Kalani’s sister had the testimony to put the Khans and Blackwoods away for good, bringing a bit of safety back into everyone’s lives. But since the federal investigation was still ongoing, there had been no trial date set. Until then, people like Kalani and her sister, and Ethan, would have to sit on pins and needles.
“Well, at least she’s busy with something productive,” Ethan said.
“Who and what are you talking about?”
“Kalani.”
“Of course.”
“She’s busy at the training—”
“Wait, no,” Annica interrupted. “No, I’m not substantiating those claims.”
“Annica,” he said, trying on a bit of that sly smile he’d learned from watching her interact with her leads and assets. For when she wanted something . . .
“Ethan,” she said, sounding bored and maybe slightly annoyed. She reached over and began to stir what was left of her drink.
“So, tell me about Cole,” Ethan said. He might as well lure her into a more pleasant conversation—at least pleasant for her. He had seen the way she’d transformed with the addition of Cole into her life, the man who began as a whistle-blower for the Khan story, who transformed somehow into an enemy, and then her savior, and ultimately, her lover. At that point, she was done hiding the progression, and it was obvious even when they were hundreds of miles apart.
She was smiling.
Ethan liked seeing her smile, whether it was from himself or Cole. After they finished their drinks, he wished her luck, with Cole and her new startup project. She had been such an important asset to his career, a steady hand plucking him out of the wilderness of recently graduated journalism school students. She had set Ethan on his path, and it was time for him to follow it to whatever end. A great story, a horrible death, or Kalani. Perhaps all three.
5
Kalani
Lately, whenever Kalani closed her eyes, she’d find herself back in Hawaii. Back in the half week she’d had with Ethan before that hard body of his had been sequestered behind a laptop at his Washington D.C. newspaper’s headquarters. His writerly brain, too, always so curious and busy, was needed for a different and far less enjoyable task thousands of miles away. That was back on the big island, when they’d made time from the lawyer meetings and DARC Ops debriefings. Opportunities for each other in various settings, small amounts of time stolen away from what they were told was more important. Time stolen from a grieving, conflicted, and quasi-criminal sister. That time at the waterfall, underneath it, behind it in the warm, dark water, in Ethan’s arms. The smell of fresh water and flowers. Plumeria, gardenia. And coconut—though not in actuality, but from Ethan’s need for sunscreen. Earlier in the day, he’d joked about needing help with its application. Kalani was a little too stiff at the time to go for it. But the hike and the laughter and the sight of him warmed her up sufficiently, and as soon as they were in the water together, she pretended she was acquainted with that excellent opportunity she’d initially denied herself. She caressed imaginary sunscreen around his shoulders, standing behind him, leaning into him to wrap her arms around to feel the slippery mass of his chest. He found her hands, holding her by the wrists as he wrapped her arms around him at his waist. It was a good thing he was holding her hands still, as they wanted to travel downward, exploring everything he had to offer.
A tasty snapshot like that could be conjured in no time, and triggered even more effortlessly. It was out of her control. Her hands dipped into the warm dishwater after dinner. Her hands under the tropical waterfall of the showerhead. Her hands doing things she’d wished Ethan could have been doing in that effortless, magical way of his.
These type of events came about so easily and spiraled out of control with even greater ease. She was happy for that, in the shower, spreading the suds around her body and imagining his hands again. She needed them. She needed what they could do to her, a release she’d been craving all day. Alone in the shower, with her eyes closed, he was with her once again. The feeling, too, had returned: what he could do to her body and how he’d made her feel. Warm water and hands. And mouths. Ethan’s large hands at her breasts, holding her there. The sharp heat of pinched nipples, searing, her mind reeling back . . .
They had to find privacy somewhere. Ethan’s idea, like usual, came before hers. He was quick on his feet, but there was a different category of speed when his analytical mind had been pointed to the quest for a private location for private activities.
“What about the people?” Kalani said, trying to catch a piece of his hand as it swung, as they moved together toward the gleam of the green-blue swimming hole. “The tour guides with the hikers, they’ll be coming back soon.”
“They can’t see through the waterfall,” Ethan said.
And it was a good thing they couldn’t.
They’d waded in and found themselves behind the almost-deafening rush of water. Knee-deep behind, it felt warm and windy and loud. Dark. Moss scaled the stone wall behind them. Kalani closed her eyes and inhaled a mist with heavy floral notes as his hands returned to her body. She’d been to that exact swimming hole in the past, but never behind the waterfall. And never with someone like Ethan. In the past, there had been potential Ethans, men who wanted to reenact a shampoo commercial gone awry, but no one who made her stomach flutter. Not like that. The floral notes and the visual beauty fell away around Kalani’s main focus. Bodies, theirs coming together for a more lurid type of ecstasy than what could be found in the narrative for a refreshing tropical shower product.
The product she’d been most interested in was firmly pressed against her backside, and the smoothness of his chest slipping against her shoulder blade as he moved in closer and pressed more of himself into her. More of it down below, too, as his appreciation for her had grown remarkably obvious. She squirmed her ass against it and he grabbed her by the hips, pulling her in tighter.
Then that hand wrapped in front of her, around her belly and down, fingertips between skin and bikini bottom. Wet skin from a waterfall. Wet from his touch. His touch sliding down over her, under her, inside her.
Standing under the waterfall of her shower in West Virginia, Kalani focused on that touch harder than she’d perhaps focused on anything before. Concentrating, making it real, making her hand into his as she began working herself as quietly as possible behind the closed door and closed curtain of the upstairs bathroom.
Eyes closed. Tightly. Alone.
Back in their tropical paradise in Hawaii, Ethan had made her knees tremble, then buckle, her body sliding back against his as his fingers split her open. Hot mouth at her neck. Hot touch between her legs, the feeling of letting go completely. The feeling, really, of a stranger. He’d still been that way, but still so utterly Ethan. It was almost as if she could look back and realize why no one else had ever had a chance.
The wall of the shower was cold and smooth against her hot skin, her back touching it. The dynamic of temperatures made everything more intense, and Kalani leaned further, sliding more of herself against the cold tile as the rest of her body heated up. The deepest parts were awake and heating and almost burning with his memory.
Whose hand was that on her breast, cupping, holding it up, and then finding through the rush of water a nipple that needed the hot crush of discovery? Writhing against the wall, underneath the suggestions of these hands, it hardly mattered.
Ethan. Hawaiian Ethan would speak very gently in her ear, very calmly. She would reply: “You promised to show me something . . . back here . . . under the . . .”
She’d lost the sound of her own voice somewhere under the roar and claps of water falling twenty fast feet after its slow decent from the mountain.
“You said you’d show me,” Kalani said again, when enough energy and concentration could reform, diverted from his deeds. “Where is it?”
First she felt the movement of swim-shorts fabric sliding down against her skin, and then the warmth of skin on hers when Ethan’s body retu
rned. And then something else, pressing against her bare ass, something hotter. Something even harder than she’d known about when they’d still had that last bit of fabric between them. Now there was nothing in between, not even air. Ethan’s body hunched around and over hers, and she bent forward as her palms found their clumsy way to rock.
In her last few seconds of mental clarity—what little she still had left to operate with—Kalani thought about the wild risk of it all. The public setting. The hikers and their eventual return. Before anything else, while she still had the strength to do so, she whispered, “Hurry.” She whispered, “Please.”
“No,” Ethan said, full-voiced, his tone beating out the fall of water. He sounded as calm, patient, and calculated as ever. As calm as that thoughtful, wonderful reporter. He said it again in such a way that she was sure he would take all the time he’d wanted. And he did, sliding himself thick between her legs, sliding everywhere but where she’d needed, teasing, pushing her open while his hands squeezed into her sides. Long and methodical and torturous, but she had no other option but to submit to what his body was doing, and was about to do to her. Ethan pulled back one last time, one last gap of air between their bodies. Pleasure washed over her as he thrust forward, before—
The knocks on the bathroom door came hard and fast, startling Kalani away from her Hawaiian fantasy, and from herself, her hands already moving up to grab a bottle of shampoo in an instinctual move at normalcy.
A muffled voice behind the door, Lea’s, launched another typical complaint about the bathroom. There had only been one decent bathroom in the whole house. But this was supposed to be one moment Kalani could have had some privacy, to take care of some pent-up frustrations. That hot and hopeless lusting for Ethan. It was hard enough that he’d been away for so long, and that all they’d had was that half-finished fantasy under the waterfall. In reality, they’d only made it halfway before the hikers returned to spoil the fun. A hot and heavy make-out session, with perhaps a little under-the-clothes rummaging. The rest she’d made up without even thinking. She enjoyed the reality very much, but lately, the tease had just about killed her. Just like right then, when the end was in sight, when she felt so close and warm and ready to explode.
“What?” Kalani snapped at her sister.
“I said how long are you—?”
“What?!” But it came out a little too loud, almost like a bloodcurdling scream. So much pent-up aggression . . .
She finally caught her breath and allowed the thumping sound of pulse to fade from her ears. In the quiet, Lea said, “Are you still going into town today?”
Town . . . At first it made no sense. Maybe that part of her brain was still under the tropical waterfall. Still under Ethan’s control there, bending to his will . . .
“Kalani!”
“Yes, Lea?” she said as coherently as possible.
“The town? You’re still going?”
The town was Claxtonburg, where they’d drive to for groceries and household supplies. There was also a slight car repair that she would have to get taken care of at a little mechanic shop in town. She’d stopped by earlier and made an appointment. It amazed her how easily she forgot about that, or anything other than Ethan.
“Yes, I’m going right after my shower.” Claxtonburg was also a place where she could talk to Ethan. They’d set up a “system,” as Ethan called it. He’d arranged it all in advance, the “rules” of the “system,” what they could and couldn’t say. How they’d say it.
After Lea finally left her alone, Kalani rushed through the rest of her shower, without any more fun, and without any interruptions, working quickly the whole time and wondering with anticipation if Ethan had sent another message for her.
6
Kalani
The mechanic walked hunched from under the raised car. He stopped and stood straight in front of Kalani and removed his hat, a black baseball cap made floppy with sweat. He waved it several times at a buzzing fly and said, “Might take a minute.”
She looked at him, the shine on his bald head, and then at the black underside of her car. “How long is a minute?”
“Before too long,” he said.
The “new” old car had been shifting rougher than usual—at least, rougher than the first few weeks she’d known it. Definitely rougher than that first test drive. It drove beautifully, then. It drove just fine now. Fine enough. But the change had worried her. A suddenly mushy clutch, a missed gear or two. One big “pop out” when she tried to gear up for the highway, and any confidence she’d had in it was shattered.
“It’s just a little adjustment,” the mechanic said, flopping the hat back onto his head.
“You mean it won’t cost much.”
“Did I say that?” He smiled.
No. He absolutely did not say that.
The man’s smile broadened. “I’m just messing with ya.”
“I’m broke,” Kalani said, straight-faced.
“I know. We’re damn well all broke.”
Kalani nodded with that sad fact, thinking of the last good wad of bills tucked in her wallet—an empty cigarette pack holding roughly eighty dollars. “Think we can keep it below sixty? If it’s just an adjustment?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Kalani thanked him for that, and he replied with, “Won’t be a minute.”
She was still trying to decipher the meanings of his odd units of time. What would or wouldn’t be “a minute,” or before or after “too long?” How long was a minute exactly in Claxtonburg, West Virginia?
Looking around at her surroundings, the hundred-year-old mechanic’s shop, and the single-block crumbling brick “downtown” beyond it, Kalani quickly came to the conclusion that a minute in Claxtonburg might definitely be after too long.
She opted out of the TV-less, single-chair waiting room, and instead clanged the hanging doorbell of the front entrance on her way out to downtown Claxtonburg. The town had once been a bustling industrial center. A rich history, even richer architecture for some of the last un-bulldozed original structures—if you could see them through the weeds that grew between the sidewalk cracks. Tiny signs from the historical society dotted the sidewalk. Kalani looked over the photographs and then read their descriptions. The place looked more vibrant through the black and white of old scratchy photographs than the all-too-real Technicolor of the current de-industrialized malaise.
Claxtonburg was a town for waiting. That was perhaps its largest industry. Waiting for a car to be repaired. Waiting for the single traffic light to change. Waiting for the coal mine jobs to come back. But perhaps the most realistic and sad was the Claxtonburg residents waiting to die. Kalani hoped that she wouldn’t be one of them.
She’d almost forgotten about being followed.
She stopped dead in her tracks when the subtlest hint of dread flushed through her body. She spun around in place to take a good 360 of her surroundings—who was approaching, or watching, or who was trying to look like they hadn’t been doing either. The latter group seemed to include an elderly woman walking slowly behind a stroller, pushing it over a lumpy sidewalk. Her grandchild, perhaps. Whatever their relationship was, they weren’t spy associates. Following several feet behind them: a man who looked like he belonged underneath a car at the mechanic’s shop. What about him? Walking to work?
What about Kalani, herself? She imagined that she probably looked the most suspicious out of everyone, out of place, looking around. Looking lost. She was lost.
She’d gone into Claxtonburg now and then for groceries, but the foreignness of the place had never lifted since that first visit. She supposed it was good to be on guard.
Should she have been more careful with the car mechanic? Maybe she could have even stayed close to the car to keep watch. At that moment, they could very well be installing a tracking device in her car so she’d never be alone. Or tampering with the brake line somehow so that it would cut at the most inopportune moment. That way, she wouldn’t be alive to tal
k about anything regarding the Blackwoods case. Certainly not to help the case with Lea. The best the bad guys could do would be to silence one if not both of them with some nondescript tragedy.
A car bomb would offer a similar effect.
Joe Car Mechanic back at the shop didn’t look like a munitions expert, or an expert in anything aside from grease and grifting. But what about that gentleman she’d caught staring into the car bay though his office window? Her skin had crawled when he peered through the blinds at her, his little fingers splitting the blinds open further, his little beady eyes darting away when they’d made eye contact with hers. Then the blinds snapped shut again. She tried not to think about things like that too much, but now that she felt the fear, it came rushing back along with it. All the horrible possibilities. They crawled along her spine up into her brain stem, sizzling there.
“Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?”
The voice pulled her from an increasingly darkened cloud of thoughts. She turned around to see a skinny young man in a stained white T-shirt. It was more of an undershirt, almost see-through with wear. “Ma’am?”
“Yeah?”
“Door’s broke.”
“Huh?”
“Door’s broke right there,” he said, pointing to the entrance of the General Store. “You’ll have to try the other one.”
Kalani just realized that she’d been trying to push open an immovable door for the last ten seconds. Drunk with paranoia, she said, dumbly, “Yeah?”
The man reached past her and with his fingertips pushed open the other door to the right side. It swung open slightly and then closed again. “Go ahead and try that one there,” he said.
It was a little disappointing that she’d forgotten about the trick door, despite having gone to that store more than once since arriving at the farmhouse. One door for in, one for out. Not that complicated. But she was used to modern strip malls—and air-conditioning—and properly working doors with clearly indicated directions, not the quaint haphazardness of Claxtonburg.
Dark Discovery (DARC Ops Book 8) Page 4
