Shock Waves (19 page)

At the beach, just that afternoon, standing in each other’s arms in the surf. No wonder Jorak thought them lovers. To all the world that’s how they looked.

Frowning against a truth he didn’t want to see, Ethan flipped to the last picture, and felt himself go very still. Only Brenna graced the photo, Brenna standing by the bed and holding the picture of Allison.

Crying.

Tough, gutsy, invincible Brenna, who’d seen her mother die and held herself responsible for her grandmother’s death, who’d been ridiculed and scorned and shut out her entire life, who’d been used and discarded, who’d picked up the phone anyway and called a man who was no more than a stranger, simply because she didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, was crying.

Because of him.

Deep inside, that little fissure turned violent, ripping away pretenses and plans, leaving a surging darkness that could no longer be denied. And he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t keep living the game, the charade, not when doing so put Brenna in the line of fire. There was really no choice.

The bathroom door opened, and he looked up to see Brenna standing there in the ivory nightgown, silhouetted by the light behind her. And he didn’t stop to think. Didn’t stop to analyze. He crossed to her and took her into his arms before she could push him away, put his mouth to hers before she could tell him to go to hell.

Long moments later he pulled back and tore open his white dress shirt, ripped off the fabric then flung it over the camera nearest the bed. “No more cheap thrills,” he said very clearly, very deliberately. Then he methodically and relentlessly obstructed the view of every other camera in the room.

Tonight would be a night neither of them would forget, and he would allow no witnesses to what went down in this room. No prying eyes. No vile photographs.

Chapter 11

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”
I
s anyone out there?” Brenna banged on the hard wood of the door to the main hallway. Heart pounding, she glanced toward the unmoving form on the floor, then resumed her pleading. “Someone please, dear God. You have to help me.”

Footsteps then, nearing the door. The click of the intricate series of locks. She sucked in a sharp breath and braced herself, commanded herself not to be afraid.

“What is it?” the guard asked, pushing open the door.

She stared at him blindly, then gestured to the heap at the foot of the bed. “It … it’s Ethan,” she said. Adrenaline rushed hot and hard. “He got rough and I hit him, and now he’s not moving.”

A slow smile curled the guard’s mouth. He was the same young man with dark hair and thick arms who’d escorted them from the ballroom. The same man whose touch ignited a wave of dark slimy revulsion. Now a gleam moved into his eyes as he studied her torn gown and tangled hair, her swollen mouth. Muttering under his breath, he pushed past her for a closer look.

Mistake. Ethan attacked the second the man cleared the door, charging him with the lamp that had once sat on the bedside table. He slammed it against the back of the guard’s head, sending him to his knees. Ethan closed in on him, and for a minute Brenna thought he was going to kick the guard in his gut, much as Jorak’s man had done Ethan that night by the James. But he didn’t do that. He merely squatted beside the groaning man and put a hand to the side of his neck, then squeezed.

The man went lax.

“That should keep him out awhile.” Ethan stood and dragged the inert form to the bed. He helped himself to the man’s semiautomatic and walkie-talkie, the knife he wore in a harness around his hips, his wallet, then he bound his wrists and his ankles, secured a dirty T-shirt over his mouth, and tucked him in neat and tidy.

“Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” he drawled, then turned to her and grinned. “Not bad for a city boy, huh?”

Brenna just stared. From start to finish, Ethan’s plan had taken less than sixty seconds to execute. From those first tenuous moment along the James, she’d known Federal Prosecutor Ethan Carrington’s expensive designer suits concealed a lot more than a body of hard muscle and hot flesh, a clever mind and will of steel. He was a man of intense patience and relentless dedication, a ruthless precision for getting what he wanted.

God, she could only imagine what it would be like to have all that energy focused on her. To have him want her as much as he wanted revenge.

“Not bad,” she said turning from him. It hurt to look at him, hurt to see the coldness in his eyes, after the way he’d looked at her earlier. Hurt to know that she’d given him a little piece of herself but he would give her nothing in return.

“Come on.” He grabbed the bundle he’d hidden on the other side of the bed. “We need to get out of here.”

She nodded, followed him to the door. He looked down the darkened hallway, then took her hand into the warmth of his and slipped into the shadows.

“What about the cameras? Won’t the guards come looking when they see you’ve covered the lenses?”

Ethan hugged the cool stone wall. “Nah,” he drawled. “They think we’re making love.”

Her breath caught, but somehow she kept moving. Making love. Just the phrase, the immediate, ensuing image, heated her blood. “Why would they think that?”

The corridor dead-ended, prompting Ethan to pause. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said, and his voice was so quiet she barely heard it above the strumming of her heart. “We’ve barely kept our hands off each other all day.”

True, dear God. Very true.

He looked right then left, hesitated, then pulled her down the shorter of the two halls. “What man wouldn’t get you in bed the second he was alone with you?”

The words, the matter-of-fact argument of the prosecutor, did cruel, cruel things to her heart. It slammed against her ribs, kept slamming. Earlier she’d realized she had to put a stop to the longing, the wanting, but when she’d come out of the bathroom and seen him standing in the glow of a single lamp, with his shirt off and the yellow light emphasizing the hard lines of his chest, something inside her had died a little death.

He’d crossed to her before she could so much as breathe, taken her into his arms and kissed her, hard, thoroughly, and for a few dizzying minutes, she’d forgotten everything, the truth of who and what they were, their circumstances, the fact that she knew to survive this man, the intensity that hummed between them, she had to close herself off to him. There’d been only the shock waves, not the dark, punishing kind she experienced when Jorak or his men touched her, but a thrilling, drugging electricity that made her want more.

Then he’d skimmed his mouth to her ear and whispered his plan, and everything had come crashing back. They were actors on a stage. Puppets at the end of Jorak’s rope.

“That won’t buy us all night,” she pointed out.

He reached the door at the end of the hall and laid a hand against the hard wood. “Don’t sell yourself short.” He let out a rough breath. “But you’re right, at least for tonight.”

She watched him finger the security panel. He lifted his other hand and flashed the guard’s badge across a small screen, and
within seconds the red
light blinked green.

In some foggy part of her mind disbelief registered, but she fought it, knowing for now she was better off not thinking too much. Ethan knew what he was doing. Jorak thought he’d abducted Ethan, but Brenna knew that wasn’t true. Ethan had been hungering for this opportunity, access to his longtime enemy. He’d been planning. He’d been prepared. And again, she thought, this man was no ordinary lawyer.

“We don’t have much time,” he whispered, pulling her into the night. Muggy air enveloped them like a lover’s embrace the second they stepped outside, the tangy smell of salt and rain and decay. Ethan slipped along the exterior of the compound, keeping his back to the stucco wall, until they reached the muddy path that led to the beach. “Can you run?”

She looked at her feet, covered only by sandals Jorak had supplied. Grabbing the bottom of her nightgown, she yanked it above her knees. “I can run.”

“Good girl.” The kiss surprised her. It was hard, it was fast and then it was over. He had her hand again and was tugging her down the muddy trail. Her feet slipped and she felt the slimy dampness of dirt and sand slinging up along her legs, but she didn’t care, just kept running.

The beach almost stopped her cold. The beach. Dear God. As long as they’d been inside the compound, she’d felt safe, because she knew, she knew the final showdown happened on the beach.

But then she remembered the hot glare of the sun, and knew that as long as the moon dominated the sky, the beach would not be washed in red.

An eerie calm stood like a groggy soldier in the wake of the storm. The surf crashed gently against the beach. Stars again glimmered against the dark night sky. Ethan led her to the far
side of the cove, where the pier jutted out over the water. Several boats bobbed in the tide.

Alarm gripped her. It was dark and they had no idea where they were. In a boat, they could drift for days…

“There’s got to be another way—”

Ethan dropped her hand and turned to her. “There is.” He jogged to the end of the pier and released one of the boats,
jimmied with the motor until a low purr flirted with the roar of the ocean, then launched it into the night.

Realization dawned. If Jorak’s men thought Ethan and Brenna had escaped on one of the boats, they would follow. They might still search the island, but not as intensely.

“Come on.” Again, he took her hand. “We don’t have much time.”

They were running then, through the wet,
clingy sand to the
dense vegetation at the back of the beach, slipping through a grove of dripping palms and vanishing into a tangle of vines
and other overgrown plants.

Pain stitched into her side, but she ignored it, focused on
putting one foot in front of the other. Vines slapped at her, tangled, pulled. She would have sworn she felt the warm trickle of blood on the side of her face, but she didn’t say anything, didn’t slow, just followed Ethan deep into the darkness.

* * *

She had to be exhausted. They’d been running over an hour,
sloshing through mud puddles and cutting through vegetation that probably hadn’t been disturbed in decades, fighting with vines, but she’d not complained, not tried to pull back, just
kept pace with him.

Ethan slowed, let himself pull oxygen deeper into his lungs. He was a trained athlete. He ran nightly. He’d been schooled
to survive. But Brenna … he’d dragged her into a mess.

On the beach they’d had the resurgent light of the moon and stars to guide them, but here in the tangle of undisturbed jungle
there was only an oppressive blanket of damp darkness, and
he refused to dwell on the fact they might not be alone.

He’d snapped. It was as simple as that. He’d seen the pic
tures, all the emotion on Brenna’s face, on his face, emotion he’d been denying, damning, and he’d known he had to get her out of there. He was prepared for whatever went down
between him and Jorak. He was prepared to go down, if that was what was necessary. But not Brenna. Christ, not Brenna. No matter what it took, he was determined to make sure she made it off this godforsaken island alive. Because more than he wanted revenge, justice, he wanted her to be okay. To live. To have the normal life she no longer thought herself capable of.

Her courage awed him. This wasn’t her fight, wasn’t her battle, but she’d walked into his life anyway, because not trying to help, she’d told him, would be unconscionable. In return he’d given her nothing, not even the answers she deserved.

“I met Jorak Zhukov at Harvard,” he told her, surprised by the harsh rasp of his own voice. The admission fell flat against the quiet of the night. “We were both law students.” The meeting had seemed innocent enough, at the library, studying at the same table. “He told me his name was Dimetri Pasquel.”

For the first time since they’d left the compound, Brenna
stopped running. She sucked in sharp breaths, and when Ethan turned to look at her, his heart twisted at the sight of blood smeared on her face, all the stains and tears on the ivory nightgown. “Christ,” he muttered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shoved the hair back from her face. “Tell you what?”

“You’re hurt.” He moved without thinking, lifting his hand to wipe the smear of blood from her cheek to find a tiny cut.

“It’s nothing,” she said, but didn’t remove his hand from her body. “You don’t have to do that.”

Ethan kept rubbing. “I never meant for you to get hurt.” He’d never meant for a lot of things.

“Not that,” she said, breathing hard. “About you and Jorak. You don’t have to tell me.”

He just stared at her. Very little light squeezed through the canopy of vegetation, the first tentative strains of dawn, barely enough to make out the lines of her face. “I think I do.”

She frowned. “Ethan—”

“It’s okay,” he said, and though he wanted to keep touching
her, running his fingers along her face, along her entire body to make sure she wasn’t hurt elsewhere. He knew they had to keep moving. Soon their absence would be discovered—if it hadn’t already been. “Just come on,” he said, and again they were running.

“He was a skinny kid,” he told her, letting the past wash back over him. “Awkward.” He could still see him that evening in the library, wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and a threadbare rugby shirt. “We got to talking, first about law school, then about other things.”

Brenna kept pace with him. “You felt sorry for him.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I’d grown up living a life of privilege, but my parents instilled social responsibility. I saw this kid, putting himself through school in a country that didn’t automatically welcome him, and I didn’t know how to turn my back on him.”

She squeezed his hand. “You can’t blame yourself.”

Ethan tripped on a root and staggered forward, steered her so she didn’t make the same mistake. “He told me he was from Croatia. That he’d lost his family to the persecution there, and had come to America to live with his grandmother.”

“To seek refuge,” Brenna murmured, and there was a hard edge to her voice. “He played you like a song.”

The bitter taste of being played a fool pooled at the back of Ethan’s mouth. It seemed like so long ago, another lifetime
since he’d let himself be so gullible to something so intangible as friendship. He swallowed against the truth, ran harder.

“He said he wanted the life his parents had dreamed of but never had the chance to live.” And like a total sap, Ethan had fallen for the sterling piece of sucker fiction.

Brenna swiped at a low-hanging vine. “You became friends.”

Ethan let the vine fall back to slap the side of his face. “We did.” It had seemed so easy, innocent and uncomplicated. Late-
night study sessions had given way to chess and campus par
ties. “I invited him home with me that Thanksgiving. Mom always made a big deal about holidays, and Dimetri’s grandmother had died, and the family decided he shouldn’t be
alone.”