Carole Mortimer - Surrender to the Past

What the hell was he doing, fantasising about making love to Mia? Present tense, not past …

Damn it, wasn’t this situation complicated enough already, due to the limited amount of information he felt able to share with Mia, without clouding the issue by resurrecting his desire for this woman that had once been so unrelenting? A desire Mia had made it more than obvious she would never feel for him again …

Ethan stood up restlessly. And instantly realised his mistake as the pulsing of his erection told him that it wasn’t only his thoughts that had become wayward in the last few minutes!

He turned away to look out of the window rather than allowing Mia to see the evidence of his arousal. Yesterday he had been certain that he didn’t even like this new tough and forceful Mia. Now his traitorous body had decided something completely different!

Not just his body, Ethan acknowledged with a frown. He had caught a glimpse of a softer, more appealing Mia just now, when she’d apologised to Trish for her rudeness, and that glimpse, it seemed, had been enough to reawaken the desire Ethan had felt for Mia since he had looked across the room where the company party was being held and seen her in that snug-fitting red dress, her hair a glorious gold tumble down the length of her spine …

‘Who took those photographs, Ethan?’

Get a grip, Ethan, he instructed himself firmly. Stop thinking about taking Mia to bed and concentrate on the here and now. ‘I hired a private security firm six months ago,’ he revealed tautly.

‘Obviously a more efficient one than my father.’

‘Obviously,’ Ethan said.

Mia had felt physically sick yesterday as she’d looked through the photographs inside the envelope Ethan had given her.

Photographs of her opening Coffee and Cookies in the morning. Of her walking alone in the park during her lunch break. Of her loading boxes of cookies into her car for delivery. Another one of her getting into her car and driving off. The list just went sickeningly on and on!

Someone—some unknown, faceless person Ethan had hired—had been following her, taking photographs of her, and she hadn’t even realised it! ‘Did my father ask you to do this?’

‘No.’

‘Then I don’t understand …’

‘Obviously not.’ Ethan turned back to face her, eyes a glittering silver-grey. ‘You already know your father had a heart attack six months ago, Mia,’ he reminded grimly.

‘Yes …’

‘And the one thing he wanted before he died was to see you again.’

‘How sweet!’

‘Don’t, Mia.’ Ethan’s warning was icily chill, his eyes becoming like silver shards of glittering glass.

‘Don’t what?’ she taunted.

‘Don’t mock what you so obviously can’t begin to understand.’

‘Are you daring to question the love I felt for my father?’

‘Obviously in the past tense,’ Ethan recognised harshly. ‘But, whether you like it or not, whether you accept it or not,’ he added firmly, ‘William will never stop loving you.’

‘He has your mother now.’

‘Considering what a cold-hearted little witch his daughter has turned into, that’s probably as well!’ He looked at her coldly.

Mia’s cheeks flushed. ‘You know nothing about me—’

‘I know that you have only a few close female friends, that there’s no current man in your life, and that you work twelve hours a day, six days a week in your coffee-shop.’

‘Exactly how long did you have me watched, Ethan?’ Mia’s hands shook as she clenched them at her sides.

‘It took almost the whole six months and a lot of man hours to find you.’ He shrugged. ‘The fact that you used only the name of a company to buy your coffee shop was what threw us off the scent for so long.’ He looked at her reprovingly.

Mia’s mouth firmed. ‘And once you had found me?’

‘A few days.’

‘How many?’

‘Five,’ he stated flatly.

‘I want any written reports on me given to you by this “private security firm”.’ Mia was breathing unevenly, not sure if she was just furious at having her private life invaded in this way, or if it was the fact that Ethan had instigated the search that made it seem so much more of an intrusion.

Ethan shrugged broad shoulders. ‘I’ve already shredded them.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

‘Because they weren’t relevant now that I’ve seen you again,’ Ethan dismissed impatiently, before moving to sit back behind his desk; he didn’t need a written report on Mia to remember what was in it. To know there was no current male in Mia’s life …

‘It’s relevant to me —’

‘It’s gone, Mia.’ Ethan sighed. ‘Destroyed. Unimportant.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

His mouth tightened at her obvious scepticism. ‘Perhaps because I have no reason to lie to you?’

‘Did you ever need a reason?’

‘Damn it, Mia—’

‘Have you told my father yet that you’ve found and spoken to me?’

‘Not yet, no,’ Ethan bit out tersely.

‘Why not …?’ She eyed him guardedly.

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t feel able to do that without first speaking to you.’

‘And now that you have spoken to me?’

Ethan breathed deeply. ‘I see little point in telling him anything when you’re obviously still so hostile to the idea of seeing him again.’

‘That isn’t going to change any time soon.’ Inwardly, Mia told herself she had absolutely no intention of feeling in the least bit guilty over her refusal to see or hear from her father again.

‘It might.’

‘It won’t,’ she assured him evenly. ‘Seeing you again—twice!—has been quite bad enough, thank you very much!’

‘I can’t see why. Unless I actually meant something to you five years ago …?’

‘You didn’t.’ Mia gave a decisive shake of her head. ‘You’re just a part of something that I would rather forget.’

And that had been, and always would be, the problem between the two of them, Ethan acknowledged heavily. Even if they could have overcome the hurdle of the mistrust Mia felt in regard to him, Ethan still knew that every time Mia so much as looked at him now she was reminded of her mother’s suicide five years ago. Along with the remorseless publicity that had followed because of her father’s relationship with Ethan’s mother.

What would Mia say or do if Ethan were to act on the desire that now raged through his body at the very thought of having all her restless aggression in his bed?

‘Ethan!’ Mia was obviously as irritated with his distraction as Ethan was.

He frowned his impatience. ‘You’ve become quite the little spitfire, haven’t you?’

‘And?’

‘I like it.’ He shrugged.

She seemed dumbstruck for a few seconds, and then she glared at him. ‘I have absolutely no interest in hearing what your opinion is of me now, Ethan!’

‘Are you sure about that?’

Could Ethan possibly be flirting with her? Mia questioned incredulously. After all that had happened, their chequered history, was he actually—? No, he couldn’t be. Ethan had made it perfectly clear that—spitfire apart—he didn’t even like the woman she was now. That he thought she was both cruel and selfish.

When Mia was neither of those things …

Walking away from her father—from Ethan—from the only life and home she had ever known—had been the hardest thing Mia had ever had to do. But to have stayed when she’d felt as if everyone she had ever loved and cared for was either gone or had betrayed her—her mother by dying, her father and Ethan by deceiving her—would have been even harder.

And if Ethan thought it had been easy for her to stay away after she had read about her father’s heart attack in the newspapers, then he was mistaken; if anything that had been more difficult to do than walking away initially.

Instead she had continued to follow her father’s medical progress in those newspapers, to inwardly ache at the changes she saw in him when he was photographed leaving hospital two weeks after his heart attack. Her father’s hair was iron-grey now, and there were lines on his face that certainly hadn’t been there four and a half years ago. She had been pleased to see he looked slightly less strained and ill when he’d been photographed again four weeks later, boarding a plane on his way to recuperate at his home in the South of France. Although that pleasure had been somewhat diluted by seeing a smiling Grace Burton at his side …

‘Could we get back to the reason I came here?’ she prompted testily.

‘Which was?’

‘To tell you to call off your private security company, for one!’ She began to pace restlessly.

‘Already done. Anything else?’

‘I want you out of my life. And I want you to stay out!’ Her eyes flashed in warning.

‘You seriously think, after all these months of searching, I’m now going to just give up on you because you tell me to?’ Ethan raised his brows in derision.

‘Why not? I gave up on all of you years ago!’

Ethan was well aware of that fact. But there were still so many things that Mia didn’t know about the past. Things that William had made Grace and Ethan promise never to tell her …

Such as the fact that Kay Burton had been about to leave both her daughter and her husband for a younger man—her tennis coach; how clichéd was that?—on the day of the car accident that had left her so badly injured and then in hospital for months afterwards. Such as the fact that the man Kay had been leaving her family for had decided he was no longer interested in being with a woman—even one as wealthy as Kay Burton would be after her divorce—who was badly scarred and would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. That had resulted in William feeling duty-bound to stand by the mother of his heartbroken daughter, even though she had been leaving him for another man and there had no longer been any love between himself and Kay.

The tennis coach hadn’t completely disappeared from their lives, either …

The wealthy divorcee Kay no longer being an option, as far as the other man was concerned, he had instead decided to blackmail William in order to keep the truth of her mother’s affair, of Kay’s intention to leave her husband and daughter, from the already traumatised sixteen-year-old Mia. Blackmail that had only come to an end when Kay had killed herself and Mia had disappeared only days after her mother’s funeral.

Not a pretty story, by any means—and certainly not one that William would have confided in his young daughter while her mother was still alive. And he had adamantly refused to tell Mia after Kay Burton took her own life.

Putting Ethan in a very precarious position now he had found Mia again. His respect for William dictated that he couldn’t break his promise to the other man and tell Mia the truth—but, having now found her again, spoken with her, Ethan couldn’t just walk away again either.

Even if he wanted to. Which he didn’t. And not just because of his love for William; this older, self-reliant and more self-confident Mia was even more intriguing than the younger, vulnerable Mia had been …

He straightened determinedly. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Mia.’

‘Pity!’

‘Isn’t it?’ he came back insincerely. ‘So, why isn’t there currently a man in your life, Mia?’

Mia was thrown slightly off-balance by this sudden change of subject. ‘Is there currently a woman in your own life?’ she counter-challenged.

‘No,’ he answered.

Her brows rose. ‘Why not?’