Man Detox: A Novel Page 17

  Irene followed his instruction. The street was barely lit, and she could hardly make out the numbers on the big houses lining up either side of the road.

  It had taken less than five minutes by the time the car pulled over at the intersection where she stood and waited. She couldn’t tell whether it was the terror of the dark night in Mexico or some other unexamined fear, her body was shaking uncontrollably when she jumped into the car and fell into Ethan’s embrace.

  “Go! Go!” Ethan shouted to the driver.

  Irene couldn’t speak. Instead, she held him tightly as the car sped away toward I-70. She didn’t ask where it was going. Nor was she interested in saying anything. Being held by Ethan and the mere proximity had done miracles to her anxiety.

  What would she say to him even if she had the ability to speak? The best course of action was to keep quiet and let him do what he thinks is best. Wasn’t he the one that rescued her from danger time and time again?

  Soon, the car took the Pena Boulevard exit and headed toward the airport. Where is he taking her? Shouldn’t she have a say on where she was going? What would happen to her work tomorrow? Should she tell him about it? Why doesn’t he tell her what he is doing?

  One question after another came to the surface and floated away as the distance to the airport shortened. She was so consumed by this mixture of swirling emotion that she didn’t notice when they drove past the area where the fateful accident took place. Ethan hadn’t said anything until the car pulled into the area where private planes were parked.

  Her nervousness and state of panic were confirmation of his worst fear. As the car was speeding around Denver in the desperate hope of locating her, he had methodically assessed everything about the events leading up to the crisis.

  The answer was staring him right in the face all along. Ethan had initially canceled his plan to go to Mexico. A wider group of stakeholders were kept abreast of the change. Instead of flying down to Cancun, he was to go to his hometown of Los Angeles to participate in a family intervention to deal with his older brother's alcoholism. After weighing the risk-reward profile of the trip and the meetings, he had decided not to go to Mexico in part because he believed he would get to see Irene at a future date.

  Only after talking to Irene on the phone did he change his mind. The only person he told about the change of plan was Rob. He had come to Denver on the basis of information that Irene might have been hurt during her captivity.

  As he questioned the only basis for thinking she had any part in the scheme, he realized the only reason he suspected her was because Rob had been insistent on making her a culprit.

  Why was Rob so desperate to do this? He didn’t know the answer to the question. But without exchanging any words with Irene, seeing how lost she looked and her mesmerizing hazel brown eyes, which were now haggard and cavernous, he knew he had made her suffer for no reason. The only solace for this was making sure he took care of her.

  “Where are we going?” She asked as they walked to the jet waiting for them.

  “Home, I’m sorry for all that happened to you,” he said, embracing her closer to his body. He couldn’t imagine how horrific it must have been to be abused. How dare he second guess his instinct?

  “We have a way of crossing paths at the bleakest of moments, don’t we?”

  “That will end soon,” he promised her as they settled inside and the plane taxied away into the stars.

  “I didn’t think we would ever see each other again…”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe we weren’t meant to be together as much as I hated to accept it as a fact.”

  “It’s been my fault all along. I was making wrong assumptions.”

  “About what?” She asked, leaning into him.

  “Everything. Did you talk to the doctor from the ED?”

  “I got her message, but I didn’t want to cause any more trouble for you… You had to do so much for me. Hard enough for me to live with the regret of causing so much pain to you…”

  “You didn’t cause any pain. Bad things happen. We can’t control everything.”

  “But this was my fault. If it weren't for me, you wouldn’t be in Mexico… If I stayed quiet and said nothing, that lunatic Roger wouldn’t have known where I was going…”

  Ethan suppressed his surprise and let her keep talking.

  “…But he was so craven. I should have recorded it. For a man his age, you wouldn’t believe how desperate he came across. I told him I was meeting my family, husband, and three kids, but he wouldn’t relent… When we landed at the airport, he made it a point to wait to see where I was going… I thought that would be the end of it. Little did I know, the man was trying to set up another target. He was asking me so many questions about how I knew you and all the rest. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him we didn’t know each other much and it was just a coincidence… I hated that man so much!”

  “Don’t worry about it. That is all in the past.”

  It was decision time. Does he trust Rob, someone he pays millions of dollars to protect him, or Irene? It was Rob that told him about the fact of Roger’s flight with Irene. That much he knew. What was new was Irene’s perspective. What reason does she have to lie to him? She had after all moved on with her life. She even turned down an opportunity to talk to the ER doc.

  If she wanted to cause havoc in his life, wouldn’t it have been easier to fabricate a story that implicated him for the abuse she had clearly suffered? If not on day one, she had many other opportunities to mess things up for him. All he had seen in her had been surrender to him. From the instant when their eyes met, her expression in his presence had been consistent. It had been genuinely disarming. The sort of connection that doesn’t have any agenda attached to it.

  On instinct, he decided to trust her more. If he was wrong about her, could he trust his judgment anymore? To confirm one last time, he needed to ask her a question.

  “How did the pretend date turn out, by the way? Never got to ask,” he smiled at her.

  She turned her head, looking up at him from her resting position on his chest.

  “You won’t believe the mess you saved me from.”

  “Was it so terrible?”

  “Remember Jared?”

  “Yes, the best man, right?”

  “We had a fight. Nothing that bad happened. He was acting crazy, you know, being drunk all the time. I felt unsafe to be there alone. Plus my friend was having a miserable time. I thought I would ask knowing you may likely turn it down. But you didn’t. Don’t know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate.”

  “Which one do you think it is?”

  “Maybe both. Fortunate, because who knows if we would have seen each other again. Unfortunate, for the obvious reasons. You could have lost your life because of me…”

  Ethan listened to her with so much keen interest. Her frankness was arresting.

  “Was that a private military that rescued us?”

  “Kind of... I hire a firm for protection.”

  “How did they know where to find us?”

  “They have a way of tracking…”

  “All the time?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Any place?”

  “Yes, for the most part.”

  “So, they could see when you were moving around in the resort, and we were taken away?”

  “Yes, in principle.”

  “Did it take them long to get to us because it is difficult to coordinate rescue?”

  That naive line of questioning, coming from the pure and innocent curiosity of this woman who had consciously preserved herself for a special day, was paving a pathway to clarity Ethan hadn’t considered.

  He had indeed been completely blind. He had been blind to his blindness and to the simplest of questions and answers. Why did they indeed take so long to rescue him? He knew about the emergency extraction capability at faraway lands let alone Cancun, which was cl
oser to SF than the east coast. There had to be one simple answer. Rob must have known about the kidnapping, if nothing else from the tracking data and chose to not act immediately. But why? He couldn’t answer.

  “Probably,” he said to assure her, hiding his own inner turmoil.

  Could his life have been put in danger because of the same man he had been paying so much many to protect him? The two ideas came crashing into his immediate attention. The innocence of Irene and the murky dungeon of the outside world.

  As the plane descended into San Francisco, Ethan had a choice to make. He needed to verify his instinct about Rob’s role in the situation.

  “Hi Rob, back in town,” he said. “My brother is a hopeless case.”

  “Is that right?” Rob answered, hiding his surprise. He had known Ethan had gone to Denver instead of Los Angeles.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about him. Where are we on the Denver situation?” Ethan asked.

  “Everything appears to be stable. I doubt we have anything to worry about for now.” Rob answered, inside he was fuming that his people on the ground had lost track of Ethan while he was there and couldn’t ascertain to him about the status of the woman.

  The last update he received was she had left work in an expensive car heading toward an expensive residential area. The photograph he had been sent about the man seen with her was certainly not Ethan. He had filed that piece of information as a back up to demonstrate the woman’s untrustworthiness.

  “How about down South?”

  “Nothing new for now, sir,” Rob said, fearing Ethan might be onto something.

  “Can we meet at my office in the morning? I have something I want to run by you.”

  “Yes, of course,” Rob said.

  As he sat in his small office, at the end of a long day of work, Colonel Rob Ratner was shaken to the core. He had taken a dangerous gamble that was at risk of destroying everything he had worked for all his life.

  For Ethan, he had gotten all the confirmation he needed. The measure of a man is his character, his father had taught him growing up. He has now established Rob was at least not fully forthcoming with him. To minimize risk, he arranged to stay at his friend’s house, which had a separate security arrangement.

  ∫---∫

  Chapter Thirty

  Irene had been patiently listening on the conversation. She could tell something wasn’t right, “Is everything okay?” She asked.

  “Yes, everything is taken care of. A couple of business issues to handle.”

  “Am I still causing trouble for you?”

  “None at all. You may actually be the solution to a big mystery.”

  “Really?”

  “We will know in the morning.”

  “How about tonight? You know I have to get back to work tomorrow morning.”

  “I highly doubt you will make it to work on time, if ever…”

  “Are you trying to get me fired?”

  “I have brought every imaginable danger into your life, from the accident to the kidnapping, I suspect that will be the most minor infraction I will have caused on you.”

  “I am happy I am here, though…”

  “Glad to hear,” he said, lifting her hand and kissing her fingers tenderly.

  When the car drove past San Francisco and headed southbound on US101, Irene knew they weren’t going back to the house she visited many days before.

  “Are we going to another place?”

  “Yes, for a little while. I’m sure it will be to your liking…”

  “Anywhere you are will be to my liking, I think, unless some catastrophic danger befalls us yet again,” she laughed.

  Ethan made a note of how much he loved seeing her laugh. She hadn’t laughed like this since they were on the dance floor. When she was at ease and relaxed, there was something about her that he found irresistible.

  Laughing and accompanied by Ethan’s running commentary about the geography of the bay area, they arrived at the gate of a mansion, easily the biggest house Irene had seen in real life.

  “Is this a residence?”

  “It most certainly is… and it will be just us for the foreseeable future.”

  Once they went inside the gate and sent the driver back out, Ethan knew he was in a safe space to sort out next steps including spending alone time with Irene. He wanted to get to know her more. He wanted to take care of her more than anything else.

  This time, as soon as they entered the house, before the interior lights equilibrated into a soft glow, Irene was the one to initiate contact. She couldn’t help herself. She had restrained herself for so long that it was more of an impulsive and compulsive desire to be with him. She draped her arms around him and leaped onto him, which caught him by surprise. Before he could say anything, she was kissing him, and he too was taken over by a primal nature.

  He carried her in his strong arms and took her to the sectional sofa in the living room. As much as he wanted to keep going, he wanted to protect her. He wanted her to know that he knew about her commitment and that he respected her for it. But the conventional thinking wasn’t to be as she tore clothes off him and revealed what she had always assumed to be a dynamite of a body.

  Irene wasn’t disappointed. If anything, she was pleasantly surprised by how lean and strong and defined everything about him was. A combination of ruggedness and handsome beauty. The sort of body that spoke of carefulness and nurturing. By the time they were on the sofa, he was naked from the waist up, and her dress had been dispensed with revealing the mismatched bra and pants.

  She wasn’t present enough in the moment to be embarrassed. All she desperately wanted and craved was to kiss him everywhere and do what she had always wanted. Could there have been a better occasion for it?

  Instead of rushing, Ethan laid her body down and tenderly went about kissing and caressing her. She closed her eyes following his instruction. It was the ultimate surrender to him. To let him do as he wishes, giving him total control over her body, her pleasure, and her whole attention. Anything he wants for he knows best, she told herself as she expectantly followed him in her vivid imagination.

  It started with her lips. Such succulent kisses. Then the cheeks and down to her neck. He was hovering above her, and she could sense the presence and heat of his body. So close to her and so far away except for the tender touches of his fingers as they held and squeezed her body.

  Every contact was an introduction into a dimension of being that was unknown to her. The surrender and expectation, the longing and love, everything about the moment was beyond her capacity to put into words. Instead of saying anything verbally, she moaned and sighed in the language only a lovesick heart could utter. Down the lips, he went to her chest and breasts. She could feel her erect and hardened nipples. His gentle rub sent shock waves through her body that reflexively sent her arms and legs looking for him.

  Before he started kissing her on her belly, she was already feeling a sensation of excitement that was more than happiness. By the time he took of her panties and started caressing her legs heading toward the place that she had shielded from all manners of contact and thought, she was already crying with joy.

  When his lips finally made contact with her burning center of being, when his tongue slid over the achingly stimulated home she had save for the only one deserving man, every voice in her body sang in unison. This was the moment she had been waiting for.

  What a pleasure! What an ecstasy! She couldn’t keep her body still as he masterfully kissed and licked all around her.

  The cumulative effect came in cascades. One level of joy surpassed by the next sweeping wave only to be supplanted by another as he patiently caressed and loved her with focused attention. When her body refused to cooperate with him, he held her down with his strong arms and squeezed her breasts.

  She didn’t know exactly when she lost it all. All she recognized was he had withheld from pleasuring himself. How he had saved her for yet another time while
unlocking a carnal pleasure she didn’t know existed in her body. She convulsed and crumbled when it became impossible to hold it together. She screamed with joy before he let her go.

  She would wake up from the deeply satisfying and most exhaustingly pleasurable excitement she had ever experienced long moments later. He was holding her tight to his body. And he was still wearing his jeans.

  What did she do to deserve this kind of angelic treatment? She worried for a second if there was something wrong with her. Did she say something unpleasant in her excitement? Was there lingering disinterest in him?

  Irene felt guilty for having taken his gift without reciprocating in any meaningful way. In fact, every recollection of their encounters had been about him giving and her receiving. When was that ever going to change? She got up and mounted on his body, quickly starting to unbuckle his belt. He stopped her.

  “Why, Ethan?”

  She felt small and undesirable.

  “We can’t do it.”

  “Why not? Did I…” she tried to fight him. But he resisted strongly. “What’s wrong? Do you not like me?”

  “Oh, I like you very much.”

  “Then why? It’s so unfair.”

  “Why is it unfair?”

  “I keep taking from you… That was the most intense and unimaginable pleasure in my entire life… But you won’t let me…”

  “There will be time for it…”

  “When? Why not now?”

  “We can’t.”

  She started crying. She had been on the receiving end of unfair treatment. She had been infuriated before because she didn’t get what she deserved. Now, her tears flowed because she felt undeserving of this moment. Why did he bring her here then if he didn’t want to be with her?

  “You don’t find me attractive. That’s why, right?”

  “On the contrary, I find you wildly attractive. Since the first time we met.”

  “Please tell me…” She cried out.

  “Well, I talked to the doctor. She told me about a few things…”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told me you were attacked. It wasn’t major, but significant enough to be cause for concern.”