Cut and Run (2 page)

At Ethan’s stare, she gave an awkward shrug. “So, in a few weeks, it’ll be a year for us.”

Shit. A year already? His track record with previous women he’d known had been measured in days and weeks. Yet he’d been with Tori for almost twelve easy, pretty fucking fabulous months.

Tori searched his gaze. “You didn’t remember?”

“I remember everything about that night,” Ethan said. And he did.

He hadn’t been looking for a date that Saint Patty’s night in Portland. Alone, he’d been enjoying a pint of Guinness at a decent Irish pub off the main drag that wasn’t stuffed to the rafters with tourists.

Just about the time he was thinking of heading home to his rented studio apartment, his eye had been drawn to a pretty, petite blond who’d come in with a gaggle of girlfriends.

He’d debated with himself for half an hour about going over to talk to her. And then things started getting rowdy in the pub. Ethan’s senses had prickled with the realization that Tori was in the direct path of an oncoming brawl.

Minutes before the full weight of a three-hundred-pound drunk could plow into the stool she occupied at the bar, Ethan strode over and asked her to dance.

When the fight eventually broke out exactly as he’d seen it happen in his mind, he was watching Tori swivel and sway in front of him while he sported a raging hard-on and U2 sang about “Mysterious Ways.”

Before the song was over, Ethan had asked for Tori’s number. Instead, she’d taken him home to her bungalow for a night of unforgettable sex.

He hadn’t looked at another woman since.

He gazed at her now, and dropped a kiss on her parted lips. “That was a very good night.”

“It’s been a very good year, don’t you think?”

“The best,” he said, bending lower to nuzzle her soft neck.

“I’m glad you think so too.” She drew back from him with a smile, but there was a deeper question in her eyes. “I guess I’ve been thinking that since you spend almost every night here anyway, maybe we should make things a bit more official. I’ve been thinking that maybe you should let your apartment go and move in with me.”

His lungs seized up. He had a hundred excuses for why that was a terrible idea—an impossible one—but nothing came out of his mouth.

Tori rolled her eyes and smacked her palm against his bare chest. “Don’t look so shell-shocked. I’m not asking you to marry me, I just thought we could live in sin for a while.” She tilted her head and gave a sweet little shrug. “Or maybe for longer than a while.”

God, he was a jackass. She looked so earnest, so open and vulnerable. So trusting.

He should never have let things go this far, this long. “Tori, I don’t think—”

“You don’t have to give me an answer now,” she blurted. “I know you like your space, and I know you don’t make impulsive decisions. So, just take some time and consider it, okay?”

She leaned into him as she spoke, and before he realized what she was doing, she’d slipped her hand down from his chest to inside the loose waistband of his jeans. She homed in on his cock and held him in her warm grasp, stroking him just the way he liked it.

A hissed curse leaked out of him as his flesh turned to granite under her touch.

She kissed him full and deep on the mouth, then drew back with a sultry smile. “We can talk some more over breakfast. In the meantime, I’ll be in the shower, in case you’d like to discuss my offer in greater detail right now.”

She unfastened the single button that held his shirt together over her naked body. Then she shrugged out of it and let it drop to the kitchen floor as she pivoted and began an unrushed walk away from him.

Damn, but the sight of her made him hot. He groaned as he watched her rounded bare ass retreat toward the bungalow’s bathroom.

“Ah, fuck the french toast,” he muttered, primed to leap after her in hungered pursuit.

But as he moved, his arm caught the egg carton on the countertop and sent it crashing to the floor. Yellow yolks leaked out onto the tiles.

Ethan swore and grabbed for the roll of paper towels, tearing off a few to clean up the mess.

Then he froze.

Because at that same instant, a voice speared into his mind. The psychic call delivered a single, unmistakable message…

Phoenix down.

Ethan stood there, his blood running cold, his brain snapped into immediate and total focus.

He’d known this moment could arrive at any time. He knew it, dreaded it.

Believed in some naive corner of his existence that it might never come.

But the signal was irrefutable.

Phoenix down.

It meant one thing. The program he belonged to was compromised. Its director and possibly any number of Ethan’s fellow Phoenix agents were dead, or soon to be.

And so was he, if he didn’t act now.

Henry Sheppard’s instructions had been plain enough, should he ever have to issue the distress call to the untold number of men who belonged to the secret government ESP program.

Assume the worst.

Cut all ties.

Trust no one.

Leave everything behind and run.

Ethan’s life—the cover he’d been living for the past two years—was over. That man was dead now.

As for his time with Tori, it was over too. Right here and now. No explanations. No goodbyes.

He could afford neither, and she would be safer knowing nothing.

She would be safer hating him for what he was about to do.

Ethan stared down at the broken eggs at his feet. From the other end of the hallway, the shower hissed softly behind the sweet, off-key tune of Tori’s singing as she waited for him to join her.

Regret put a raw ache in his chest, but the agent Ethan had been trained to be pushed the emotion aside. There was no time for it. There was a good chance he and the others like him were already being hunted.

He dropped the paper towels on the counter, then reached down to retrieve his shirt from where Tori had let it fall. He put it on, inhaling the scent of her on the white cotton as he buttoned it up.

It was the last breath he’d take of her. The last moment he would know as her lover.

Grabbing his boots and coat from the kitchen’s back door, he quickly slipped them on.

Then he walked out of the house and into the light flurry of morning snowfall without a single backward glance, leaving Ethan Jones and everything that man cared about behind him.

2

Seattle, Washington

Present day

Ethan had picked up a tail about a block away from the hostel where he was staying since he’d arrived in the city less than two weeks ago.

Dressed in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, lug-soled boots and a navy blue windbreaker, the man shadowing him didn’t exactly blend in with the summer crowd of tourists and hipsters down near the waterfront.

He didn’t seem concerned with blending in. His balding scalp was shaved close to the knobby block of his skull, and behind the dark sunglasses that hid his eyes, the assassin’s focus was rooted entirely on Ethan.

Blatantly, he followed Ethan into a packed restaurant on Western Avenue, not far from the bustling Pike Place Market.

The noontime crowd was thick and noisy, the air inside Etta’s aromatic with the smell of grilled seafood, interesting spices and hoppy microbrews.

While Ethan was shown to the last open booth in the dining room to the right of the door, his pursuer parked on a stool at the end of the long bar counter at the opposite side of the restaurant. Ethan didn’t miss the subtle glance in his direction as the man was greeted by the bartender and handed a menu.

This wasn’t the first time Ethan had been hunted in the three years following the demise of the Phoenix program. Another assassin had found him last summer in Kansas City, where Ethan had taken a job with a landscaping firm.

It was an inconvenient quirk of his ESP ability that his premonitions never told him when he was in harm’s way.

The day the sniper had him in his sights in the affluent suburban neighborhood in Missouri, Ethan hadn’t even realized he was in danger until he bent to clear a jam on his weed whacker and a bullet zipped over his head, missing him by a fraction of an inch.

He’d dropped everything then and there, and started running. He’d cut an uneven path across the country in the year since, never staying put for more than a few weeks at a time.

Cash and carry. No questions asked, and no truths given. That was his mode of operation now.

No strings, no complications. And definitely no emotions. He’d learned that lesson in spades the morning he walked away from Tori Connors.

There were days—and nights—his regret still felt raw.

But he’d had no choice where she was concerned. A reality that was hammered home in cold, inescapable fact when he considered the hired killer waiting for him across the restaurant.

Ethan lived off-grid as much as possible, and made a habit of not letting the grass grow under his feet. It had served him well so far, probably the only thing keeping him alive.

He glanced up with a vague smile as a middle-aged waitress came over to greet him.

“How you doin’ today?” she murmured without pausing for a reply. “What can I get for ya?”

“Tell me about the crab cakes. Any good?” he asked, well aware they were the restaurant’s claim to fame.

As his server described the special seasoning and cooking method, Ethan pretended to listen, while in his peripheral vision he studied every physical nuance of the man who’d been tailing him. “Sounds great. I’d like two, please. And a cup of black coffee.”

“Coming right up.”

Ethan settled into the booth, watching as the other man murmured his order and leaned his elbows on the bar. He was trying to appear casual now, watching people stroll past the window. The bartender poured him a beer, but it sat untouched in front of the man.

As Ethan’s server delivered his coffee, he wondered what type of weapon the assassin concealed inside his jacket.

Would it be a gun from this one too, or something more personal, something hand-to-hand? No doubt he wouldn’t be left to wonder for long.

He should have already been gone from Seattle. Usually, he figured it was time enough to move on once he started seeing Tori’s face in his dreams—dreams that woke him with a start, made him wish he was someone else. It happened more often than he cared to admit.

But better that he see Tori in his dreams than the recurring nightmare of fire and destruction that had begun haunting his sleep ever since the Phoenix program went dark.

The flames and melting heat were a premonition; that much was certain.

But a premonition of what?

He hadn’t had contact with any other agents in all this time. There had been no other messages—psychic or otherwise—from Henry Sheppard.

Ethan knew the program was no more. He just didn’t know who was responsible, or who had betrayed and murdered the program’s creator.

Whether the hired gun across the room knew anything useful remained to be seen, but Ethan intended to do what he could to find out. He needed information, answers that might help him understand who he was running from and how far his unknown enemies might be willing to go to find him or the other members of Phoenix. His survival depended on it.

And yes, there was a part of him that wanted something more than that. He wanted to inflict pain. He wanted justice.

He wanted vengeance, not only for the demise of the program, but for all that had been yanked from his own fingers.

When the man at the bar glanced his way again, Ethan decided to put the wheels in motion. Digging out cash enough for his pending lunch order and a tip, he left the money on the table and slid out of the booth.

His pursuer had just picked up his twenty-dollar burger and was about to take a bite when Ethan strode out of the place.

There was no need to look back to check if the man in the windbreaker and dark shades was going to follow him. As he stepped outside, Ethan felt the assassin’s eyes on him from the other side of the restaurant’s large front windows.

Ethan hung a left on the wide sidewalk, heading for the corner of Western and Virginia. Better to take the steep side street, away from the waterfront and its milling crowds, than risk leading his pursuer into the heart of the tourist zone on busy Pike Place.

He walked briskly up the incline on Virginia, certain the assassin would be rounding the corner not far behind him.

Ethan picked up his pace, ducking into the alcove for an underground parking lot. He positioned himself at the very edge of the concrete wall, waiting for his opportunity to strike.

In a moment, he heard the swift approach of someone on the sidewalk. As soon as Ethan spotted the sunglasses and shaved head of his pursuer, he lunged out, driving his elbow into the man’s throat.

The guy gasped at the impact. He staggered, wheezing a sharp breath. Then he lowered his head like a bull on the charge and barreled into Ethan.

The man was a tank, driving him back against the cement wall. Ethan’s breath coughed out of him, his head snapping back, cracking sharply on the wall.

He felt the gun a second later. Cold metal came out of the assassin’s windbreaker pocket to jam against Ethan’s gut. He twisted, grabbing his attacker’s wrist in both hands and wrenching it hard, until he heard the pop of breaking bones.

The gun went off as the man lost his grip, dropping it to the ground in a clatter. As it hit, a bullet shot wildly into the alcove, echoing like a clap of thunder.

Shit.

There wasn’t a lot of time now. The noise was going to attract plenty of attention.

Neither Ethan nor his assailant would want to see their faces caught on cell phone cameras, let alone the local news.

Calling on his years of training in hand-to-hand combat and self-defense at the CIA’s Farm, Ethan repositioned, twisting the assassin’s arm around to his back. He jammed it high, teeth bared in a snarl as his attacker gurgled a curse, face contorted in pain. “Who sent you?” Ethan demanded.

The man groaned, but didn’t answer. He struggled, still in fight mode even though Ethan must have broken his wrist and was halfway to dislocating his shoulder as a bonus.