Shock Waves (8 page)
“And you?” Ethan asked, and again there was a warmth to his voice, a gentle coaxing that brushed up against that dark place inside of her. A prosecutor, she reminded herself. A man skilled at choosing just the right angle to secure the information he needed.
A man not to be trusted, no matter how much she wondered what it would feel like, for just one fraction of one second, to have those strong arms of his close around her and hold on tight. That was just loneliness talking, she reminded. Longing. The basic human need for companionship.
This man was not the man to fill that need or any others.
She looked at him, careful to wipe away the longing, careful to keep her voice strong. “I’m afraid you’ll have to decide that for yourself, prosecutor. If you can’t see the answer to that question for yourself, there’s no point in me saying anything further.”
Chapter 5
T
he sun boiled over the turquoise waters of the ocean in an angry display of reds and pinks and oranges. Violent slashes of light streaked through the lingering gray of dawn. Sensing land, craving the coming confrontation, Ethan watched high, thin clouds whipping by the small window of the jet. His ears tightened and popped with the gradual descent of the aircraft.
Beside him, Brenna slept.
He refused to look at her. Not again, not anymore. He’d done that enough. Through the deep, dark hours of the night, with only dim lighting illuminating the cabin and two guards glaring at him with weapons poised and ready, he’d been unable to turn from her, unable to look away from the way her slight, black-clad body melted into the thick leather seat. With any other woman he might have called it relaxation but not with Brenna. He’d literally seen the wall of exhaustion collapse around her. She’d fought it, just as she’d fought him, but in the end she’d succumbed.
And now she slept.
Christ. No wonder she was exhausted. Her performance had been spectacular. And that’s what it had to be, he’d told himself as he’d watched the shadows play against the soft lines of her face. A performance. Her voice had been pitched perfectly singsong, distant, stretched to the breaking point. Her eyes, stunning. Eerie as always, but glowing with a hard light he’d rarely seen. And her body language. Even now, hours later, the tension she’d radiated tightened through his chest.
A performance.
The plane bucked through a pocket of turbulence, continuing its steady descent. And yet beside him he felt no movement, no conscious awareness of the disturbance.
Ethan felt his jaw clench, his body go tight with frustration. For a man accustomed to sorting through lies and exaggerations, excuses and alibis, a man accustomed to zeroing in on the truth, the lack of clarity grated like a riddle he couldn’t wrap his mind around. He’d faced a lot of adversaries, hardened criminals and slippery defense attorneys, but now, intuitively, he realized he faced the most dangerous demon of all.
Himself.
He, the man who’d lived up close and personal in the aftermath of Jorak’s deceptions, a federal prosecutor and member of the antiterror task force, a man who’d long since learned to never, never believe in anything that couldn’t be seen or touched, Christ, he
wanted
to believe her. That was the real kicker, the bitter pill that jammed in his throat. Everything he knew about Jorak, everything he’d learned about deception and trickery, urged him to see through her lies, but something deep inside him responded to her, to those whitewashed fairy eyes, tempting him to forget everything he knew, everything he’d learned, and trust her.
Over the years he’d lost count of the number of suspects he’d interrogated, the witnesses he’d cross-examined. He was good at his job. He knew how to scrape aside emotion and focus on that which could be trusted—facts. Because facts didn’t lie. But the cruel fact of the matter was that during those dark, dark moments when Brenna Scott had looked at him through remote eyes, with tangled hair falling against her pale face, telling him the most ludicrous, impossible story in the world, he’d almost believed her. He’d wanted to believe her.
Wanting. God. He had no business thinking of Brenna Scott and wanting in the same sentence.
Another bump, this one more violent, and there in the shimmering blue distance, the first sight of land on the horizon. An island. Small, green, beckoning.
Ethan used the island and a fresh surge of anticipation to block her story, the way it had slipped past his suspicions, like a soft hand easing beneath the fabric of clothing, sliding beyond what he knew to be real and true. The desire—the need—had stunned him. Bothered him. He’d sat inches away from her, watching the play of shadows against her face, hearing them thicken her voice, all the while fighting the urge to pull her into his arms and comfort her, chase away the demons, the darkness.
Now, long hours later, he found himself grateful in a sick way for the constraints that prevented him from making such a stupid mistake. He didn’t know who this woman was, didn’t understand how she knew what she claimed to know. The more she’d talked, the deeper the night had grown, the more he’d found his certainty that she worked for Zhukov crumbling. And that made her dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
Jorak Zhukov was a master of deception. Ethan, better than anyone, knew that. Z knew what buttons to push, what ropes to pull. A woman like Brenna Scott was the perfect weapon.
“Where are we?”
The sleep-roughened words cruised through him like a shot of early-morning whiskey. He knew better than to look at her, but turned anyway, found her face inches from his, her eyes darker than usual, heavy with sleep.
The urge to streak a finger along the side of her face, to slide the tangled blond hair back from her bruised cheek, had him closing his hand into a tight fist.
“The
Gulf of Mexico
or the
Caribbean
, I’m guessing,” he said, and the thickness to his voice surprised him. The whisper deep inside grew more insistent, the disturbing trickle, the unwanted draw.
He had to find out, damn it. Once and for all, he needed to know just who this woman was, on whose side she stood.
She peered around him, toward the increasingly turquoise water below. The faint scent of something spicy and exotic taunted. “Are we landing?”
You tell me, he wanted to say but didn’t. “Looks that way.”
She watched the water a moment longer, then let her head loll back against the thick leather of her seat. “It’s not like me to sleep so deeply.”
“Your story tired you out.” He saw it all the time, from people called to testify.
Her eyes took on the same glow from the night before, her mouth hardening into neither a smile nor a frown, just grim acceptance. “You think that’s what I was doing? Telling a story?”
Again he resisted the urge to swipe a strand of blond hair from her face. It was bad enough that he was looking at her. He didn’t need to touch.
Might never be able to stop.
“Time will tell,” he muttered gruffly. Soon, too. Very, very soon. Time would tell and, unlike people, time didn’t lie.
* * *
There was no airport, only an airstrip, all but deserted. The plane touched down with the smoothness expected from a top-of-the-line private jet, gliding to a seamless halt at the end of the surprisingly well-maintained runway.
No attendants greeted them. No other planes flanked them. No tourists or employees milled about the small, decrepit building through which they were led, ankles no longer bound together, but hands still secured behind their backs. No gift shops or rest rooms or food courts, no customs officers, though through a darkened hallway Ethan saw signs of what looked to have once been a formal passenger processing area
Two armed guards walked in front of them, two behind, one on each side. No one spoke, not even Brenna. She just looked straight ahead, with her soft blond hair blowing in the warm tropical breeze. The sun assaulted them, telling Ethan they had indeed traveled south. He was grateful he still wore his running gear from the night before. The black outfit that hugged Brenna’s lithe little body would undoubtedly hold the heat.
A battered gray Hummer whisked them into the dense vegetation of the jungle. Vines of green tangled up palm trees in various stages of growth. Considerable debris lay alongside the bumpy road.
Adrenaline pumped through him. He looked at the woman seated beside him, her thigh brushing his, and couldn’t help but notice the moisture beading along her face. “Maybe you should have dressed for the occasion, huh, angel?”
The second the words left his mouth, regret swarmed him, but he ignored it. He had to know, he reminded himself. He had a plan, had to execute.
But Brenna didn’t rise to his bait. She just sat there, quietly, staring straight ahead.
The vehicle slowed near an arched entryway, reminiscent of an elaborate resort he’d once visited along the Mayan Yucatan. Three armed guards, clearly Latino, strolled from within a small windowed station. A moment later, after a conference with the driver, a wrought-iron gate ambled to the side, granting them access to the heavily tree-lined road.
The compound came into sight five minutes later. Large,
Mediterranean
in design, shockingly white against the vivid azure sky. Just like Brenna had predicted. The massive structure sprawled like a damning nail in an unwanted coffin.
“Home sweet home?” he asked quietly.
This time she looked at him, pierced him with those eerie blue eyes of hers, but rather than condemning, they glowed with a pity that pricked somewhere deep.
“Time will tell,” she answered in that remote voice he was growing to detest. The parody of his own words stung.
“Out,” they were instructed after the Hummer stopped in front of a massive, whitewashed stucco entryway.
Ethan maneuvered from the back seat, instinctively turning to offer Brenna a hand, even though the cuffs prevented him from doing so. She glanced at him and slid past him, stepping into a wash of hot morning sunshine.
Silently they were led through a white marble entryway, columns flanking them on each side, toward the back of the house.
“Wait here.” The cuffs binding their wrists behind their backs were released, two double doors thrown open, and they were pushed inside the sanctuary.
Ethan took only two steps before stopping cold. He saw the wall of windows first, massive, overlooking the beach below, the turquoise waves swishing against sugar-fine sand. Slowly he turned to take in the rest of the room, and a chill quickened through him.
White. The entire room was white—walls, marble flooring, ultra-chic modern furniture, even a sleek baby grand piano. On the wall hung an ornate, filigree mirror. And on a glass table below sat a pewter statue of a jaguar frozen in motion.
And all that hope he’d been denying, the hope that beat against his chest like an endangered bird trapped in a cage too small, shattered.
I can see you in a mirror,
he remembered her saying. He moved across the room now, drawn by the object he didn’t want to see.
“There’s a glass table below it, and on the table there’s a jaguar. A sculpture.
He put his hand to the animal and ran his palm and fingers along the familiar smooth lines, fought the memory. Fought the truth.
* * *
She felt the second the change washed over him. She didn’t need to look at him, didn’t need to see those intelligent green eyes to know he saw what she saw. The room from her dreams. The room she’d told him about. The room he would now take as further proof that she’d been here before, that she was involved with Jorak Zhukov.
“Well, well, well,” he said in that slow, dangerously seductive
The burn singed through her. She squared her shoulders and tilted her chin, refusing to let the hurt, the stinging disappointment, glimmer through. There was no point defending herself. She’d known men like Ethan Carrington before, so hardened by the life he’d lived, so cynical and jaded that he trusted only that which could be seen or felt.
Right now, both condemned.
“You should have listened to me,” she said, and the strength to her words was not forced. “You should never have let them bring you here.”
“And miss an opportunity like this?” His eyes were on fire, not so much with anger or scorn, but with the thrill of the chase. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment?”
Brenna blinked, but the image didn’t fade. The tall raven-haired man watched her with a gleam of excitement in his eyes. He reminded her of an eager kid on Christmas morning. “You won’t have to wait much longer.”
“You know what the kicker is?” he asked, and this time the slightest trace of harshness twisted his voice. “I almost believed you.”
The words landed hard, kicked deep. She staggered back from their force, his touch, not at all understanding the slide of disappointment through her chest. “That’s because you’ve taught yourself to see the truth,” she shot back. “Even when you don’t want to.”
That got him. His eyes flared, then narrowed in on her. Then, God help her, he laughed. It was a deep and rich sound, echoing through the cavernous room. “A man could come to enjoy you, Brenna Scott.”
The flash of heat was immediate, zinging like an arrow down low in her stomach, spreading, pooling between her legs. “I’m not here for your enjoyment.”
Smiling now, a slow and sensuous tilt of his lips, he streaked a finger down the side of her check. “That, angel, remains to be seen.”
Again she stepped from his touch, but the image remained, gossamerlike, just out of reach, a yearning she neither understood nor trusted. “Some things can’t be seen,” she said very softly, very pointedly. “Some things just are.”
He said nothing to that, not at first, just continued to watch her through those burning green eyes. For some crazy reason she couldn’t shake the sense he was enjoying this. “And some things aren’t,” he said finally.
