To the Brink (11 page)

The statement was for her. He understood that she needed some time to get used to "them." He didn't. He knew exactly what was happening, and he didn't need another week, another month, another year, to get things in perspective.

He loved her. It was that plain. That simple.

For the first time in his life, he was in love. Knocked on his ass, ready to slay dragons, filled to the bursting point, in love.

Crazy. It was the craziest damn thing he'd ever heard of. A man didn't just fall in love with a woman over dinner and marathon sex. And yet he had.

He understood, though, that a woman—especially one as special as Darcy Prescott—didn't fall in love with a man given the same set of circumstances. She needed a little time to come up to speed.

Still, by the time he'd lifted her up and settled her over him and she'd taken him deep into her lush, welcome heat, he'd developed some hellish high hopes that maybe this woman would.

"We'll start out with the
conchitas a la parmesana
for an appetizer." Ethan handed his menu back to Madam Jacques.

"And for your main course, monsieur?"

"The whitefish."

'The
corvina a la milanesa
?"
The middle-aged Frenchwoman waited tables and tended bar in the restaurant she ran with her husband.

"Yes. Please."

Darcy had taken him to the French restaurant their second night together in Lima. One could not live on lovemaking and cherry Life Savers alone, it seemed. God knew they'd tried.

The next evening, they'd gone back again. And now it had become a habit.

"And for you, mademoiselle?"

"Ceviche, please," Darcy said, smiling.

"Bon. Tres bon."
Their hostess gathered the menus and walked away.

"What?" Darcy asked with a laugh when Ethan shuddered.

"Ceviche? Raw fish?"

When she smiled and tilted her head like that it lit up her face and did weird things to his heartbeat. "I'm sure you've eaten worse out in the jungle."

"Not by choice." He lifted his Pisco sour. He'd developed a taste for the powerful brandy topped with foam and bitters when Darcy had introduced him to the drink the first night they'd come here together. They'd been back several times since then. And he'd enjoyed several more of what he had since learned was the national cocktail of Peru.

"Salut."

She touched her glass to his over the table.
"Salut,"
she murmured, and tipped her glass to her lips.

And like he'd been doing hourly, he fell a little deeper in love. With her face. With her spirit. With an unflappable optimism that sometimes left him slack-jawed with awe. Most of all, he fell in love with the way she made him feel about himself.

With her, he could forget some of the things he'd done, some of the places he'd been.

And he couldn't get enough of her. In or out of bed.

Which worked out great because she couldn't seem to get enough of him, either.

"So what's a nice girl from Ohio doing so far from home?" he'd asked one night as they lay on her bed, naked and cooling down under the slow, lazy paddles of an overhead fan.

"Following a dream," she'd said simply, and turned on her side, facing him.

"You have big dreams, do you?"

"My parents did. For me. For my older sister."

With her slim fingers tracing a line back and forth along his naked hip she quietly told him about her dad. "He's a big, barrel-chested teddy bear of a guy. Worked—still works—in a Cincinnati tool and die factory. Loves to laugh."

"Is that where you got your green eyes? And this amazing hair?" He lifted a thick strand, wrapped it around his fist.

"Both are my mom's doing."

"She must be very beautiful."

"She is. And she's smart. Yet she's waited tables for minimum wage and tips for years."

"Maybe she likes it," he suggested.

She shook her head. "Maybe. But she works like a dog—Daddy, too. They wanted us to go to college."

"Us?"

"Me and my sister, Delia. You talk about beautiful."

"I
see
beautiful." He leaned in and kissed her. "And what does Delia do?"

"She's a social worker. By the time I graduated, she was already burned out, and she'd only been at it two years."

She shook her head and propped a pillow beneath her cheek. He turned on his side so he could touch her. Couldn't get enough of touching her.

"Made me think twice about what I wanted to do, you know? I still knew it had to be important, something to make the folks proud. Anyway, now I still get to help people but not with the kind of horrendous problems that Delia saw."

Now she helped Americans abroad in her position at the vice consul's office in Peru.

The scrape of her chair on the tile flooring brought Ethan back to the moment. She'd scooted up closer to him so she could take a sip from his drink.

"I hear you do your job well," Ethan said after giving her a hard time about drinking her own drink.

"What exactly is your relationship to Hayden?" she asked, understanding that anything Ethan heard he had to have heard from Hayden.

"I hear," he said, ignoring her question and digging a little deeper to get an answer to his, "that sometimes you stick your neck out a little too far."

She lifted a shoulder. "I do what needs to be done."

And then some. Hayden had related an incident when a U.S. college student on holiday had gotten drunk and rowdy at a bar and ended up in jail charged with theft of property.

"And that includes going into a very rough part of the city by yourself trying to find someone who would stand as witness for a spoiled rich American college kid who shot off his mouth to the wrong person?"

"He was innocent. At least of the theft charges. He could have rotted in that jail cell."

"And you could have been raped, or killed, or both poking your nose into that end of the city."

According to Hayden, if a local
policia
hadn't come along by accident and scared a street thug away, it was hard telling what might have happened to her.

Ethan tensed all over just thinking about it. Per Hayden, Darcy sometimes took too many chances.

"Don't ever forget that you're in a foreign country, Darcy. The rules change drastically outside U.S. borders. Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the Shining Path planted a bomb outside the U.S. Embassy."

The Shining Path was a Maoist revolutionary group with hard-dying plans to overthrow the Peruvian government with their doctrine of killings and torture.

"Since Toledo was elected president, that's not happening so much anymore," she assured him.

"It doesn't mean it won't happen again."

The Shining Path, along with other extremist groups, might have lost a lot of momentum, but there were holdouts. And the holdouts were the most extreme members of the groups.

And God knew Ethan saw the dregs of humanity in his work.

There were so many bad guys out there. They'd never scared him, until now. And now he was scared for Darcy.

"All I'm saying is be careful, okay?"

"Okay," she said to mollify him. "Enough about me. What about you?" she asked, and lifted her hand to fuss with the hair at his temple in an attempt to distract him.

It worked. He let it work. He didn't want to get angry. He didn't want to get all dictatorial on her and start issuing ultimatums about not sticking her neck out, so she'd stay safe.

And he didn't want to wreck the mood.

He shrugged and drifted on the soothing feel of her fingers. "Basic stuff. Three brothers and a sister. Mom's a teacher. I think she plans to retire next year."

"What about your dad?"

"Quiet man. Smiles a lot. You'd like him. And he'd love you. He was Army, too, before he went into law enforcement. Special Ops. Rangers. A 'Nam vet."

"Ah. So you're carrying on the family tradition. Saving the world."

He grunted and sobered, uncomfortable talking about something he hadn't thought about in a very long time. And yet it did make him think and remember why he'd enlisted.

"Yeah, well, that's what I thought when I signed up. I was going to make a difference." He'd actually been that naive.

She sat back in her chair, frowned at him. "You say that as if you don't think you do."

Okay. This was a mistake. He'd opened a door to a topic he didn't want to talk about. Not with her.

He didn't want her touched by some of the things he'd done as an agent of the U.S. of A. Things she wouldn't want to hear about. Things that would drain the blood from her face and erase that adoring look from her eye.

"How about we talk about something else?" he suggested.

It hurt her a little that he'd shut that door. He could see that. And he was sorry. But it wasn't negotiable.

She let the subject drop with a soft smile. "What would you like to talk about, then?"

"How about we discuss that incredibly sensitive spot right... um... here," he suggested, distracting her with a wandering hand on the inside of her thigh.

He loved how she shuddered and went all sultry for him. No games. No false modesty. Just open, hungry desire.

Madam brought their appetizers and he drew his hand away from certain trouble. Although he started to wonder if Darcy might be willing to meet him again for a quick, hot session in the tiny unisex bathroom at the back of the restaurant.

He got hard just thinking about that spicy little quickie they'd shared there last night.

"I don't suppose," he said, his voice sounding so rough that he alerted her to his intentions before he even voiced them, "that you'd like to meet me in the back hallway?"

She grinned. "Once was a little risky, don't you think? Twice would definitely be pushing it."

She glanced over her shoulder as Madam headed back toward the kitchen. "Madam likes us now, but she might take a different view if she knew what we'd been up to last night."

Last night when he'd taken her up against the bathroom door in a heated frenzy of love and lust and urgency.

"Then again, Madam is French," he pointed out hopefully.

"You are a bad, bad man," Darcy said with a laugh as she helped herself to the platter of appetizers.

"And you're just now figuring that out?"

He got the blush he wanted and was certain she was thinking about the same thing he was—a naughty little game he'd talked her into playing earlier this afternoon.

He filled his own plate and indulged in something almost as good as sex. "I don't know what all is in this and I don't care. It's unbelievable."

"It's some kind of shellfish," she said as she sucked one off the half shell with open delight. "Flash baked, not raw," she added when he looked a little wary of the delicacies swimming in butter, lemon wine, and Parmesan cheese.