Read Online Shock Waves by Jenna Mills - Free Book Online

from.” He turned toward the front of the plane, not realizing how close her face was to his. Skin brushed, cheek to cheek, hers soft, his rough, mouths alarmingly close. Their eyes met.
    She pulled away.
    He tensed, and deep inside something thrummed in a way he recognized as trouble. “Up there,” he indicated, again gesturing with his hand. “The stars ahead of us aren’t as bright, meaning we’re traveling south.”
    She leaned forward, squinted against the night. Jorak’s men had dimmed the lights in the luxurious cabin, but track lighting ran up and down the aisle between the leather seats. They sat toward the back, just in front of a row of munitions crates. Two guards stood outside the locked cockpit door, assault weapons ready.
    It had yet to dawn on them that Ethan wasn’t putting up a fight.
    “Away from the United States ,” Brenna muttered.
    To Mexico . Just as she’d predicted.
    “How’d you learn to do that?” she asked. “Read the sky like a map.”
    This time Ethan didn’t fight the smile. It formed by itself, seeping from his chest and curving his lips. “My grandfather.” As a young boy, his father’s father, the distinguished senator had taken his namesake on weekend camping trips. The two of them had played soldier, the elder Ethan providing an early glimpse of hard lessons his grandson would one day learn at the Virginia Military Institute. And from Jorak Zhukov.
    “Senator Carrington?”
    Incredulity softened her voice. He glanced toward her, found curiosity glowing in those eerie fairy eyes. It was the first spark of life he’d seen since the guards had touched her. “That surprises you?”
    Her lips quirked. “Intrigues is more like it.” She tilted her head, allowing tangled blond hair to fall back from her face. “I remember seeing him on TV during campaigns. He hardly seemed like the outdoorsy type.”
    True enough. To the world, Grandfather Carrington had been an icon of propriety and dignity, of stuffy committee rooms and formal cocktail parties. With his tailored suits and thick head of white hair, his bushy eyebrows and that deep commanding voice, his senate colleagues had insisted he could debate a nun out of her virtue. But to Ethan his grandfather was the man with the baggy old jeans and worn flannel shirts, the one with a wicked sense of humor and a thirst for adventure.
    “People aren’t always what they seem,” Ethan said, and the words jammed against his throat on the way out. He shoved the reaction aside, reminding himself there was a difference between appearances and evidence.
    The evidence against Brenna spoke a language all its own. She knew too much, facts and details that could only have come from one source. One man.
    “I grew up in a house with three sisters. My grandfather insisted I needed good, quality, boy time.” Time away from drama and perfume, from giggling and hair ribbons and fights over who took whose earrings. “He’d take me camping, just the two of us.” And there, alone, deep in the Virginia woods, his grandfather had taught him how to bait a hook and snag a trout, how to build a fire from rock and stone, which berries would sustain and which would poison, how to track a wild animal, when to shoot and when to wait. “That’s when he taught me to read the sky.”
    Brenna’s smile grew distant. “My grandmother taught me a lot, too.”
    There was an odd note to her voice, one that niggled like the kind of comment made by a witness that often led to a goldmine. “Such as?”
    Not so with Brenna. Not now. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
    The urge to reach for her, to feather a finger against the nasty bruise along her jaw had him curling the fingers of his free hand into a fist. “I think that it does.”
    She blinked, narrowed her eyes. “Why did your grandfather teach you what he did? He could have rescued you from your sisters lots of other ways.”
    That was easy. “Survival,” Ethan said. “Grandfather Carrington