by Angel Payne
“Ava!” Bella’s greeting was half buried in giggles. “Finally. Per amor di Dio, where have you been?”
“I—uhhh—had to—Wardrobe had something for me to—”
“Did you make it for Cameron’s meeting?” As the woman scooted off Ethan’s lap, her tone clicked into a business mien, though that didn’t stop her from sliding a hand down his chest as she went. Ethan’s tight but discernible grunt, definitely a sound of pleasure on top of pain, assured that the knot in Ava’s throat wasn’t going anywhere.
“I—” she stammered. “Yeah. I was there.” She couldn’t bring herself to move. Or to stop staring into the mirror, where it seemed easier to look at Ethan now. If she confined him to the reflection then it wasn’t really him sitting here. It wasn’t really his wrinkled clothes, with his dark blue pants stretched into that hard mound where it most mattered. And it sure as hell wasn’t his stare that stabbed through the dark discord of his hair, right at her, without a moment of softness or acknowledgement about what they’d shared yesterday. It wasn’t him staring as if she might as well be just another pretty face in a land that ate pretty for breakfast.
“Good, good.” Bella strolled to the refrigerator and pulled out a vitamin water. “Porca vacca, with all this excitement, I’m simply parched. Ethan darling, do you want one, too?”
“Negative.” He let that stretch into the most uncomfortable three seconds of Ava’s life. “But Ava looks like she might.”
“I’m fine.”
She spewed the words more than said them. She could barely stand here breathing the same air as him right now, let alone be bothered with the sham of civility. Ethan seemed to understand at least that much but Bella didn’t. Her boss whipped over a look of such stunned fury, Ava was forced to drop her head. Humiliation joined her rage, pouring its scalding pain through the giant crack in her heart and into the center of her soul.
“Of course she is. Ava’s always good to go. Aren’t you, sweetie?”
“Oh, yeah.” She threw a smirk full of Cinderella sweetness at Bella. “That’s me. Ready for…anything.” With the smile still in place, she let her eyes throw Evil Queen daggers at Ethan. “But you know, I did leave some, umm, supplies back at main set. Be back in a jiff.”
As she turned and stumbled to the door, she was all too aware of Ethan rising behind her. There was no way she couldn’t be. Even now, with every cell in her body yearning to get away from him, the awareness of his size, his heat, his potent presence was like a drug on her helpless libido, pulling ruthlessly at her for another hit.
When would she learn?
When the hell would she realize that guys like him had special radars for women like her: the ones who got one look at their dog tags and one earful of their boot stomps, and opened their legs while closing down their common sense…until it was too damn late. Like now.
“I need to get going too, missy,” she heard him say to Bella.
“Awww.” Her trademark pout permeated every note. “For real, arrow bear?”
Arrow bear?
She was strongly tempted to use that as an excuse to hurl when she got outside the trailer door. But getting away from Ethan Archer, as fast as she possibly could, ranked much higher on this mission objective.
Chapter Thirteen
Ethan didn’t bother shouting after her. It hadn’t worked yesterday and it sure as fuck wasn’t going to work now. Instead, he skipped straight to catching up to her, hooking an arm around her waist, and hauling her into a nearby building that was thankfully unlocked. From the desks he’d glimpsed through the window, he guessed the place was a temporary production office. The assumption was right. The room also contained a bunch of filing cabinets, rolling chairs, and even a kitchenette with a single-cup coffee maker. As settings went, it was fine. He wasn’t too sure about the seething fireball of a woman still locked in his hold.
“Let me go!” Ava demanded.
“Stop kicking and I will.”
“I’ll scream.”
“Empty threat, sunshine. You’re doing a fine job of that right now.”
“Shut. Up. And take your goddamn hands off of me!”
“Stop kicking first. Please.” Ironically, he summoned some Dom mojo to emphasize the last word.
“Ethan, if you don’t let me go—ahhh!”
He released her. And watched her fall right on her adorable ass. Because she’d been kicking so hard, she had no proper footing to stand.
Because of how you hurt her. How you’re still hurting her because of this ruse with Bella. And have to continue digging that damn knife into her, until that memory stick is found.
He turned, unable to contain his grimace. He’d done shitty things for this job but this capped the list. He hadn’t signed up to be lounging around a goddamn movie studio, playing James Bond games, and earning himself a tormented glower from the woman he’d pursued across seven months and over a thousand miles. This woman he now had to treat like a possible suspect in this fucking thing, at least in the eyes of his team.
But if he went to Franz and came clean about everything, told him that Ava Chestain had passed his personal “body cavity search,” the captain would toss his ass onto a plane for home faster than anyone could yell Roll, mark, action. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, let that happen, not when Ava was working every day for a man with tight ties to terrorists who’d been pulling some scary, shifty shit lately. If he had to endure Ava’s hatred for that, so be it. She’d be pissed but she’d be safe.
He held out a hand to help her up. Ava glared, shoved to her feet by herself, then parked herself in one of the rolling chairs, pulling a hand through her hair in fury. Hell. She had to remind him of how the thick chocolate curls had felt between his fingers, didn’t she?
It took every ounce of concentration he had to keep his voice even. “Are you okay?”
“Do you care anymore?”
He caught her stare, afire with fury and pain, and answered quietly, “After last night, is that fair?”
She let out a bitter laugh. “After last night, should I have expected to come to work and find Bella straddling you like a lap dancer? Of course, after the two of you warmed up at the cast and crew meeting—”
“Bella and I share a past.” The words were tight with his tension. The truth was, Bella—at the time, Brenda—was a mistake that never should’ve happened. Just being around her the last forty-eight hours had shown him that. What had he seen in her eight years ago? A sexual appetite that matched his own, that was what—not that he was going to drop that particular bomb into this conversation. “We’re comfortable with each other. And this ‘consulting’ shit is a whole lot of brand-new and weird to me. She’s trying to help.”
“Right. With her naked body in your face.”
He hated this. Dancing on the line between truth and fiction…this wasn’t how he did things. He was called in when the op called for someone to dig at the reality, uncover the facts. Bending them made him feel like a wolf in a bad sheep fleece. Sure, he’d pulled on the wool before, just never after one of the lambs had let him strip her, dominate her, and bury himself inside her until reaching one of the best climaxes of his life. Just the recall of it tempted him to pull the window shades, lock the door, and take her all over again, spread-eagle under him on one of these desks…
Fuck. That stick had better turn up soon.
Dwelling on that mirage wasn’t doing squat to help him right now. C’mon, asshole, you do remember at least a few things about the art of tact, right?
“Okay, so her communication style is…unique.”
“You didn’t seem to be minding ‘unique.’”
Ava deliberately dropped her gaze to his crotch. Crazily, he opened his stance, letting her look her fill of the engorged space between his thighs. The flush that filled her beautiful cheeks turned the moment into agony, every inch of his dick on fire, every drop of cum in his balls boiling, but he didn’t waver as he summoned the strength for a reply.
“I’m a man, Ava. Biologically, I responded to her—after she rubbed and stroked and dry-humped me for close to an hour. You’ve done this inside of twenty seconds with your eyes alone.”
She didn’t say anything to that. But her silence, tremulous and thick, was three times worse. She wrapped arms around herself and rasped, “Is that supposed to make everything okay?”
He looked to the floor. And was pretty sure he saw most of his gut mixed with the grime between a couple of loose floor tiles. “I can’t tell you what’s okay and what’s not.”
“Really? You had no trouble doing exactly that last night.” She sniffed and there was no mistaking why. The sob that followed overlaid her next words. “And I thanked you for it. Dios mio, I adored you for it.” She shot out of the chair and paced to the kitchenette. “Qué tonta eres. I’m such an Idiot. Zoe was right, wasn’t she?”
He moved toward her in a couple of silent steps. “Zoe?”
She started. His new proximity took her by surprise. Good. That was his intent. Keeping her off guard would keep her truthful. He didn’t expect her to spill anything on Lemare, believing every instinct he had that she was ignorant of his Lor side, but maybe this was his way of getting all the way inside her emotional window and gaining her trust despite everything he had to hide from her right now.
“My sister,” she explained, bracing hands on both sides of the little sink. “She called this morning before I came to work. I told her about you.” Bitterness stamped her conclusion. “She wasn’t happy.”
“Because my carpool van is a Black Hawk and my negotiation suit is a set of BDUs.”
She sliced another glare over her shoulder at him. He was used to getting such a look, that mixture of how did he know and thank God he knows. “A little bird named Rayna talked, huh?” Her fingers pressed against the counter, betraying how she intended to deal with her cousin about it.
“She was only trying to help,” he contended. “Just like Zoe.” One more step brought him to the kitchenette, as well. As much as he ached to pull her close, breaching her personal space would shatter both their composures, so he maintained a stance against the other end of the counter. “I was starting to snap it together for myself, anyhow.”
That got him a longer look. It came attached with a wince. “You snap too much,” she whispered.
He threw back a gentle smile. “Hazard of the job, sunshine.”
The wince crumpled into another sob. “Don’t pull out ‘sunshine’ on me right now. Don’t you dare.”
He held up a hand. “Fair enough. As long as you help me in return.”
She only answered by rolling her eyes before shoving away from the counter. How was it that on any other subbie, that shit reeked of gum-smacking twelve-year-old but on her it was a gorgeous invitation to harness her sass with the power of his tongue—or any other means necessary?
He gritted back the arousal to focus on her more carefully. She trembled from head to toe as she walked to the opposite side of a small round conference table. Yeah, she was still pissed but a new epiphany hit as he studied her. Witnessing the new “closeness” between he and Bella didn’t comprise all of her anguish. That had only hit the start trigger. If his intuition was running true, and there were few occasions when it wasn’t, her torment was tied directly to his presence itself, to the fact that he still stood here at all.
In his dress blues.
Smacking her in the face with memories. Painful ones. Likely the stuff that Rayna was going to tell him last night before Colton and his team put their unique dent into things.
What the fuck had happened to her?
Half hating himself for the move, he pulled one of the chairs at the table and lowered into it. Yes, he knew the impact of what he was doing. Visually, it made him submissive to her. He emphasized the impact by opening his arms and laying them flat on the table. “Pretend I’m Rayna and Zoe, too. Pretend I just want to help. Help me understand, Ava. Talk to me.”
Silence fell. Outside, a truck beeped as it was thrown into reverse. A costume rack squeaked by. Leaves skittered in the wind. Hollywood clamored on. The world spun.
The woman who plummeted into the chair next to him didn’t care. One look at her face, contorted in her misery, told him why. Her mind wasn’t here anymore. It was in the past, facing the heartbreak that waited for her there.
He ordered his arms to stay where they were. Grabbing her and holding her isn’t going to help her through this. You can’t help her climb a mountain if she’s on your back.
After several long minutes, she spoke.
“I had a few boyfriends from the base when I was very young.” Her voice was a wobbly rasp. “They were fun but it always ended once a long deployment came up, or a girl came along that wanted to hitch up, get a little house, and start having babies and swing sets.” A little smile twitched her lips. “I wasn’t the girl who wanted all that. My mamá—my mom—died when I was nine, and watching what my dad went through, to say good-bye to her…it broke my heart, too. It broke me in some ways, I guess. Crazy, huh? One day, you’re a kid who cares about nothing except the next school dance. The next, you’re wondering if your dad will ever smile again. And it wasn’t Papí’s fault. Things just get…broken. And so do people, right?”
Ethan wasn’t sure if she wanted an answer or not. He chose silence. These were strange waters for him. Listening to people, even the things they showed instead of spoke, was part of his job, natural as breathing, because he was always behind a window of his own. But that neutrality didn’t exist now. He felt the ache in each of her softly accented syllables. Burned with the sadness that clung to the indigo depths of her eyes.
“Oh God,” she finally murmured. “Why am I telling you any of this?” She shook her head, pulling nervously at her hair. “You have to get to some meeting, right?”
“It can wait.” Until next year if it had to. Especially because his instinct didn’t want to shut up now. Despite that, he dreaded giving voice to it. “So who was it that didn’t make you feel broken anymore? Colin or Flynn?”
Her head yanked up. Across her face, a race of emotions took place. First she gazed at him in fear. Hot on its heels was amazement. Then trepidation again. “How the hell do you know—” She visibly hauled back her thoughts from that gallop and confessed, “Colin. It was Colin.”
He was a little surprised to watch a soft smile tug at her mouth. Surprised and jealous. Tying back both the useless sentiments, he ventured, “He was from the base?”
“Oh, yeah.” She lowered a hand and scooted it toward his. As she curled their index fingers together, she went on, “I’d never met anyone like him. He was like a rock star with a yut-cut. Bigger than life, so cocky and silly…he made me forget I’d ever been sad in my life. I think I fell in love with him inside a week. The day before he shipped out to Kirkuk, he proposed. We didn’t have time to go find a ring, so he made me one out of some wire and pieces of a seashell we’d found on Alki Beach. He told me—”
She stopped herself with a hard swallow. Ethan’s chest clenched. “It’s okay.” He added the rest of his hand to their clasp. “Ava, you don’t have to do this.”
“He told me he’d come back,” she bit out. “He promised…we’d buy a real ring.” She pulled in a ragged breath. “A lunatic with an IED made sure that never happened.”
Again, he didn’t speak anything in response. He let her have the silence. The normal things people said with news like this…were just that. Normal. Standard niceties used to make a story from hell feel less horrific. He’d buried enough friends, grasped enough widows’ hands, to know the silence was kinder.
After a few minutes, he took a chance on letting his instincts gain voice again. “And…you thought it would be different with Flynn,” he said softly.
She gave a ragged nod. “Sure did.”
“Was it another IED?”
Of all the responses he expected, her full-throated laugh wasn’t anywhere near the list. As he arched a bewildere
d brow, she blurted, “It was one hell of an explosion. You got that part right.”
“Officially lost here.”
A blush actually claimed her face. She shook her head. “Flynn was just the mistake who taught me that boys in this,” —she stabbed a finger into his uniformed chest— “are not a great idea for this.” She swung the directional back at her heart.
With that, the energy in the air shifted. Her grief got clearly sidelined for antagonism. Once more, silence seemed the wisest plan for response.
“I’d been weeping in my wine about Colin for over a year,” she explained. “My friends finally decided that getting me drunk and laid would help with that a little. Flynn was just in the right place at the right time. He was a cute, smart PFC who worked on helicopters with his big, rough hands…better than chocolate to a girl who’d had none for a while.”
He still rendered little else. The story about Colin had been easier to handle than imagining her in a cute girls-night-out dress minus a few inhibitions thanks to Señor Patrón, then going home with some asshat who only wanted one thing from her. For the moment, he ignored the realization that in her mind, that was exactly how he appeared now, too.
“I ended up giving him my number afterwards.” She blushed hard again. “Stuffed it down his pants to be exact, right after learning he’d never be shipped out due to a nasty high school football injury. In my mind, the Universe was telling me the grief dues were paid and I’d finally won the jackpot. We got very serious, very fast. Well, what I thought was serious.”
“Engineer Flynn wasn’t on the same page?” The man must have been a damn idiot but Ethan wasn’t about to voice that.