One Secret Night. Yvonne Lindsay

would I need to be protected from the truth? Don’t I deserve to know why he thought my sister and I would be better off without our mother in our lives?”

      “Maybe it wasn’t as clear-cut as that.”

      Ethan shook his head. “It must have been. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to get the rest of our family to support him in his lie. My aunt and my uncle and his wife, they all knew the truth. They’ve all kept the secret for all these years.”

      “Are they still alive?”

      “Yeah, we all live on the family property. We see each other pretty much every day.”

      “Then maybe you can find out from them,” she suggested. “Whatever the outcome, though, Ethan, there’s no point in holding a grudge against a dead man. Right or wrong, your father made his decisions. They can’t be undone or the past changed. The only thing you can do is move forward.”

      “Is that what you do?” he asked. “Move forward and not ask questions?”

      She smiled and lifted her head and met his serious dark brown gaze. “Except for right now, yeah, something like that. It saves on baggage.”

      Ethan shook his head slightly. “I can’t imagine living like that.”

      Isobel shrugged. “It’s not for everyone. Certainly not for someone like your father, for example. For whatever reason, he kept those payments going for years, got your whole family involved, with the idea that he was protecting you and your sister. I imagine you’re probably very much like he was. Strong.” She coasted her fingertips over his shoulders and down his arm. “Intelligent.” She ran her fingers back up his arm and lightly touched his forehead. “And protective.” Her fingertips traveled back down to his chest and she rested her full palm against it. “Those are the qualities about your father you should remember him by. And how much he must have loved you.”

      Ethan remained silent for a while before speaking. “You have an interesting insight for someone who never met my father and who never met me before tonight.”

      “You think I’m being presumptuous, offering you my opinion?”

      “No, not that. If anything, you probably described my father to a tee. I suppose that coming to terms with everything, losing him as suddenly as we did, I had briefly lost sight of that. I still want to know why he never told me about our mother, though.”

      “Is tomorrow soon enough for that?” Isobel asked, raising onto her knees and straddling him as she’d done earlier. “Because I think, for now, it might be fun to distract you with other things.”

      Four

      Isobel woke as the sun was beginning to cast a corona around the edges of the heavy floor-length drapes at the window. For a moment she was disoriented, but soon remembrance flooded her mind. She lay motionless next to Ethan’s sleeping body, listening to his steady breathing, reveling in the warmth that radiated from him. Wow, she thought, that had been quite a night. Who would have thought that Mr. Buttoned-Up would be quite so skilled in the bedroom? She smiled to herself. It was true what they said. It was the quiet ones you had to watch.

      Her body still tingled and she felt wonderfully alive. Last night had been special. Very special. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at Ethan in the half light. His beard had grown, dusting his jaw with an even darker haze than had been apparent at dinner. That, and his mussed-up hair, made him look more untamed and approachable than he’d been before. It was as if he was two people. A public, reserved Ethan and a private one. She liked that she’d gotten a chance to spend time with both.

      Her fingers itched to reach out and touch him. To awaken him both mentally and physically. But caution stilled her hand. If she was going to leave, best to leave now, while he was still sleeping. That way, they could avoid the awkward goodbye that would come after she told him she’d rather not keep in touch. She wasn’t prepared to invest time into any type of commitment. It wasn’t her way. And this guy, well, he had commitment written all over him. In fact, she didn’t doubt that she’d been an aberration for him.

      She slid carefully from the bed and found her dress and shoes on the floor at the end of the bed. Her panties were a lost cause, she decided, after silently scanning the carpet for a minute. Besides, she had clean pairs in her pack. Giving a mental shrug, she held her things to her and carefully made her way to the door, thanking the efficiency of modern maintenance that the door opened and closed silently, allowing her to exit the bedroom without making a sound.

      In the main room she located her pack behind the sofa where Ethan had left it last night and quickly got dressed. She’d give just about anything for a hot shower and a toothbrush right now, but she didn’t want the sound of running water to wake Ethan. Now that she’d made her decision to cut and run, she didn’t want anything to stand in her way. Not even the man who’d ensured she’d enjoyed what had unarguably been the best sex of her entire life.

      Her inner muscles clenched on the memory of the pleasure he’d wrung from her. No hit and miss with him. She smiled. No, he was hit after hit every time. A girl could get addicted to that, could want to hang around for more of the same. She reminded herself that she wasn’t the hanging-around type. Not for any reason, and certainly not for a man. She was a wanderer through and through, with little to call her own aside from what she could carry in her pack.

      Ethan had talked about a family business, relatives that he worked with and spent time with every day. She couldn’t imagine an existence more different from her own. No, there was no room for commitment in her life, and no place for some as impermanent as her in his.

      Isobel threaded the straps of her shoes through the fingers of one hand while hoisting her pack over one shoulder with the other. She turned to blow a silent kiss in the direction of Ethan’s bedroom. It had certainly been fun while it lasted.

      In the elevator on the way to the ground floor, Isobel slid her sandals onto her feet and smoothed her dress, thanking the good sense she’d learned years ago to only purchase non-crush fabrics. Sometimes it cost a little more, but it was worth it when you lived a transitory life out of a backpack.

      The air had a definite autumnal chill to it when she exited the massive glazed doors of the apartment building and she hesitated under the portico, deciding where she should head to next.

      She really needed to find somewhere inexpensive to check into so she could shower and change and get her professional head back on her shoulders. Last night had been a sinfully satisfying deviation from her usual behavior but the sooner she put it behind her, the better. Question was, how was she to do that? She waited in the cool morning air for a few minutes and then, as luck would have it, a taxi pulled to the curb to drop off a passenger. Someone returning from overseas, judging by the amount of luggage the driver hefted from the trunk of the car. As he started to get back in, Isobel stepped forward.

      “Excuse me, is there any chance you could take me to a low-price hotel near here?”

      “Sure, love. Hop in.”

      Thanking her lucky stars, Isobel pushed her pack into the backseat and followed it onto the worn upholstery. As the car pulled away, though, she wondered what might have happened if, instead of slinking away, she’d stayed to waken Ethan. Where could they have gone from last night? That they would have made love again was in no doubt. In fact, they could have skipped the potential for morning-after awkwardness and worked their way straight through to afternoon delight.

      No, she told herself sternly, forcing her head to remain resolutely facing forward. As good as their night together had been, she had to remember her motto, her very code for living. Never look back.

      Besides, she had work to do that would have drawn her out of town soon, anyway. A job that was a cakewalk when it came to it, but that would bring in a tidy paycheck. It was these safe, easy glamour jobs that gave her some much-needed rest after a more trying assignment, and paid enough to subsidize the side of her work that was really important.

      She’d allowed herself a month to get the