The Cinderella Mission

Much more of emotion-tugging Ethan and she’d leave this assignment with a marshmallow heart. “I’m sorry for laughing earlier, about you living with your aunt, I mean. It’s really sweet that you stayed on to take care of her.”

“Take care of her?” Ethan snorted. “Better not let Aunt Eugenie hear you insinuating she needs help for anything. She’s sixty-five going on twenty.”

“Oh, okay.” Was his aunt some kind of socialite poster-girl for plastic surgery? Panic tickled her lungs. She might like herself just fine the way she was. That didn’t mean she wanted to spend the next two weeks with Ethan’s aunt questioning what he saw in such a quiet wallflower. “She knows this is just a working relationship, right?”

“Yes.”

Her panic faded. “Good.”

“But the servants don’t.”

“Servants?” Kelly pulled her gaze away from Ethan and looked out the window. Sprawling houses loomed on either side of the road—brick, columns, even the occasional turret. Plots of land acres large spread between gates and towering homes. With every block, the houses grew bigger and Kelly grew more uncomfortable.

“We need to protect the cover,” Ethan continued. “The servant network is tight in my aunt’s world. We don’t want them wondering and passing along their doubts. If we expect to pull this off, they need to think we’re a couple and we can use the practice.”

A couple? How had she gone from getting over him to pretending to be his girlfriend for two weeks? “What have they been told?”

“That you work for an embassy as a translator. I met you through a friend. We fell for each other, and you’re taking an extended vacation to meet my family.”

The sense of having been maneuvered washed over her and she didn’t like it. If he’d told her this the night before, she would have shot down his plan.

And he probably knew it. “When were you going to tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

Kelly stared out the window and counted passing houses to calm her temper. Of course she didn’t get to count very many since the yards were so darned big. No snowmen littered these lawns like in her Nebraska hometown.

She’d realized he was wealthy. But this neighborhood wasn’t just rich. It was filthy rich. Beyond-her-comprehension rich.

He obviously didn’t have to work. She recognized his thrill-seeking need, but he could have channeled that into any number of expensive hobbies. Instead of swimming with sharks in Aruba, he dodged bullets to make others safe.

Damn. He grew more admirable with each passing Mercedes.

“This didn’t have to be so complicated.”

“It isn’t,” Ethan insisted. “If anything, there will be fewer questions and more acceptance than if I’d just shown up at the summit ball with you. People would have been curious about you, which would attract too much attention. This gives everyone two weeks to become accustomed to the idea.”

“And afterward?”

“We break up.”

Breaking up with a guy she’d never gotten to enjoy. That depressed her as much as the loss of his longer hair, the lost chance to test the length and texture with her fingers.

Ethan turned off the road, pausing at a security gate to punch in a code. Kelly peered through the metal bars.

This wasn’t just a big house. It was a mansion.

A white-columned palatial home sprawled before her. Towering evergreens with snowcapped branches proclaimed age and heritage. An iced-over fountain bigger than most pools perched in the middle of a horseshoe driveway.

All of Ethan’s altruistic qualities aside, he came from a different world. He might as well reside on a different planet. She’d harbored dreams and fantasies about this man for two years, and yet she didn’t know the first thing about him.

No doubt, their break up would be completely believable.

Steering up the drive, Ethan thought through the round of introductions he would have to make—housekeeper, chauffeur, cook. Thought of all the times he would touch Kelly like an attentive boyfriend. Like a lover.

His great plan had a serious flaw.

Too late now. Bottom line, this would protect Kelly on a number of levels. Not only would she be better prepared by his aunt, but Ethan also fully intended to follow through on the plan to teach her self-defense. Who knew what their digging into foreign embassy workings might stir? All the more reason to have her close by where he could guard her.

At least her voice wasn’t tormenting him anymore since she’d started clamming up four blocks ago. The tension emanating from her had increased with the size of the houses. He dreaded the moment she would turn and look at him differently, when she wouldn’t be able to see past the stacks of money to the man anymore.

The house might be his but it wasn’t him, and for some reason it became important that Kelly understand that.

Forget front-door welcomes. He didn’t want her first impression of his home to be some three-story winding staircase and a cathedral ceiling. He sped past the horseshoe driveway and circled around to the back. Pulling into the five-car garage, he parked between his aunt’s Mercedes and the housekeeper’s VW Beetle.

Ethan shut off the engine as the door slid closed behind them. “Leave your luggage. I’ll bring it up later when I take you to the main house. First, we’re going to head upstairs to the apartment.”

“Where I’m staying?”

“No.”

“Your Aunt Eugenie has a suite over the garage?”

“No. I do.” The surprised lift to her brow brought a rush of victory. He’d find his footing with this complex woman yet. “I thought you could use the time to ask any more questions before you meet everyone.”

“You mean questions about how you set me up.” Her eyes probed him with quiet censure.

She couldn’t have already figured out why he needed her here, could she? Heaven help him if he’d been too obvious about the socialite polish.

He reached behind the seat for her laptop computer to give himself a reason to look away. “Set you up?”

“By not telling me about the real reason for coming here.”

He twisted forward with her laptop and lapsed into the foolproof method of answering questions with questions. “Suppose you tell me since you do such a good job at spelling things out.”

“Because even with everything I said yesterday, you still don’t trust that I can keep my head on straight while posing as a couple. So you’ve planned this ‘lover practice’ in front of your servants for the next two weeks.”

Lover-practice. Now that had a tempting ring to it. “Kelly, I’m not doing anything more than I said. We’re here to work through leads in hopes of finding Alex Morrow before someone tortures him to death. And maybe we’ll be able to stop the whole heist attempt before the summit so a room full of people won’t be in danger. And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to make damned sure we both have every tool available so no one gets hurt.”

So Kelly wasn’t hurt.

He ignored the nagging voice that insisted he was already hurting her by not being honest. But he’d abandoned scruples long ago in favor of winning, and he wanted that thirty-year-old file on his parents.

Kelly threw her door open. “Then let’s get started.”

Ethan led her up the stairs, punching in the alarm code onto the pad outside his door before pushing inside. As always, he made a quick sweep through his barnlike studio apartment. He held up a hand for Kelly to stop while he took the six steps in three strides up to his loft bedroom. Closing the door behind him, he jogged up another half set of stairs to the open gallery computer area. Loping back down, he nodded. “All clear.”

“Do you always check your own house this thoroughly?”