And to get his head back together before this twenty-four-year-old, used-to-be-virgin flipped his world any more. He needed to find a fit for those edges. Soon. He couldn’t do that with her hands on him and his body five seconds away from making a lie of his claim to need ten minutes. He rolled from the bed to his feet and pulled on his boxers. “Let’s get something to eat.”
Kelly dragged a sheet behind her and wrapped it around her naked body. “Why don’t you come into the house?”
A pit bull in gray satin.
He ignored her question and charged down the stairs, the computers from the loft above emitting a halo glow throughout the darkened apartment.
Her light tread followed. “Have you been staying away from the house because of me?”
“No.” His feet padded across the chilly tile. “I don’t spend much time there. It’s not me. Too formal.” Too many memories. “I feel like I need to put on a damned tie every time I walk through the door.”
“Was that your parents’ house?”
He nodded, already searching for a way to change the subject. “Aunt Eugenie and I had a talk.”
Well, hell. That didn’t do much for changing the subject. He yanked open the refrigerator, the light knifing through the dim room.
“About what?” Kelly dropped to a chair at the table.
He dug out a box of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza and dropped it on the table. He’d developed an addiction to the stuff in college and could use something to keep his hands busy until his mind engaged again. “About when my parents died.”
“And?”
Telling her wouldn’t jeopardize anything, and he didn’t relish having his head ripped off again for keeping secrets. He’d explain what he could and try not to sweat the rest. “She used to do what we do.” He reached into the freezer, where Kelly’s ice cream had taken up residence in his kitchen the past two weeks. “Occupationally.”
“No way!” Her grip loosened on the sheet.
His traitorous eyes homed in on the hint of dusky pink peeking from the sheet. “Uh-huh.”
He turned to fish out a spoon before he caved to the temptation to crawl back in bed with her.
Not yet. Not until he reestablished some boundaries. While feasting on pizza instead of Kelly, he told her the rest of what his aunt had shared.
Kelly swirled her spoon in the carton of rocky road ice cream. “So someone’s still out there, responsible for issuing the order.”
“If what she believes is true, then yes.” He pitched the pizza crust back in the box. “And I believe her.”
“Me, too.” Her leg extended under the table, her foot caressing up and down his calf. “Questioning could rain down fire on your head.”
“It could.” He captured her foot and anchored it to his thigh. “I’ll talk to Hatch in a couple of days.”
“I’d like to help.”
“Let me see what I’m dealing with first.”
She toed his stomach.
“Ouch! That hurt, damn it.”
“It was supposed to.”
She dropped her foot to the ground, pinning him a look that rivaled her dragon’s glare. “I know you tried to get Hatch to pull me off this case again.”
Ethan closed the pizza box, stalling. Not that it helped him find a safer answer. “Did he talk to you?”
“No. It wasn’t tough to figure out.” She hitched her sheet higher with a dignity worthy of any Grecian goddess. “Why can’t you see I don’t need to be protected? You’ve had a chance to follow your dreams. I want to follow mine, too, and I think I’ve made a damned good start for twenty-four years old.”
“Yes, you have—”
“Don’t placate me,” his pit bull in satin continued. “I may not be the most savvy agent in the DC area, but I’m holding my own. I’m advancing. I’m meeting the world on my terms and I won’t let you take that away from me. My parents dictated what I did for years. I won’t let anyone do the same again.”
He didn’t want to dictate anything. He just wanted to keep her safe. Ethan grabbed the pizza box from the table and pitched it in the trash. “There’s a difference between controlling you and trying to keep you alive.” He gripped the edge of the cool steel sink, his back to her, not that it erased the image of her burned in his brain. “I can’t help how I feel. Mortality has taken a chunk out of my hide a few times too many for me to ignore it.”
He threw his head back, staring up at the vaulted ceiling and drawing in steadying breaths.
Kelly slipped up behind him. Her arms circled his waist, her cheek falling to rest on his shoulder blade. He clasped her hands in one of his to stop her from saying something that would lead to a fight. God, he didn’t want to fight with her right now.
As much as he hated dredging up the past, maybe it would make her understand so he could keep her safe. Ethan reached inside himself to find the words. For Kelly. “I have exactly three memories of my mother. I remember her tying my shoe in the front entry hall. Just a flash of time. Not much of a memory. Then there was another time we sat on a bench at the zoo. We watched the monkeys and pitched peanuts into the cage.”
“Those are good memories to have.” Her words whispered over his skin with warm comfort. “I’m sure she would be glad those things you did together stayed with you.”
“I only mentioned two memories.”
She rubbed her cheek against his back. “I know.”
Ethan turned in her arms to face her. “How the hell do you get me to talk without asking?”
Shrugging, she waited in that Kelly fashion that always started him talking when a seasoned interrogator couldn’t have pried a word from him. Face reality, bud. Somehow, she’d gotten to him, tempting him to share things with her he hadn’t told anyone else.
He tucked her to his chest, his hands rubbing along her back, finding it easier to accept comfort somehow if he was the one touching. “I remember the day she died. I always told people it was a void, not unusual with accidents like that. Then I didn’t have to talk about it. Made sense when I was five. Became a habit later on. No one needed me to fill in the blanks, since it was obvious what happened.”
Ethan buried his face in Kelly’s soft hair, the scent of roses and their lovemaking wafting up, his only grounding in the present.
“My parents always bought the best of the best for safety in cars. They insisted on a shoulder harness seat belt for me, even back then. But the strap on this car came up high against my neck. I remember my mother taking her scarf and wrapping it around so the harness wouldn’t chafe my neck. My mother was asleep in the back. I was excited to be up front with my father.”
Kelly stiffened in his arms, just before her hand snaked up to his neck and soothed small circles against his skin. He felt a tear leak from her eyes, down his chest.
He should stop. The burden was his to carry, and it was damned selfish of him to have sought her out in the first place. But he’d started and he knew his dragon lady would make him finish.
Ethan lifted a strand of her hair and looped it around his finger. “Then there was this car beside us. I always liked driving fast, so I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t really understand until my father shouted to my mother to wake up.”
Staring at the dark strands, he lost himself in their luster and softness. How long he spent wrapping the lock around his finger, he didn’t know, didn’t care, just soaked up the softness of Kelly to dull the edges of the past scraping at his memory. “Then they shot him.” His finger crooked reflexively. “The car slid off the road. Down the mountain. Flipped, maybe four times, until it landed on the roof. My mother didn’t stand a chance.”
His finger numbed, and he realized he’d twisted the lock of her hair too tightly. She’d never winced. Typical Kelly, putting others first.
How much more would it cost her to be with him?
Untwining the hair, he eased her from his chest and shook the circulation back into his finger. One hand still holding Kelly, he stared over her hea
d at his flickering computer screens above rather than face her tears yet. “My shoulder harness held, so I wasn’t hurt. I hung from the ceiling for maybe…five minutes. Five hours. Forever. I don’t know.” His father hung beside him, open eyes staring unseeing. His mother lay below. Already dead. “I remember the smell of her perfume on that scarf with the seat belt tight against my neck.”
He swallowed against the phantom constriction. “Still can’t stand a damn necktie to this day.”
Her cool fingers continued to stroke his neck, soothing the fever in his skin, almost reaching through to the memories, too. “What happened next? How did you get out?”
Ethan dug through the years. He hadn’t thought much about afterward. Of course he’d only been five at the time. “There was snow outside the window, on the ground. I stared out the window at that while I waited.”
He paused, an image inching its way to the surface in hazy detail.
“What?”
Holy hell. “Kelly, there were boots outside that window.” He looked down into her eyes, red and puffy from crying tears over him. Something he’d vowed he would never cause.
“The rescue workers? Or someone come to help?”
He shook his head. “Any of those would have called in to me. No one spoke.” The long-ago crunching of steps through the snow faded. “The boots turned and walked away.”
“Ethan, you weren’t the only one to survive the accident that—”
A beeping pierced the air, drifting down repeatedly from the computer loft.
Ethan jolted. Dread pierced him.
His computer. The security system. Someone had broken onto the grounds.
Shoving away from the counter, Ethan tore himself from the lure of Kelly’s arms and tear-stained eyes. Hadn’t he learned his lesson after Gastonia? No emotions on the job.
A mistake he damned well couldn’t afford to make again.
Chapter 13
Kelly sprinted up the stairs behind Ethan, the computerized alarm cutting through the air. She tripped on the tail of the sheet, stumbled, caught the banister and righted herself.
“Damn. Damn. Damn!” She yanked the satin sheet from around her foot and resumed her charge. Past his bedroom to the next level in the open computer loft. Already, Ethan sat at his desk, clicking through keys. Images on the surveillance screens shifted, flickered, focused.
Outside her bedroom door? Her door clicked closed.
But she locked it. Always.
“Hell.” With a vicious shove, Ethan rolled his chair back and shot to his feet.
“Ethan!” Kelly shouted at his bare back, flinging her tangled sheet aside before chasing him. Modesty would have to take a back seat to speed and keeping Ethan from rushing headfirst into heaven-only-knew what. “Find out who it is first.”
Ethan bolted toward his bedroom. “Didn’t put a camera in your room out of some damned stupid sense of honor,” his voice jabbed at the air, lowering as he darted into his room, “emotional crap that gets people killed.”
Kelly trailed him just as Ethan jammed his legs into a pair of sweats. She yanked on her tights, grabbed one of Ethan’s T-shirts from the floor.
He pulled his 9mm off the dresser. “Stay here.”
“Like hell I will.” She dug in the bag she’d taken with her to her workout, beneath her CD player, her hand closing around the grip of her SIG-Sauer. Her constant companion since Ethan had startled her that first time in the greenhouse.
She sped down the stairs on bare feet, through the great room, just catching the door before it swung closed after Ethan. Damn, he was fast.
She should have been on guard.
But she’d been too caught up in Ethan. Herself. How they felt together.
She tore through the garage, into the hall leading to the back stairs into the main house. He’d been so right about staying apart to keep objectivity. Now she had all those images of him as a little boy, not just the playful images, but also ones of him hanging by his seat belt for hours, staring down at his dead mother.
Had his tears fallen onto her body?
Kelly gasped past a hitch in her side that had nothing to do with running through the endless corridors or the minor aches to her newly loved body. Dimmed lights cast shadows along her path, offering cover for someone to lurk. Her hand clenched around her weapon.
Lush Persian rugs padded her steps. Framed landscapes and portraits marched along the walls, so far her only companions.
She rounded the corner. Ethan stood with his back flattened to the wall beside her door. A crystal sconce slashed yellow light across the hard planes of his face. He lifted a finger to his mouth.
As if she needed reminding.
She plastered her back to the wall on the other side of the door, the flocked wallpaper tickling her arms. Ethan gripped the knob, turned, slowly, until the door creaked open.
Silence.
Ethan swung around into the doorway, gun drawn. Kelly’s heart thudded while she waited as backup, staring at his bare chest, such a broad and vulnerable target.
Silently, he gestured all-clear. She followed him into her room, the soothing blues and pewter grays offering no comfort now.
Light sliced across the carpet in a slim line from the door to her private bathroom cracked open a couple of inches. The beam flickered across the plush carpet as someone moved inside the bathroom. A slight figure in a lime-green sweat suit hovered over the tub.
Adrenaline singed Kelly, along with a hefty kick of anger. How dare anyone break into her room? Invade her privacy?
Ethan crossed the room with pantherlike grace and silence. Before Kelly could more than blink, he kicked open the door.
The figure whipped around.
Kelly stopped. “Brittany?”
Brittany screamed.
Her hands shot behind her back. A bottle thumped to the floor. Kelly’s shampoo bottle spun like a kissing game gone mad, liquid splattering the walls.
Dripping.
Eating the paint from powder-blue walls.
Kelly shivered. Suddenly the cellophane treatment didn’t seem so torturous after all.
Ethan advanced, gun by his side. “What the hell’s going on here?”
Brittany’s belligerent gaze flicked from half-dressed Ethan to Kelly in Ethan’s shirt. The teen’s eyes filled and her chin quivered. “I thought you were doing your Pilates stuff.”
“She was,” Ethan answered, defying Brittany to argue. “And what were you doing?”
“I was helping you realize how wrong she is for you,” the teen whined. Brittany collapsed to sit on the edge of the garden tub, blinking back tears. “It wouldn’t have actually hurt her.”
Ethan’s set jaw broadcast that he wasn’t as forgiving. “Like the weights? Or the Jacuzzi temperature?”
Brittany stared at the floor and flipped the corner of a bathmat with her toe.
While they were on a confessional roll, Kelly went for the whole shebang. “Did you really think you could get away with following him without our noticing?”
Brittany shrugged. “I only wanted to see where you lived when he went to pick you up that day, and maybe check out what you did sometimes. I couldn’t believe it when Miss Williams announced he was bringing a woman here. So yeah, I followed you and messed with the hot tub. Big deal.”
Sympathy tweaked Kelly. Fried hair seemed a pretty juvenile prank from a kid with an adolescent crush, and she knew too well how crush-able Ethan Williams could be.
The teen gripped the edges of the marble tub. “I wasn’t really gonna hurt you or anything. I just wanted him to see what a klutz you are.”
Kelly’s kinder feelings disappeared faster than the paint under Brittany’s toxic shampoo mix.
“I mean, like, really.” Brittany rolled her eyes. “What does he see in you?”
The girl just didn’t know when to quit.
Echoing from the hall, shouts and footsteps saved Kelly from answering. Not that she knew the answer.
The
bathroom door swung wide, Eugenie silhouetted in surprisingly sedate blue silk pajamas, the butler and cook standing behind her. “Oh, my.” Eugenie’s eyes assessed Ethan and Kelly side by side, then Brittany, finally landing on the peeling paint. Her face hardened. “Oh, my.”
“Exactly,” Ethan snapped. “Kelly, you were the one she was after so you’re the one to decide. What do you want to happen to her?”
Brittany whimpered.
Kelly mentally flipped through options. Could all of those incidents really be that simple? Or was Brittany linked to someone else? If so, she likely occupied the low rung on the ladder. In which case the best thing would be to let her go and have her followed.
As much as Kelly relished the idea of seeing the spiteful twit carted downtown and deloused, she knew what to do. “Let her go.”
And get to the nearest secure phone ASAP.
Ethan nodded.
He’d been testing her, and she’d passed. A rush of pleasure surged through her greater than when she’d aced her graduate proficiencies.
Brittany stormed past without a single thanks—the ungrateful brat.
Ethan nodded to the butler standing in the door. “See that she leaves the property.”
“Yes, sir,” the butler said before leaving.
Kelly sagged against the sink, her SIG-Sauer heavy in her hand as she stood alone with Ethan and his aunt.
Alone and definitely under-dressed.
Eugenie nudged the bottle with her fuzzy slipper. “Cook will send someone up to clear this away. We’ll obviously want to replace all your beauty products immediately.”
“Thank you.” That wouldn’t take long. Even with Eugenie’s makeover, Kelly still shied from too many products. Simple meant fewer goofs for Kelly the Klutz.
“Well, goodnight, then,” Eugenie called as if ending a formal dinner party. “I’ll leave you two to find your own way back to bed.”
Eugenie paused, turned and reached past Ethan’s head. Her hand came back with a rose petal. “Ethan Williams, I haven’t had to get after you for picking my flowers since you were ten.”
The Cinderella Mission Page 18