Page 10 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
“Just... please. I’m asking for a few days of peace, and then you can go back to mocking me and I can keep on avoiding you and we can both live the rest of our lives, blissfully having no respect for each other. Do you think you can do that?”
The cabin that had seemed so lush a few minutes before was suddenly like a spaceship—foreign and cold. Lights the color of amber were shining through the darkness, directing them to the emergency exits, but Maggie knew better. There was no way out but through.
“Can we do that? Please?” Maggie thought she might break under the weight of all that silence, but Ethan wasn’t speechless. If anything, he looked like a man who had so many things to say he couldn’t possibly pick just one.
Then he shook his head and settled on “Yeah. Truce. Whatever you want.”
Maggie turned and watched the lights of the city fading behind them, the dark waves of the Atlantic stretching out ahead. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the man beside her was like that water, sweeping and powerful and beloved. But Maggie had spent the last year feeling like an open wound. She was an open wound and he was full of salt.
“I really do like your hair.”
Colin hadn’t.I didn’t marry some short-haired girl, he had muttered when he saw it, not quite loudenough to prove she’d actually heard what Maggie knew she’d heard. It was one of his greatest skills, like poking a stick through the bars of a tiger’s cage—irritating, taunting—and always protected from the consequences of his own actions.
But Maggie had kept it shorter anyway. A few inches above her shoulders but long enough to pull back because, the truth was, she liked it too.
Ethan went back to poking at buttons and opening compartments while the lights of the city were swallowed by the sea.
“Do you know where we’re going?” she had to ask.
“Nope.”
“Are you...” Maggie looked down at her hands. They were chapped and raw but not quite bleeding. They looked like how the rest of her felt. But for the first time in a long time, there was another heartbeat in the darkness. She was scared but not alone. “Aren’t you at least a little bit curious?”
She could barely make out his face in the shadows. He should have been less powerful with his million-dollar looks off the table, but it wasn’t Ethan’s face that made him. It was his presence. And, if anything, it was heightened in the dark. She could hear him breathe. She could see him shift. She could feel him—thirty inches and a million miles away.
“Whatever happens, I’m with you. Whatever comes, I’m in.”
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzp.The chair slowly descended until it lay fully flat and he turned on his side.
“Hey, wanna make out?” he asked. She glared. And then Ethan chuckled and closed his eyes. And slept.
Chapter Six
“Maggie.” The voice was low and close and almost familiar. Like a dream she couldn’t quite remember but wanted to have again. “Maggie... Margaret Catherine Chase, you’re going to be late!”
Maggie bolted upright and remembered: She was on an airplane. She was with Ethan Wyatt. But she was also possibly (probably) covered in drool, and he was trying very, very hard not to laugh, so Maggie gave him a drooly scowl and told him, “That’s not my name.”
“And a good morning to you too!” His hair was mussed and his grin was crooked as he stood above her, haloed by a bright, clear light. The plane smelled like coffee and bacon, and out the window... “Welcome to England.”
She’d never been because there had never been money, and once there was money there wasn’t time. It was the catch-22 of her life, and she felt a little naive as she looked down at the frosty hillsides.
“We’ll be landing soon.” Peter slid an omelet and a cup of coffee in front of her.
“Thank you,” she said. “Could I have—”
“Cream, two sugars?” he guessed, then gave her a wink. “Already in there.”
Wow. Whoever their mystery benefactor was, he’d done his homework.
“So on a scale of one to ten, how freaked out should I be that these people know how I take my...” Maggie trailed off when she realized Ethan wasn’t beside her.
She turned to see him near the back of the plane, digging in a suitcase and pulling out a fresh shirt. When he grabbed his old one by the collar and slid it over his head in one smooth motion, he looked like an ad for bodywash or body spray or just bodies in general because the move revealedmuscles she’d thought only existed on book covers. Killhaven was making a mistake, Maggie realized, because it turned out Ethan Wyatt looked far betterwithouthis leather jacket.
Which he knew. Of course he knew. So she was going to turn around and stop staring. She had to. Any second now. The last thing Ethan needed was another woman fawning over him, so she was going to turn around and eat her omelet. Yup. She was going to get right on that. But then he bent to dig in the bag again, pivoting slightly.
And that was when she saw the scar—long and jagged, starting at his shoulder and then running down the right side of his back. The wound was old and healed but still angry—as if something dangerous lived inside of Ethan and was still trying to claw its way out. And none of it made any sense.
Ethan Wyatt was smooth perfection and effortless charm. Easy smiles and clever quips. The product of focus groups and Photoshop and at least ten thousand dollars’ worth of high-end orthodontia.
