Illicit Senses (Illicit Minds Book 1)

by Rebecca Royce

  Part of him—the part that was most likely deranged—wished it were his business to care about the choices Addison made, or to know and love Jeremy. The thought disturbed him, and he decided instead, to take in the scenery around him. Anything not to go down the impossible path his mind wanted to travel, where there was nothing but a world of hurt waiting for him.

  “How far are we?” He crooked his neck, hoping to work out the knot he couldn’t seem to get rid of.

  “About eight blocks.”

  “Can we walk?”

  “In the rain?” She gave him a look that said he was nuts. “Why do you want to walk?”

  “I don’t want to pull up in a car that screams Wade, in case anyone is waiting for us. Do you melt in the rain?”

  Addison laughed, a long, hard sound, and he grinned in response. He hadn’t expected her to be amused. “Gregory, stop the car here, we’re going to walk.”

  “Ah, I don’t know, Addison.”

  Spencer leaned forward and patted him on the back of the shoulder. To his credit, Gregory didn’t flinch at being touched by someone with the Condition. “I won’t let anything happen to her. She’s less likely to be attacked if they don’t know we’re coming.”

  He hoped he was right, but he meant what he’d promised. Nothing would happen to Addison while she was with him. He hadn’t protected Priscilla—hadn’t known he’d needed to until it was too late. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

  The thought stopped him short. Priscilla had been his friend, his partner, even his lover at one point in time. When had Addison begun to exist in the same league?

  He pointed to a spot up ahead next to a Mexican restaurant and asked Gregory to stop the car again. This time the older man obeyed, and Spencer followed Addison out of the car onto the street. Looking up, he noted that the street sign said Grand Avenue.

  He looked around to take in his surroundings. A taxicab behind them honked at Gregory to move the car out of the way. It was only then that Spencer noticed the “No Parking, Standing, or Stopping” sign in front of them. Smiling, he realized Gregory had risked the wrath of New York taxi drivers by letting them off at a taxi stand and getting in the way of the taxis and their fares.

  “Do taxis run in all the boroughs?”

  “They do. But you usually have to bribe them to come out here. They don’t like leaving Manhattan. Sometimes it’s easier to get a ride share, but my grandfather doesn’t like to use those or to have us use them. Too many people could see us that way.” Addison shrugged and tugged her black pea coat tighter around her body. “But I suppose it doesn’t really matter. A lot of what once was is changing. Brooklyn has become pretty trendy. They have to bring more and more people out here.”

  He gripped her small, dainty hand in his and crossed the street. He liked the feel of it.

  “Worried I’m going to run away?” She looked down at their joined hands.

  “No, I just want to be able to pull you with me without saying anything if I get a sense that we need to run.”

  It was true. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it for her. He’d never been able to predict the future. In some ways, that particular ability would have been easier than the ones he had.

  The rain was cold on his face, but he didn’t give in to the urge to put his head down and look at the ground as he walked. There was no way he wasn’t going to watch where he stepped. Addison stayed silent, which he appreciated. A lot of chitchat would have put him more on edge than he already was.

  After stopping at two lights, and being obligated to move out of the way of a box truck backing into traffic, they finally arrived at a large brick building. Immediately, it struck him as unusual. Surrounded on all sides, and even across the street, by small, four-story buildings, the building where Jeremy’s nanny lived was a skyscraper by comparison. It had to have been more than twenty floors high.

  “Kind of unusual for the neighborhood, isn’t it?” Spencer had to shout to be heard over the wind, which had decided to pick up speed and strength.

  “It is. I’ve only been here three times. Once to drop Jeremy off to play with Loretta’s nephew, and the other two times to bring her a paycheck. She’s more like a member of the family than an employee, and I had to make sure she didn’t need anything because she was sick. I never thought about it, but you’re totally right.” She shrugged. “I wonder who thought it was a good idea to put this here.”

  He walked toward the door and pulled it open so Addison could walk through ahead of him. “Do you know much about architecture?”

  “Not at all.” She cleared her throat. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks red from the cold. Wet blonde hair that looked silver from the rain fell everywhere, having been blown out of its neat bun sometime during their eight-block trek. “Do you?”

  “A little bit.” He motioned to the guard, who had been staring at them since they entered the building. “Do we need to sign in with him or anything?”

  “He’ll let us up.”

  “After he calls Loretta?” Spencer was still hoping for an element of surprise, although that was becoming less and less likely, as the building was more secure than he’d anticipated. Then again, Jeremy had been taken from a building with security the equivalent of that in a bank vault while his aunt slept in the other room.

  “No.” She grinned. “Wade owns this particular building.” His look must have told her that he wished she had told him that when he’d asked about the building earlier. “You asked me if I knew about architecture or if I thought the building was unusual here. I don’t know about architecture, and I didn’t build it, so I’d never thought about its oddity.”

  He was going to have to remember that Addison was capable of leaving out very important pieces of information to suit her needs.

  He grabbed her arm and stopped her as she moved forward. “Is that usual? Do you guys house most of your employees? The ones that work for the family, I mean.” There was no way they could house the entire population that worked for Wade Corporation as a whole.

  His mind moved at a thousand miles a minute. Everything was so intricate, so put-together. It felt like if he could just see all the pieces of this puzzle, he could get a better sense of it. So far everything led back in one direction: Oliver Wade.

  “Grandfather thinks it’s a good idea to keep the people who work for us happy. He pays them well and makes sure their needs are met. That way, they’re less likely to steal.”

  “And less likely to leave.”

  “How do you figure?” Her gaze bored into his. She squinted, seeming to concentrate hard on looking at his face. The intensity in her baby-blues made his groin harden.

  “If they’re totally indebted to you, not only by where they work but where they live, they may feel trapped, as if not working for you would be next to impossible. It’s similar with the institutions. Sometimes, people want to know why we don’t stage a coup or an uprising, but where would we go? None of us have any skills or abilities that would make it easy for us to survive. The only thing I can do is follow energies. I’d give myself away pretty quickly or starve to death.”

  “Well, they’d take one look at the swirling thing your eyes do and they’d know right away anyway.”

  “What swirling thing?”

  “In the center of your eyes, when you’re using your ability, a thousand different shades of blue, gray, and green move around your pupils.”

  No one had ever said that to him before. “Really? I’ve never heard that. Are you sure you’re not just imagining it?”

  “I’m positive.” She laughed. “It’s not like you can see your own eyes.”

  “That’s true, but you would think someone would have told me.”

  “Maybe they’re just not as observant as I am. Anyone could see the blackness that comes when you reach dark space, but it’s the light colors that swirl around in there when you’re sensing something that’s really captivating.”

  Addison moved forward and out of his g
rip as she approached the guard. Did she have any idea what she’d just said? She’d just called his eyes captivating. Part of him wanted to strut like a rooster. The other part was horrified. Addison Wade was becoming a tax on his well-being. Maybe in another lifetime they could have been just a man and a woman getting to know each other…

  Focus, he commanded himself. He was in a tall building in Brooklyn. A building that just so happened to be owned by Oliver Wade. Jeremy was missing.

  Addison was hot. He wished he could bang his head against something. Even when he tried to be stone cold in his thinking, she snuck into his head like a bad cold he couldn’t get rid of.

  She walked back, smiling. “We can go up.”

  Silently, he followed her to the elevator and waited for it to arrive. She smelled good, too, something like vanilla, as she had earlier, and now also coffee beans. Damn, the situation wasn’t getting any better for him. He needed the day to end. It was funny how some days flew by, but this one, in particular the time he spent with her, seemed to move slowly, as if every second counted.

  The elevator dinged and they entered. It was noticeably colder inside, by at least a few degrees. “They need to turn down the air conditioning in here. It’s winter.”

  Addison laughed, and he was delighted by having made her do that again. “So, you were saying you know about architecture.”

  “I know about it in the ways it relates to me.” Spencer made note that she pushed the top floor button. Interesting. So not only was Loretta an employee of the Wade family, but she warranted the penthouse? “Does your family do construction?” That would be new information on the Wades.

  “No, but there’s a division of Wade that invests in real estate. Or at least there used to be. I think we just sold off that division. Grandfather said we owned enough for a good long while. We kept the property we owned. The rent is good income for the company, but we got rid of the division that did the purchasing.”

  “You say that like you’re very aware of how it went down.”

  “One of the other people from the council bought it. Grace Ann Charters. I guess they’re trying to branch out from liquor.”

  The name made his skin crawl. Five years earlier, that woman had rewritten the rules of conduct for people with the Condition. One of them had been that no one from an institution could act at all violently outside the institution walls. That had meant that when Priscilla had pushed the man trying to kill Spencer, she had deserved the bullet that had been put in her brain moments later.

  Priscilla should have let him—Spencer—die. He shivered at the memory. It had been the gunshot that had brought him back to his senses. The gunshot and the bridge Priscilla had kept open for him in her mind while she died.

  Not wanting to give Addison a chance to notice his distress, he opted to keep talking about the building. It gave him something else to think about as well. “Certain kinds of architecture affect certain kinds of conditions differently. Most of the ‘freaks’ that can control the weather have to be standing on solid ground to do it. A lot of people with my abilities can’t trance properly in buildings made of lead or steel.”

  “But you can?”

  He nodded. “Easily. I’m that powerful.” It wasn’t bragging. He just wanted her to know so she understood the kind of technique it took to do what he was about to do. “Your home, and this one, are all built with those same substances.”

  “Is that standard?” Her face took on the strained, panicked look again.

  “For old buildings, yes. For this more modern one, no.”

  “Because of the lead.”

  “Yeah. The health problems associated with lead paint made people stop using it in their building materials.”

  The elevator doors opened and they stepped out onto the floor. While she walked briskly to the door on the left with the number 2 on it and knocked, Spencer made note that there were only two apartments on the floor. He stepped out of the elevator and followed her slowly as he glanced at the other door. The fluorescent light that lit the hallway was out over the doorway marked 1.

  “She’s not answering. Do we wait?”

  He shook his head. “Not if we want to make sure she’s not dead.”

  “I could try calling her.” She’d suggested that before they left her apartment, and he’d told her not to. If she wasn’t dead, he didn’t want her to know they were looking for her.

  “Nope.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to break the law now. If they catch me doing this, they’ll put me to death.”

  “All punishable offenses are death offenses.”

  She’d quoted the Conditioned law, and he had to admit he was impressed. Well, maybe he needn’t be—she was going to inherit her grandfather’s place on the council when he retired or died. She could probably recite all the different ways to torture them in her sleep.

  “It’s the most awful law.” She visibly swallowed, and he forgot his internal rant about her future council seat. Maybe it would be a good thing when she took over. Maybe they’d become more humane. He would look forward to that day. “Would it be the Fury that killed you?”

  “Maybe. It might also be the police.” The police had killed Priscilla.

  Her eyes got huge. “They’d just shoot you? No questions asked?”

  “Like they’d put down a dog.” He kicked hard at the door. It vibrated but didn’t open. Addison’s gasp made him smile. “I’m not really kicking down the door. That was just for effect.”

  She groaned. “Not funny.”

  “I wish I was action-movie strong. I’m afraid I’m more nefarious than that.” He bent down to look at the lock. “Give me one of your hairpins.” Her messed-up hairstyle was going to prove useful for more than just tempting his senses and making him think about sex.

  “You’re going to pick that lock with a hairpin?”

  “Unless you have a better idea.”

  “I could try to talk the guard into giving us the spare key.”

  “Somehow you’re not getting the idea of stealth here.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “I guess I’m not that good at subterfuge… and you kicked the damn door. Not exactly quiet.”

  She had him there. He let his gaze roam her body for a moment. “You’re obviously not good at spy tactics, but you are good at secrets. I just haven’t been able to figure out which ones you’re keeping yet or why.” He pointed to the hairpin. “Give that to me.”

  She handed it to him, and he didn’t miss that she didn’t contradict him. Better to say nothing, he supposed.

  Straightening the pin, he pushed its ridged side into the keyhole. A few good strokes and it opened for him.

  “How did you learn to do that?” Addison whispered.

  “Why are you whispering? If she’s in there and she hasn’t opened the door by now, she’s dead or in a coma.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Funny how that works. I guess we’re both good at keeping things to ourselves.” He motioned to the open door. “Shall we?”

  Eight

  Addison didn’t know what she was more nervous about: breaking and entering Loretta’s apartment or Spencer’s announcement that he knew she had a secret. Couple that with her attraction to him, which she couldn’t seem to get under control, and she was one giant mess.

  Loretta’s apartment was frighteningly quiet. Dark shadows danced across the white walls and the sound of a ticking clock was the only noise. She wasn’t sure why it was bugging her so much. Places were always silent when no one was in them, but something about the space struck her as ultra-hushed. Maybe she just watched too many movies. Spencer wasn’t acting at all concerned.

  He walked quickly from the entranceway toward a door on the left and disappeared from her view. She almost called him back before she decided that would be incredibly cowardly of her. She really didn’t want to come across as terrified, even if she was.

  She took a deep breath as she looked around. The apartme
nt was small, but it had a beautiful view of the Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan behind it. One bedroom stood to her left, where Spencer had disappeared, and where she assumed there was a bathroom. The kitchen was to the right, visible above a wall that reached only halfway to the ceiling.

  She walked toward the eating area of the kitchen and scooted around the wall to open the small refrigerator. It was stocked with all the essentials—milk, butter, eggs and orange juice, as well as fruits and vegetables. Not things you would buy if you knew you were going out of town. That meant either Loretta was simply out of the apartment, or she’d been taken.

  “Doing a little detective work?”

  She jumped. “I was just trying to see if there was anything missing.”

  Spencer raised an eyebrow. “Is there?”

  “Truthfully, I have no idea. The fridge is pretty stocked.”

  He moved next to her, and she felt strangely comforted by his warmth against her body. “So now you’re wondering if she’s coming back and if we’re about to get caught.”

  “Is mind-reading one of your strange abilities?” He’d been frighteningly close, except for missing the wild sexual fantasies she had in addition to her terror. She was sick in the head, which was the only explanation for the inappropriate feelings she couldn’t get under control.

  “No, just following the logic.” Spencer touched the coffee pot that stood on the counter next to a small, silver toaster oven. “It’s still warm.”

  That must have some significance she wasn’t following.

  “So?”

  “Do you go out of the house and leave your coffee pot on? At the institute we’re all very careful not to leave electrical equipment on if we’re not present.”

  “I don’t know if we leave it on or not. It’s always on when I get up in the morning and off when I come home at night.” She raised her hand to stop what she assumed he was going to say. “I know. I’m spoiled. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.” His eyes flared with an unreadable emotion and she was reminded of what a mystery he was to her.