Shock Waves (18 page)

The pull increased, the vortex of the past. Closer. Darker. “A woman,” she told him. There was no point lying or evading. No point denying. “I saw a woman.”

Ethan’s hold on her tightened, one hand sliding up to tangle in her hair. “Then what?”

In a flash the night was gone, replaced by a brilliant summer morning. The sky was blue, so impossibly, beautifully blue. There were no clouds, though. No breeze. Only a stillness, stark and punishing. The faint hum of insects. Flies, she would later learn. And the green, the grass and the trees, the lingering stems of irises past their prime and fresh stalks of daylilies that multiplied every year.

“She was just lying there, beneath the shade of a weeping willow. Battered and beaten. Naked.” Through the vacuum of sound there’d been only the tinkling of a nearby stream and the sickening buzz, the lingering echo of her screams. Screams for help. For mercy. Screams for the future she would never see, an end that she prayed would come quick.

And the screams of a little girl forced to face the ugliness of the world far too early.

“Who was she?”

Deep inside, something started to tear, threatened to completely give way. Brenna held those shredded ends together tightly but the truth seeped through her clenched fingers, and she started to shake.

“Brenna?” Ethan pulled from her and stared down at her, tilted her face to his. His eyes were no longer hard and condemning, no longer the cynical, fact-thirsty eyes of the prosecutor, but the warm, devastating eyes of the man. “Who was she?”

All the emotion she’d shoved down deep, starting that day so many years ago, when she’d been running barefoot through the woods with her golden retriever, Bambi, burst free, and for a dangerous moment she wanted to sink against this man, let him hold her. Let him make it all go away.

But that couldn’t happen, and she knew it. None of this was real. Not the concern she saw in the burn of his eyes or felt in his startlingly gentle touch, not the crazy desire to forget the past and savor only the moment, this moment, not the damning urge to once, just once, let go.

“My mother,” she told him, stripping every sliver of emotion from her voice. “She was my mother, and I saw her death a week before it happened.” She swallowed hard, tried to bank the flow, but it was strong and it was dark, and no matter how desperately she fought it, it would not be denied. Words that had been jammed inside her, so awful she’d not shared them with anyone, not even her grandmother, who’d found her two days later, rocking in the darkness of her mother’s closet, broke free.

“I saw it,” she ground out, tearing out of Ethan’s arms. She saw the way he was looking at her, the horror in his eyes, and despite how badly she wanted to sink back into his arms, she just kept backing away from him, as though he was somehow to blame.

“And I felt it.” All of it. “Her terror, the ropes cutting into her wrists, the warm night air against her naked flesh.” Tears filled her eyes and spilled over, but she didn’t brush them away, just kept talking. Kept backing away.

“The horrible sense of inevitability,” she said, aware that her voice had dropped to barely more than a scratchy whisper, much like her mother’s final words. “The filth and pain of each violating thrust.” She saw Ethan move toward her, but held up a hand. “Don’t,” she said, but it sounded more like a screech. “I saw her die. I
felt
her die.” She’d let her die. “I cried the tears that she cried when she realized she wouldn’t be around to raise her daughter.” A maniacal laugh broke free. “Me. I felt her pain over leaving me alone.” Even now the memory shattered. “But I couldn’t stop it,” she whispered through the tightness in her throat. “I couldn’t stop it.”

And she couldn’t stop what was going to happen to Ethan, either, no matter how hard she tried. No matter how much she wanted. The only thing she could stop, the only thing she could control, was the pain, the stabbing vulnerability she allowed into her own life.

“Are you happy now?” The question ripped out of her, harsher than he deserved, especially the way he was standing there staring at her, looking heartbreakingly helpless but unbearably strong. “Is that the evidence you wanted, prosecutor? Does that make you feel better, to have more pieces of the puzzle?”

She didn’t wait for him to answer. She spun from him and hurried across the room, to a pair of French doors leading onto a small veranda. The kiss of the warm breeze greeted her, the angry hum of the ocean, the quickening of the sky around her.

She wasn’t running, she told herself. That’s not what this was about. She didn’t run. She’d never run.

This was about the truth, the fact that she and Ethan Carrington were from different worlds. Not just different worlds, but colliding worlds. Incongruous worlds. He was a high-profile man of concrete evidence and cold fact. She was a woman of instinct and intuition. To let herself believe, to let herself fantasize that this intensity between them was real would only lead deeper into the darkness. The absolute worst thing she could do was allow herself to depend on him, want him, trust what she felt for the tall man with the hard eyes but gentle hands.

No matter how badly she wished otherwise, no matter how badly she wanted, this pretense could never be real.

* * *

Ethan watched her go. Instinct demanded he go after her, comfort her somehow, pull her into his arms and hold her, take away the pain, but he didn’t move. Couldn’t. Not when her words continued to lash at him from all directions.

Her mother.
Christ. The first death she’d witnessed in the dark confines of her childhood bed, a bed that should have been filled with teddy bears and dolls, had been her mother’s.

He closed his eyes, not wanting to see her standing on the patio with her hands curled bloodlessly around the railing, but she was waiting in the darkness of his mind, as well. A little girl of seven, with soft blond hair and shining blue eyes, the youthful glow of innocence. The girl in his mind wore pigtails and dirty overalls, with a smear of mud on her cheek.

Sickness scratched into his throat, and the image changed, twisted, from a mischievous little girl to one thrashing in her bed, crying out with terror, not understanding what she’d just seen. A nightmare, her mother had told her. A nightmare.

Ethan opened his eyes and let out a rough breath, couldn’t stand there one second longer, not when the truth pierced deeper by the second. He strode toward the parted doors, stepped into the warm humid air of late evening, and felt the soft ping of rain. Angry clouds blotted out the moon, making the streaky lightning more vivid.

I saw her die. I felt her die.

I
let
her die. She hadn’t said the words, hadn’t had to. He’d seen them reflected in her dark, unseeing eyes. Felt them somewhere deep inside, somewhere he didn’t want to name.

The need to eliminate the distance between them, to pull her against his chest and block out everything, the past and the present, the gently falling rain, shook him. He’d done that to her. He’d sent her into the night, the rain, because in his world two and two always, always had to add to four.

But in her world they didn’t.

Lightning split the sky in a network of horizontal and vertical slashes, flaring brightly, then fading into darkness. Thunder rumbled. The truth taunted. If he crossed to her, touched her, that meant he believed what he’d seen in her eyes and heard in her voice, what he’d felt deep inside in that walled-off place he’d quit listening to years ago.

And that violated the core building blocks of the man he’d become.

The cameras were watching, recording, but still he didn’t move, just stood there on the edge of the balcony, watching her.
Wanting.
Somewhere along the line, somehow, some way, the facts had blurred. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, how she’d slipped under his skin, into his blood, but once again he’d made a crucial mistake. He’d let himself get close, let himself care. Let himself trust something he could neither see nor feel. Again, damn it. Again.

He started toward her, stopped abruptly.

Circumstances, he told himself, the pull of adrenaline and desperation. Good old-fashioned compassion. He felt responsible for her. The disturbing hum that jolted him when he looked at her, heard her voice, put a hand to her body, or worse, his mouth to hers, that was only the result of their circumstances. Nothing more.

The transformation came over him abruptly, the prosecutor he’d become pushing aside the man he’d once been, the man who’d believed, who’d wanted, the same idyllic notions as his sisters, the foolish boy who’d once seen sailboats in the sky.

More comfortable now, he shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket and closed the distance between them, draped it over her shoulders but didn’t let himself touch. “It’s starting to rain.”

In a violent rush of motion she spun toward him, letting the expensive jacket fall to the wet concrete. “Why are we doing this?” she asked, and her voice cracked on the words. Her damp hair stack to the sides of her face, but somehow she still looked beautiful. “Why are we playing this game? Why aren’t you trying to escape?”

All good questions, all ones he wouldn’t let himself answer. “Because it stops with me.” Where it had started.

Her eyes flashed with the lightning. “What? What stops with
you?”

Everything.
The past and the present, the danger and the truth, the insidious wanting. The whisper of inevitability. But he didn’t say the words, just watched her from eyes he knew to be cool and impassive.

“You can’t do it, can you?” she asked, and the disappointment, the disillusionment, in her voice almost sent him to his knees. “I bared my heart in there to you, but you can’t answer a simple question in return.” Her mouth twisted. “You can’t trust.”

He took the accusation like a blow. Then, because she was right, because his hands ached to do something stupid like touch her, he balled them into tight fists. He could no longer trust himself to move, not without falling deeper into a hole he was no longer sure he could pull himself out of.

“Trust me, angel,” he drawled with the insolence that never failed him during interrogations. “There are some things you’re better off not knowing.”

“Me?” she returned. “Are you sure about that?” Her eyes flared. “Or maybe the real truth is,” she added, sounding more like a prosecutor by the minute, “it’s yourself you’re trying to protect. Yourself who’s better off without me knowing.”

The wince was automatic. “Maybe we both are.”

A hard sound broke from low in her throat, not raw passion like before, but sheer disgust. “If you really believe that,” she said, but didn’t finish, just brushed by him and walked inside, leaving him standing in the rain.

* * *

Through the golden glow of a single lamp, he saw the pictures the second he turned toward the bed. Brenna had gone into the bathroom and closed the door, leaving only a shaft of light spilling from beneath. She’d not said a word since she’d left him on the balcony. He wasn’t sure how long he’d stood there in the drizzle, five minutes, ten, maybe twenty, but when the rain stopped and the thunder faded into the distance, he had turned and walked into the ballroom, found her standing rigidly at the wall of windows overlooking the dark, angry ocean.

“It’s time for bed,” he’d said, putting a hand at the small of her back, but she’d moved away from him, his touch, toward the door, where the guard had stood ready to escort them to their room.

He’d hurt her. She’d dredged up her past for him, but when she’d asked him a simple question in return, he’d denied her. And in doing so, he’d succeeded in doing what he’d set out to do—push her away.

Never had success tasted so bitter.

Now he strode toward the big bed, where a stack of computer-generated pictures awaited atop the floral comforter of orange and yellow hibiscus. Disgust gripped him. He knew Jorak had been watching them, but seeing the evidence of that stacked neatly on the bed sickened in a way he hadn’t expected.

Brenna. Christ, there she was, as she’d been that first night, dressed in black and standing beneath a sycamore tree. The two of them standing close, Ethan gripping her shoulders. Touching her.

The look of dread on her face twisted through him. How had he not seen it that night? How had he not noticed?

Because he’d been blind, he knew now. The need to destroy Jorak Zhukov had distorted his ability to see clearly, to interpret clearly, leading him to find motive and deceit where none existed.

The urge to rip the picture to shreds was strong, but Ethan resisted, unable to destroy the image of Brenna as she’d been that first night, when she’d selflessly walked into his life to warn him, without giving her own safety a second thought.

And then there they were, here in this very room, by the bed, kissing. The memory flared through him, not of the demanding kiss he’d intended to deliver, the one that would prove she was affiliated with Jorak, but a press of mouth to mouth that had caught him completely off guard.

Ethan let the picture fall to the floor, only to come face-to-face with another image, this of their bodies intimately tangled. In bed. He’d told himself he was only playing for the cameras, comforting a woman after a bad dream, but now he stared at the raw emotion on his face, the way his hand lay protectively against her back, and something inside him started to tear.