project I’ve been working on with some of my students. We’ve built this great greenhouse.” She sketched the building with her hands. “Corn. Wheat. Soybeans. Easily renewable resources. And we’ve got a converter we designed…” She trailed off, aware that he was staring. “And I’m babbling. You don’t care about any of this. Sorry.”
Jonah had always hated when she’d interjected her “little project” into dinner-party conversation, even though it had been his idea that she leave grad school for the more family-friendly schedule of teaching high school. The way she figured it, if Jonah hadn’t cared about the biofuel project, then Ethan certainly wouldn’t.
“Sorry,” she said again when he just stared at her. She felt a hot flush climb her cheeks. “That’s not what you’re here to talk about, is it? You want to settle things, make sure I’m okay. Well, I am.” She took a deep breath to quell the taint of nausea at the back of her throat. “I didn’t go looking for you because I wanted a proposal, or money or anything like that. I’m fully prepared to have this baby and raise it on my own. Heck, I’m looking forward to it. If I’m lucky, I’ll meet a man and fall in love with him, and the three of us can make a family, make more babies, have the white picket fence, the Labrador and the whole nine yards.” She paused, then continued, “But that doesn’t change the fact that this baby is half yours, so I needed to tell you about him or her. What you do with the information is pretty much up to you.”
She was babbling again, she realized. Or maybe she was speaking normally and it just felt like babbling because Ethan was so reserved, so remote.
Still standing by the window, silhouetted against the darkness, he inclined his head in a brief nod. “Thanks for telling me. And I’m sorry you got caught up in what happened back at PPS. I just need… I need to take a walk.” He glanced from her to the door and back. “Don’t go anywhere until I get back.”
“Where am I going to go?” she said, but he was already gone, the door swinging shut at his back, leaving her alone in silence broken by the faint hum of fluorescent lights and ventilation, the sense of movement and activity just beyond the door.
Nic sat for a second, not sure how she felt other than sore everywhere, and unbelievably tired.
Well, that was over. She wasn’t sure if she was more relieved or disappointed. She felt hollow, drained of just about everything. Her headache had even subsided, leaving her vaguely restless.
She glanced down, making sure she wasn’t hooked to any machines before she sat up in the hospital bed. When that earned her only a long, lazy spin of the room and a thump of the headache, she decided to try using the bathroom. If she could make it there and back under her own steam, she was doing okay. Maybe even okay enough to go home.
Suddenly, she couldn’t think of anything more appealing than her four-room apartment with the soft Navajo blanket on the bed.
“Bathroom first,” she said aloud. Suiting action to word, she threw back the blankets and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet were numb and her whole body felt disconnected, as though her head was floating along under its own power as she made it across the room, nearly to the bathroom door.
Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw a dark shadow through the window of the hallway door. The shadow paused, then pushed through.
Nic turned, expecting a lecture from Dr. Eballa. “I was just—” She broke off because it wasn’t her doctor. It was an unshaven, heavyset man wearing a white lab coat over a T-shirt, jeans and heavy boots.
He grabbed her before she could react, and covered her mouth with his hand.
Panic spurted as Nic screamed against his palm. She struggled, kicking him with her bare feet and scratching at him with her fingernails. He didn’t react, just held on as she felt a prick in her upper arm, then a fiery sizzle in her veins that quickly faded to cool numbness.
Aware of her surroundings but unable to stay upright, she slumped to the floor and hit hard. He pushed through the door for a moment, then returned, pulling a gurney behind him. He grabbed her around the waist, heaved her up onto the gurney and covered her most of the way with the blanket from her bed.
Then he wheeled her out of the room.
Chapter Three
Ethan walked the hospital corridors with no real destination in mind. He simply thought better when he was moving. He always had.
Nicole’s child might have half his DNA, but he knew as well as anyone that biology didn’t make a father. Character made a man a father. Honesty did, and integrity. Wholeness.
And though Ethan considered himself a logical, honest man, he was anything but whole.
Seeing a knot of people in the hallway up ahead, he detoured down the next offshoot corridor. If he’d still believed in the religion his mother had tried to instill in him, he might’ve thought it no accident that the hallway dead-ended at the hospital chapel. Since he’d long ago renounced faith in a higher power, he thought only that it was a quiet, empty space with padded benches.
He sprawled in one, let his head fall back with a thump and closed his eyes.
Just that morning, everything had been normal. True, the TCM investigation was way beyond PPS’s usual cases, but that was work, not personal. Over the past five years he’d done his best to insulate himself against letting things get personal. If he wasn’t involved, he couldn’t be hurt.
More importantly, he couldn’t hurt anyone else.
“Ethan?” Evangeline’s voice said from nearby. “Is everything okay?”
Though he normally enjoyed her company, his first thought now was oh, hell.
He cracked his lids and watched her sit in the pew across the aisle from him. She was wearing the top half of a set of scrubs, along with her own pants and shoes. Her right arm was bandaged from shoulder to elbow, and a Band-Aid above her left eyebrow was several shades darker than her pale skin. But she looked steady enough as she said, “What’s wrong?”
“Where’s Robert?”
“Why, because you and he are both Neanderthal enough to think it’s his job to keep me under control?” She sent him her trademark give-me-a-break look. “For your information I’ve been treated and released. No hospital room, no observation period. I’m fit and ready to get back into the fight.” She flexed her good arm, showing a decent muscle, but he noticed that she didn’t try it with the bandaged arm. “And to answer your other question, Robert is on the phone with one of his police contacts, trying to get an update on what the crime scene analysts and the bomb squad think about the office.”
“Still, you shouldn’t be walking around alone,” Ethan said.
She sent him a sharp look. “I ran PPS by myself for more than two years, during which time, I might add, I hired you. Just because Robert rose from the dead doesn’t make me incapable of defending myself.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say you were, but your name is on the hit list and your office took the brunt of the attack. You have to be careful. We can’t afford to lose you.”
If Robert had begun to reemerge as the leader of PPS, Evangeline was the glue that held them together. She had drawn Ethan into the organization, giving him the base of support he’d so badly needed, along with the freedom
