Bride Of The Bad Boy

She arched her brows in what he could only liken to curiosity, as if she were genuinely interested in hearing his suggestions. They might as well have been taking tea together, for all the concern she seemed to have for her imprisonment.

“Now, I know you didn’t mistake my house for this Boomer whoever’s place,” he began again.

“Bumper,” she interjected. “Bumper Shaugnessy.”

“Whatever,” he said wearily, feeling the gun in his hand begin to sag again. This time, he didn’t bother to correct his aim. “I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m sure it has something to do with me.”

She inclined her head forward. “And your name is…?” she asked.

He parted his lips slightly with his tongue and watched her thoughtfully. “Zorn,” he finally told her. “Ethan Zorn.”

She nodded, but seemed more fixed on what his mouth was doing than on what he was saying. He smiled. This was definitely getting interesting.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” she told him, sounding genuinely pleased to make his acquaintance. “Are you only visiting in Endicott? Do you have relatives here?”

“What I’m doing here, Angel—”

“‘Angie.’”

“Angel, is really none of your business. However,” he continued quickly when she opened her mouth to interrupt him again, “what you’re doing in my house is very much my business. Especially since you keep avoiding the question.”

“I’m not avoiding it,” she told him. “I was just trying to make polite conversation.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather make sense of this whole situation.”

He edged closer to her on the bed, until his thigh was pressed against hers. Then he reached behind her to grab the bill of her cap, yanked it from her head and tossed it to the floor. A rich, rowdy stream of gold, copper and silver spilled down around her shoulders in loose spirals of curls, and she expelled a tiny, hiccuping sound of surprise. He smiled his most sinister smile as he reached for a handful of the soft, silky tresses at her nape, then wrapped them loosely in his fist.

He had no desire to get ugly. Angie Ellison seemed like a nice person, and he always did his best to refrain from roughing up nice people. Unfortunately, for the line of work he had chosen, roughing people up was near the top of requirements in his job description, and every now and then those people seemed perfectly nice. He hoped this wouldn’t be one of those times.

“Now then,” he said, trying once more, not quite able to ignore the softness of the hair he had wrapped around his fingers and the scent of spring flowers that had suddenly surrounded him the moment he’d freed the tangle of curls. “What are you doing in my house?”

The jig was up, Angie thought. Or whatever it was they said in those gangster films she used to sit through at the Roxy Theater on Willow Street when she was a teenager. Stalling wasn’t working, and frankly, her brain was spinning from trying to make chitchat a viable source of survival. Ethan Zorn was starting to get impatient. And although she wasn’t entirely sure what impatience did to mobsters, it was probably a safe bet to assume that it didn’t much become them.

That assumption was reinforced when he bunched a fistful of her hair in his palm and tugged her head backward, then settled the muzzle of the gun against her throat.

“Tell me,” he demanded.

“Oh,” she gasped, her heartbeat hammering double time at the feel of the cool, hard metal nestled against her tender flesh.

This was not the way she had envisioned the evening turning out. When he tugged on her hair again, harder this time, Angie finally, finally began to understand exactly what she was up against. Not only had she gotten in way over her head, but she was about to be sucked down into a vast whirlpool of dark water unlike anything she’d ever encountered before.

“Please…” she petitioned softly, “you…you’re hurting me.”

To her complete mortification, tears sprang to her eyes—more a result of her fear than anything physically painful—and she bit her lip hard to prevent them from spilling. She did not want this man to see her cry. Crying was a sign of weakness, and she didn’t want to appear weak to Ethan Zorn.

His hold on her hair loosened some at the sight of her tears, and his expression actually seemed to soften. Strange, she thought, that a gangster could look guilty and remorseful over something as simple as a woman’s tears. But Ethan Zorn looked exactly that. After a moment, he removed the gun’s muzzle from her neck, clicked on the safety and returned the weapon to its holster. But he continued to hold on to a handful of her hair, stroking a curl between thumb and forefinger, as if he’d discovered a magic talisman of some kind.

“Last chance,” he told her, his voice low, but lacking in some of the menace it had carried earlier.

“All right,” she ceded, finally understanding that there was no way he was going to let her go until she answered his questions. “Like I said, I’m Angie Ellison. And I…I work for the Endicott Examiner.”

“The newspaper?” he asked, seeming genuinely stunned by her revelation.

She nodded quickly. “I broke in here on purpose, knowing full well that this is your house.”

He eyed her thoughtfully for a moment, then murmured, “Why?”

She swallowed hard and met his gaze, again surprised by the depth of the intelligence and emotion so evident there. Once again, he actually looked sorry to have manhandled her so, she marveled. He honestly seemed pained to have hurt her, however mildly.

“Because I know who you are,” she told him.

He grinned, the crooked set to his mouth making him look oddly appealing. “And just who am I?”

Angie’s heart began to beat more quickly. “You’re Ethan Zorn. And you…you work for the mob.”

His only reaction to her charge was a slight twitch to one cheek, and a vague darkening of his eyes. If she hadn’t been as close to him as she was, she probably wouldn’t have even noticed it. For a single, taut moment, he seemed frankly amazed by her assessment of him. Then, just as quickly, he became amused.

“The mob?” he repeated with a chuckle. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know.”

“Angel, you have got one vivid imagination, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s ‘Angie,’” she corrected him irritably. Gun or no gun, she really hated being called “Angel,” especially in the sexually charged, way-too-familiar manner in which Ethan Zorn said it. “And you do, too, work for the mob,” she continued assuredly. “Don’t bother to deny it, because I know you do.”

He shook his head lightly. “I work for the Cokely Chemical Corporation,” he told her. “I’m here on business for a few weeks. I’m a sales rep trying to drum up some new accounts.”

“Riiiiight,” she said, feeling a bit of her nerve return, now that he seemed to be relaxing some. “And Cokely always sends its sales reps out with big guns. I guess that’s to guarantee winning over the potential client, isn’t it?”

He glanced down at the gun, then back at Angie. “Traveling businessmen are easy targets,” he told her. “I don’t like to get caught off guard.”

“Or maybe you just never know when you’re going to have to off a snoopy journalist,” she countered before she could stop herself.

“‘Off a snoopy journalist’?” he echoed with a chuckle. “Angel, you’ve been watching too many Humphrey Bogart movies. I’m a sales rep for the Cokely Chemical Corporation. That’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, sure, that’s your cover,” she said with a nervous nod, wincing when she recalled, too late, that he continued to hold a fistful of her hair. “Look, my father owns a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant here, and you haven’t called on him yet. Now, why would a sales rep overlook what would be his most lucrative client in town for more than two weeks? He wouldn’t. My father’s company would have been your first stop. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t work for Cokely.”

“Okay, let’s assume for a minute that I don’t work for Cokely. Just how did you come to this conclusion that I work for the mob?”

“I have my sources.”

“Yeah, well, obviously Cokely isn’t one of them. If you’d bothered to ask them, they would have told you I’m on their payroll and have been for years.”

“Yeah, they did tell me that, as a matter of fact.” She paused for only a moment, then added, “But like I said—I have other sources. And you could have just paid off someone in personnel to verify your employment, should someone ask about it.”

Ethan Zorn eyed her with much consideration, then freed the hair he had wound in his fist. Without speaking, he rose from the bed, strode carelessly to the desk on the other side of the room and retrieved a large white envelope from the blotter. Then he removed his wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open. He tossed that to the middle of the mattress, then lifted the envelope and spilled its entire contents beside it.

“My credentials,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”