“I don’t know why you’d waste the time bothering, but whatever floats your boat. Be my guest.” She waved her hand in the air as if it didn’t matter to her one way or another.
It did though. She didn’t need her public humiliation rehashed around the water cooler. But she wasn’t all that worried, even though she knew Ethan was an extraordinary agent. He could only find out her past from two people and she didn’t think either of them was going to talk. At least they’d better not.
He reached out and touched her. Just a light brush with the back of his fingers along her jawline, but it sent the desires inside her careening out of control. “Don’t worry, little Beth, I intend to.”
“Why?” she asked, meaning more than his determination to know her past. But why had he decided to start treating her like a flesh and blood woman now? Why did he care about her past? Why had he touched her?
He shrugged. “Like I said. I’m curious.”
The words hit her like a smack in the forehead. Curiosity. Nothing else. He wasn’t touching her sexually. He didn’t feel the sensual pull toward her she felt toward him. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to make an idiot of herself.
She surged up from her chair, stepping toward her filing cabinet as if there was something in it she wanted. “You said you needed something.”
“Yes, Beth, I need something all right.”
The words were like dark sorcery, filtering through her mind and wreaking havoc with all sorts of connotations she knew he didn’t mean. But with a superhuman effort, she managed to maintain her professional façade and answer the question that had him so impatient to begin with.
Chapter 2
Ethan saved what he was working on and closed down his computer system, his movement precise and controlled. Frustrations rode him hard though.
He’d come back from his last assignment with a name. Arthur Prescott. An information broker and the man responsible for the deaths of two foreign agents Ethan had considered his friends. The information broker was American and working out of a small town on the Oregon coast. His home was like a fortress overlooking the ocean, but he managed to keep his thumb on the pulse of high-tech discoveries nationwide.
That wasn’t so surprising, considering many of the nation’s top minds in the computer industry could be found in Oregon, Washington, and California. But the man did not limit himself to brokering deals on pirated computer technology. He had his fingers in pies all over the country and Ethan was determined to see that those fingers got burned. Badly.
But he couldn’t find any way into the bastard’s house or network of contacts. External attempts to crack Prescott’s computer system by TGP’s best hackers had proven fruitless, and for a rich man, the guy hired few employees, even domestics. There should be openings in his organization. There always were with men like this, but nothing was showing up. An-where.
Prescott was one careful SOB, but Ethan was determined to find a way in and when he did, he was going to shut the man’s operation down. Completely. Ethan had no tolerance for people with no loyalty but to their own desires. Even mobsters could be patriotic but not this guy. He was in it for Number One and to hell with his own country and everyone else in it.
He wasn’t even a spy for the opposition. Hell no, he sold information to anyone with enough money to pay for it. Prescott showed no favoritism and he had few friends, but then men like him rarely did. He didn’t have a lot of enemies either, though. He was a broker and the people who bought his information knew that he brokered deals with their enemies and they didn’t care. There weren’t a lot of scruples in the world of espionage.
And this man had even fewer than most. Ethan was damn sure he was responsible for the deaths of more than just the foreign agents. Which gave him all the more reason to want to take Prescott down, but for right now he was hitting one brick wall after another.
Time to go home and let his subconscious work on it while he focused on something else. Maybe he could set up a jump. Isaac had said he wanted to go skydiving. Maybe they could even invite the new guy. Get to know him a little better, find out how much metal he was made of.
Ethan finished buttoning up his office before he stepped into the corridor.
Beth was still at her desk, her curly brown hair falling out of its clip, her lower lip caught between her teeth while she closed her system down. Her movements were hurried and her expression almost furtive.
“Got a hot date tonight?” he asked as he reached her. The possibility that she was going out with the new agent dispelled all thoughts about his current case from Ethan’s mind more effectively than if he’d taken a bungee leap into a three-hundred-foot ravine.
Her slender shoulders jerked like he’d surprised her and she looked up, her soft brown eyes not focusing on him immediately. It was the kind of look a woman gave a man after they’d made love and she was still off in the never-never land of satisfaction. His gut tightened with something he’d worked very hard to sublimate for going on two years.
It shouldn’t be so difficult. She was not his type. He went for sophisticated and usually glamorous…the type of woman who knew the score and didn’t mind the tally.
With doe-brown eyes that sparkled behind glasses she was forever fiddling with, gentle features, and a figure that landed somewhere between Uma Thurman thin and Mae West curves, Beth looked and acted more like the girl next door. She was friendly and warm to everybody, a little stubborn, and a lot innocent. She was the kind of woman who expected marriage and a white picket fence on the other side of hot and sweaty sex, if she imagined getting down and dirty like that at all.
He gave an internal shudder at the thought. Of the marriage…not the sex. His gut told him sex with her would be mind blowing, which made no sense. But he couldn’t shake the feeling. Nevertheless, he wasn’t even sort of ready to start settling down. Free climbing a sheer rock face didn’t make him break out in a sweat, but the idea of getting married would have him breaking out in hives all over if he let it take root.
Beth was a committed kind of woman and he was a no-commitments-but-his-job kind of man.
She was also the boss’s daughter and Whit could be a mean son when riled. He might be out of the field, but he still maintained an aura of hardness an agent of his caliber never really lost. Beth’s refusal to date agents was a well-established fact as well, but that didn’t stop Ethan’s libido from surging in her presence. It was getting damn annoying…not to mention physically uncomfortable.
She had this way of looking incredibly innocent and enticingly sexy at the same time. All the internal reminders in the world that she was not an Ethan Crane type of woman were about as helpful as a taser against an automatic weapon.
“Oh, it’s you.” She adjusted her glasses and made an obvious effort to focus on him. “Hi, Ethan. No hot date…just dinner with my folks.”
If he knew the old man, dinner wasn’t for another couple of hours. “You’re leaving early tonight.”
She sent a furtive glance to the corridor behind him. “Quitting time is five o’clock.”
Was she hoping Hyatt was going to show?
“Not for you. Not usually.” He’d teased her about it a few times, saying she couldn’t have much of a social life if she spent all of her time at work.
She’d always replied that there was plenty of time for socializing after seven o’clock. His lips quirked now at the memory. That was one of the things he liked about her. She might not be sexy in the conventional way. She didn’t exude confidence like a lot of the female agents, or even what he might expect for the daughter of the old man and his politically well-connected wife, but Beth always gave as good as she got.