Shock Waves (16 page)

At the room she and Ethan shared, a guard unlocked the door and shoved it open. She went inside, followed by Ethan, and then the door was shut, and again they stood alone.

Questions streamed through her, questions she’d intended to confront him with on the beach, without the risk of anyone hearing what they were saying. Who was Jordan Cutter and what would happen when he was brought here? Why wasn’t Ethan acting more concerned? How could he be so casual about everything, when clearly Jorak did not intend them to leave the island alive?

But he’d derailed her first with a kiss, then with questions of his own, and now here they were, alone in this room dominated by a big bed, with cameras recording their every breath.

“Now what?” she asked, turning toward him. The memory flashed in without warning, of the day before—God, was it only the day before? It seemed more like a lifetime. Ethan had looked at her through those dark, penetrating eyes and let her know in no uncertain terms exactly how he liked to kill time.

“More games?” she asked with a cynicism she wished she still felt. But she didn’t, not when every minute she spent with Ethan exposed her to the man he was, not the man he wanted the world to see. The man who’d been hurt and shaped, the man who was driven to stand alone.

“Son of a bitch,” he swore softly. He strode toward the small table beside the bed, where a crystal frame embraced a large, black-and-white photo. Of a man and woman. In graduation gowns and caps. Embracing. Laughing. Love shining in their eyes.

Ethan grabbed the frame and pulled it close, shadows consuming his eyes like smoke from an inferno. The couple in the frame was young. Innocent. None of the cares, the trials of the world marred their faces. Only hope and joy, a thirst for the life ahead of them.

Ethan. The man in the picture was a much younger Ethan. And the woman—it was the same woman Brenna had seen in the photograph sitting atop Jorak’s white grand piano.

“Who is she?” she asked, though deep inside she already knew.

The woman. The woman from the beach.

The woman Ethan would die for.

He dropped the picture onto the brightly colored comforter dominated by orange and yellow hibiscus. Then he turned to her, exposing her to the darkest, most hate-filled eyes she’d ever seen. “Jorak’s wife.”

Two words. Two little words, one piece of information, but they lanced through Brenna like a broken needle. Jorak’s wife.

The woman Ethan loved.

“I don’t understand—” But Ethan had already strode past her, into the sunny bathroom, where he slammed the door shut. Water shot through the pipes seconds later.

Brenna stepped forward and picked up the picture, looked first at the woman, the light dancing in her eyes, then at Ethan, young and ready to conquer whatever stood in his path, an image captured before he’d lost faith in the world. And then she did something she’d sworn to never, never let herself do again.

She cried.

* * *

He hated being played with. He hated being confused. He hated not knowing what the next day, hell, the next minute, would bring.

Ethan stepped from the coldest shower of his life and grabbed a towel, swiped it viciously over his body then slung the terry cloth around his hips and secured a knot. He’d staged the showdown with Jorak. He’d meticulously planned every step along the way. He didn’t give a damn about using himself as bait.

But he’d never planned on Brenna.

Frowning, he glanced at the closed bathroom door, but saw only Brenna as she’d been that afternoon, standing up to her knees in the turquoise water, with the wind whispering through her pale hair and the ridiculously blue sky behind her, the sun fighting with the shadows in her eyes. Fairy eyes, he remembered thinking. Now the analogy didn’t seem quite so foolish.

He remembered her. He hadn’t at first—or at least, drunk on the idea that she was affiliated with Jorak, he’d not let himself remember. But he’d felt a nagging familiarity the first time he’d seen her standing by the James, and now he knew. The clinic. He remembered seeing the woman behind the counter, remembered the way she’d turned from him the second he’d caught her eye. He remembered seeing her in the hall. Remembered how she’d swerved to avoid touching him, a gesture that had only made him all the more determined to brush against her. Touch her.

Now he looked into the mirror and saw his face, not the face of the golden son of Richmond, not the face of the confident, unflappable, celebrated prosecutor, but a collection of hard lines and flat planes, of flintlike eyes and unruly whiskers. But he saw something else, too, a thirst, a hunger, a desire in those narrowed eyes, almost a craving.

It was the face of a man Ethan had not seen in a long, long time, not since the night he’d learned the truth about Jorak Zhukov.

And he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand why he suddenly felt so damn alive. He didn’t understand her story about touching and shock waves. And most of all, worst of all, he didn’t understand the way she twisted him up inside, the burning desire to believe her, to accept the wild story she’d told him, the kind of tale he’d raked witnesses over the coals for saying under oath. It was crazy and he knew it, but the need to touch her burned like an obsession; touch all of her, see if he could give her more shock waves. Different shock waves.

See if he would feel them, too.

Swearing softly he strode to the door and grabbed the handle, stepped into the warm bedroom. “Brenna, I’m sor—” He stopped cold. His heart kicked hard.

“Brenna?” His voice was louder this time, harder, edged with a panic that stunned him.

So lovely … maybe I should enjoy her first.

The words, uttered by Jorak just that morning, twisted through Ethan. He spun toward the far side
of the room, hoping she’d just fallen asleep on the chaise lounge.

She hadn’t.

“Brenna!” He scanned over to the bed, saw the picture of him and Allison no longer lying
atop
the comforter, but on the hard tile floor in a puddle of broken glass. Blood pumping, he searched for other places to hide, dropped
to
his knees and checked under the bed, strode to the armoire and tore open the doors, pulled out the clothes.

Nothing.

She was gone.

“So help me God,” he swore, pivoting toward one of the cameras. “You hurt her,” he ground out, balling his hands into tight fists, “touch just one hair on her head, and you will regret it.”

A sound
at
the door then, the turn of the locks. Ethan was across the room in a heartbeat, wasn’t
at
all surprised
to see a
placidly smiling Jorak in the doorway, flanked by two guards.

He lunged. “Where the hell is she?”

“Patience, my friend,” Jorak said mildly, as the guards rushed in
to
restrain Ethan. “Patience.”

The urge
to
fight ripped through him, but he kept himself standing still. Deadly
still.
“What’s the matter?” he taunted. “You can’t fight me like a man? You have
to
recruit others
to
do your dirty work?”

The
man he’d once called friend made a condescending clucking noise. “You’ve always enjoyed our games in the past, Ethan. What’s changed?”

Everything.
Everything.
“If you hurt Brenna—”

“What? If I hurt Brenna, what? You’ve already given me the information I need, yes? Why should I keep her around?”

Ethan clenched his jaw. The truth burned the
back of his throat. If he played this wrong, his whole house of cards went up in smoke, hideous and black, lethal.

“It’s always smart
to
keep an ace in your pocket,” he drawled with a laziness he didn’t come close
to
feeling. “Isn’t that what you always said?”

Jorak’s smile hardened. “So it is.” He turned and gestured
behind him, then a young woman came forward and handed Ethan a black garment bag.

“For you,” Jorak said. “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Then the entourage was gone and the door was slammed shut, the locks clicked into place, leaving Ethan standing with the bag in his hands and rage clouding his vision.

More games. With hands that wanted to shake, he tore at the zipper and opened the bag, saw the tuxedo. It was black, with tails, European in design, much like one he’d seen Jorak wear years before. At his wedding.

He didn’t want to put on the damn tuxedo. He didn’t want to keep playing, pretending this was nothing more than a highstakes game of chess, not with Brenna’s life on the line. But more than everything he didn’t want were the two things he did to bring Jorak to justice and to touch Brenna again.

“I’m all yours,” he drawled when the guard came for him fifteen minutes later. The thin man with the thick crop of dark hair jammed a gun to the small of Ethan’s back and led him down an intricate network of dimly lit hallways to a wing of the villa he’d never seen before.

He saw her the second he entered the ballroom. The only light came from an army of flickering candles lining the walls and the long dining table, but he didn’t need light to feel relief. She stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with her back to him. The fading light of twilight cast her in silhouette, making her blond hair look darker, the slim black dress look sleeker. She was standing so still, unnaturally still for most people but completely natural for her.

The need to touch and hold, to taste, to protect, almost sent him to his knees.

“Have mercy,” he half swore, half breathed, then crossed to her, not giving a damn about the guard with the gun or the cameras he was sure were mounted somewhere along the ceiling. “Brenna.”

She turned to him slowly, revealing a sweep of soft blond hair falling against her forehead. Her eyes went wide, her lips parted.

Need almost blinded him.

He acted without thinking, touched without caution. He had to have his hands on her, and he did, first her shoulders, slightly red from the glare of the afternoon sun, then down her arms to her waist, around to the small of her back. He was holding her then, pulling her close, running his hands up her back to tangle in her hair. And, God help him, for the first time, she was holding him back.

“If he hurt you,” he gritted out, and barely recognized his own voice. “If he put so much as one hand on—”

“No,” she murmured against the jacket of his tuxedo. “They didn’t touch me.”

It hit him then, what he was doing
to
her, the agony he had to be inflicting, and he pulled back abruptly severing the contact between them. “Christ.” Never in his life had he felt so helpless, and he hated it. But even stronger than that feeling was his desire for her. “I’m sorry.”

Her eyes went dark. “It wasn’t your fault. You were in the shower.”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” he insisted, and knew that he wouldn’t again, not for one single second. “And I shouldn’t have touched you.” Not after what she’d told him, that all it took was a mere brush of flesh
to flesh to
send her into hell.

Through the glow of candlelight he saw her lips curve into a smile, but it wasn’t warm and soft the way he wanted, but hard, bitter. “Isn’t that part of the game?”

The question stung, because it was true. “Not if it hurts you,” he countered, because God help him, that was true, too.

He saw her swallow, saw her brace herself. “It doesn’t hurt me,” she said, and her voice was thicker, like the honey he’d ridiculously dreamed about smearing all over her body. “Not like you think.”

He tried to do just that, to think, but the
haze blurred everything. “You don’t feel anything?” he asked, and cursed the blade of disappointment. He didn’t want
to hurt her, that
was true. But he did want
to make her
feel.

“That’s not what I said,” she whispered, then did something
she’d never done before. She reached for him, his hand, and drew it to her face. “I only said it didn’t hurt.”

He stared at the shadows flickering across her face. They stroked, gently, provocatively, brushing along the hollow of her cheek and caressing her lips, making his fingers itch to trace their path. “So I can do this?” he asked, and did just that,
skimmed a finger along the soft curve of her face.

Her smile was slow, oddly
tremulous. “Yes.”

He was a man of stillness and patience. He’d
taught himself
to plan, to wait, that the sweetest reward came from holding back when he wanted to charge, from denying when he wanted
to
indulge.

But there was no holding back now, no denying, not when the feel of her mouth beneath his fingers demolished everything he’d ever taught himself. Everything he’d ever believed.

“What about this?” he asked experimentally, lifting a hand to the curve of her collarbone.

A low whimper broke from her throat, not of pain but edged with a pleasure that fired his blood. She looked up and let her head fall back, angling her neck and allowing her hair to fall against his fingers. “Yes.”