Page 78 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year
Suddenly, she couldn’t silence all the sounds she wanted to make and she wanted to cringe with shame, but Ethan gave that low growl again and whispered, “There you go, sweetheart. Let me know what you like.”
“I like you,” Maggie blurted and, instantly, he froze.
As in he didn’t move.At all.
No more kisses or wandering hands, just the heavy weight of him and she wondered for a split second if maybe he was a robot and she’d said the emergency kill code that made him power down because Ethan was completely, utterly motionless until...
The head came up. And she watched him morph into an Ethan she’d never seen before, boyish charm mixed with lethal intensity as he said, “Finally.”
And then he kissed her again, harder this time, taking her in his arms and rolling until she was on top, and for a moment she pulled back to study the face that was too rugged to be pretty and too beautiful to be anything but gorgeous. Like an angel who liked to bend the rules but was still, deep down, one of the good guys and everybody knew it.
A beam of moonlight sliced through the curtains and fell across his face like a spotlight, and a little voice inside of Maggie whispered,Blue, as she looked into eyes that had been a different color almost every time she’d ever seen him—changing, morphing, blending—just like the man himself.
But this was a color she’d seen before. A color she’d seen recently.
“Sweetheart?” Ethan’s hands were still and his gaze was burning as he looked at her throughthe dark. “We can stop. We don’t have to—”
Blue.Something blue.
And Maggie remembered. “We have to search her office.”
“What?”
She was already climbing out of bed, looking for her shoes, and reaching for the flashlight. “We have to search her office. Right now.”
“You searched it already. The notebook wasn’t in there.”
“Not for the notebook! The envelope!” Oh, she was almost giddy. It was the same way she felt right before a plot came together, stars aligning and pieces clicking. “The blue envelope!” She gestured with one shoe and pushed her hair out of her face and tried not to think about how—or why—it was suddenly wild and free. “The day we got here, James brought in the mail, remember? There was a blue envelope in the stack. I just remembered it because it was the same color as...”
Oops.Maggie trailed off.
“As what?” Ethan asked, and she knew it was far too late to change the subject.
“Your eyes,” she admitted, and he gave her his cockiest grin.
“I’m going to tease you about that so hard later, but for now”—he threw off the covers—“let’s go.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Ethan
Flashlight beams sliced through the darkness as Maggie raced the shadows, trying to get to Eleanor’s office before...
Well, Ethan didn’t know what—or who—Maggie was trying to outrun. He just knew he couldn’t let her go alone. She was like a ghost, floating down halls and around corners, toward the door that probably should have been locked at some point, but Ethan had already kicked it open once and, let’s face it, that wouldn’t have stopped Maggie anyway.
Nothing was going to stop Maggie.
Ethan smiled a little in spite of the hour and the circumstances and the fact that this mission had pulled him from a very warm, very pleasant bed.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was standing on a ledge now, not sure if he was about to fall or jump—and no longer sure of the difference. He just knew that when he looked at her, his stomach dropped. It was like skydiving on the ground, and Ethan was half afraid to pull his chute.
By the time they reached the office, Maggie wasn’t running anymore. She stood in the center of the room, flashlight like a searchlight sweeping over mountains of clutter and piles of books and then settling on the little table with its stack of mail.
“There!” Maggie exclaimed, pointing. “See? No envelope.”
“You mean the envelopethe color of my eyes?” His favorite thing in the world was teasing this woman, but she was too excited to even notice.
“It was right there... It was...” She was turning, searching. Desperate.
