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believed every man needed to know how to stand on his own two feet, how to survive.”
    Her gaze almost seemed to glow. “Survive what?”
    The question threw him back in time, to a night a quarter of a century before, when he’d sat shivering on a boulder in sub-freezing temperatures, scraping two stones against each other.
    “I’m cold,” he’d said. “Can’t you just do it?”
    His grandfather’s face had fallen into a gentle frown. “At some point in your life, Ethan Douglas, you’ll find the only person you can depend on is yourself. You need to be prepared.”
    The prophecy of those long-ago words blasted through him now, as hot and intense as the floor furnace in his grandfather’s old house. “This,” he said. Everything inside him went hard, but the word came out soft. “Deceit. Betrayal.” He paused, held her gaze. “You.”

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    Chapter 4
    « ^ »
    B renna’s eyes, those fascinating pools of whitewashed sapphire, went dark. “You’re wrong about me, you know. Dead wrong.”
    Dead. Wrong. The words twisted through Ethan, wrung him out. He didn’t know, that was the problem. And for a man accustomed to clarity, the uncertainty grated at him. Every time he thought he’d secured a handle on her, on the truth, she managed to erase that clarity with nothing more than a few quietly spoken words or a distant, knowing smile.
    “Tell me about the compound,” he said, refusing to affirm or deny her claim. “You said Mexico , right?” He waited a charged heartbeat before pointing out the obvious. “That’s south.”
    A soft sound broke from her throat. “And because we’re headed south, you think that means I work for Zhukov.”
    It was the obvious answer. “You said it’s on a beach? Something about a room all in white and a sculpture of a jaguar.” Automatically, his jaw tensed. He knew that sculpture, damn it. More than knew it, he was the one who’d picked out the exquisite piece of pewter.
    It’s perfect, Eth! Absolutely perfect! God, I love you.
    The memory stabbed deep.
    “You asked what my grandmother taught me,” Brenna said, and he forced himself back from the landmine of the past.
    “You told me it didn’t matter,” he reminded.
    “I was wrong. It does matter.” She paused, pulled her bottom lip into her mouth. “She taught me the same thing your grandfather taught you. She taught me about survival.”
    Ethan stared at the bruise on her jaw, the scratch along her neck, and wondered just how far Jorak would go to lay a trap. How many lies he would tell. How many innocents he would destroy.
    “You think I’m the threat?” he asked quietly. The thought left a bitter taste in his mouth.
    Her gaze met his. “You want to believe the worst about me. You refuse to consider the possibility I have nothing to do with what’s happening. Is your world that jaded, Ethan? Is it really so hard to believe that someone you don’t know might try to help?”
    The jolt went through him like unexpected turbulence. Her eyes—normally such a translucent blue you could see truths too painful to acknowledge—burned with an accusation that scorched to the bone. It was as if she’d picked up his grandfather’s hunting knife and skinned him in one swift stroke.
    “Give me something, then.” The words ripped out of him. Proof. Evidence. Anything. “Something to believe.”
    “That’s just it,” she said, and the glow returned to her eyes. “I can’t give you what you want. Belief has to come from inside of you, not from me.”
    Ethan just stared. In all his years grilling suspects and coaxing witnesses, rarely had anyone turned the tables on him. She refused to look away, just kept watching him through those burning eyes, with her chin at a defiant angle and her tangled hair falling against her shoulders. She reminded him of a movie he’d once seen, where a woman accused of witchcraft had refused to break, refused to recant, even as she’d been tied to a tree with flames licking at