Bride Of The Bad Boy

Angie braved a quick dip of her head toward the window, gazed into a room furnished in Early Conspicuous Consumption, and saw that it was indeed the white-haired, mild-mannered Mrs. MacNamara who was fiddling with the stereo dials. And she kept fiddling for a good three minutes until she located the alternative station operated by the local high-school communications class. Only when the boom-boom-boom of Nine Inch Nails slammed against the walls did Mrs. MacNamara move to a chair by the grand piano and pick up her knitting.

It’s that damned comet, Angie thought, shaking her head in wonder. It would be passing directly above Endicott in a week and a half, and everyone always said it made people do things they’d normally never do.

Like break into a house one had no business breaking into, she thought further, dropping to her hands and knees to crawl beneath the open window. Like risk the wrath of a malevolent killer like Ethan Zorn to keep her family safe.

Actually, Angie didn’t know for sure that Ethan Zorn had ever killed anyone. She simply assumed that he had, given his line of work. Mobsters were always killing people, weren’t they? Or at least they were hiring assassins or others of such ilk to do the killing. Until recently, there had never been any mob activity in Endicott. Not until Mr. Zorn had come to town. But now there was all kinds of talk of illegal goings-on. Well, some talk anyway. A little. Angie just wished she could pin down exactly what those illegal goings-on were. She was the crime reporter, after all.

She moved around the perimeter of the house in silence, and when she was satisfied that Mrs. MacNamara was in fact the only person home, Angie made her way back to the area below the alleged master bedroom window. Two stories hadn’t seemed all that high in broad daylight. But now as she squinted into the darkness above her, that window seemed a pretty fair climb.

She filled her lungs with the hot September night and released the breath slowly. There was nothing else for it—she had no choice. Besides, the waterspout was so conveniently located at that corner of the building—and directly beside Ethan Zorn’s bedroom window—that she just couldn’t resist.

Gripping the metal spout firmly with one black leather-gloved hand, Angie dug the toe of her black high-top sneaker into the wide space between the bricks and heaved herself upward. Slowly, steadily, clawing first the bricks and then the drainspout, she made her way up the side of the building, feeling oddly exhilarated, like some nuclear-age superhero in a garishly painted comic book.

It wasn’t until she reached the bedroom window that Angie began to panic. Because she realized then that deep down in her heart, she had been hoping the window would be locked and impassive, so that she could scrap this whole silly plan and go home for a good, long, helpless cry. Unfortunately for her, though, the window was not only unlocked, but open wide to allow in the warm, early-autumn breeze. It was going to be a piece of cake to break into Ethan Zorn’s house.

Dammit.

With one final, heartfelt sigh, she reached for the concrete windowsill and swung her body toward it. For a single, brief moment, she hung there by both hands, berating herself yet again for doing something so incredibly stupid. Then she inhaled a deep breath, pulled herself upward and rolled herself over the sill and into the house.

Ethan Zorn rolled his itty-bitty, outrageously expensive car to a halt in front of his rented house and swore yet again that he would never, ever, not even if his life depended on it, fly standby again. It was too stressful, too unpredictable, too plebeian and too crowded.

Of course, he reminded himself, there had been a time in his life when he’d loved crowds and unpredictability, not to mention acting plebeian. But he’d never much cared for stress. Funny, how over the last decade he’d managed to completely banish from his life the things he had always loved, and nurture the one thing he had always hated. Or maybe it wasn’t so funny after all, he thought further with a frown. Certainly, it hadn’t been fun.

He pushed the troubling thoughts away as he shoved his car door open. Then he unfolded himself from inside, arched his body into a long, lusty stretch on the pavement and reached back toward the passenger seat for his briefcase and garment bag. The two items seemed to be his constant companions these days, and he noted absently that both were starting to show signs of fatigue and wear.

Much the way he was himself, he ruminated almost whimsically. But then, in his line of work, men like him never lasted long.

After kicking the car door closed with his heel, Ethan activated the alarm, wondering why he bothered. His newly adopted headquarters—he hesitated to consider the small town of Endicott, Indiana his home—was a place rife with decency and wholesomeness, more’s the pity. But he was accustomed to watching his back in all areas of his life, and wasn’t about to stop now.

His house keys jangled lightly as he ascended the steps and crossed the wide porch, and as an afterthought, before inserting the key into the lock, Ethan tried the front door. Unlocked. Again. He was going to have to have yet another chat with his housekeeper, Mrs. MacNamara.

Of course, Mrs. Mack had grown up in Endicott, so she couldn’t possibly understand what dangerous elements existed out there in the big, bad world. Endicott was the heart and soul of midwestern America, a place where dreams and wishes actually still had the potential to come true.

It was almost laughable, really, Ethan thought, the naïveté and blissful ignorance of this town. If people had any idea what he was really doing here, they’d pack up their children and pets and run screaming for the safety of the shallow green hills outside town. Fortunately for Ethan, he’d covered his tracks well. But then, that was absolutely essential in his line of work. One misstep, and he could be dead.

The front door creaked comfortably as Ethan opened it, and he was assaulted by the unlikely percussion of hard-rock music. Following it to the sitting room, he saw Mrs. Mack sound asleep in a chair beneath her knitting, and the stereo speakers fairly dancing on the bookshelf with every thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of a bass guitar. He crossed to the receiver and switched it off, and glorious silence descended to awaken the elderly woman.

She blinked at the soft light enveloping her like a shawl and met Ethan’s gaze. “Oh. Mr. Zorn. You’re home early. I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow night.”

Ethan swiped a hand wearily over his face and rubbed his forehead hard. “My business concluded earlier than I thought it would, so I went ahead and came back. Everything okay?”

His housekeeper nodded. “As well as can be expected with Bob on the horizon.”

He shook his head. So she had been sucked in by all that comet garbage, too, he mused. That was the only thing about this town that Ethan found disturbing. This comet hysteria that seemed to have been affecting everyone since the day he’d arrived a couple of weeks ago. Comet Bob had been blamed for everything from missing pets to power outages to slow mail delivery. And every time local citizens did something stupid—whether it was speeding right by a traffic cop or getting caught in the act by one’s spouse—they conveniently blamed it on Bob.

“Fine,” Ethan said, dismissing the comet talk before it could begin. Suddenly, he was too tired to berate his housekeeper about the front door, so he ran a big hand wearily through his black hair and told her, “I’ll just turn in, then.”

Mrs. MacNamara nodded again. “Me, too. Ever since Bob was first spotted out there last month, I’ve been completely sapped of energy.”

Of course, Ethan thought, that would have nothing to do with the fact that the woman was nearly eighty years old and had recently taken on the total responsibility for her fourteen-year-old great-grandson, who was, if nothing else, a juvenile delinquent. No way could it be that. It must be Bob who was responsible for her sudden weariness.

“You do that, Mrs. Mack,” he said, keeping his thoughts to himself.

He waited until his housekeeper was out of sight, then shrugged out of his Brioni suit jacket and tossed it over his arm, rolling his shoulders against the pressure of the holster strapped across his back. The big MAC-10 pistol tucked inside had traveled in pieces from Philadelphia in the overstuffed garment bag Ethan had checked for the flight. But the moment he’d collected the bag from the luggage carousel, he had ducked into the nearest men’s room to quickly reassemble it, fastening the gun back in place. He felt far too vulnerable without it.

After loosening his Valentino necktie until it hung unfettered beneath his collar, Ethan hoisted his garment bag over his shoulder, gripped his briefcase more firmly and headed upstairs to his room. As he silently ascended the plushly carpeted steps, he switched his briefcase to his other hand and began unfastening the buttons on his Versace dress shirt, pulling it free of his trousers.

Comfort. That was all he wanted at the moment—comfort and relaxation. He paused outside his bedroom door to toe off his Gucci loafers, and was about to reach into the room to switch on the light, when he heard a strange, soft sound whisper through the darkness on the other side. The squeak of a bedspring, he realized immediately. Someone was in his room, squeaking his bedsprings, no less.

He took a single, silent step backward and lowered his burdens to the floor without a sound. Then he plucked the MAC-10 from his holster and flicked off the safety. The balmy night was suddenly suffocating, and he swiped at a thin sheen of perspiration that dampened his upper lip. Then he stepped toward the bedroom door again, pressed his hand flat against the wall and reached around to flick on the light switch.

As the bulb burst into bright white light overhead, Ethan moved into the doorway with his gun drawn before himself, his legs braced, with feet planted firmly against each side of the doorjamb. He had expected to see any number of people greeting him just as menacingly on the other side.

What he didn’t expect to see was a petite blonde dressed completely in black, standing on tiptoe at the head of his bed with the pillows piled beneath her feet, a position that almost gave her the additional leverage needed to reach the painting of Moby Dick overhead. She spun around at the intrusion of light and promptly lost her footing, falling hard on her fanny at the center of the mattress.

When she saw Ethan’s menacing stance behind the big, black gun, she gasped and slapped both gloved hands over her mouth, as if she were trying to stifle a scream. Her dark eyes widened in terror, but she uttered no further sound. Her body seemed to tremble all over, and her chest rose and fell erratically as she struggled to take in enough breath.

Instinctively, Ethan knew that she had broken into his house for some reason other than harming him physically. What on earth that reason could possibly be, however, had him totally mystified. Although he’d been living in Endicott for two weeks now, he couldn’t recall ever having seen the woman who had invaded his house. Because he definitely would have remembered a woman like that. Not to mention eyes like those.

A brown-eyed blonde, he marveled. He’d always had a major thing for brown-eyed blondes. How very fortunate to find one in his bed now.

When he realized how frightened she was of him, he knew he had the upper hand, and he was helpless to prevent the smile that curled his lips. Tightening his grip on the gun, just to make her even more frightened—and therefore more amenable to answering his questions—Ethan took a few steps into his room, kicked the door closed behind him and reached quickly back to twist the key in the lock. Then he withdrew the key and tossed it carelessly to the other side of the room.

Still cupping her hands tightly over her mouth, the woman watched the slim length of metal arc delicately into the air, and took note of its descent and landing behind the Queen Anne chair in the corner by the fireplace. Her gaze moved from there to the open window opposite the bed, and Ethan could see that she was already weighing her chances with both escape routes, wondering which might provide the best alternative.

Nice try, he thought. He wasn’t about to let her get away that easily. Maybe not at all.

He took a few more steps toward the bed, the slight movement enough to bring the woman’s head whipping back around, her gaze locked on his. She finally dropped her hands from her mouth, but she still seemed unwilling—or unable—to make a sound. And she still didn’t make a move from the bed.

As Ethan drew nearer, he realized she was even smaller than he’d originally estimated, and he wondered what the hell she thought she was doing breaking into the home of a man twice her size and weight. She must love to live dangerously, he decided. So danger was exactly what he would give her.

She remained motionless as he completed his approach, and he had to force himself to stop at the edge of the mattress and not crawl into bed beside her. Instead, he fastened his gaze to the black baseball cap that sat backward on her head, and the spray of loosely curled dark gold hair springing from the opening that normally would have been in the back. Then, as salaciously as he could, he skimmed his gaze downward, meeting her eyes levelly before turning his attention to her mouth, her breasts, her body.

“Well, well, well,” he said softly after completing his inventory. When the woman edged backward to press herself against the headboard, he broadened his smile to bare his teeth, held his gun level and perched on the edge of the mattress. “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” he wondered aloud. “And, more important than that, why is she still here?”

Hoo, boy, Angie thought with only a vague sense of reality. She was in it now. Deep. As she met the gaze of the big, lethal-looking man who had caught her searching his bedroom—because it was way preferable to staring down the muzzle of the big, lethal-looking gun he had trained between her breasts—she wondered what exactly she was going to do now.

Thinking back, she supposed it might have been a good idea to plan an escape route in case Ethan Zorn discovered her presence in his home. But at the time, being discovered just hadn’t seemed likely. And besides, at the time, she’d been too busy trying to decide what to wear.

Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, she thought now.

She supposed, if she tried really, really hard, she could convince herself that the menacing Mr. Zorn wasn’t planning to shoot her. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have locked the door and thrown away the key—it would only hinder him in the speedy disposal of her body. Not to mention the fact that if he had planned to shoot her, he probably would have pulled the trigger by now. So maybe all this business with the gun was just a little something he did to scare people.

As far as Angie was concerned, it worked.

“You’re not going to tie me up, are you?”

The question was out of her mouth before she even realized she was thinking it. She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Idiot, idiot, idiot, she berated herself. Why on earth had she asked him such a thing?