The Cinderella Mission (12 page)

Guilt pinched Ethan hard as he thought back to the way he’d questioned Kelly’s capability nearly two weeks ago in Hatch’s office. “No. Not at all. She’s been a surprisingly quick study.” Well, hell, he’d be talking her into a promotion into a war zone before long. “I’m more concerned that all these accidents are too coincidental.”

The director steepled his fingers against his mouth. “Do you have direct evidence that your cover has been compromised?”

Even one busted cover could sound a death knell to time in the field. Once word leaked out, he couldn’t work undercover ops anymore. Neither could she.

Then he could have Kelly.

Except he didn’t have the right to steal from her a life he knew she wanted. A life he had been called to live himself. He would resent anyone who took that from him.

A rogue memory whispered of times Celia had begged him to give up agency work, and the risks he’d faced then had been nothing to the ones he saw now in ARIES. Her tender pleadings had torn him in two.

And frustrated the hell out of him.

Ethan scooped Kelly’s blanket from the floor and pitched it in the other chair. “There’s no concrete indication.”

“Well, son, I hate to point out the obvious, but this is what you do. Bag the bad guys. Your job has risks. Taylor knew what she was signing on for. Do you have any thoughts on persons outside the scope of this operation who could be responsible for the incidents?”

“There was a professor who…” Ethan scrubbed a hand over his jaw, steadied his breathing, searched for some of the professional objectivity that had carried him through missions in the past. “Who attacked her in grad school.”

Hatch stared back, no hint of surprise showing in his eyes.

Ethan stopped pacing beside the stone mantle. “You knew?”

A ghost of a smile flickered across Hatch’s face. “I know everything there is to know about all of my people.”

Of course he did. Operatives abandoned rights to personal privacy when they signed on with ARIES. He should have realized the same applied for everyone in ops support, as well. The job might come with certain losses of personal freedom, but it also came with some hefty connections and Ethan intended to use them now. “I want him put away.”

Hatch’s perceptive eyes probed Ethan until he wondered if the old man knew him better than he knew himself. Finally, Hatch released Ethan from the visual interrogation. “Don’t you think that’s Taylor’s call to make?”

“She did what she could. Now I’m going to do what I can. With or without your help, sir.”

Hatch nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you.” A look of understanding that transcended age passed between them, and Ethan could see himself in Hatch, thirty years into the future.

Jaded but not broken. Driven. Alone.

The creak of the water pipes increased until the shooshing sound of water stopped. Ethan turned to leave.

“Williams.” Hatch pushed to his feet. “Is there anything else I should know?”

Talk about caught between a rock and a gem mine. If he told of their involvement, it could look bad for Kelly, especially rough at the start of her career.

Ethan opted for the obvious. The truth. His truth. “I’ve stepped over the line. I’ve become emotionally involved and it’s screwing with my judgment.”

The director’s face stayed blank. “And Taylor?”

Ethan shook his head. “She doesn’t know how I feel. And believe me, sir, she’s not looking for a wedding ring from me.”

A fact that still jabbed his pride.

“Hmm.” Hatch stood. Grabbing a fireplace poker, he prodded the embers in the grate. “And what about you?”

Ethan ignored the question. “I want her reassigned. Let her work surveillance. She’s trained well. But my gut tells me things are off-kilter with this one and I want her out of the line of fire.”

Hatch replaced the poker and faced Ethan. A calculating look narrowed his eyes. “What if I told you I’ll take her off the assignment, but you’ll lose access to the file on your parents’ murder. What would you say to that?”

Ethan swallowed down a wad of regret and gave the only answer he could. “I’d say okay.”

Those probing eyes stabbed clear to Ethan’s soul and for once, he let someone look inside him if it would keep Kelly safe. A log fell, popped in the silence.

“Nice try, Williams. But she stays.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you. That answer told me plenty, as if I didn’t already know.” He closed in on Ethan. “Do you really think I was that clueless about the two of you when I paired you for this assignment? You overestimate yourself, son, and that’s far more dangerous than any out-of-control hormones.”

Hatch backed a step. “You’re the team for this op. People work with partners they’re attracted to every day. Do you
think you’re the only one it’s happened to? I can personally guarantee you’re not.”

Surprise over the rare peek into Hatch’s personal life stilled Ethan for two clicks of the pendulum on the cuckoo clock before he tugged his thoughts back to the problem at hand. Ethan sifted through those thoughts for the words that would force the issue of removing Kelly from the line of fire.

Hatch held up a hand. “Hold on a moment, son. If you push me and I have to move her to another aspect of this assignment, she’s going to have someone else watching her back. Do you really trust anyone else to do as good a job keeping her alive?”

So much for being the most Machiavellian guy on the block. Hatch had him beat by a mile. “You win.”

“No. Let’s pray Alex Morrow wins.” Hatch grabbed his trench coat from the hook and draped it over his arm. He paused at the door. “Williams?”

“Yes?” Ethan turned to look at his mentor, not daring to hope he’d be given a reprieve for Kelly.

“About your parents…you never needed that file from me.”

Ethan frowned. “Sir?”

“Ask your
aunt
about your parents.”

“I already have.”

“Ask her again.” Hatch’s hand twisted the knob and opened the door to the rest of the shop…and to a host of new questions. With no answers. And no closer to getting Kelly any further away.

K
elly swished her feet through the pedicure soak, wishing her worries could dissolve as easily as the scented beads in the bubbling water.

She sat in the spa chair, the mauve and crystal decor a far cry from the Snip and Curl her mother frequented. The bite of chemicals in the air, however, Kelly recognized well.

Adjusting the heat level on her chair, she wriggled to get comfortable. Cellophane wrapped around her hair while thoughts of Ethan wrapped around her mind. She’d been so proud of the way they’d pulled together a comprehensive security plan with other agents and some ingenuity from the Marines.

Instead, she’d missed a basic element. They couldn’t slice away their emotions from the job, and the price Ethan would pay was so much higher than her own if they failed.

The flight back from North Carolina with Hatch the evening before had been blessedly short and filled with discussion of the security measures in place for the ball.

Only two days away.

What would happen afterward?

She sniffled, dragging her wrist under her nose. She wasn’t crying, damn it. All the chemicals from other clients were just stinging her eyes.

Yeah, right. She needed to shut down those emotions and couldn’t seem to find an ounce of the cool distance Ethan had donned since they left the mine. He needed a real partner, not someone playing out a Nancy Drew Nabs a Hardy Boy fantasy.

She glanced beside her to make sure Eugenie hadn’t seen the momentary weakness. The older woman reclined unmoving in her pedicure chair beside Kelly, green cream smeared across her face and a fabric mask over her eyes.

Eugenie had insisted on some serious pampering at Peter’s spa and salon after work, vowing the dank mine air could do irreparable damage to Kelly’s skin and hair. Kelly had almost kissed the woman’s clog-clad feet in gratitude for giving her some much-needed distance from Ethan after a day of terse exchanges at the computer console.

Only two more days and “Cinderella” time would be over. No more dancing lessons. No more torturous seaweed treatments.

No more hot-chocolate chats with Aunt Eugenie.

Aunt?

Eugenie. Eugenie Williams, Kelly reminded herself. Not her aunt, even if she had treated Kelly’s feelings with more insight and sensitivity than even a blood relative.

Kelly scratched a finger along the cellophane twisted around her hair. Even though the thing itched like a son-of-a-gun, she appreciated how Eugenie had kept the changes gradual, giving her a chance to become accustomed to each one so she never felt awkward or exposed. A simple trim and conditioning the first time. This time, she’d opted for layers and a cellophane wrap Eugenie vowed would enhance the color without changing it.

Not bad.

Except she had to spend an hour looking like a creature
from outer space to achieve the effect. Kelly crossed her eyes at her own alien image staring back at her from the mirror across the salon.

A door to one of the back rooms swung open, admitting three smocked workers followed by Peter holding two glasses of wine. Smiling and intuitively silent, he placed the crystal wine glasses beside both women, before turning to instruct a stock boy unloading bath beads.

If only life really was this simple.

It would be. For the next few minutes, she would take the Eugenie-road and live in the moment.

Eugenie swirled her feet in the water with a contented sigh. Her hand lifted and fell to rest on top of Kelly’s with unerring accuracy. She squeezed.

Kelly squeezed back. “What?”

“Just an old woman reassuring herself again that you’re all right.”

Kelly patted Eugenie’s hand. “I’m fine. And I would never call you old.”

“Smart girl.” Flipping the mask up, Eugenie sat straighter. “But I’m afraid I’m feeling my age today. Brushes with mortality in the young do that to a person.”

“The park owner sent up an alarm before we even had a chance to suffer from mild frostbite.” The body heat combusting from her and Ethan had more than compensated for any chill.

“My age provides a host of thoughts on what could have happened on your way down.”

Those awful first moments spent wondering if Ethan had been hurt rolled through her mind in a nauseating wave. Their two hours in the mine would have been so very different if she’d been trapped with an injured Ethan.

Or heaven forbid… She shuddered.

Eugenie’s grip tightened on Kelly’s fingers a final time before her hand returned to her lap. “Once a person has lived through a next-of-kin police notification, she never gets over fearing another.”

“I’m so sorry we worried you.” Again, those moments of fear for Ethan kicked through her mind, painfully, lending importance to a man she needed to get over.

“I never expected to lose my brother like that. And his wife. It was too much.” Eugenie drew in a shaky breath and shook her head. “No. I take that back. Losing Ethan, as well, would have been too much.”

Kelly caved. Maybe it was the soothing effect of the footbath, or the lulling strains of classical guitar, or just the lingering remains of her long-term infatuation, but she wanted to know more about Ethan.

And this woman was the best source of information. “Is Ethan like his father?”

“Good Lord, no. My brother was a banker. I vow the man probably had sex with his tie on.” Chuckles rumbled through Eugenie until the green facial mask threatened to crack.

Kelly couldn’t help but join in, all the while envying this woman’s ability to keep life light, uncomplicated. Happy.

Eugenie’s face softened beneath her mudpack. “But I loved him.”

“Of course you did.” She never doubted her parents’ love even though their goals for her differed from her own.

“No doubt they’re up there in heaven wincing over the way I brought up their boy.” She rolled her eyes, her hands smoothing wrinkles out of her tangerine caftan. “But I did the best I could. Believe it or not, I even settled down a bit. I was quite the world traveler before.”

“As opposed to now?” Good God, the woman must have been a party animal. Kelly smiled as Peter knelt to dump a fresh capful of crystals into her footbath, then the older woman’s, as well.

Eugenie leaned closer to Kelly. “I was a real hottie, too.”

Peter smiled up from the footbath. “You still are, Miss Eugenie.”

“Why thank you, Peter.” She winked, then waited until he rounded the corner into the back room, before continuing,
“He used to have a crush on me, followed me around like a lost puppy. He was all of twenty back then, and I had no inclinations to be his Mrs. Robinson. Besides, I was still nursing a broken heart.”

Kelly definitely didn’t want to talk about broken hearts at the moment. “What’s to stop you now?”

Eugenie’s eyes twinkled with a light identical to the one Ethan used to flash so often. “There’s a risqué streak in you after all. Having an affair with my masseur, who happens to be fifteen years my junior, would certainly rattle the social set.”

“That it would.”

Hair dryers and chatter filled the silence between them.

Kelly watched a woman across the salon whip out a wallet full of pictures and couldn’t stop herself from asking, “What was Ethan like as a child?”

If Eugenie started with matchmaking ideas, no doubt they would be doused soon anyway. And Kelly wanted as many memories as she could store to take with her when she left.

“What was Ethan like as a child? Intense. All motion. Probably hyperactive, slightly dyslexic. A real handful, and most schools didn’t offer much in the way of enlightened compensation for those things back then.”

Kelly churned the new layers to Ethan in her mind. She should have recognized the signs. The way he learned better verbally. Always preferred the computer to the written word. Even the surplus of books on tape in the floorboards of his car.

That the sound of her voice had wrecked his concentration for two years. The heady notion tingled all the way to her wrapped roots.

“Many people at the schools we tried saw him as a troublemaker. But he had the most incredible ability to think outside the box, even then. Yes, his imagination took flight in pranks, but never anything dangerous.”

Kelly couldn’t help but think of how Ethan had orchestrated such an inventive plan for security at the embassy
ball. Wrangling a joint operation with the Marines to implement their nonlethal weapons for use in crowds had been inspired. And using Carla Juarez as a liaison so Ethan remained anonymous added to his brilliance. They might well never have to resort to the back-up firepower in place.

Experience counted and Ethan’s had shown on this mission.

Eugenie reached for her crystal wine glass, sipping gingerly before sagging back into the leather massage chair. “One winter, he slipped out and jammed sticks into all the neighborhood’s electric gates so they wouldn’t open. The next morning, dozens of men and women in suits climbed out of their cars in the cold and glared at my house.”

That part of Ethan, she recognized. Kelly could almost see him smirking from the bushes.

“He never confessed his reason for doing it, but I always suspected it was his revenge against the country-club crowd for the way they snubbed their noses at me when I moved back to Virginia. I’d chosen to leave the fold and they were going to make me work to earn their acceptance.”

The image of Ethan as a child shifted to a youthful avenger, the man who’d taken on the world’s injustices. She couldn’t help but wonder how many other times she’d misjudged his bad-boy actions.

Suddenly, she wanted Aunt Eugenie to stop. The reckless Ethan was much easier to resist than this boy-turned-man she was learning about. But Eugenie was a mama-figure on a roll about her child and Kelly didn’t stand a chance of stopping her.

“He never liked school much. Too many rules and constraints. I tried the best prep schools. His tie always found its way onto one of the statues of saints in the garden.”

The grin cracking the crust on Eugenie’s face told Kelly Ethan probably hadn’t been reprimanded too harshly.

“After Ethan’s third expulsion, I gave up on the formalized education route. I soon realized if I wanted any peace, I had to keep him busy. I hired tutors and we traveled. He
did better with hands-on learning. So I made life one big field trip. Which suited me fine, since then I could travel without feeling guilty for uprooting a child.”

“It sounds like a wonderful way to grow up.” One she herself would have wanted. How would her own parents have reacted to a rebellious child? Somehow she doubted they could have been as accommodating had she been the one with the learning disability.

“I must not have done too badly because he was accepted into the University of Chicago. He didn’t graduate with honors…not by a long shot. But he finished on time from a prestigious school. He’s grown into a fine man, if I do say so myself.”

Maternal pride radiated from Eugenie over the man Ethan had become. Not the grades. Not even his job. But the person. Kelly loved her parents, yet couldn’t help but hope she would be able to model this woman’s parenting style. Someday.

What kind of father would Ethan make?

Images of him building forts with children in the middle of the sculptured garden filled her mind. Sounds of their laughter echoed.

She shut those thoughts down before they could grow roots in her brain. Kelly peered in the mirror at her alien image covered in plastic wrap and hair solutions for a bracing reality check. “You should be proud.”

“I am.”

“I would imagine it’s a comfort that he decided to stay on here living with you.”

Eugenie peeked out of one eye at Kelly. “Dear, you misunderstand. He chose to let me stay. Everything became his once he turned twenty-one. Up until then, I was simply the executor.”

And he lived above the garage? Her interrogation gig took a surprise turn—not necessarily for the better.

She leaned back and half listened as Eugenie rolled out another story of Ethan the Neighborhood Menace. She
didn’t know what to do with all these new images of Ethan. Stories and vulnerabilities—and yes, imperfections—that made him all the more human. Not some bad-boy Adonis dazzling her before he blew out of town again.

This was a man.

And damned if he wasn’t even more appealing in a way that made her envision rings and babies and all those things Ethan insisted weren’t in his plans.

Yet, she couldn’t stop herself from listening.

And dreaming.

Ethan roared into the garage, sliding his Jag in beside Cook’s Beetle and the wall, his aunt’s empty space gaping two cars down. Shutting off the engine, he worked the peppermint stick to the side of his mouth, flipping a second one between two fingers, leftovers from his and Kelly’s day in North Carolina.

Frustration itched through him, thanks to too much unfinished business, first with Kelly, then Hatch’s bizarre references to Aunt Eugenie.

At least Hatch had already reassured him Kelly’s old professor was currently ensconced in an alcohol rehab, so he couldn’t have been responsible. But who was?

Tension stretched within Ethan. Something had to give.

Just as he reached for his keys, the garage door hummed to life, cranking open again. His aunt’s Mercedes pulled into the empty spot.

The passenger door swung open, two very feminine legs swinging out. Brown leather thigh boots wreaked hell on his libido.

Kelly had obviously found her own mark to place on Aunt Eugenie’s fashion advice. She never wore heels, always opting for flats, but in a way that brought a new flash to her clothes. Boots skimmed up slim legs to a dress hem that hiked well above the knee as she scooched out of the car. Kelly stood, her wool coat swinging around her hips.

Why the hell did it take a grown woman so long to stand
and shake her dress back down to a decent length? Kelly swept her hand down the loose-fitting slinky sweater dress. Nothing fancy, but the brown dress had hints of gold shimmering in the fabric when she moved.

And she was moving too much.

Her hair glided with each turn of her head like some shampoo commercial and it made him crazy. All of it. The whole package. The whole woman. There wasn’t anything he hadn’t already noticed before the accessories, but the confidence in the tilt of her chin…