung the car door closed. Now seemed as good a time as any to have that conversation with her and find out what Hatch had meant back at the mine.
Ethan called over the car, “The banana thing was funny, you have to admit.”
“Of course it was. But I couldn’t tell you that. I had to be a responsible adult.” She strode across the garage in a swirl of orange silk and the finest faux fur money could buy.
He would have thought she’d stolen the floor-length monstrosity off a pimp if he hadn’t signed the bill. Yet his eccentric aunt somehow made it look regal. “Thank you. I know you would rather have been shoving bananas in tail pipes, too, and instead you had to be that responsible adult for a kid who wasn’t even your own.”
Her smile creased lines on her face he knew he’d put there from worry.
She patted his cheek. “Oh, you’re wrong there. You’re very much my own.”
An odd burn started in his brain. Hatch’s words twisted through Ethan’s mind. The strange emphasis on the word aunt. She couldn’t mean her words literally.
Could she?
Not that it should be earth-shattering. She’d been his mother for almost as long as he could remember.
Regardless, his aunt harbored some kind of secret that he needed to know and now seemed the perfect time. Ethan forced his stance to stay loose, relaxed, in spite of the tightly coiled tension in his gut. “Am I your biological son?”
Eugenie’s blue eyes, so like his, widened. She pressed a bejeweled hand to her heart while Ethan waited for her to catch her breath or gather her thoughts. His own heart thudded more than he would have expected. He told himself it didn’t matter either way.
She gave him a tender smile along with a slight shake of her head. “No, you’re very much your parents’ offspring. Your mother had the labor from hell to get you here, difficult boy that you’ve always been.”
“Okay.” He processed the information and couldn’t decide whether he’d wanted it to be true. Finally, he decided he was glad. Eugenie was already his mother in the ways that counted and he had to be relieved she hadn’t felt the need to lie to him out of some sense of shame.
; “What makes you ask now?”
She was lying about something, however, and he needed to know. “I’m going to ask you a question again. And this time I want the real answer. It doesn’t matter to me what it is, as long as it’s the truth.”
Eugenie shifted her shopping bags in her hands, but stayed silent, her lack of a promise not escaping Ethan.
“What happened to my parents?” Still, she didn’t speak, her face staying an oddly blank mask similar to the one he’d perfected over the years. He pushed on, determined she wouldn’t stonewall him this time, “I’m days away from learning on my own, so if there’s something you need to tell me, tell me now.”
She stared back at him while the winter wind whistled through the eaves. She studied him with an intensity reminiscent of the time he’d asked to go white-water rafting. After consideration, she’d decided fourteen was old enough. He wondered what would concern her that much now.
Placing her bags on the hood of Cook’s Beetle, Eugenie started toward Ethan. “We may not be biological mother and son, but we do share the same genetic tendencies. We’re both unconventional. We love to travel.” She traced a finger along the sludge-encrusted side of his Jag, leaving an indelible mark in his rudimentary field-craft tamper check. “What you don’t know is that we share a common reason for why travel is so important.”
Eugenie rubbed her index finger and thumb together until the dirt flaked free. “Nice trick with the car. But of course I used the same in the past. Ethan, I used to work for the same employer you do.”
Shock rooted his feet to the cement. His aunt? Short and soft Aunt Eugenie, with her steel-gray bun and her hedonistic lifestyle?
His complete incredulity must have shown since she continued to explain, “You know the wealthy lifestyle offers the perfect cover for sliding in and out of countries. The circles our family ran in gave me entry to hearing more than you can imagine. Or maybe you can.”
He could. And slowly the image of her doing the same shifted and settled with such clarity he couldn’t imagine how he’d missed the possibility for so many years.
She glanced around the garage with a new edge to her eyes Ethan recognized well.
He nodded to her. “It’s clean here. I sweep the garage and my rooms for bugs daily.”
“Good boy,” she said as if he’d brought home a clay paperweight from school. “I was recruited in my early twenties. I put in twelve good years before retirement. Not too shabby for a field operative.”
A full-fledged operative. In the field. Not an entry-level paper pusher. Those twinkling blue eyes of hers had seen the same harsh world he had. Those soft hands that had bandaged his banged-up knees had held a gun.
She’d given all that up, a job he couldn’t imagine living without, to take care of him. The thought humbled him with the magnitude of the debt he owed her, beyond anything he’d imagined.
“My God, Aunt Eugenie. I’m sorry for what I cost you.”
“Don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions. I didn’t choose to retire. Things went very wrong.” She twisted her rings around her fingers, the diamonds refracting overhead lights in a disco display. “Not all branches of the CIA are squeaky clean. Thirty years ago, scientific research into genetics was just exploding onto the scene. There were so many new possibilities and the CIA needed to be on the cutting edge or the rest of the world would be there first. I had some friends in a Black Ops division called MEDUSA.”
Ethan kept his face blank. ARIES fell under the MEDUSA header, the whole division and its section being given mythological names. “Friends?”
“We all started out as low-level operatives, but some were more ambitious than I was—Clyde Hanson, Samuel Hatch, Willard Croft, all went over to a secret section of MEDUSA called PROTEUS.”
“Whoa. Hang on a second. You and Samuel Hatch knew each other?”
A smile flickered across her face. “Yes, Ethan. Samuel and I were…friends.”
Ethan’s world tilted at the implication, but then his aunt was only about five years older than his boss. Hatch’s confidence about distractions from partners on the job suddenly took on a whole new complexion. “What does all this have to do with my parents?”
Eugenie smoothed back a lock of Ethan’s hair as if he were ten again. “Well, there I was with my high ideals, thinking I was invincible, as all young people do. I asked the wrong questions about the genetic testing. I angered the wrong people in this country, as well as others. The next thing I knew, your parents were dead.”
A cold wad of certainty clenched in Ethan’s gut. He knew too well where this was going, had heard of it happening to others, but never considered…
“The bullet in your father’s head and one threatening phone call told me all I needed to know.” Eugenie tipped her head back, staring unblinking up at the ceiling for a moment before leveling her gaze at Ethan and continuing, “I was expected to shut up and get out, or my nephew would be next.”
The long-ago sound of that bullet popped in his memory. The swerve of the car. The lurch off the road, flipping, tumbling, his world rocking right along with it. Never quite righting itself again.
All the anger and frustration and even fear he’d felt then surged to the surface now. Renewed memories his child’s mind had suppressed elbowed to be set free. He forced himself to function. “Why didn’t they just kill you?”
“Because unfortunately for my poor brother and his beautiful wife I documented what I know. It’s tucked away as your life insurance. If anything happens to either of us, it goes to a friend of mine in the press.”
Ethan gripped her shoulders and tried to ignore the slight curve inward, from age or worries, he didn’t know right now and couldn’t afford the sympathetic distraction. “Aunt Eugenie, you have to tell what you know. You can’t keep secret something that might hurt others.”
“Says who?”
“Me.” His grip tightened. He respected his aunt, but couldn’t reconcile the shifting image of her. “There’s a code we have to live by. We may bend rules, but to protect people. Not to execute them. Whoever did this has to be stopped.”
Her jaw set with the same determination of years ago when she’d charged into his school to confront the headmaster for daring to use corporal punishment on her nephew. Ethan had hung up his tie for good that day.
Time to take another approach with her. No way would he win against that steely will if she was set on protecting him. “Okay, I understand why you felt the need to keep it secret then. You didn’t know who to trust. You were alone and I was a still a child. But I’m an adult now. You don’t need to protect me anymore. Whatever you know has to come out.”
Her shoulders drooped another inch. She shook her head. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. Even people on the inside can’t be trusted.”
She stepped away, swiped her bags off the hood and bolted into the house, pimp fur coat sailing behind her.
Ethan pressed his thumb between his eyes against the throbbing pressure. She couldn’t mean Samuel Hatch? Ethan would trust the man with his life. Or more important, with Kelly’s. But then he never would have suspected his aunt had been some Mata Hari in her day.
Or that his parents had been assassinated.
More memories long locked away blasted through his defenses in Technicolor. Of the day his parents died. The shouts. The smell of snow, gunpowder—and blood. The unleashed memories howled through his brain.
And in the middle of the hurricane, he saw one constant. One beacon of peace to reach for.
Kelly.
Kelly stretched her legs in front of her, reached, swayed, continued the constant toning motion. Tried to recapture the soothing effects of the greenhouse atmosphere. Tried inhaling the lush, transporting scents of gardenia and orchids.
With no success.
The evening of captivating stories about Ethan had taken their toll. Once clear of the garage and Eugenie Williams, Kelly had sprinted to her room for her workout clothes and a blanket. A
nd, please Lord, some peace.
She tweaked the volume on her Walkman, but the increased sound of rushing waves did little to drown the distractions humming in her brain. Her hand gravitated to the slim chain around her neck that now held the aquamarine Ethan had bought at the mine. Sentimental. Silly. But a beautiful reminder of an incredible man. Forty-eight hours from now, she would be in the ballroom. Seventy-two hours and she would be through working with him.
Don’t think about Ethan as a vulnerable, enchanting child.
Back to the ball. She gave up trying to escape into her exercise routine, instead closing her eyes and reviewing the upcoming mission. Their meetings with security liaisons, with the Marines and Secret Service. Updates with Carla Juarez and Robert Davidson, who would monitor surveillance from the ARIES war room. And of course Aunt Eugenie’s requisite block of time to work her Cinderella miracle.
What would Ethan think of her?
Kelly hated the vain thought, even while a part of her thrilled at knocking the man off balance, making him regret what he’d missed. She skimmed her hands along her arms to dispel the chill of loss raising goose bumps along her skin.
Come hell or high water, she wouldn’t ask him again. She might be on a quest to assert herself, but with that came a certain sense of her own worth. She deserved to be appreciated for herself. If Ethan wanted her, he would have to come begging.
What would it be like to have his hands on her and know he wouldn’t stop? Or to have his eyes caress her from across the room, no-holds-barred, no reservations? Just total and complete promise?
Her skin heated as if his gaze already skimmed her every curve, the sensation so real she couldn’t help but open her eyes to find—
Him. Ethan.
Standing just inside the closed doorway, he watched her, his gaze so hot he must have negated any blast of air from outside that might have alerted her. She’d locked the greenhouse door and engaged the security system Ethan had installed. But of course he knew the code.
Even if he hadn’t, he was that good at his job. She might be honing her skills, but his years of experience and natural talent gave him an edge. A dangerous and oh-so sexy edge. This Ethan she recognized well, even if she didn’t know what had brought the shift back.
The Cinderella Mission Page 16