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bland. Ethan Carrington was a man of cold hard fact and irrefutable evidence. He would never believe her without details. “The water is an incredible shade of turquoise.” Like a painting, so vivid it could hardly be real, glimmering like jewels in the hot afternoon sun. “The sand is like sugar.”
    Against her face, his hand went still. “ Mexico .” No sound came with the word, just the movement of his mouth. “More.”
    The word hung there between them, thicker than the night. It took effort, but Brenna forced her gaze from his, instinctively realizing how easy it would be to lose herself in the illusion of this man and give him more. Give him too much.
    The prosecutor was interrogating her, she reminded herself. That was all. There was nothing intimate about the way he spoke to her, looked at her. Touched her.
    Limousines were not part of her world. She glanced around her posh prison, noted the ivory seats were cushy enough to serve as couches. The bucket of champagne still waited. Next to it, there was a small blank screen.
    “Go on,” Ethan said, turning her face back to his.
    “There’s some sort of compound,” she said, watching shadows play across his cheek. “There’s a huge room with everything in white.” The color of purity—and deception. “A wall of windows overlooking the ocean.”
    “What else?”
    “Hatred.” The word shot out by itself. “So much hate it’s palpable.”
    “I’m there?”
    “Yes.” She closed her eyes, invited the unfathomable image to return. The hard lines of his face, the edge of defiance. “I can see you in a mirror.” Oval and ornate, a silver-filigree frame. “There’s a glass table below and on it there’s a jaguar. A sculpture,” she clarified. “The animal is running, cast in pewter.”
    Ethan swore softly. “And Jorak Zhukov?”
    Slowly, she opened her eyes. “And others, with guns.” Guns that would soon be used.
    “What else?”
    For five nights in a row she’d had the dream, each time the same, only more intense. She never saw more, never gleaned more detail. “He wants something from you.”
    “What?” There was no real curiosity in the question, only a mocking insolence. “What does Jorak Zhukov want from me?”
    Something he was willing to kill for. Something Ethan was willing to die for. She’d held herself in the dream as long as possible the night before, refusing to let herself surface even when she gasped for breath. “Something only you can give him.”
    His mouth twisted. “Why am I the only one who can give it to him?”
    “Because you’re the one who betrayed him.”
    Ethan went very still, all but his eyes. They burned. His hand fell from the side of her face. He looked deceptively harmless in the faded VMI T-shirt and running shorts, but the energy humming beneath the surface of his skin warned Brenna otherwise. This man was dangerous to her in ways she’d never encountered before.
    “Is that a fact?” he asked silkily, and even though he no longer touched her, the words feathered deep. “Just how is it you think I betrayed him?”
    Warning flashed through her, but she couldn’t back away now, couldn’t back down, not when Ethan Carrington looked at her as if she’d just kicked him in the gut. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. But, God, how she wished that she did. That was the answer, she knew. The key to the riddle.
    His face was a study in hard lines and punishing angles, his eyes penetrating, his mouth, no longer soft and full, but a thin line. She could imagine him like this in a courtroom, staring down the one accused, hoping the force of his glare would intimidate into a confession. “Tell me what you do know.”
    Not enough. Not nearly, nearly enough. Somehow, some way, she’d slipped beneath Ethan Carrington’s impregnable defenses and hit a nerve. She’d delivered a morsel of information that fell too close to home. This man, this man who dominated courtrooms like a fierce gladiator