The Cinderella Mission (Family Secrets #1)(48)
Author: Catherine Mann

He didn’t want to dictate anything. He just wanted to keep her safe. Ethan grabbed the pizza box from the table and pitched it in the trash. “There’s a difference between controlling you and trying to keep you alive.” He gripped the edge of the cool steel sink, his back to her, not that it erased the image of her burned in his brain. “I can’t help how I feel. Mortality has taken a chunk out of my hide a few times too many for me to ignore it.”

He threw his head back, staring up at the vaulted ceiling and drawing in steadying breaths.

Kelly slipped up behind him. Her arms circled his waist, her cheek falling to rest on his shoulder blade. He clasped her hands in one of his to stop her from saying something that would lead to a fight. God, he didn’t want to fight with her right now.

As much as he hated dredging up the past, maybe it would make her understand so he could keep her safe. Ethan reached inside himself to find the words. For Kelly. “I have exactly three memories of my mother. I remember her tying my shoe in the front entry hall. Just a flash of time. Not much of a memory. Then there was another time we sat on a bench at the zoo. We watched the monkeys and pitched peanuts into the cage.”

“Those are good memories to have.” Her words whispered over his skin with warm comfort. “I’m sure she would be glad those things you did together stayed with you.”

“I only mentioned two memories.”

She rubbed her cheek against his back. “I know.”

Ethan turned in her arms to face her. “How the hell do you get me to talk without asking?”

Shrugging, she waited in that Kelly fashion that always started him talking when a seasoned interrogator couldn’t have pried a word from him. Face reality, bud. Somehow, she’d gotten to him, tempting him to share things with her he hadn’t told anyone else.

He tucked her to his chest, his hands rubbing along her back, finding it easier to accept comfort somehow if he was the one touching. “I remember the day she died. I always told people it was a void, not unusual with accidents like that. Then I didn’t have to talk about it. Made sense when I was five. Became a habit later on. No one needed me to fill in the blanks, since it was obvious what happened.”

Ethan buried his face in Kelly’s soft hair, the scent of roses and their lovemaking wafting up, his only grounding in the present.

“My parents always bought the best of the best for safety in cars. They insisted on a shoulder harness seat belt for me, even back then. But the strap on this car came up high against my neck. I remember my mother taking her scarf and wrapping it around so the harness wouldn’t chafe my neck. My mother was asleep in the back. I was excited to be up front with my father.”

Kelly stiffened in his arms, just before her hand snaked up to his neck and soothed small circles against his skin. He felt a tear leak from her eyes, down his chest.

He should stop. The burden was his to carry, and it was damned selfish of him to have sought her out in the first place. But he’d started and he knew his dragon lady would make him finish.

Ethan lifted a strand of her hair and looped it around his finger. “Then there was this car beside us. I always liked driving fast, so I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t really understand until my father shouted to my mother to wake up.”

Staring at the dark strands, he lost himself in their luster and softness. How long he spent wrapping the lock around his finger, he didn’t know, didn’t care, just soaked up the softness of Kelly to dull the edges of the past scraping at his memory. “Then they shot him.” His finger crooked reflexively. “The car slid off the road. Down the mountain. Flipped, maybe four times, until it landed on the roof. My mother didn’t stand a chance.”

His finger numbed, and he realized he’d twisted the lock of her hair too tightly. She’d never winced. Typical Kelly, putting others first.

How much more would it cost her to be with him?

Untwining the hair, he eased her from his chest and shook the circulation back into his finger. One hand still holding Kelly, he stared over her head at his flickering computer screens above rather than face her tears yet. “My shoulder harness held, so I wasn’t hurt. I hung from the ceiling for maybe…five minutes. Five hours. Forever. I don’t know.” His father hung beside him, open eyes staring unseeing. His mother lay below. Already dead. “I remember the smell of her perfume on that scarf with the seat belt tight against my neck.”

He swallowed against the phantom constriction. “Still can’t stand a damn necktie to this day.”

Her cool fingers continued to stroke his neck, soothing the fever in his skin, almost reaching through to the memories, too. “What happened next? How did you get out?”

Ethan dug through the years. He hadn’t thought much about afterward. Of course he’d only been five at the time. “There was snow outside the window, on the ground. I stared out the window at that while I waited.”

He paused, an image inching its way to the surface in hazy detail.

“What?”

Holy hell. “Kelly, there were boots outside that window.” He looked down into her eyes, red and puffy from crying tears over him. Something he’d vowed he would never cause.

“The rescue workers? Or someone come to help?”

He shook his head. “Any of those would have called in to me. No one spoke.” The long-ago crunching of steps through the snow faded. “The boots turned and walked away.”

“Ethan, you weren’t the only one to survive the accident that—”

A beeping pierced the air, drifting down repeatedly from the computer loft.

Ethan jolted. Dread pierced him.

His computer. The security system. Someone had broken onto the grounds.

Shoving away from the counter, Ethan tore himself from the lure of Kelly’s arms and tear-stained eyes. Hadn’t he learned his lesson after Gastonia? No emotions on the job.

A mistake he damned well couldn’t afford to make again.

Chapter 13

Kelly sprinted up the stairs behind Ethan, the computerized alarm cutting through the air. She tripped on the tail of the sheet, stumbled, caught the banister and righted herself.

“Damn. Damn. Damn!” She yanked the satin sheet from around her foot and resumed her charge. Past his bedroom to the next level in the open computer loft. Already, Ethan sat at his desk, clicking through keys. Images on the surveillance screens shifted, flickered, focused.

Outside her bedroom door? Her door clicked closed.