Chapter 14
Kat
Itook longer in the shower than I had to. It was just too much, all that pleasure and excitement and revelation. I had to back off.
I couldn’t believe I had found myself actually wanting to tell him my awful, dangerous secrets. The disaster that had befallen my lost sisters and me.
I’d stopped myself just barely in time. That way lay a whole world of hurt.
I wasn’t going to do that to him. He didn’t deserve it.
No one did, but particularly not this guy.
This delicious, attractive, charismatic, yummy, problematic guy.
He’d been through plenty of hell of his own, just like me.
Which somehow made the barriers between us thinner.
He was sneaky as hell, though. Like an expert cat burglar, delicately picking all my locks, and hey presto, my legs fell open.
And now he’d decided it was his moral responsibility to keep me safe, which was sweet of him, very gallant, but a huge pain in the ass.
That triggered all kinds of territorial animal behaviors in men, which were extremely difficult to manage.
It was up to me to keep my head on straight.
Too late to keep my panties on, though. Oh, well.
God, the man was magic. He could actually touch me at will without triggering my defensive reflexes and getting clobbered. I couldn’t imagine how he pulled it off.
I went into Ethan Masters’ wardrobe, and laughed out loud. That room alone was the size of my living room and kitchen combined. Closets with racks of suits, coats, pants, shirts. Shelves full of gleaming shoes. Drawers full of silk ties. For fuck’s sake.
I found a drawer filled with exquisitely ironed and folded T-shirts, and picked one out. It was wine-red, and very soft. I tossed it on, and the neck slid off my shoulder, and the hem hung down below my butt, but it was perfectly fine for midnight pancakes.
My mouth watered, but who knew if it was hunger or lust? I’d never been so fascinated by a man. I wanted to know him, for real. Even more dangerous, I wanted to be known by him. But this guy could take me apart from the inside out.
It was a disaster waiting to happen. But I couldn’t walk away. Not without some more of this. He’d stimulated my appetite.
I wandered through the apartment, following the tantalizing scent of pancake batter browning in butter. I leaned in the kitchen entryway, enjoying the spectacle of a stunning, muscular guy, naked to the waist, wearing only loose athletic pants, standing at the stovetop griddle, spatula in hand.
“Aren’t you worried about getting burned?” I asked.
He smiled over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t fry bacon like this,” he admitted.
“But pancakes don’t scare me.” He waved me over to a stool at the bar that was an extension of the kitchen island, and piled four fluffy, golden pancakes with perfect, crispy borders onto a plate, sliding it toward me.
“There you have butter, syrup, whipped cream, jam, and Nutella, and sliced strawberries, too,” he said. “Dig in.”
I pulled the plate to myself, inhaling the aroma. “I’m a real basic bitch when it comes to pancakes,” I confessed. “I’m a butter and real maple syrup kind of girl.”
He gave me an approving look. “A woman after my own heart.”
I smeared a little butter on top, and drenched them with maple syrup. The first dripping, fluffy, steaming bite made me practically moan with pleasure.
“Oh Lord, have mercy,” I mumbled. “These are insane.”
And they were. High, tender, fluffy, with a delicate golden crust, and that tender buttermilk zingieness. It was an oral orgasm.
“You like?”
“Oh, my God,” I muttered, around a mouthful of food. “So good.”
“I had harsh critics, and frequent practice,” he said, dropping another knob of butter to sizzle on the grill. He expertly ladled another batch onto the griddle.
“Your little sister?” I asked.
He nodded. “She was a pancake freak. Very fussy eater. We had them a lot.”
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
His eyes lit up. “Can I have one question for every answer that I give?”
“No,” I said flatly. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”
He let out a sharp sigh. “Okay, fine. No bargains. Ask whatever you want.”
“You said you and your brother broke out of juvie and rescued your sister from the basement,” I said. “So, what then? Since you didn’t hurt the evil uncle and aunt, what did you do? Where did you keep your sister? How did you feed her?”
Ethan flipped his pancakes, and stared at them as they sizzled on the grill.
“I got lucky,” he said. “I met a guy in juvie. He put me in touch with this guy in Portland. Renzo was his name. He was a hacker, and he needed crackerjack hackers for his crew. I was good, and Shane wasn’t half bad, either.
So when we got Freya away from my aunt and uncle, the three of us shoplifted and grifted our way to Portland.
We worked for Renzo for a couple of years, until we found our feet. ”
“No school for you, then?”
“Nah. I made Shane go, and Freya. I figured I’d be the only freak. Then Renzo got busted, and that was the end of that. I got myself a GED and once Shane was big enough to look after Frey for me, I joined the Army.”
“So, you hacked for criminals by night, and made pancakes and helped little sis with her homework by day,” I said.
“More or less, but she didn’t need much help.” He flipped the cakes onto a plate. “She’s the genius of the family.”
I shook my head. “The bar must be high for you Masters types.”
He grinned at me. “You want more pancakes?”
“Oh, no, this is fine. I’m stuffed.”
He made short work of his own plate of pancakes. I watched, imagining his teenage self, on the lam, figuring out how to provide for his family at sixteen. Not a whole lot different than how it had been for Raffi, back in the day, with Gabri and me on her back.
Not that I could say anything to him about that. I blew out a sigh, and then nibbled a meltingly sweet strawberry. “We should get some sleep,” I said. “I think tomorrow will be busy. We need to figure out what the hell was going on at the Fletchley Building.”
He murmured at me noncommittally, around a big bite of pancake.
“You want to know something weird about today’s job, at Clemens & Associates?” I asked.
He swallowed his bite of food, eyebrows going up. “Of course.”
“I was freaked out by that job before you even got there,” I said. “Who is Clemens, anyway? He was talking about you as if he knew you from way back.”
“I met him when I was getting a master’s degree in business,” he said.
“He contacted me about his start-up. He wanted me to partner with him on his new cryptocurrency. It seemed interesting from the prospectus, but I had the sense it was shakier than he was saying. Then I met you. And all hell broke loose.”
“That’s odd,” she said. “Because the whole place was just a front.”
“In what sense?” he asked, frowning.
“In a literal sense. There was nothing there. They called me from the temp agency, and sent me there to work the front desk, but there was nobody in the back. I peeked. The place was empty. Empty cubicles, a phone that never rang. The office manager, Julia, was as nervous as a wet cat. I asked about the bathroom, to put my lunch in the fridge, and she bit my head off.”
“That is weird,” he agreed.
“Yeah, considering what happened in that elevator. When I saw the empty desks, I thought, oh shit. They’re running a con, and I’m just window dressing. That guy’s name on the wall, and behind it, nothing.”
“I tried calling Hugh, while you were in the shower,” he said.
I grunted. “He’s not going to talk to you. They’ve got him by the balls. Something big. Gambling debts, embezzlement, selling financial secrets to foreign nationals, kiddie porn. Something awful.”
“You have a devious mind,” he said.
“It was his vibe,” I said. “The stench of sleaze cannot be mistaken. He was also a dickhead. I’m not sorry for him, even if they’re squeezing his balls in a vise.”
Ethan’s phone, which lay on the bar, began to buzz. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Midnight-thirty. No rest for the wicked. Unless this was a girlfriend, doing a booty call, of course. Always a possibility.
He glanced at the display, cursing under his breath. “I should have buried this thing,” he said,” Will you excuse me for a second?”
“Of course,” I said. “Go right ahead.”
He hit the screen and put it to his ear. “Jenn, why are you calling at this hour?…yes, I know, but I was busy…”
I heard a burst of high-pitched yapping on the other end of the line.
Ethan rubbed his brow as if his head was hurting. “Oh, fuck. That lunch with the senator is tomorrow? You’re kidding me. What time?”
Another vociferous burst from the phone.
Ethan rolled his eyes. “No. I’ll do the press conference tomorrow morning, but you need to call the Emory Summit people and tell them I can’t make it for the opening address…
I don’t know, Jenn! Tell then whatever you want.
Get creative. Tell them I broke my leg…no, I’m not mad at you.
I got attacked in an elevator this morning by eight goons, so I’m on high security alert…
yeah. I’m fine, but it killed my appetite for public appearances.
I want to lie low while I figure out who the fuck was trying to kill me…
no, that won’t work. Don’t guilt me, okay?
Not tonight. I’m not in the mood. Ten-thirty tomorrow. Got it.”
As I watched, it dawned on me, what an incredibly public figure this man was.
His money, MasterTech, press conferences, lunch with the senator.
He owned at least six different companies under the parent company MasterTech, and they were launching a hotly anticipated new product, FireGlass, one that even I had heard of.
Pictures and videos were taken of him constantly, microphones were shoved in his face, questions shouted by eager journalists, everyone hanging on his every word.
Women fawned all over him. The hot, charming, genius billionaire.