CROSSFIRE by Jenna Mills Page A

"Mom almost fainted."
    There was a light in Hawk's eyes now, brighter than the kerosene lamp. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"
    "Mom was furious," Elizabeth recalled. In some faraway corner of her mind she realized how ridiculous it was to be sitting in a small dark cave in the middle of nowhere, with the frigid night air pushing in on her, talking to Hawk about her childhood. But awareness didn't change the truth.
    She'd forgotten how easy it was to talk to him, how he always asked questions, then listened. When she'd looked back on their brief time together, which she'd tried not to do, she'd seen only that one disastrous night, the out-of-control, frenzied lovemaking.
    And that's all it took to yank her thoughts back to the here and now.
    "She ranted about how Miranda had ruined everything. I was so sure she was going to get in huge trouble and tried desperately to convince Mom not to punish her, but she was so lost in her anger it was like I wasn't even there."
    Even as a child, she'd hated conflict, that crazy, out-of-control feeling that offered no promises of security or happy endings.
    "But Kristina breezed into the room and said, 'Mom, she's just a kid. She was only having fun. Lighten up.'" Elizabeth paused, swallowed the emotion burning her throat. "And then Mom started to laugh. I just stood there, staring at them, awed that my seven-year-old little sister had the courage to defy Mom's explicit orders and Kristina had the guts to step in and tell Mom she was overreacting."
    To this day, it amazed her that children from the same family could develop such distinct personalities.
    "Where was Ethan during all this?" Hawk asked.
    Elizabeth grinned. Even as a kid of nine, Ethan had adhered to a strict code of justice. "Convincing Dad that the whole ordeal was actually Mom's fault for making us dress up in such ridiculous outfits in the first place."
    Hawk lifted a hand to his shoulder and rubbed. "Just another day in the whitewashed world of the Carrington family, huh?"
    Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut, opened them a heartbeat later. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, but the chill deepened. "That's just it. Even when it was crazy, it was wonderful. That's all I ever wanted, for my family to be happy. When something went wrong, when my parents argued or Kris stayed out past curfew, when Ethan broke one of mom's prized Fabergé eggs, I just wanted to make it better, fix it somehow." They'd called her the peacemaker. "I couldn't stand seeing them unhappy."
    The light in Hawk's eyes dimmed. "But you couldn't fix Kris dying."
    The softly spoken words stabbed through Elizabeth . She felt herself stiffen, the surge of emotion and memory rush through her. They crashed against the cage of the past, battered the flimsy constraints. The coldness settled deeper into her bones.
    "No," she whispered through an uncomfortably tight throat. "I couldn't stop Kris from dying." But she should have been able to. A simple phone call. That's all it would have taken. One phone call, and her sister might still be alive, married with a few kids, following in her father's footsteps and pursuing a career in politics. Instead, only pictures remained. And memory.
    She'd never forget the look on her dad's face as he stood by her sister's coffin. "It was January, only a few days after the family had celebrated New Year's. We'd laughed and smiled and toasted the year ahead." Deep inside she started to shake. She looked at Hawk sitting a few feet away, with his back against the rock wall and his long legs stretched before him, the khaki shirt wrinkled and torn and open at the throat, and wished, for a fleeting dangerous moment, that the past didn't stand between them like a steel-reinforced wall, that she could scoot across the floor and feel his arms close around her. That she could absorb the heat of his body. That they were different people. That they could share without damage.
    But Elizabeth had never been the starry-eyed dreamer in the