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.
