Shock Waves (6 page)
Her lips quirked. “Intrigues is more like it.” She tilted her head, allowing tangled blond hair to fall back from her face.
“I
remember
seeing him on
TV during campaigns. He hardly
seemed like the outdoorsy type.”
True enough. To the world, Grandfather Carrington had been an icon of propriety and dignity, of stuffy committee rooms and formal cocktail parties. With his tailored suits and thick head of white hair, his bushy eyebrows and that deep commanding voice, his senate colleagues had insisted he could debate a nun out of her virtue. But to Ethan his grandfather was the man with the baggy old jeans and worn flannel shirts, the one with a wicked sense of humor and a thirst for adventure.
“People aren’t always what they seem,” Ethan said, and the
words jammed against his throat on the way out. He shoved the reaction aside, reminding himself there was a difference between
appearances and evidence.
The evidence against Brenna spoke a language all its own. She knew too much, facts and details that could only have come from one source. One man.
“I grew up in a house with three sisters. My grandfather insisted I needed good, quality, boy time.” Time away from drama and perfume, from giggling and hair ribbons and fights over who took whose earrings. “He’d take me camping, just
the two of us.” And there, alone, deep in the Virginia woods, his grandfather had taught him how to bait a hook and snag a trout,
how to build a fire from rock and stone, which berries
would sustain and which would poison, how to track a wild
animal, when to shoot and when to wait. “That’s when he taught me to read the sky.”
Brenna’s smile grew distant. “My grandmother taught me a lot, too.”
There was an odd note to her voice, one that niggled like the kind of comment made by a witness that often led to a goldmine. “Such as?”
Not so with Brenna. Not now. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
The urge to reach for her, to feather a finger against the nasty
bruise along her jaw had him curling the fingers of his free hand into a fist. “I think that it does.”
She blinked, narrowed her eyes. “Why did your grandfather teach you what he did? He could have rescued you from your sisters lots of other ways.”
That was easy. “Survival,” Ethan said. “Grandfather Carrington believed every man needed to know how to stand on his own two feet, how to survive.”
Her gaze almost seemed to glow. “Survive what?”
The question threw him back in time, to a night a quarter of a century before, when he’d sat shivering on a boulder in sub-freezing temperatures, scraping two stones against each other.
“I’m cold,” he’d said. “Can’t
you
just do it?”
His grandfather’s face had fallen into a gentle frown. “At some point in your life, Ethan Douglas, you’ll find the only
person you can depend on is yourself.
You need to be prepared.”
The prophecy of those long-ago words blasted through him now, as hot and intense as the floor furnace in his grandfather’s
old house. “This,” he said. Everything inside him went hard, but the word came out soft. “Deceit. Betrayal.” He paused, held her gaze. “You.”
Chapter 4
B
renna’s eyes, those fascinating pools of whitewashed sapphire, went dark. “You’re wrong about me, you know. Dead wrong.”
Dead. Wrong. The words twisted through Ethan, wrung him out. He
didn’t
know, that was the problem. And for a man accustomed to clarity, the uncertainty grated at him. Every time he thought he’d secured a handle on her, on the truth, she managed to erase that clarity with nothing more than a few quietly spoken words or a distant, knowing smile.
“Tell me about the compound,” he said, refusing to affirm
or
deny her claim. “You said
Mexico
, right?” He waited a
charged heartbeat before pointing out the obvious. “That’s south.”
A soft sound broke from her throat. “And because we’re headed south, you think that means I work for Zhukov.”
It was the obvious answer. “You said it’s on a beach? Something about a room all in white and a sculpture of a jaguar.” Automatically, his jaw tensed. He knew that sculpture, damn it. More than knew it, he was the one who’d picked out the exquisite piece of pewter.
It’s perfect, Eth! Absolutely perfect! God, I love you.
The memory stabbed deep.
“You asked what my grandmother taught me,” Brenna said, and he forced himself back from the landmine of the past.
“You told me it didn’t matter,” he reminded.
“I was wrong. It does matter.” She paused, pulled her bottom lip into her mouth. “She taught me the same thing your grandfather taught you. She taught me about survival.”
Ethan stared at the bruise on her jaw, the scratch along her neck, and wondered just how far Jorak would go to lay a trap. How many lies he would tell. How many innocents he would destroy.
“You think
I’m
the threat?” he asked quietly. The thought left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Her gaze met his. “You want to believe the worst about me. You refuse to consider the possibility I have nothing to do with what’s happening. Is your world that jaded, Ethan? Is it really so hard to believe that someone you don’t know might try to help?”
The jolt went through him like unexpected turbulence. Her eyes—normally such a translucent blue you could see truths too painful to acknowledge—burned with an accusation that scorched to the bone. It was as if she’d picked up his grandfather’s hunting knife and skinned him in one swift stroke.
“Give me something, then.” The words ripped out of him. Proof. Evidence. Anything. “Something to believe.”
“That’s just it,” she said, and the glow returned to her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want. Belief has to come from inside of you, not from me.”
Ethan just stared. In all his years grilling suspects and coaxing witnesses, rarely had anyone turned the tables on him. She refused to look away, just kept watching him through those burning eyes, with her chin at a defiant angle and her tangled hair falling against her shoulders. She reminded him of a movie he’d once seen, where a woman accused of witchcraft had refused to break, refused to recant, even as she’d been tied to a tree with flames licking at her legs.
“Christ,” he muttered, then turned toward the night. Clouds whizzed by now, high, thin, obscuring the faint glow of the southern stars. She was a complication he hadn’t counted on, a kink in his plan he hadn’t expected. He understood the vendetta between him and Jorak. He knew what was at stake. He knew how to bring the other man down.
But Brenna … her involvement disturbed him in a way he didn’t understand. All signs pointed to her involvement. A messenger, maybe, someone sent by Jorak to warn Ethan what would happen if he didn’t cooperate, to intimidate him prior to the face-to-face meeting. Maybe that’s why they’d bruised her jaw, to prove Jorak gave mercy to no one, not even those in his employ. Or maybe he only meant her as a distraction, a beautiful woman to muddy the waters and blur Ethan’s focus.
The evidence was clear, the facts compelling. Those were the commodities Ethan trusted, the touchstones on which he thrived. But God help him, for one of the few times in his life, he didn’t want to believe.
He smiled bitterly, reminding himself it would take more than a pair of fascinating blue eyes and dire warnings to make him forget the betrayal that had forged him into the man he now was, and the thirst for justice that had consumed him ever since.
“Tell me something.”
The three words reached out of the darkness and lured him back toward her. He turned to find her watching him, just watching, her eyes glowing with the expectation of a defense attorney about to lay a trap. “What would you like me to tell you?”
“Why you didn’t put up a fight.”
He was a man who trained himself for all possibilities, but the gustiness of her request caught him by surprise.
“Back by the river,” she clarified. “You saw the limousine before the men saw you. I was watching. You could have slipped back into the woods, gone the other direction.”
And missed his chance at Jorak, the invitation he’d been carefully engineering for weeks. Months. Years.
“Cowards run,” he said simply. His grandfather had taught him that. VMI had reinforced it. Jorak Zhukov had proved it.
Brenna’s eyes took on that unnatural glow he’d come to recognize. And dread. “And real men stand and fight? Is that it?”
“You tell me,” he said, mirroring her quiet words. He glanced toward the two guards blocking the cockpit door, the MP-5Ns slung across their shoulders, then back at
Brenna
. “Didn’t you say you could see what’s going to happen?”
She surprised him by laughing. “I’m not a witness you’re cross-examining, Ethan. I’m not a suspect on the ropes. You can’t block my questions through questions of your own.”
All by itself his mouth curved into a smile. “Touché.” He’d have to be more careful around her, more aware. She saw too much, shone a spotlight into dark corners he didn’t want illuminated. “Maybe I already have enough blood on my hands. Maybe I’m not interested in amassing more. Too sticky.”
The light in her eyes dimmed. “In other words, if Jorak has you, he’ll leave your family alone.”
The truth, the fact she’d gleaned it from words purposefully vague, proved he had to keep his guard high. “It’s me he wants. It’s me he’ll have.”
“What about your own blood?” she shot back. “Don’t you think your family will care if it’s spilled?”
“It won’t be.” Of that he was sure. He’d worked too hard, planned too long. Nothing would stop him now. No one. Not Jorak, not this woman—with her claims of precognition and those unnerving fairy eyes that seemed to see right through him—and, God help him, especially not the niggle deep inside, the ridiculous whisper that sometimes evidence didn’t mean a damn. “Not so long as I have what he wants.”
“And do you?” she asked. “Have what he wants?”
“He thinks he wants it.” The truth, he knew. That’s what Jorak claimed to want. But Ethan had long since learned the truth could be a gift beyond compare, or a weapon of destruction.
“You think otherwise,” Brenna observed.
He lifted his gaze to hers, let his eyes look directly into the swirling blue that dared him to look deeper. “Sometimes our focus can become so singular it turns into an obsession. All we see is what we want. It defines us, drives us, blinds us to the world around us …
and the consequences.”
“Who are you talking about, Ethan?” She tilted her head, letting the tangled blond hair fall against her cheekbone. “Jorak Zhukov?” She paused like a skillful attorney, let the silence pulse and thicken between them. “Or yourself?”
Ethan just smiled. This woman may have been sent by Jorak and she sure as hell was a distraction, but it had been a long time since anyone had so boldly held a mirror up to his face. He knew better than to enjoy her, the challenge she posed, but like so many other times, knowing better rarely stopped him.
It was like playing chess, one calculated move at a time. The mystery, the anticipation was all part of the pleasure.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“Very much.” Her quiet voice resonated with a strength and conviction that nudged against those defenses he’d hammered into place. “If you’ve let Jorak blind you to the world around you, if you’ve let whatever this thing is between the two of you shape you, define you, then he’s already won.”
They sat side by side in thick, luxurious airline seats, their wrists bound together, their ankles joined. He couldn’t get away from her or she from him. Neither of them could charge the guards in front of the cockpit door. Somehow, though, somehow, with a few well-chosen words, with a penetrating stare that stripped him to the bone, she’d just backed him into a sharp and shrinking corner.
The admiration trickled deeper. “Don’t talk to me about winning, angel. Not after what happened with you and your detective.”
It was just a query, a probe, a test, but in the space of a fractured second the color drained from her face. Even the bruise, that nasty smear of green and purple and black, faded.
He knew that look, had seen it countless times in the courtroom, when he leveled a point-blank question at a witness or defendant, a carefully worded query that forced them to dredge up ugliness they’d worked hard to sequester.
“Whose fault was it?” he continued, despite the sudden sickness swarming his throat. His gut. “Whose fault was it the good detective ate his service revolver for dinner?”
* * *
Brenna went very still. Absolutely, horribly still. One minute she’d had the cunning attorney on the ropes, but in a heartbeat he’d turned the tables. His softly spoken question sliced through the defenses she’d stapled and glued and tacked into place, through the hardened layers of scar tissue, down deep, to that cold, dark place she kept hidden from the world.
Dave Brinker. Young, hardworking, strong. A man capable of great devotion and driving passion, but of incredible acts of generosity and tenderness, as well. He’d been a good cop. Solid. Thorough. It was true he’d cared more than he should have, but victims hadn’t been mere case files to him, they’d been people, with lives and loves, hopes and sorrows, futures. Each one that fell took a piece of Dave Brinker with them.
The edges of her vision blurred. She felt herself start to sway, the dimly lit, obscenely luxurious cabin around her rotate. The vertigo sucked at her like the cold vacuum of time and space, allowing the sludge of the past to bleed through. The punishing rhythm of her heart drummed in her ears. The breath she tried so hard to pull deep stalled in her chest. Her eyes slid shut, revealing the gun, the Glock Dave had always carried but rarely pulled, all shiny and well cared for.
The report of a single shot threw her back against the seat.
“Brenna?”
The sound of her name came at her through a hazy tunnel, distant, warbled, but the image wouldn’t let go. The bitter smell of sulfur crowded in on her, the coppery taste of blood pooled in the back of the mouth. Everything started fading then, the vibrancy, the passion, melding into nothingness.
“Jesus, Brenna. Stop it!”
Light, pure and white and blinding. Seducing. The warmth of it surrounded like a shroud, welcomed.
“Open your eyes, damn it!” The words assaulted the cocoon, reverberating with a life force that rivaled the one slipping away. Something nudged her then, something hard, and with stunning speed the sleek little jet came back into focus, revealing a broad masculine shoulder rammed up against hers. “Ethan?”
He struggled against the restraints that prevented him from reaching her. “What the hell was that all about?”
She blinked, brought him into focus. The lines of his face were harder than before, tighter. More severe. His tan seemed several shades lighter. “What happened?”
“What happened?” Something hot and unreadable flashed in his eyes. “You mean besides the fact that you just checked out of the land of the living for a few minutes?”
It all came back to her then, on a horrible, relentless wave. Dave. His death. She hadn’t sensed it at the time, hadn’t known. No one had bothered to tell her. Certainly not Adam.
She could see it all now, though. Feel it. The punishing hopelessness. The relentless guilt. The bottomless despair. He’d never forgiven himself.
Neither had she.
“My
fault,”
she whispered. The rhythm of her heart slowed, echoing through her, one painful beat at a time. “Mine.”
Ethan twisted closer. “What was your fault?”
The dizziness swirled closer, but this time she fought it, fought the past. Fought the future. Fought the ridiculous desire to feel Ethan’s arms close around her and hold her tight, hear his deep
“The last time I saw him was at my grandmother’s funeral.” He’d stood alone that day, beneath a ridiculously gorgeous oak, whereas the day before he’d stood surrounded by friends and family who’d gathered to say goodbye to his wife of thirteen years. They’d stopped trying for children after three miscarriages, and she’d become his world. The week before her death, her murder, they’d begun investigating international adoption.