“Oh, I wasn’t aware I was asking anything personal. I just thought I was making small talk.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, but I can see the wheels churning in his head. I have to pinch myself to ensure I am not dreaming. David Kinney next to me . . . having dinner! It used to be a daydream of mine.
Not that I’d let him know it in a million years, of course.
“It’s personal,” he finally says.
“OK.” Sometimes you can’t push too hard, but I’ll bide my time. I’m a reporter after all.
We make small talk for the rest of dinner. I ask him what he does, and he tells me he’s a businessman. Like, duh. He asks me what I do, and I tell him I work at an office. Well, I do.
I find myself relaxing with him. Letting my guard down. And I think he’s relaxing with me too. He’s probably thinking I’m not the ditzy blonde I appear to be, and that I don’t have fangs.
I don’t talk about movies.
Dinner is over before either of us is aware of it. I have eaten more than my calorie ration for the day, and I notice he has barely touched his dessert.
“You must be tired,” he says solicitously.
“I’m not actually.” I want to stay here with him and talk some more. Then I remember I’m supposed to be in convalescence.
“Oh yes.” I fake a yawn. “I’ve been a little tired after the concussion.”
“Jeffrey has already seen to your car. He had it lifted and towed to the Avis workshop in Aberdeen.”
I’m surprised. But then, I shouldn’t be, right? Jeffrey is Mr. All-Fix it.
“Thank you,” I say.
“No problem. It’s under insurance, as you say, and it’s already been paid for under the Avis clause you signed.” He gets up. “I’ll turn in myself. It has been a long day. Would you like Jeffrey to see you to your room, Virginia?”
I like the way he says my name. Vir-gi-nia. So pronounced and enunciated, as if it were a precious jewel on his tongue.
I would like you to see me to my room, Ethan Greene.
“No thank you,” I say, feigning tiredness. “I can go up myself.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow then.” His eyes arrest mine like a promise.
A thrill shimmies down my backbone.
“I’ll see you. Goodnight,” I say.
“Goodnight.”
As I exit the dining room, I’m aware of his scorching gaze boring holes into the back of my head. But I don’t feel creeped out.
If anything, I’m more excited than ever.
8
I wake up the next morning, unrefreshed. I have been tossing and turning all night in my bed, half-thinking and half-dreaming about Ethan Greene. He is certainly like nothing I expected.
He’s better.
He’s more sophisticated, more dignified, and yet . . . melancholy surrounds him like a shroud. He’s shy, and it’s a quality I find endearing.
I rake my brains through all the interviews I have seen or read on him. He was certainly nothing like this. He never talked much in interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. But when he gave them, I remember him as polite but guarded. Maybe a little standoffish, especially with the paparazzi.
But Ethan Greene is an absolute dreamboat. He’s almost like a character David Kinney could have been playing in some romantic comedy, except that David Kinney never made romantic comedies. The characters were not tortured enough for him.
However, he did make doomed romances. Unusual romances.
Obsessive ones.
I wash up, wondering what Ethan Greene is up to today. I put on a V-necked sweater and jeans. My head wound is healing, but the area around it has gone purple. Once again, I arrange my hair to fall in a major wave over it.
I go down to find Ethan Greene. My body bristles with anticipation. For some reason, he affects me more than I thought possible. I want to see him again. I want to be in his company for hours and hours.
I bump into Jeffrey.
“Good morning, Ms. Tremont.”
“Good morning, Jeffrey. Is Ethan up and about?”
“Indeed. He’s out in the back.” Jeffrey points to the open doors leading to a back patio.
I haven’t explored the outside of the house.
Ethan is nowhere to be found on the patio, which opens to a sprawling grassland, bordered by trees and shrubs. This place must be a bitch to maintain.
I wander a little distance, wishing I had brought my walking shoes. I avoid the nettles and uneven hillocks on the ground. I walk beyond the first row of trees and enter a dense tangle. Where is Ethan? I will be doomed to wander around here, never to find him. I had no idea this place was so huge.
Glorious light filters through the trees. I go towards the shine, and I’m rewarded as the scene opens out to a breathtaking vista of a valley amidst hills. The valley is lush with vegetation and scalloped by a bubbling stream a hundred feet below. I wonder if this is the ravine I fell into.
Ethan is seated upon a stool. He faces the valley. He is painting upon a canvas set upon an easel. He looks up and gives me a smile every bit as breathtaking as the scenery.
“Good morning.”
My heart skips a beat. “Good morning.”
I go over to peer over his shoulder.
“Oh wow, you are very good.”
He is. I realize now that all those paintings hanging in the corridor upstairs were done by him. As was probably the still life with the single rotten fruit. An actor, an entrepreneur, and now an artist. Is there no limit to what this man can do?
The scene he is painting is that of the valley, except that he has added details. The landscape is no longer of this world. Spires and fluted towers dot the purple and blue hills. Crafts in the shapes of alien insects, but which are obviously mechanical, swarm across the crimson sky.
The painting is far from finished. It’s still quite barren, but what’s already on the canvas astounds me.
He frowns. “It isn’t quite what I want it to be.”
“But it’s very, very good. You should have your own gallery. I would want to buy this.”
“You would want to buy this?” He averts his head to glance at me quizzically.
“Yeah, if I can afford it.”
I’m being honest. He does really have talent. I’m no art critic, but I do know what I would like to adorn my walls.
“It’s yours,” he says simply.
“Huh?”
“When I finish this, you can have it.”
I’m taken aback. “Oh no, you can’t give this to me. It’s too . . . too much.”
It is. All that hard work. All those days and days of being out here, letting his mind and imagination soar above the clouds – literally.
“Oh no, I mean it.” He is earnest. “There’s plenty more where it came from, and it’s the least I can do since your car crashed inside my property.”
“It wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”
“Still.” He frowns. “Say, since you’re feeling better and all, Jeffrey can drive you to the hospital and drop you there for a checkup. Just to make sure you’re OK.”
I thought you didn’t want Jeffrey’s presence raising questions at the hospital. But of course, I’m not going to let him know I eavesdropped.
Ethan says, “He’ll drop you at Emergency and you can call him to pick you up when you’re finished. He has other errands to run.”
This comes off smoothly. But I can tell that he doesn’t want Jeffrey in the hospital. Hence the drop-off, now that I’m in walking and sound mental condition.
Just for a lark, I ask him, “Do you want to come with me to the hospital?”
It’s his turn to be flummoxed.
“I, uh, have errands to run too.”
“OK.” I ensure that the corners of my mouth droop slightly, giving off the air of disappointment.
He visibly flinches, and I allow myself a secret smile. Ethan Greene exhibits the classic symptoms of not being around peo
ple much, and so he quite doesn’t know how to maneuver himself skillfully amongst them. Especially the more manipulative ones.
I spend the rest of the morning chatting to him as he paints. We talk of nothing consequential, and he does not let too much of his personal life seep through. Nothing is said of his past.
It’s amazing how pleasant it is to talk to him. Even when we fall into silence, it’s companionable. There’s no pressure for us to say something interesting, and just watching him scrunch up his brow to concentrate on painting is enough for me.
Jeffrey serves us a picnic brunch all the way out here. We nibble on ham and cheese sandwiches, topped off by raspberry tea.
When the sun climbs high enough in the sky for me to call it noon, Ethan says, “I’ll drop you off at the hospital.”
“OK,” I say.
His secrets will be ferreted out in time.
*
Ethan is as good as his word.
He drops me off at the entrance of the little hospital in Aberdeen.
“Call me when you’re ready,” he says.
“Off to run your errands?” I inquire politely.
He gives me a wry smile. “Yes.”
I get that it’s a small town, even with Aberdeen combined, and everybody knows everybody else.
I register at the normal clinic, not at Emergency. The doctor who attends to me is a black woman –middle-aged, very attractive, and not as harried as I expect doctors to be. Maybe it’s because the waiting room is only half full. It’s probably one of the perks of living in a small town where almost nothing ever happens.
“A concussion, you say?” she asks. “I will have to send you for a CT scan, just to be sure there isn’t any internal hemorrhage.”
“You have a CT scan machine here?”
“Of course. We are not totally in the boondocks.”
The CT scan comes out normal. But I have already spent two hours in the hospital and I’m afraid Ethan might be waiting for me, even though he has never texted me once.
I say casually to the doctor, who has my scans up on a fluorescent projection screen, “Do you know a man who lives in Kelowna called Ethan Greene?”
“Ethan Greene.” She wrinkles her nose, and then a light bulb goes off. “Ah. That Ethan Greene.”
“Why? What did he do?” I feel the hairs on my neck prickle. I don’t know if there has been a shift in the tectonic plates of my emotions in the past twelve hours – but suddenly, I really, really don’t want to hear anything bad about Ethan Greene. Though hear it I must. After all, this is my job, isn’t it? To ferret out the lifestyles of the rich and almost forgotten.
“I haven’t seen him in a couple of years now. Then again, I’ve only been working here for eight years, which is a lot shorter than most of the staff here. He has been in a couple of incidents.”
“Incidents?”
“There was once, a couple of years back, when he brought in a woman to Emergency.” The doctor’s face grows solemn. “Ethan Greene is the kind of man you’d remember, you know, because he reminds you of someone you’ve seen before. You’d ask him, ‘Hey, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ And he’d say, ‘No’, and brush you off.”
I nod carefully, not revealing anything. Not everyone is a movie buff, especially in small towns where there is usually only one Cineplex, and they don’t have the luxury of shows being onscreen for as long as major cities.
The doctor continues, “He was extremely distraught when he came in. I was the resident on call that night. He brought in this woman, and she had been beaten up. Her lip was cut and swollen, and she had a black eye. She was young. Hispanic. Not from around here, and I could tell from her way of dressing that she was a high-class hooker.”
I wonder if this is the hooker who disappeared. The hairs on my arms prickle.
“I examined the girl and asked her what happened. She remained mum. Wouldn’t tell me a thing, other than she walked into a glass door. I knew that was bullshit, pardon the expression. Meanwhile, Ethan Greene paced out there in the waiting room like an anxious, expectant father. The girl had rope burns on her wrists and ankles. Her ass had new bruises, as if she’s been caned repeatedly. Her private parts had been invaded, no doubt, and roughly. She had even been sodomized.
“But she still wouldn’t say anything. And so I decided to question Ethan Greene.”
I suck in my breath. Ethan? I can tell immediately by the storyline that the doctor suspects Ethan of sexually assaulting the hooker.
“What did he say?” I ask, as if I’m not personally affected by the answer. As if we are talking about a case that happened in a newspaper report.
And I shouldn’t be personally affected. Why should I, right? I’m writing an article on this. I shouldn’t be personally affected by any of my subjects. Curious, yes, but not emotionally involved.
“He very politely told me that he’d picked her up from the street. Someone had hurt her, and he was being a good Samaritan.”
There’s that term again. A good Samaritan.
The doctor continues:
“‘You have to make a police report,’ I tell him.
“‘I will, later,’ he says to appease me. But I know that he won’t.
“I tried to get the girl, whose name was Marla Sanchez, I remember now, to make a police report. But she refused. She was keeping mum for a reason, and I don’t know what that reason is. But I reckon Ethan Greene is wrapped up in this whole thing. Maybe he’s paying her off. Maybe she’s not some random hooker to him. I don’t know.”
“I see,” I say, my mind churning with possibilities. I just cannot reconcile the Ethan Greene I just spent the whole morning with against this image of . . . well, the doctor is making assumptions, so what happened is anybody’s guess.
Still, there’s the troubled diary etching of:
I can’t contain him anymore. I can’t predict what the triggers are. All I know is that he is becoming more powerful.
*
I say goodbye to the doctor, who makes me promise to come back if I experience any dizziness or headaches. She’s a good sort, and if I were her, I’d be making the same assumptions about Ethan Greene.
Those assumptions trouble me.
As do Ethan’s diary entries.
I dial Ethan’s cellphone, and fifteen minutes later, he arrives to pick me up. As soon as I see his calm, beautiful face, my heart soars despite me telling myself over and over to get over my fan-girly crush.
Maybe it’s not a fan-girly crush anymore. Maybe I really do enjoy being with the adult and current persona of Ethan Greene.
I get into his car – a black Mercedes S-class with tinted windows.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“So how was your visit? Everything clear?”
I’m tempted to tell him the truth, but I want a reason to linger around him a while longer. “I’m not totally in the clear yet. There’s still some residual giddiness and headaches I have to be aware of. Once I’m clear, I can start preparing to get back to civilization.”
“You can stay as long as you like, until you get better,” he offers, as I knew he would. And immediately, he looks uncomfortable, as if he has said something he shouldn’t have.
“I don’t want to impose.”
“You’re not imposing.” He does not glance at me. He seems torn between good manners and asking me to do what he really wants me to do – leave.
“Ethan,” I say hesitantly, “are you all right?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be? Did someone say . . . something?”
“No. I just wondered.”
“Ah well.” He appears relieved.
“Ethan.” Out of impulse, I lay my hand on his arm.
He looks down at it, and then at me. There’s a stricken look in his eyes that I don’t expect to see. I withdraw my hand immediately. I didn’t mean any harm by it.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s all right. I’m sorry. I d
idn’t mean to react that way.” The Adam’s apple on his throat moves like running mice. He is extremely discomfited, and I don’t know whether to laugh or be alarmed. “It’s just that I . . . I’m not used to having company. I’ve been living mostly alone for a long time. With Jeffrey, I mean.”
“I understand.”
I wonder if I should press my advantage and ask: Why do you choose to be alone? But I decide that we both have had enough for the day, and give him a break from my mini-interrogation.
Does Ethan Greene scare me?
I don’t know. Certainly I am not afraid of him as he is. This wonderfully handsome, soft-spoken man in the driver’s seat does not give off a single sinister vibe that should make me pause. It is merely the rumors that surround him – the question marks that this community seems to have dangling above his head.
The suppositions. The assumptions.
Perhaps I am naïve. Perhaps I should be very afraid.
But I have an assignment to complete, and I’m determined to see it through till the very end. Yeah, that’s my official line – even to myself.
The truth is . . . I just want to hang around Ethan Greene for a little longer. OK, for a lot longer. For as long as he lets me.
Or for as long until I discover the truth.
9
I spend the next two days with Ethan hiking around Pine’s Lookout. Ethan is my personal guardian – looking out for the telltale signs of dizziness and nausea that I am expected to exhibit at any time, as though I’m in my first trimester of pregnancy. The hill is much larger than I thought. It’s amazing how much of it he owns. Although land is probably cheap here, its size is still considerable.
“You get a lot of trespassers?” I ask.
“Sometimes. Especially during Halloween,” he says. “A lot of people think the house is haunted.”
“Is it?”
I have never felt any vibes, but then, I never did have a supernatural radar.
“It does have a reputation. I bought it for cheap because the previous owner killed himself in it.”
Damaged Beauties (Romanced by the Damaged Millionaire (Erotic Romance)) Page 4
