Shock Waves (4 page)
Against her face, his hand went still. “
Mexico
.” No sound came with the word, just the movement of his mouth. “More.”
The word hung there between them, thicker than the night. It took effort, but Brenna forced her gaze from his, instinctively realizing how easy it would be to lose herself in the illusion of this man and give him more. Give him too much.
The prosecutor was interrogating her, she reminded herself. That was all. There was nothing intimate about the way he spoke to her, looked at her. Touched her.
Limousines were not part of her world. She glanced around her posh prison, noted the ivory seats were cushy enough to serve as couches. The bucket of champagne still waited. Next to it, there was a small blank screen.
“Go on,” Ethan said, turning her face back to his.
“There’s some sort of compound,” she said, watching shadows play across his cheek. “There’s a huge room with everything in white.” The color of purity—and deception. “A wall of windows overlooking the ocean.”
“What else?”
“Hatred.” The word shot out by itself. “So much hate it’s palpable.”
“I’m there?”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes,
invited the unfathomable image
to return. The hard lines of his face, the edge of
defiance. “I can
see you in a mirror.” Oval and ornate, a silver-filigree
frame. “There’s a glass table below and on it there’s a jaguar. A sculpture,” she clarified. “The animal is running, cast in pewter.”
Ethan swore softly. “And Jorak Zhukov?”
Slowly, she opened her eyes. “And others, with guns.” Guns that would soon be used.
“What else?”
For five nights in a row she’d had the dream, each time the same, only more intense. She never saw more, never gleaned more detail. “He wants something from you.”
“What?” There was no real curiosity in the question, only a mocking insolence. “What does Jorak Zhukov want from me?”
Something he was willing to kill for. Something Ethan was willing to die for. She’d held herself in the dream as long as possible the night before, refusing to let herself surface even when she gasped for breath. “Something only you can give him.”
His mouth twisted. “Why am I the only one who can give it to him?”
“Because you’re the one who betrayed him.”
Ethan went very still, all but his eyes. They burned. His hand fell from the side of her face. He looked deceptively harmless in the faded VMI T-shirt and running shorts, but the energy humming beneath the surface of his skin warned Brenna otherwise. This man was dangerous to her in ways she’d never encountered before.
“Is that a fact?” he asked silkily, and even though he no longer touched her, the words feathered deep. “Just how is it you think I betrayed him?”
Warning flashed through her, but she couldn’t back away now, couldn’t back down, not when Ethan Carrington looked at her as if she’d just kicked him in the gut. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. But, God, how she wished that she did. That was the answer, she knew. The key to the riddle.
His face was a study in hard lines and punishing angles, his eyes penetrating, his mouth, no longer soft and full, but a thin line. She could imagine him like this in a courtroom, staring down the one accused, hoping the force of his glare would intimidate into a confession. “Tell me what you do know.”
Not enough. Not nearly, nearly enough. Somehow, some way, she’d slipped beneath Ethan Carrington’s impregnable defenses and hit a nerve. She’d delivered a morsel of information that fell too close to home. This man, this man who dominated courtrooms like a fierce gladiator dominated an arena, had finally lost the tight grip he kept on the world around him. She’d seen the slash of fury in his eyes, the hatred.
But he’d caught himself. Like a rogue wave frozen before it could crash against the rocks, he’d forcefully cut off the emotion that had gripped him.
She stared at him now, at the glint in his ridiculously green eyes, the shadow of dark whiskers covering the hard line of his jaw, and wondered what in God’s name she’d stumbled into.
“There’s going to be a confrontation.” That much she could tell him. And if he knew, if he was warned, maybe he stood a chance. Maybe he would be the last man standing, not the one who lay in a pool of blood on the beach.
The future isn’t etched in stone.
God, how she hoped. Foolishly, naively, and yet still she hoped.
“In the compound?” The harshness of moments before no
longer laced his voice, just idle curiosity.
“On the beach.” With the sun shining and the surf gently crashing. “You and Jorak, and the woman.” Flora?
Everything changed. From the moment she’d mentioned betrayal, Ethan had been tense, on guard, almost bracing
himself.
Now the harsh lines of his face
softened, the planes of his body relaxed, the glitter of his eyes turned to a gleam. “The woman?”
The question was simple, a mere request for clarification, but Brenna was beginning to realize nothing was simple with Ethan Carrington. He lived in a world of complexity and strategy. Taking anything he said or did at face value would be a grave mistake.
Still, she let the images roll back, tried to bring the woman into focus. They’d been painfully vivid the night before, etched with precision into the fabric of the dream, but the second she’d yanked herself awake, everything had faded from vibrant color to whitewashed pastel. It was all muted now, tattered, more sensation than concrete image.
“The one you love,” she murmured, and her heart clenched
on
the words. That much she knew. That much she remembered. The strength of the emotion did cruel, cruel things to her heart. What would it be like, she couldn’t help but wonder, to be loved by this man. To be wanted. To be possessed. “You’ll die before you let Jorak touch her.”
For a moment Ethan just watched her, very carefully, very pointedly, using silence as she imagined he would leverage it in a courtroom, as a commodity, to make a point or intimidate a witness. But she held quiet, waiting, knowing no matter how frenetically her heart beat, no matter how hotly emotion streamed through her, the ball now lay in his court.
And then he laughed. It was a rich sound, deep and animated and oddly seductive, and it reverberated through the luxurious limousine. His eyes, hard and focused fragile moments before, crinkled in amusement. “You’re good,” he muttered. “I’ll hand you that, angel. You’re good.”
Reality looped around her throat, tightened. He didn’t believe her. She didn’t need to hear the actual words to know the truth. Ethan Carrington was laughing at her, just like so many before him. So many others she’d tried to warn.
So many others who had died anyway.
“Trust me,” she said, squeezing the words past the knot of inevitability. She looked into his face, but saw only the man lying facedown on the beach, the sand no longer pristine white, but stained by his blood, “There’s nothing good about this.”
“They’re
your
dreams,” he reminded quietly. “Not mine.”
She ignored the scrape against her heart. “But it’s your life,” she countered, “whether you believe me or not.”
He shook his head. “You almost had me,” he muttered. With a frown, he shoved a hand through his closely cut hair. “Right up until the bit about the woman, you almost had me.”
There was a note of regret in his voice, an edge she didn’t understand. She held his gaze, looked deep, couldn’t fathom what she saw. Something glimmered in those green depths, a faint light in the darkness, almost like pain.
“You’re wrong,” she said, but knew he would not believe. “I saw what I saw, felt what I felt.” And even now, more than twelve hours later, the intensity jammed in her throat like an army of needles. “There is a woman, and you’ll die before you let Jorak Zhukov touch her.”
What would it be like, she thought again, but aborted the question before it could fully form. What it would be like didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t happen.
He didn’t laugh this time, didn’t react with anger or incredulity, just a bone-deep weariness. “You and my sisters,” he said, shaking his head. “These silly romantic notions.”
The sense of time moving forward, slowly, unstoppable, tightened through her chest. She watched him, focused on those intelligent, commanding green eyes. He was a man easy to admire despite the cynicism that hummed through his blood. He was a prosecutor, after all. Disbelief was his job, doubt the commodity that kept him sharp. She couldn’t blame him for not believing her, and yet frustration ripped at her.
She knew better than to care, than to let herself become personally involved. She knew what lay in store. And it wasn’t as though Ethan Carrington had any desire to be involved with her. The truth of that screamed from every hard, unyielding line of his body. But Brenna couldn’t suppress the thought that a pivotal lie had already been violated.
“Z hasn’t changed at all,” he muttered, glancing at the bucket of champagne. “Sending a beautiful woman to do his dirty work.” He reached across the seats and grabbed the bottle, the two glasses. “Care for a drink, angel? Might help the time go by faster.”
Brenna blinked. “This is all some kind of game to you, isn’t it?” A game in which there could be no winners, not when he thought she was affiliated with Jorak Zhukov. On a rush the enormity of her mistake came back to her, the details he’d coerced her into providing. Not coerced, she corrected. She’d supplied them readily enough, never realizing how easily he’d twist them to use against her. “For a man of facts you sure do have a vivid imagination.”
The light in his eyes burned with an intensity she’d never seen before. “So what’s your role in all this, Brenna Scott?”
He popped the top on the champagne, and the sweet liquid fizzled free. “My escort? A companion? Someone for me to cozy up to and trust, reveal all?” Smiling now, as though he was enjoying himself, he poured a glass and handed it to her.
“How far are you willing to take this, angel? How far are you willing to go to earn my trust?”
Incredulity gripped her, even as heat licked deep. She knew the gleam in his eyes, the dare, had seen it before. “The truth is what it is,” she said quietly. “Whether you choose to believe it is your problem, not mine.”
He poured champagne into his glass then stuck the bottle between his knees and lifted his flute toward her. “To us,” he said in a silky voice, heavy with just a hint of an old-south drawl. “And the woman on the beach.”
Brenna watched him lift the glass to his mouth, watched his lips part, watched him drink deeply.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, meeting her eyes. “Not thirsty?”
Her throat went tight. “No.”
He started to respond, but a shrill sound cut off his words. A panel in the side of the door slid open, and a phone emerged.
Ethan grabbed for it, clicked it on. “And so it begins,” he drawled by way of greeting. His eyes narrowed into deadly chips of glittering emerald. “Jorak.”
Chapter 3
”
H
ow nice of you to remember.”
The voice, deep, cultured, quietly amused, turned everything inside Ethan as hard and cold as stone. He remembered the voice, all right, had never been able to erase it from his memory, not when it poisoned his dreams on a nightly basis.
“Your voice isn’t all I remember, you sorry son of a bitch.”
Laughter rumbled through the receiver, low, ridiculously refined. “Now, now. Is that any way to greet an old friend?”
Ethan clenched his jaw, his fingers curling tightly around the small black phone. Years of bottled animosity burned deep. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the greeting you deserve.”
“Soon,” Jorak promised. “Soon.” He paused, chuckled once more. “Until then, I wanted to let you know the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I hated the thought of you wasting any time mourning.”
As if there’d been any doubt. Ethan looked from Brenna’s expressionless face to the back of the luxurious limousine. A dark shield separated him from the men in front, no doubt bulletproof. Not that he had a gun. Not that he wanted one.
Not yet.
“Too bad. Guess I’ll have to cancel the spray of flowers I ordered. They were your favorites, too,” The memory slammed in, the tall woman with the thick, glossy blond hair, the stunning white dress, the gorgeous pink bell-shaped flowers, And the fragrance. God. He’d never forget the fragrance. “Lilies.”
Jorak clipped out a phrase in a language Ethan didn’t understand but recognized as the other man’s native tongue.
“Ah,” Ethan said, ignoring the wave of emotion. “I see you remember, too.”
A low clucking sound came across the phone line. “She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she?”
With cutting clarity Ethan saw her as he’d seen her that night, lying on the floor, broken, bleeding.
“It’s always the innocent who suffer,” Jorak added. “Always the innocent who pay for our crimes.”
Somewhere deep inside Ethan, something snapped, and the rage roared back, dark, violent, as punishing as if seven years had collapsed into seven minutes. “Not always.”
“You should be thanking me,” Jorak retorted. “I could have brought you in alone.”
Ethan narrowed his eyes, but the past kept pushing, pushing. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The woman, of course,” Jorak said in an enormously pleased voice. “I thought you’d appreciate some company.”
Everything crashed into focus, and Ethan realized his mistake. This conversation wasn’t about Allison but the woman sitting next to him, with her chin at a defiant angle and her fairy eyes shining from an unnaturally pale face. Her tangled blond hair stood in stark contrast to her black leather jacket.
Brenna. She’d called herself Brenna.
“She is striking,” Ethan muttered, and the sickness spread. He’d almost believed her. She’d reeled him in, skillfully, diligently, until she’d made that one crucial mistake, and everything Ethan had taught himself came rushing back. Facts never lied. People did.
“I’m sure we’ll find some way to pass the time,” he added,
looking directly into her eyes. She didn’t look away the way
most accomplices did, just lifted her chin higher.
“Enjoy her while you can,” Jorak advised. “Obey and she
won’t be hurt,” he added, then the line went dead, and Ethan was left staring through the limo’s dim lighting at the woman who knew far too much. “How much is he paying you?”
Finally she reacted to something he said. Her eyes widened; her mouth slipped open. “Paying me?”
“Is it strictly a business arrangement?” His imagination tortured him with images he didn’t want to see. Of Brenna and
Jorak, the many forms of payment a man could provide. “Or is he giving you something else?” Because he wanted to frown, he forced a slow smile to form. “Something more addictive than cold hard cash?”
For a moment she just looked at him, through him. Her eyes, usually an eerie calm, went turbulent, as though she were witnessing a heinous act of brutality. And when she spoke, her
voice was no longer accepting, but laden with a scorn that
punched deep. “You’re not the man I thought you were.”
“The one from your dreams?” he shot back silkily. God
help him, he didn’t want to enjoy this, enjoy her, but the game seduced. “The one who’s in grave danger?”
“The danger is real.”
That was true. But Ethan knew something she did not, something Jorak did not. Ethan knew this so-called abduction was no abduction at all, but a long-awaited invitation. The other man thought he was in control, but the ace belonged to Ethan.
She handed him her glass of champagne, untouched by her mouth. “I believed what I read about you,” she said. “I believed the bit about dedicating your life to truth and justice.”
“And now?” he asked, sipping from her glass.
She pushed the hair from her face. “The man I thought you were wouldn’t attack without justification.” She paused, swallowed. “He wouldn’t condemn me, pronounce me guilty, before announcing the charge, giving me a chance to defend myself.”
Her words, quietly spoken as always, landed hard. Admiration bled through. “You’re right,” he said, ignoring the twisting deep inside. “I’m a
prosecutor. I deal in fact and evidence, how the pieces fit together to create the truth.”
“And just what is the truth?” she asked. “What is it you think I’ve done?”
“You call me for days, requesting a meeting, telling me it’s important. You show up tonight, knowing things you shouldn’t—” The limousine’s speed slowed. Ethan swung toward one of the darkly tinted windows, saw no lights on either side. Wherever the men were taking them, it wasn’t populated. “You tell me Jorak is alive when the government thinks he’s dead.” He checked his watch, found the hour well after ten. “You tell me the vendetta is personal. That something bad is about to happen.”
“Something bad is,” she said quietly.
He made a sound low in his throat, the laugh his sister Lizzie called dangerous. “Depends upon how you define
bad,”
he
muttered as the limo turned right and rapidly accelerated. “The bit about the detective was especially brilliant.”
Through the dim lighting, she blinked. “Dave?”
He sipped deeply from her champagne. “I didn’t recognize the name, not at first.” Just a low buzz of familiarity, the mosquitolike gnawing that he was forgetting something important. “But while I was running I remembered.”
He had her attention now. She’d
even scooted closer, leaving little of the cushy leather
seat separating her black jeans-covered thigh from his loosely fitting shorts. “Remembered what?”
In a courtroom, this is when he would smile, let his appreciation of victory shine through. But he could find no pleasure in what he’d remembered. “Brinker, right? Dave Brinker.”
Brenna did smile. It was a slow
transformation, all the grim
lines and dire warnings washed away by a suffusion of warmth. Like a sunrise, he thought in some ridiculous corner of his
mind. Subtle, unstoppable, seductive as hell.
“You know him?” The question came out on a rush, and
when Ethan said nothing, just watched her, her eyes went wide.
Dark. Anticipation thickened the cool air blowing against them.
“What? What aren’t you telling me?”
Ethan let out a rough breath, not at all
sure why he suddenly
felt like a man about to utter the death sentence in front of a criminal’s entire family. “I know him,” he said, and the hoarseness to his voice caught him by surprise. “I knew him.”
The light, the color and vitality, the hope, drained from her face. “Knew?”
That twist inside, the one he’d felt earlier, the one he was
working to ignore, tightened another notch. “Are you saying you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“That your good detective swallowed the barrel of his service revolver six months ago.” The second the words left his
mouth, sickness slid from the back of his throat to his
stomach.
He’d spat the words like a skillful counterattack, but shame quickly filled the void. He found no glory in recounting the other man’s tragic death.
Her lips parted. “No,” she whispered. “That can’t be.”
“Why would I lie?” Compassion welled up, pushed hard, but he shoved it aside. Truth came in facts. Not emotions. “According to courthouse gossip, Brinker resigned the force then went to
For a moment Brenna did nothing, said nothing. She just stared at him through the darkness, her fairy blue eyes horribly dark against her face. Tangled hair fell against her cheeks, but she made no move to push it back. She just stared, like he’d reached inside her chest and crushed her heart.
Her hand moved first, her right hand, slowly lifting to trace a sign of the cross, from her forehead down to her chest, to her left side, then right. Then her fingers returned to close around the weathered cross dangling between her breasts, and her eyes, still dark but no longer empty, drenched in an emotion that looked damningly real, slowly closed.
“No.” The word didn’t even qualify as a whisper. The sound was too raw. Too broken. “It wasn’t his fault.”
He touched her without thinking. His hand found her face, eased the hair from her alarmingly cold, impossibly soft cheek. She opened her eyes, pierced him with a look of such intensity
it zapped him
somewhere deep
inside.
That should have made him pull back. He knew it was a mistake even as he slid his index finger toward the bruised flesh beneath her eye, even as he
swiped the single
tear.
“What, Brenna?” He tried for the prosecutor’s voice, but found only that of the man. “What wasn’t his fault?”
* * *
She couldn’t breathe. Brenna braced herself for the onslaught, the blinding rush, but found only the voice, quieter than before. Not the prosecutor’s voice, but the man’s voice.
The man from her dreams.
Through the semidarkness of the limousine, the longing
swept in. The drowning sensation curled through her like one of those evocative mists rolling off the river, seeping clear through to her heart. She knew she should push him away, end his touch, dismiss the sensation. But for a moment, God, just for a moment, she sat there with her eyes closed, breathing deeply.
From the second Ethan Carrington had regained consciousness, his voice had
been hard, accusing. But now his touch was
soft, and in it she felt a humanity at odds with the accusations he’d hurled at her. His fingers whispered across the soft flesh beneath her eyes, rubbing away the evidence of her grief.
Six months. She couldn’t believe it.
Six months.
That
would have been April. The two-year anniversary. She’d thought about calling him that week, touching base. But she hadn’t. She’d decided to leave the past in the past, not drag up memories best left dead and buried.
Another wave of emotion rolled over her, but she fought it. Detective Dave Brinker had believed in her when no one else
had, trusted her when no one else would. In return, she’d
helped him locate missing children, track a killer. Months had passed since she’d talked to the man. Years. She could still see him as he’d stood that last day, a solitary figure in a black trench coat beneath the leafy branches of an old oak.
“Brenna?” Ethan’s voice, warm, quiet. “Do you know why
Detective Brinker committed suicide?”
Emotion knotted her throat. What would it be like, she wondered, to just let go. To quit trying to hold all those broken
edges jammed together, to trust the subtle persuasion she felt in Ethan’s touch?
Trust me, Brenna, baby. Trust me.
She stiffened at the memory. “Adam.” The name stuck in the back of her throat, like bile.
Recognition flared in Ethan’s eyes. The warmth of his breath fanned over her, but no longer did it fight the chill. The truth drilled too deeply. “The partner?”
“Some people called him that.” And Brenna, God, she’d called him so much more.
The old rage stabbed deep, the frustration of being convicted without a trial. She looked into Ethan’s eyes, drenched with a concern she knew better than to trust, not after the way he’d been grilling her. Not after the accusations he’d launched. And she knew. God help her, she knew she’d been a fool to turn to a man of fact again, when all she had was feeling. She’d made that mistake before with Adam.
Very efficiently she lifted a hand to Ethan’s wrist and moved his arm away from her. If her body mourned for his touch, his warmth, she ignored that.
“You think I’m working for Jorak Zhukov,” she reminded and disappointment lashed like the willow branch her grandpappy had once used to punish her.
“You think he paid me to lure you into a trap.”
