My One And Only (26 page)

fifteen

A
bby punched the button on her intercom the following afterno
on. "Yes, Marcie?" She told her
assistant.

"Detective Krestyanov is here to see you." Abby darted a quick glance at the clock on her desk. She was expecting Ethan at any minute. "You can send him
in," she told her assistant,
"And if Ethan gets here, ask him to join us."

"Sure."

"Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?" the detective asked as
he threw open the door to her
office.

Abby rounded her desk and waved a hand in the direction of the stuffed chairs. "Hello. Would you like to sit down?"

He shook his head. "No time. I've got to meet
my part
n
er downtown. I got your message about that playing card."

Abby had called him that morning and left a voice-mail message. "I take it the lab didn't turn anything up?"

"No." He scowled. "And it's the damnedest thing. I went to the evidence room to look at the card myself. They've sent it out of state to another lab."

She wasn't surprised. "Oh?"

"Until you called this morning, this was nothing more than a routine attempted break-in. Why the hell would they do that?"

"You couldn't access the case files on my parents' murder either, could you?"

"Sealed," he confirmed. He started to pace. "I'd like to know just what the hell I'm getting myself into, Ms. Lee. I haven't run into this much—"

"Am I interrupting?" Ethan stuck his head in the doorway.

Abby smiled at him. "No. I'm glad you're here."

The detective swung around. "Maddux. Do you have that file for me?"

Ethan nodded and handed him the large envelope in his hand. "This is everything I've turned up in the last few weeks, plus the information we got from Harrison."

Krestyanov stuck the envelope under his arm. "All right." He turned back to Abby. "I talked this
over with Detective Garrison, and we're going to look into it. We won't be able to do much before we have to run it by the department."

"When you do," Ethan pointed out, "they'll tell you to drop it."

"I figure that too." The policeman ran a hand through his already rumpled dark hair. "I'll see what I can do, though, and I'll get back to you."

"I'd appreciate that," Abby told him.

"All right." He nodded to Ethan on his way out the door. "I'll be in touch."

The door swung shut, and Abby wasted no time. She wrapped her arms around Ethan's waist and hugged him hard. Late in the night, when they'd lain fully spent and exhausted, Ethan had gathered her to him so closely, she'd felt their heartbeats merge. The feeling had been so intimate; her heart had almost overflowed with love for him. Tears had followed. When first one, then another salty drop had plopped onto his skin, Ethan had eased her away and looked at her with concern. It had taken her several minutes to persuade him that she was crying for his loss and not her own. He'd offered to finally share all of it with her today.

"Thank you for coming," she said.

He crushed her to him. "You don't have to do this," he assured her.

"You do. And I want to." She stepped away from him and reached for her purse. When she
took his hand, his fingers closed hard on hers.

As they moved through the outer office,
Abby spoke to her assistant. "I'll
be out for the rest of the day, Marcie. If anything urgent comes up, refer it to Deirdre."

Marcie's jaw nearly dropped. "Deirdre? Are you kidding?"

Abby shook her head. "No. It's time she started earning her way as event chair."

T
hey made the cab ride in silence. Ethan fought a growing sense of alarm as they neared the gates of the public cemetery. He hadn't been here since the day Letty had brought him to his mother's funeral. At that time there had been Letty, a priest she had hired, and him. Today he had only Abby.

Something had broken loose inside him last night. There in Abby's living room, he'd finally lost the war. True to her word, she'd accepted all of it. He'd made love to her with a fierce intensity that had left him drained and breathless and unaccountably cleansed.

Abby had refused to let him retreat to safety.

Rather than passively riding out the storm inside him, she'd spurred it, urging him higher and faster. When he'd tried to slow the pace, she'd demanded more. She'd stripped him of every vestige of restraint and civility, forcing him to give full release to the turmoil he'd buried for so long.

Once, she'd sunk her teeth into his shoulder,
and the not-so-subtle nip had fought its way through another barrier. He'd lost count of the peaks and valleys she'd shown him. By the time he'd emptied himself for the last time, he'd lain in her arms feeling as weak as the day he was born.

Abby had stroked his shoulders and whispered her love in his ear. It had simultaneously shaken him and strengthened him. When she'd wept over his sorrow, he'd felt humbled by the sacrifice. She had renewed him, and with that realization had come an even more pressing one: he could never give Abby what she deserved until he was ready to lay the past to rest. He wasn't sure he had her courage.

She had kissed him and promised to give him some of hers.

His fingers tightened on hers briefly before he released her hand to reach for his wallet. He gave the cabdriver a fifty-dollar bill and asked him to wait. Except for a few lone visitors, the cemetery grounds were deserted. Abby paid a vendor at the entrance for a small bunch of flowers. Ethan put his arm around her shoulder and led her to the place he hadn't been to in nearly thirty years.

He found it odd that he'd never forgotten the way through the winding paths, as if every step had been permanently etched on his brain.

When they reached the tiny marker for Lina's grave, Abby handed him the flowers. He held
them for a long time and simply stared at the piece of granite. He had always believed he would hate Harrison Montgomery at this moment—that everything the man had done and failed to do would well up inside him until he boiled with it. Instead, he pictured the haggard look on Harrison's face when he'd talked about Lina. Had she known, Ethan wondered, that Harrison had loved her?

Had she known that he'd never married because, Ethan now suspected, a part of his heart was buried in that grave?

"What do you remember?" Abby asked softly.

Ethan continued to look at the small stone. "She had red hair," he said. "Dark red. It was long, but she always wore it up. I never saw it down except at night." His chest had started to ache. "Sometimes she let me braid it."

Abby wrapped her arms around his waist. He absently stroked her back. "She laughed a lot. She had a great laugh."

"Like you."

"Mine is rusty," he confessed. "I don't use it as much as she'd want me to." He sifted through the memories again. "She liked butterflies. Once, she took me to a butterfly arboretum so we could see them. I wanted to catch one for her. That's when she taught me the lesson about letting wild things be free."

"Like her."

"Like her," he agreed. "She could have let Harrison's father destroy her."

"She had your strength."

"A lot more. She wouldn't have hidden from her feelings for this long."

Abby's arms tightened around him. "What would she tell you if she was here?"

He thought about it for a long time. "My mother was never afraid to feel things, even when it hurt. She loved Harrison." He'd never admitted that before. "Even though he disappointed her, she loved him. And me. I always knew that she loved me."

He closed his eyes for a moment. A soft breeze ruffled his hair and rustled the leaves of a nearby shade tree. He heard the sound of a bird whistling from the branches, as if it sensed that the stormy weather of the past few days had finally passed, and it felt free to sing again.

In so many ways, he thought. He could visualize the clearest picture of Lina's face that he'd had in years. "Love her," she seemed to be telling him. "For God's sake, Ethan, have the courage to love her."

"I will," he whispered to the wind.

Abby slipped out of his embrace and faced him with tears in her eyes. She took the flowers from him and stooped to put them on Lina's grave. Gently, she cleared away the leaves and twigs that had gathered around the stone. She pulled each flower from the bunch and placed it with excruciating care. When she was done, she stood beside him again and linked her fingers with his.

"Someone will come by here now," she told him, "and see that and know that you loved her."

A
bby gasped when Ethan pressed a kiss to a particularly sensitive spot near her collarbone. They were in his hotel room. She wasn't really sure when they'd decided to go there. Sometime after they'd left the cemetery, the mood between them had undergone a subtle shift. He had looked at her with an overwhelming tenderness, and she'd nodded, understanding the silent inquiry.

Ethan smiled against her skin. "Want me to do it again?"

Abby threaded her hands in his hair. "I might expire if you do."

He laughed and kissed her deeply. She wrapped her arms around his neck and returned the kiss with equal fervor. He'd lingered over her endlessly that afternoon. He'd taken her places she'd never even dreamed of, then driven her higher as he'd lavished attention on every inch of her flesh. Her body felt both pampered and exhausted. When he lifted his head, his eyes were filled with the same tenderness she'd seen earlier. "Thank you, Abby."

She smiled at him. "I'm the one who got all the attention today."

He shook his head, his expression rueful. "You know what I mean."

She did. She stretched with the contented luxury of an overfed cat. Giggling, she remembered telling him how she'd felt like the slowest and fattest gazelle in the herd. "What are you laughing about?" he asked her.

"Gazelles," she said enigmatically. "And panthers."

Ethan entwined his hands with hers and pressed them to the pillow. "You're amazing."

"You're not so bad yourself," she assured him as he lowered his head.

The jarring ring of his cell phone on the nightstand interrupted them. He looked over at it with disgust. "I should flush that thing."

"It might be important," Abby told him.

He shook his head and kissed her. "Not more important than this."

The phone continued to ring, insistent and demanding. Finally, he tore his mouth from hers with a muttered curse and reached for it. "Maddux," he barked.

Abby watched his expression change from frustration to determination as the voice on the other end identified itself. He rolled away from her and sat up in bed. "How do you know?" he asked the caller.

Abby placed a hand on his shoulder. Ethan nodded at whatever the caller was telling him. "Fine
,"
he said. "We'll be there in fifteen minutes." He hung up the phone and tossed it on the nightstand.

"Ethan, what is going on?"

He held out a hand to her. "We only have time for one shower, so it'll have to serve both of us."

"Who was that?" She let him pull her from the bed.

"General John Standen. He wants us downtown for a briefing."

"
I
don't understand," Abby said an hour later as she listened to John
Standen talk to Detective Nick
Krestyanov. "You think the person who tried to break into my house is connected to the center? How do you even know about this?"

Carter Jameson patted Abby's hand. "Ethan asked us to look into it."

She shot Ethan a look of surprise. He nodded. "My investigator had already turned up evidence that your father's military connections might have somehow played a role in his murder. I asked a few questions."

"I knew your father," Carter said, "when he worked at the recruiting office. I used to volunteer there just to take my mind off things. I didn't put you together with him until Ethan started asking around."

Abby frowned. "But the break-in
—"

"After that night," Ethan said, "I came down here to see what I could find out."

John Standen concurred. "We began to really dig around. Most of the older veterans in this town still remember your dad's restaurant. It wasn't hard to get some answers."

The detective snorted. "I found it hard enough."

Carter laughed. "You didn't know how to ask the right questions."

Abby rubbed her eyes, hoping to clear her head. "And you think someone here knew why my father was killed?"

"A lot of money got passed around by the Feds after your dad's murder, Abby," the general told her. "People who barely knew the man were encouraged to remember deeper friendships."

"And his friends disappeared."

"Damn bunch of cowards," Carter muttered.

John continued. "But to a man, everyone remembered one thing about the weeks following his death." He looked at Detective Krestyanov. "There's a fellow named George Dryden. He's been here several years."