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She didn’t follow him. She had her own appointment—with the bathroom. She also wanted to give him enough time to have that first cup of coffee.
When she left her room forty-five minutes later, after having made the bed and put away her clothes, she went to the kitchen but found it empty. A pot of coffee had been made, however, and she smiled with satisfaction.
Where was he? In the shower?
She didn’t intend to stand around waiting for him to make an appearance. She was in the living room, heading toward her bedroom, when he appeared on the balcony two floors above.
“Come up here,” he called down. “I’ll be outside.”
His bedroom had a deck—or was it a balcony, too?—that faced east. She had looked at it yesterday, but hadn’t gone out, because his damn command had kept her from stepping outside. There were two comfortable-looking chairs and a small table out there, and she’d thought it must be a comfortable place to sit in the afternoon when the sun had passed its apex and that side of the house was shaded.
She went up the two flights of stairs to his bedroom. His bed, she noticed, had been stripped; that gave her a sense of satisfaction. She could see him sitting in one of the chairs outside, so she went to the open French door. Coffee cup in hand, he sat with his head tilted back a little, his eyes almost closed against the brilliance of the bright morning sun, the expression on his face almost…blissful.
“You’re handy with the salt, aren’t you?” he said neutrally, sipping the coffee, but she sensed he wasn’t angry. Of course, the coffee from the kitchen wasn’t dirt-flavored. When he made the next pot of coffee in here, he might not be as sanguine about things.
“Payback.”
“I guessed.”
He didn’t say anything else, and after a moment she shifted her weight. “Was that all you wanted, just to say that?”
He looked around, as if he’d drifted off into a reverie and was faintly surprised by her presence. “Don’t just stand there, come out here and sit down.”
Just thinking about doing so gave her the sense of running into a wall. “I can’t.”
That got a quick smile from him as he realized she was still housebound. He didn’t say anything, but immediately the mental wall disappeared.
“Crap,” she said, stepping outside and going to sit beside him.
“What?”
“You didn’t say anything, you just thought it. I’d hoped you had to speak the command out loud, that I had to hear it, before it would work.”
“Sorry. All I have to do is think it. I was tempted to use the gift yesterday afternoon and tell a few people to go jump in the lake, but I restrained myself.”
“You’re a saint among men,” she said dryly, and he gave her a quick grin.
“I was dealing with the media, so, considering the level of temptation, I tend to agree with you.”
Media, huh? No wonder he had refused to take her with him.
“I called last night to tell you I wouldn’t make it back until late, but you didn’t answer the phone.”
“Why would I? I’m not your secretary.”
“The call was for you.”
“I didn’t know that, did I?”
“I left a message for you.”
“I didn’t hear it.” The answering machine was in the kitchen; she’d been in his bedroom when the last phone call came in, which must have been him calling her.
“That’s because you didn’t bother to play it back.” He sounded annoyed now.
“Why would I? I’m not—”
“My secretary. I know. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”
“I try,” she said, giving him a smile that was more a baring of her teeth than anything related to humor.
He grunted and sipped coffee for a while. Lorna pulled her bare feet up in the chair and looked out over the mountains and broad valleys, enjoying being outside after an entire day cooped up in the house. The morning was cool enough to make her wish she had on socks, but not so cool that she was forced to go inside.
“Do you want to go with me today?” he finally asked, with obvious reluctance.
“Depends. What are you doing?”
“Overseeing cleanup, talking to insurance adjusters, and I still don’t have an answer to why two detectives were asking questions immediately after the fire, so I’m pursuing that by going directly to the source.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“I’m glad someone thinks so,” he said wryly. “Get ready and we’ll eat breakfast out. For some reason, I don’t trust the food here.”
Chapter Sixteen
Tuesday morning, 7:30 a.m.
The man sitting concealed behind some scrub brush had been in place since before dawn, when he had relieved the unlucky fool who had been on surveillance duty all night. When he saw the garage door sliding up, he grabbed the binoculars hanging by a strap around his neck and trained them on the house. Red brake lights glowed in the dimness of the garage; then a sleek Jaguar began backing out.
He picked up a radio and keyed the microphone. “He’s leaving now.”
“Is he alone?”
“I can’t tell—no, the woman is with him.”
“Ten-four. I’ll be ready.”
His job done for the moment, he let the binoculars fall before the light glinting on the lenses gave him away. He could relax now. Following Raintree wasn’t his job.
“Has the fire marshal said yet how the fire started?” Lorna asked as they drove down the steep, winding road. The air was very clear, the sky a deep blue bowl. The shadows thrown by the morning sun sharply delineated every bush, every boulder.
“Only that it started around a utility closet.”
She settled the shoulder strap of the seat belt so the nylon wasn’t rubbing against her neck. “So have one of your mind readers take a peek and tell you what the fire marshal thinks.”
Dante had to laugh. “You seem to think there are a lot of us, that I have an army of gifted people I can call on.”
“Well, don’t you?”
“Scattered around the world. Here in Reno, there are nine, including myself. None of them are gifted with telepathy.”
“You mean you can’t call your strongest telepath, tell him—”
“Her.”
“—her the fire marshal’s name, and she could do it from wherever she is?”
“The telepath is my sister, Mercy, and she could do it only if she already knew the fire marshal. If she were meeting him in person, she could do it. But a cold reading, at a distance of roughly twenty-five hundred miles, on a stranger? Doesn’t work that way.”
“I guess that’s good—well, unless you need a stranger’s mind read from a few thousand miles away. I suppose this means mind reading isn’t one of your talents.” She hoped not, anyway. If he’d read her mind that morning…
“I can communicate telepathically with Gideon and Mercy, if we deliberately lower our shields, but we’re more comfortable with the shields in place. Mercy was a nosy little kid. Then, when she got older, she wanted to make sure we couldn’t pop into her head without warning, so she armored up, too.”
“What all can you do? Other than play with fire and this mind-control thing.”
“Languages. I can understand any language, which comes in handy when I travel. That’s called xenoglossy. Um…you know I have a mild empathic gift. Something that’s fun is that I can make cold light, psycholuminescence. That’s usually called witch light.”
“Bet that comes in handy when the electricity goes off.”
“It has on occasion,” he admitted, smiling. “It was especially fun when I was a kid, and Mom made me turn out the light and go to bed.”
That sort of home life was as alien to her as if he’d grown up on Mars, and it made her feel vaguely uneasy. To get away from the subject, she asked, “Anything else?”
“Not to any great degree.”
She lapsed into silence, mulling over all that information. There was so much she didn’t know about this stuff. From the way Dante talked about himself and his family, their gifts had evolved with age, and their skills had grown like any other skill, through constant use. If she began learning more about what she could do, would she find more abilities within her power? She wasn’t certain she wanted that. In fact, she was almost certain she didn’t. Enough was enough.
Now that she was away from his house, she felt exposed and vulnerable. Though his autocratic way of keeping her there had been maddening, maybe he’d had the right idea. She had been insulated from the world there, able to more calmly think about being one of the gifted—albeit a lowly “stray” rather than a Raintree or Ansara, which she likened to being a Volkswagen as compared to, well, a Jaguar—because she hadn’t had to guard herself. With every minute they drew closer to Reno, and with every minute she grew more and more anxious. By the time he sent the Jaguar prowling up the on-ramp to the interstate and they joined with heavy traffic, she was almost in a panic.
Old habits and patterns were very hard to break. A lifetime of caution and secrecy couldn’t be easily changed. What was easy enough to contemplate while in seclusion seemed entirely different in the real world. Lorna’s mother hadn’t been the only person in her life to react so negatively to her ability. Dante could call it a gift all he wanted, but in her life it had been more of a curse.
She felt suddenly dizzy and sick at just the thought of getting deeper into this new world than she already was. Nothing would change. If she let anyone know, she would be leaving herself open for exploitation at the best, ridicule or persecution at the worst.
“What’s wrong?” Dante asked sharply, glancing over at her. “You’re almost hyperventilating.”
“I don’t want to do this,” she said, teeth chattering from sudden cold. “I don’t want to be part of this. I don’t want to learn how to do more.”
He muttered a curse, gave a quick look over his shoulder to check traffic, and slotted the Jaguar between a semi and a frozen-pizza truck. At the next exit, he peeled off the interstate. “Take a deep breath and hold it,” he said, as he pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. “Damn it, I should have thought—this is why you need training. I told you that you’re a sensitive. You’re picking up all the energy patterns around you—has to be all the traffic—and it’s throwing you into overload. How in hell did you ever function? How did you survive in a casino, of all places?”
Obedient to his earlier suggestion, Lorna sucked in the deepest breath she could and held it. Was she hyperventilating? she wondered dimly. She supposed she was. But she was cold, so cold, the way she’d been in Dante’s office before the fire.
He put a calming hand on her bare arm, frowning a little when he felt how icy her skin was. “Focus,” he said. “Think of your sensitivity as this shining, faceted crystal, picking up the sun and throwing rainbows all around you. Envision it. Or if you don’t like crystals, make it something else fragile and breakable. Are you doing that? Can you see it in your imagination?”
She struggled to concentrate. “What shape crystal? Hexagonal? How many sides does it have?”
“What difference does it—never mind. It’s round. The crystal is round and faceted. Got it?”
She formed a mental picture of a round crystal, only hers was mirrored. It didn’t throw rainbows, it threw reflections. She didn’t mention that, though. Concentrating helped dispel that debilitating coldness, so she was willing to think of crystals all day. “Got it.”
“Okay. A hailstorm is coming. The crystal will be shattered unless you build a shelter around it. Later you can come back and build a really strong shelter around it, but right now you have to use whatever materials you have at hand. Look around. What do you see that you can use to protect the crystal?”
In her mind she looked around, but no handy bricks and mortar were nearby. There were some bushes, but they weren’t sturdy. Maybe she could find some flat rocks and start stacking them in layers to form a barrier.
“Hurry,” he said. “You only have a few minutes.”
“There are some rocks here, but not enough of them.”
“Then think of something else. The hailstones are the size of golf balls. They’ll knock the rocks down.”
In her mind she glared at him; then, desperate and unable to think of anything else, she mentally dropped to her knees and began scooping a hole in the sandy dirt. The sides of the hole were soft and kept caving in, so she scooped some more. She could hear the storm approaching with a thunderous roar as the hail battered everything in its path. She had to get under shelter herself. Was the hole deep enough? She put the crystal in the hole, and hurriedly began raking dirt around and over it. No, it was too shallow; the crystal ball wasn’t completely underground. She began raking dirt from a wider circle, piling it on top of the crystal. The first hailstone hit her shoulder, a blow like a fist, and she knew the dirt wasn’t going to do the job. With no time left and no other choice, she threw her own body over the dirt mounded over the crystal, protecting it with her life.
She shook herself out of the image and glared at him. “Well, that didn’t work,” she snapped.
He was leaning very close, his green eyes intent on her face, his hand still on her arm. “What did you do?”
“I threw myself on the hand grenade, so to speak.”
“What?”
“I was trying to bury the damn crystal but I couldn’t get it deep enough, so I threw myself on top of it and the hailstones beat me to death. No offense, but your imagery sucks.”
He snorted and released her arm, sitting back in his seat. “That wasn’t my imagery, it was yours.”
“You thought of the stupid crystal.”
“Yeah. It worked, too, didn’t it?”
“What did?”
“The imagery. Are you still feeling—I don’t know how you were feeling, but I’d guess it was as if you were being attacked from all sides.”
Lorna paused. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not feeling that now. But it wasn’t as if I were being attacked. It was more of an anxious feeling, a sense of doom. Then I got so cold, just the way I did in your office before the fire.”
“Only then? You’ve never felt overwhelmed like that except in my office?” He considered the idea, frowning a little.
She rubbed the back of her neck, feeling the knots of tension. “Contrary to what you seem to think, I could pretty much go anywhere and do anything without feeling all those swirls and currents, or like the world was coming to an end. I thought you were the one doing all of it, remember?” Whatever this new stuff was, she didn’t like it at all. She wasn’t a happy-go-lucky person, never had been—it was tough to be Little Miss Sunshine when you were getting slapped every time you opened your mouth—but neither had she felt hopeless, overwhelmed by a dark despair that went way beyond depression.
“I’m not a sensitive,” he said. “I’ve never felt what you’re describing. I know I give off a force field of energy, because other sensitives have picked up on it, but no one has ever said I made them feel as if the world was coming to an end.”
“Maybe they didn’t know you the way I do,” she said sweetly.
“You’re right about that,” he replied, smiling a little, and just that fast the air between them became heavy and hot, as if a summer thunderstorm were approaching. His gaze dipped down to her breasts, stroked over the curves with an almost physical sensation. He’d never touched her breasts, hadn’t touched her sexually at all unless she counted the times she’d been able to feel his erection against her. Come to think of it, that was pretty damn sexual. With a jolt of self-honesty, she realized she’d liked knowing she could make him hard; thinking of how he’d felt made her abdominal muscles clench, low in her belly.
How could he do that, make her respond so fast? Her nipples beaded, so that every breath she took scraped them against her bra, which made them even harder. She almost hunched her shoulders to relieve the pressure, but she knew that would be a dead giveaway. Her bra was substantial enough that he couldn’t see her excitement, which was a good thing. He might suspect, from the heightened color she could feel in her cheeks, but he couldn’t know.
His gaze flashed up, caught hers. Slowly, but not at all hesitantly, he lifted his hand and rubbed the back of one finger over her left nipple, letting her know that she’d been wrong: he knew. Her cheeks got hotter, and she felt that delicious clenching again, the softening deep inside. If she hadn’t been thinking about having sex with him…if she hadn’t been thinking just a couple of hours ago about seeing him naked…maybe she wouldn’t have responded so readily. But she had been, and she did.
“When you’re ready,” he said, holding her gaze a moment longer. Then he dropped his hand and nodded toward the fast-food restaurant. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
