by Eliza Watson
She stared into his eyes, unsure what to say.
“What if something happened to your family? Could you live with that? I think you have enough to live with right now.”
That was an understatement. He was right. She couldn’t turn back at this point. And she didn’t have to tell her family who she was. For all they knew she was Oriana Davidson from Chicago. They didn’t have to meet their granddaughter, Olivia Donovan, ever.
She let out a heavy sigh. “Let’s go.”
He gave her a reassuring smile and pulled back onto the road. “We’re dating, not married. I work in law enforcement, so they won’t question my gun if they see it, and you own an eclectic fashion boutique.”
She nodded. She had their background memorized, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t slip up and reveal something she shouldn’t.
They pulled into a parking lot, the gravel crunching under the weight of the SUV. Pine trees canopied most of the area, and the scent of pine and lake water clung to the warm, humid air. To one side of the lot, a half dozen small, white cottages sat back fifty feet from the shoreline. On the other side sat a large white house with a wraparound porch filled with hanging pots of red and yellow flowers. It wasn’t the porch from her nightmares.
Ethan turned off the vehicle and peered over at her. “Ready?”
She stared at the house, heart racing. She could do this. With Ethan by her side, she not only felt safer but able to handle whatever may lie ahead. She nodded faintly, hiding her mom’s wedding ring beneath the neckline of her dress.
Ethan grabbed the suitcases from the back, and Olivia took her carry-on from the backseat. They walked toward the inn as a squirrel darted across the yard. It scaled a wooden post, raced along a two-by-four, then scurried through a birdhouse, materializing on the other side. It hopped on board a wooden train car and sat perched as it zipped down a track, its final destination a birdfeeder with a sign reading Need More Birdseed.
They walked up the porch steps, her heart pounding so hard blood pulsated in her ears. She took a calming breath. Relax.
A bell jingled over the door as they walked inside. A staircase with a wooden banister led from the foyer to the upstairs. Wide, open windows welcomed the warm humid air over dry air-conditioning. Framed photos lining the buttercup-colored walls recounted the lake’s history, including one of four women in bathing suits circa the 1950s, arms around each other, standing on the shore. Olivia glanced around, hoping for a déjà vu, but nothing sparked a memory.
“Welcome and congratulations,” a young blonde woman said with a warm smile, walking into the foyer.
Congratulations? Ethan and Olivia exchanged confused glances.
“Aren’t you the honeymoon couple?” she asked.
Olivia shook her head. “No, we’re not.”
“Oh, sorry. My honeymoon couple was due here right about now. I just brought the champagne and strawberries to their room. Are you celebrating a special occasion? You know, we were ranked the county’s most romantic inn the past five years.”
“I’d read that,” Ethan said, not missing a beat, slipping an arm around Olivia’s shoulder. Surprised by his touch, it took her a moment to remember they were supposed to be a couple. She relaxed against him and placed her hand on his back, a sense of comfort washing over her. “Thought it would be a great spot to celebrate our anniversary. Get away from the city and enjoy a lake sunset with a great bottle of wine and do a little stargazing.”
That did sound romantic, especially for Ethan.
“How many years?” the woman asked.
“Been dating a year,” he said.
“Dating a year…” She wore a curious smile, like she was wondering if Ethan would be popping the question during their stay.
“Who’s in that picture?” Olivia asked, avoiding an awkward conversation about their potential engagement. Ethan didn’t appear bothered by what the woman was implying, but he’d had years of undercover practice. She and Ethan supposedly being a couple was going to take some getting used to. However, she had to admit she was already too comfortable with his arm draped over her shoulder.
“That’s Esther Williams and my grandma. She used to rent a cottage on Shadow Lake. Next lake over. My grandma used to swim with her.”
Was her grandma Kate Donovan? Was this woman Olivia’s cousin? They were around the same age but didn’t look a thing alike. The petite woman’s shoulder-length blond hair had hot pink highlights. A Tinker Bell tattoo peeked over the top of her low-cut white camisole, and cutoff jean shorts accented her tanned legs. She smelled like coconut suntan lotion and nail polish remover, apparently in the process of removing her chipped pink polish. Olivia glanced down at her own professionally manicured red nails.
“I’m Tracy,” the woman said.
“Ethan and Oriana,” Ethan said.
“Houdini vacationed here also, but we don’t have his picture. He lived in Appleton, just a few hours away, when he was little. Came here a few times. That’s why he chose to spend eternity here.”
“Eternity?” Ethan said.
“His ghost haunts the lake,” she said matter-of-factly. “Especially on Halloween, when he died. You’ll see water splashing, like someone’s swimming across the lake, but nobody’s there. Don’t worry. It’s a friendly ghost. Just like the one here at the inn. My great-grandpa. He built this place in 1905.”
Tracy was Olivia’s cousin.
Olivia’s heart hammered in her chest. Ethan’s arm was still draped over her shoulder, and he gave her a reassuring squeeze, undoubtedly realizing Tracy’s relationship to her. She relaxed slightly, trying to envision her and Tracy swimming together, playing Barbies, and painting each other’s nails. Would Tracy remember even though Olivia didn’t?
“He’s usually in room five. His old bedroom. But sometimes he hangs around outside at night keeping watch.” She walked over to a small wooden desk. “Ever been to this area before?”
Olivia shook her head. “No, we haven’t.”
“We’re from Chicago,” Ethan said. “Don’t get to the country much.”
Olivia glanced down at her conservative white Marc Jacobs sundress and Louis Vuitton carry-on bag. If she’d grown up here, she might have ended up sporting pink hair and working in the family business like Tracy. Like her dad, she couldn’t picture herself living in Five Lakes.
“Once you’ve conquered the mini-golf course next door and taken a canoe trip, you can rent a Jet Ski from Raymond just down the lake. And of course we have plenty of champagne and strawberries if you’d like a romantic evening enjoying one of our gorgeous sunsets or alone in your cottage. We also have a room available in the inn if you’d like, it’s more romantic than the cottages.”
Ethan slipped his arm from Olivia’s shoulder and rested his hand on the small of her back. He smiled, gazing into her eyes. “I think we prefer the privacy.”
Holding his gaze, she swallowed hard, nodding slowly in agreement. He broke their trance, peering back over at Tracy.
“I totally understand. If I could have you sign in here, please.”
The roster asked for their names and where they were from. Olivia wrote Chicago. It wasn’t a lie. She was from Chicago. She just hadn’t been back there, or here, in twenty-four years. Ethan massaged his hand over the small of her back.
And she was glad she wasn’t here alone.
Chapter Ten
The lampposts along the dirt path to their cottage washed the evening in a yellow glow. The low hum of several motorboats heading in for the evening carried across the lake, as did voices from bar patrons a mile up shore. Ethan scoped things out. The cottages, located on a remote end of the lake, had a thicket of pine trees to one side and a canoe rental company and mini-golf course to the other. A vast expanse of connecting lakes stretched in front of them.
“Isn’t going to be the easiest place to secure, is it?” Olivia asked.
Apparently, his concern was transparent. “There’s plenty of escape routes
if needed,” he assured her.
The place was a friggin’ nightmare. Someone could access the cottage by car, boat, ATV, or seaplane. Generally, at a safe house like this, a witness protection team would have a guy or two hidden around the outside perimeter watching the place and two inside with the witness. It would be easier to stick Olivia in the middle of a military base or an unoccupied prison wing. Yet, he didn’t want her holed up in either. She’d been through way too much already. Besides, that wouldn’t help when it came to protecting her family also. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be much protecting involved. Instincts and experience told him it wasn’t the mafia after her, and it was unlikely that anyone in San Francisco knew her father’s past. He’d been too careful to confide in anyone.
Usually, Ethan knew who was after a witness and why. The not knowing made his job all the more difficult. But for now, he could protect Olivia on his own. He needed Mike in San Francisco investigating leads and trying to track down this guy. After what Eduardo had claimed about an inside snitch, Mike was the only marshal Ethan trusted. Despite that, his buddy didn’t have access to the case file, so he didn’t know Alex Doyle’s real name or Ethan’s current location. And he wouldn’t, until it was necessary.
When they reached their cottage, he set down the luggage and unlocked the door. They stepped inside, and he flipped on a light. The scent of pine and lemon cleaners assaulted his nose. He shut the door and slid the flimsy lock in place. The squirrels there were smart enough to break in.
“Not much of a lock,” Olivia said.
Not compared to the two deadbolts on her door or her state-of-the-art alarm system. Usually his witnesses started out clueless, and he had to train them to always be on guard. Her dad had taught her well. Ethan couldn’t imagine such a cautious man putting his and his daughter’s lives in danger by continuing his life of crime, and certainly not by running the scam through Olivia’s gallery. But he still wasn’t ready to rule out the possibility completely.
He glanced over at a small kitchenette, then at the red Naugahyde couch in the middle of the room. A practical piece of furniture for vacationers lounging around in wet swimsuits, but it didn’t look even half as comfortable as the worn red rug covering the knotty pine floor. Windows lined the front of the cottage, providing a scenic view of the lake, along with a clear view of them inside.
“I brought some magnetic alarms. Not real high tech, but they’ll do the job. I’ll attach them to the windows and door so we’ll know if someone opens them.” He secured the window locks and closed the green curtains decorated with mallards.
“Kind of rustic compared to the inn.”
“I’ve stayed in much worse.” She undoubtedly hadn’t. Anything less than four stars was likely slumming it for her.
She swiped a finger across a small wooden dining room table. “It’s clean and kind of homey.” She dropped her suitcase off in one of the two bedrooms and returned, holding her cell phone. “I’ve only got one bar. I’ll probably have to climb a tree to get decent service around here. Going to see if it’s any better outside. I have to call Rachel.”
“Remember, you’re in Paris.” He’d given her a new cell phone so whoever was after her couldn’t track them using her phone’s GPS like he had. “I’ll join you. Need to call Mike and see if he got the results on the contents of that syringe.”
Apprehension creased her brow, like she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the truth about her father’s death. He wasn’t sure, either. If this guy had murdered her father, that promoted him from intruder to killer.
They stepped outside, and Ethan removed his phone from his waistband. “Our best bet is probably at the end of the dock, away from all the trees.” He walked toward the dock. Olivia hung back, and he turned to see a panicked expression on her face, her gaze glued to the water. Right. She was afraid of water. “It’s okay. I’m a certified rescue diver.”
“So if my body sinks to the bottom, you can find me?” Her look said Gee thanks.
“I think it’s pretty shallow. Dock doesn’t go out that far.” He swatted a mosquito feasting on his arm and flicked its corpse into the air.
“Bet I used to swim in this lake when I was five, and now I can’t even step foot in it.”
“Who knows, maybe by the end of the week you’ll be diving off the end of the dock.”
“Doubt that.”
They gazed across the lake lit by a full moon and lights from the cottages and homes along the shore. A brightly burning campfire illuminated a section of an island about a mile off shore. Faint voices in the distance and an occasional mosquito frying against a bug zapper filled the stillness. Suddenly, an explosion of singing came from the island.
“Omigod. This is the lake in the Impressionist painting on my dad’s wall. That’s the island in it. My dad once told me he went to camp there. One summer I wanted to go to Girl Scout camp, and he wouldn’t let me. Didn’t want me being away from home so long. I threw a fit, saying it wasn’t fair that he could go to camp and I couldn’t. Those first years we were in San Francisco I’m surprised he let me out of his sight to go to school.” She shook the memory from her head. “So, the painting had been in the family for years. My dad had hung on to something from our past besides my grandma’s letter and…” she trailed off, gazing over at him. “So it was possible for my dad to correspond with his family if he’d wanted to?”
Ethan nodded. “He could have sent letters through our DC office, and Roy could have arranged secured phone conversations.”
She continued staring at the island in silence.
He wanted to ask what her grandma’s letter had said, because he wanted her to confide in him. If not about the letter, then about other things. He wanted to know more about Olivia Doyle and Olivia Donovan. A lot more.
* * *
Lying on the couch, Ethan grabbed his gun off the cocktail table next to him. “Prepare to die,” he muttered.
“Chirp, chirp, chirp,” the cricket outside the window continued taunting him, not taking his threat seriously.
He flew off the couch, ready to blow the sucker away, when his phone rang. It was 1:00 a.m. This couldn’t be good. He grabbed the phone off the table to find Mike’s number displayed, and he answered it.
“Shit man, you aren’t gonna believe this,” Mike said.
“Not medication in the syringe?”
“I don’t know, still waiting on the results, but this guy got into her place when I wasn’t here.”
Ethan’s grip tightened around his phone. “Where the hell were you?”
“He set off a bomb at the café across the street, and I ran down to help out. Christ, I thought this guy was after some stupid paintings. Didn’t expect him to be blowing up places to distract me.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“No, thank God. Place was pretty empty. Just a few minor injuries. He seemed to know what he was doing. If he’d wanted fatalities, there’d have been some. But he had a good fifteen minutes in here, and the place is trashed. Not sure if he found what he wanted or not.”
“Were the corners of the paintings slashed?”
“No.”
Interesting. He obviously hadn’t felt anything would be hiding behind Olivia’s paintings, unlike her father’s.
“I’m following up on a few leads and hope to hunt down the asshole. Some eyewitnesses gave a vague description of a guy leaving the café just before the bomb went off, and it sounds like our guy from the cemetery. There was a security camera outside a pawn shop next door. Might be able to get something off that. I’ll call ya tomorrow. Be careful. This guy’s frickin’ nuts.”
Ethan disconnected. “Shit,” he muttered, tossing the phone and his gun on the table. This guy raised the stakes, making Ethan even more certain Olivia’s father’s death hadn’t been a heart attack.
Or wasn’t this the first place this guy had blown up? The safe house. Kind of coincidental that Ethan was now tracking down two bombers.
“Was that about me
?” Olivia stood in her bedroom doorway. The full moon poured through the tops of the windows, casting her in a blue hue. Her oversized white button-down shirt was even sexier than her green silk nightgown the night before. It barely covered the tops of her slender thighs, nearly revealing what was underneath. Likely a thong. A white lace thong.
He nodded, glancing away. “Your place got broken into.”
“Is Mike okay?” Panic filled her voice.
He explained about the bomb.
Her gaze narrowed in mortified disbelief. “Was anybody hurt?”
He shook his head.
She let out a relieved sigh, walking toward him, her gaze traveling down over his bare chest to his boxers where it lingered. He nearly went hard. She stopped a few feet away. So close he could see the perspiration beading on the dip over her upper lip and the pink color flushing her cheeks. Not even a freckle dotted her flawless skin.
“I wonder if he took anything,” she mused.
He shrugged. “Hard to say.”
A coyote howled in the distance, and she glanced over at the open window. The humidity had the place feeling like a sauna. If he hadn’t cracked a few windows, allowing a faint breeze in, they’d have suffocated by morning. The ancient air-conditioning unit in the window rattled and hummed too loudly to operate. He wouldn’t hear an intruder until he attempted to open the window further and set off the magnetic alarm.
She peered back over at him, wiping the perspiration from her upper lip, letting her finger rest by the side of her full lips. She had a killer mouth.
“Do you think he’s on his way here?” she asked.
“Doubt it. You didn’t leave anything behind to lead him here, did you?” He’d told her to secure all her dad’s info in her safe—hidden behind a bookshelf—and to make sure she didn’t leave a copy of their airline itinerary lying around.
“I locked everything in my safe. But I found an airline itinerary at my dad’s, dated several years ago for us to fly to Madison. It was inside an unglued cover of his Bible. This guy might have found it.”