Free Shock Waves by Jenna Mills Page B

little protest rise up.
    “When was the last time you looked?” The question slipped out before she could think better of it, and in the silence that ensued, seconds passed before she realized she was holding her breath.
    Slowly Ethan turned to face her. She didn’t need him to speak to know his answer, the truth glowed in his eyes, the same faraway look he’d had when speaking of his grandfather. “When I was a kid I saw sailboats.”
    This time when her breath caught, it was for a very different reason.
    Time hung there between them, elongated, stretched to the breaking point. Silence drowned out the silky hum of the jet engine, the low murmur of the guards talking up front. Instinct demanded that she look away from Ethan, break the moment, but curiosity refused to let her. The man … fascinated her. In so very, very many ways he reminded her of Dave, but in other ways he was unlike anyone she’d ever met.
    Touch her, and it will be the last mistake you make.
    She recoiled from the memory, the dream, the strobe-light image of Ethan running down the beach, shouting. Of the woman, her torn white sundress flapping in the breeze. The surging, crashing wave of red. The flash of white.
    The darkness.
    “Brenna?”
    She blinked, focused on the angles of his harshly handsome face, absorbed the sight of him now, sitting inches from her, with his eyes all concentrated and glowing, whiskers darkening his jaw. Alive. “What?”
    “Are you o—” He broke off the question, launched another. “Why was Detective Brinker at your grandmother’s funeral?”
    She didn’t know whether to laugh or clench her fists in frustration. For a moment she’d successfully ripped away something between them, that invisible barrier Ethan used to hold himself apart from others. The doubt that had throbbed between had vanished, and he’d been just a man, she just a woman, comparing notes from a simpler time.
    Now the prosecutor waited.
    “Because,” she answered quite simply, quite honestly, “he held himself responsible for her death.”
    But simple was never good enough for men like Ethan Carrington, and he immediately dug for more. “Why?”
    Brenna looked away from him and stared down at her hands, her nails short and unpainted, her fingers curled against her palm. When she opened them, she knew she’d find small crescents dug into the flesh, deep and red, rimmed by bloodless white.
    Two years. Two years since the lies and the betrayal, the consequences. The aftermath. Two years since she’d held a gun on a man she’d once trusted, a man who stood before her naked and leering, laughing. Two years since she’d raced through the night, run from her car and onto the porch, burst into the house, the darkness, knowing even as she did that it was too late. That she was too late.
    Two years since her world had caught up with her.
    Two years since she’d quit living.
    “When I was growing up, I had a knack for finding things.” Back then, it had seemed like a game, an adventure. A gift. Only later did she learn the truth. “Stuffed animals, jewelry, neighborhood pets.” She closed her eyes, drifted back in time. “My grandmother had a cat. She was a tiny little white angel, with slanted green eyes and little pink ears … only problem was she was deaf. One day we couldn’t find her anywhere—calling wouldn’t work—and realized she’d managed to get outside. Gran was sick with worry. Little Elsie was completely defenseless. We looked and looked and looked, and then I had the strongest feeling to venture out back to an old abandoned shed. Inside I found a broken floorboard, and down below, little Elsie sat, cold and scared and shivering.”
    Brenna opened her eyes but didn’t look at Ethan. “I’d never been inside it before that day. I didn’t even know it was there.”
    Nothing. Just silence, the thick, heavy kind that spoke a language of its own.
    “When I was seventeen a girl in my class disappeared.” Gretchen. A