Phoenix Rising

by Corrina Lawson

  Then she’d see that he was perfectly capable of making his own choices.

  Chapter Eleven

  “What’s up this morning?” Alec asked at breakfast. “More shopping?” He popped a little chocolate donut into his mouth.

  “I think one chain store is enough. First, we’ll get a breakfast that includes things other than donuts and then maybe a walk.”

  She poured a glass of orange juice for him. Alec looked more relaxed than yesterday. He’d let his hair fall naturally around his face rather than trying to tame it, though those circles under his eyes told her he hadn’t slept much. She remembered when her life had changed irrevocably after her mother’s death. She’d been a prisoner for some time before Philip’s rescue. It had, quite frankly, sucked, and she hadn’t been properly functional for months. Philip had had patience with her meltdowns and her fears. Now it was time to pay that forward.

  Alec was in better shape than she had been. He was an adult—that helped—and he wasn’t in mourning for someone close to him. Still, he’d been kidnapped, told his entire life was a lie and forced to confront some awful truths. She’d have curled up in the fetal position. Alec, however, had approached it all with an optimism that seemed heroic, not to mention getting enjoyment from the little chocolate donuts.

  He was far stronger than she would ever be. And, though it was petty, she couldn’t help admiring the way he filled out his T-shirt.

  “Anything new with your fire or TK?”

  He ate another donut and looked at the ceiling. “Nope.”

  Damn. “How did you like the internet?”

  “It’s a bit overwhelming.”

  “Find anything out about me?” She put the carton back in the fridge. If he was smart, and she knew he was, the first thing he should have done was run a search on her.

  “That’d be telling, counselor.” He washed down the donut with the juice. “I thought of looking up the Resource.”

  Oh, shit. For all she knew, the Resource tracked all the searches about it, which could lead them straight here. I should have thought of that last night. But she’d been too rattled and off-balance after his kiss. “Did you look them up?”

  “Nope. I wanted to learn something new, not read about something I already know.”

  She let out a deep breath. One bullet dodged. “What else did you look for?”

  He flipped one of the chairs around so he could rest his arms on the back of it. “Did you know this house doesn’t exist on any maps?”

  A loaded question. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Because it belongs to a CIA agent?”

  “Because it doesn’t have a residential address. All the mail goes to a post office box.”

  “That makes a difference?”

  “It does for internet search engines.” Would he buy that? Google Earth could probably find this place and it had to be on the tax rolls, unless Philip had done something funky there, which was entirely possible.

  She poured brewed tea from a teapot decorated with lilacs into a matching cup. Morning tea usually relaxed her. This morning, she’d need several pots to even approach relaxed. Hell, she needed to spike it.

  “I think it’s more likely that your foster father hid this place.” Alec jumped to his feet.

  She flinched, flashing back to the memory of how he’d grabbed her last night. The teacup slipped out of her hand, headed for the floor. “Dammit!”

  The cup stopped an inch from the floor, safe, hanging in midair.

  “Alec?” she asked, swallowing, looking at him.

  He knelt very carefully in front of the teacup, his mouth taut in concentration. The cup settled quietly on the floor, intact.

  Alec let out a deep breath and stared at the cup again, frowning. He must be trying to lift it up. Beth counted the seconds, trying to disappear into the woodwork so as not to disturb him. Thirty seconds passed, though it seemed much longer. The cup didn’t move. He stood up with a sigh of disgust.

  “Weak. Too damn weak.”

  She reached down, picked up the cup and set it on the counter. Why wasn’t he more excited?

  “Alec, your TK worked. It worked!” Thank God.

  “Only for a second.” He slapped an open hand on the counter. “Damn.”

  “But it worked. You saw.”

  “No, it didn’t, not really.”

  “You saved my teacup. You grabbed it in midair.”

  “It’s a cheap trick. It was all instinct. I’m back to where I was when I was five.” He turned away, rubbing the back of his neck.

  But it had worked, if only for a moment. Not a simple push of something either, he’d been able to move fast enough to save the cup from shattering. She hadn’t damaged him beyond repair. He would get his gifts back. This wasn’t her fault.

  Her heart felt immeasurably lighter.

  “Your gifts are there, and you can access them if really necessary.” She smiled, almost giddy with relief. “And, thank you. That was my favorite teacup.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess.” He stared at the teacup. “So when do you think the full control will be back?”

  “We don’t have any parameters, so I can’t say for sure. But it couldn’t hurt to repeat yesterday.”

  “I want to practice driving. And I want to see the beach.”

  “Yes, all that, but breakfast first. You’ll get a chance to see the town too. We’ll do as much as we can today. We might not get another chance.”

  “Because you think the Resource will find us?”

  “Soon, yes.”

  “And that scares you?”

  “Of course it does.”

  Yesterday, she would have insisted that he run, that he had to go with her. But after last night, she wasn’t certain any longer that she had any moral high ground. The Resource had manipulated him, she had manipulated him. Hell, she’d kidnapped and drugged him. And she couldn’t even tell if he really cared about her or if he had a patient’s fixation on her.

  Time to let go of the fantasy that she’d save him.

  She was no savior, only a scared bumbler. He had to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, considering how he was bound up with F-Team and their work, she bet he’d choose them. At least now, he had truth of how he’d gotten to that point. Once he got his fire back, he could even stand on his own. Perhaps she’d given him the tools he needed to survive.

  “You sure it’s the Resource that scares you? Or do I scare you?” He stared at her for a long time. “Are you going somewhere on me, counselor?”

  There had been a moment when he’d truly scared her last night, though she couldn’t tell if she’d been more scared that he was going to kiss her or more scared that she wanted him to kiss her.

  “I understand you’re frustrated.” She swallowed. “But I also know that in one day, your TK is back. Another day and your fire might be back. And then you’ll be gone, one way or another. Likely, you’ll go back to the Resource, to see if there’s news about the terrorists that escaped with the bomb.”

  “Last night, I thought about how I let them get away. I screwed up the mission, you know. I have to fix it.”

  She nodded. “I know. I should have realized that about you sooner.”

  “You hate me being a soldier.”

  “No, I wish you didn’t have to be a soldier. There’s a difference.”

  She looked down at the small puddle made by tea that had sloshed from the cup. Once Alec stepped inside the Resource, she couldn’t follow. The best she could do was show him his potential aside from being as soldier, as fast as possible.

  He stepped closer to her and lifted her chin. She shuddered, feeling that strange vibration between them again, so very powerful. It had taken a lot of willpower to turn it away last night. But it had been the right thing to do.

  Her toes curled from his touch. She backed away and reached for a paper towel to clean up the tea. She knelt in front of the spill. He leaned down next to her, hands resting on his knees.

&
nbsp; “You really don’t want to hold me here, do you? You’ve been telling me straight.”

  “Yes.” She stood and tossed the dirty towel in the garbage.

  They walked to the car. As she drove, he talked. He had a lot of questions and not just about driving. From the roundabout way he approached a few of them, she thought he’d found some internet porn last night. How refreshingly normal.

  “Have you dated, Alec?” She doubted it. Lansing wouldn’t have let him.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it dating. When I turned eighteen, Daz took me out to some clubs and, well, um—”

  “I see.” And she did. It made perfect sense with his mentions of the strip clubs. Daz had taken his honorary little brother out to get laid, probably on a regular basis. At least his first sex had been a normal enough experience. But it also meant Alec had no experience with relationships. Another thing Lansing had robbed him of.

  “Anyway, I was curious about what was on the ’net but some of what I found just confused the hell out of me. For instance, what’s ‘slash’ and why is it so popular?”

  Great. He’d found slash. Whatever happened to guys who simply looked up nude photos? “Where did you see the word?”

  “I Googled Harry Potter. There were a bunch of hits that came with it.”

  “I bet.” She kept her eyes on the road. “Slash means a homosexual relationship between two characters, usually in fiction, who aren’t homosexual in the original work.”

  “That’s sorta what I thought. Lansing believes being gay is bad. Unnatural. Wrong.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  He shrugged. “Gabe’s gay. Nobody on F-Team cares, except for the ribbing he gets at the strip clubs. I don’t think they told Lansing, though. But, anyway, Harry Potter isn’t gay but they paired him up with guys anyway, like Draco. And Snape. I don’t understand why you’d hook up straight characters.”

  “The number one rule of the internet: if it exists, there is porn of it. How did you end up with the male slash?”

  “I was trying to find something on Hermione.”

  Hermione. Good choice. Alec had taste in his fantasy women. “When did you read Harry Potter?”

  “Lansing thought he would be a good role model for me,” Alec said. “It was a nice change from the nonfiction that I had to read for two hours a day.”

  “Find anything else in your ’net search?”

  “Lots and lots of girls.”

  Whew. “No doubt.”

  “But I found one other weird thing.”

  “Just one?”

  “A reference to furries. What are they?”

  Furries? “How the hell did you find that?”

  “I followed a link after I was, uh, looking at Halle Berry as Catwoman. F-Team has that movie in the rec room.”

  Catwoman and Hermione. Not so bad, for fantasies. It could have been a lot weirder, given Alec’s isolation. “Furries are people who like to have sex while pretending to be animals. Some wear costumes. Some don’t.”

  “Some of these furries like more than like it. They crave it. I found this long story about how this woman couldn’t stand her new boyfriend because he could only get it on if she dressed like a cow.”

  She laughed, almost missed the next corner, and had to jerk hard on the wheel. When the car was straight again, she glanced at Alec. “Another lesson: Don’t discuss furries dressed as cows when driving.”

  “Gotcha.”

  He lifted the iPod and picked some Motown. Her shoulders relaxed a little.

  “It’s impossible to not like this music,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Did you listen to it growing up?”

  She put a hand above her eyes to shade out the morning sun. “No. It’s well before my time. I found it a few years ago.”

  “I could really dance to it.”

  She took the left at the intersection, heading into town. “You can dance?”

  “Sure. Lansing said every proper gentleman should learn. First, I learned ballroom, then the Foxtrot, the Charleston and the Tango. And some dances that Lansing said dated from the Victorian age.”

  “Those group dances that everyone does at once, changing partners all the time?” There was the Victorian age again, the era that was all over Alec’s bookshelves. It must have some hold on Lansing.

  “Yeah. Lansing was good at them. One time, he pulled all the research techs together and made them dance like that. I think he was a little drunk at the time.” Alec tapped his fingers on the dashboard. “Daz taught me some hip-hop. I picked up more in the clubs. Do you dance?”

  “No, I never learned.” Images of slow dancing with Alec came to mind, with her hugging him as tightly as those jeans. She swallowed down the lump in her throat. That should not happen.

  “Why not?”

  She blinked, trying to remember what he was referring to. He certainly hadn’t read her mind. Ah, he’d asked about dancing. “Good question.” They passed the Wal-Mart, heading down the main street. “I never felt comfortable dancing, I guess.”

  “Then that’ll be something I can teach you.” He sat back in his seat, arms crossed, smug.

  “Yes. You can.” At least in her dreams.

  The buildings closed in on them as the street narrowed and they entered the original downtown, about five blocks of two- and three-story wood and brick buildings. It looked so tiny next to the big box stores and the strip malls. Once, it had probably looked authentic too. Now, it had far too many shops specializing in barely passable antiques or high-end jewelry and clothing. Sadly, the locals shopped at Wal-Mart.

  “Kinda claustrophobic, isn’t it?” Alec said.

  “Most downtowns were built this way, at least in New England.” She turned down a narrow alley that opened into a small parking lot. Alec twisted in his seat, trying to see everything at once.

  “Aren’t these just more stores?”

  “Partly.” She stepped out of the car. “But we need to eat, then we’ll walk to the harbor and anywhere else you want to go.”

  “Great.” He made a complete turn once outside the car, taking in the small bank across the street, the back entrances of a toy store and a jewelry store, and the delivery entrance to a restaurant that wasn’t open yet. “Nothing very tall here. What’s on the top floors?”

  “Either offices or apartments.”

  “Do all small towns look like this?”

  “Most of them in New England do. Some are bigger, some are pretty derelict by now. It’s the same basic design, though.”

  Alec fell into step behind her as she headed for the local bakery. They walked a block, past the closed stores. Alec glanced at the jewelry store. He stopped for a second to look over the antique store.

  “That’s Queen Anne furniture, right?” he said.

  “I think so. I don’t know a lot about antiques.”

  “I’m sure it is. Lansing has a set in his dining room.”

  “Lansing has upscale taste.” Cognac, eggs Benedict, authentic Queen Anne furniture and opera. She wondered what Alec would be like in an upscale setting. He’d picked up F-Team’s casual habits, to assimilate better. What had he been like before then? A younger version of Lansing?

  She shuddered at the idea.

  Alec stopped again to peer into the toy store window, almost pressing his face against the glass. But he didn’t say anything so she kept silent until he was ready to go. She suspected he hadn’t had many toys as a child. Lansing didn’t seem like he would be big on toys. As a father figure, he would have been a distant one, not one to indulge his foster son in play.

  The small country bakery had a line stretching out the door. The wooden display case took up one side, and two small, round tables and a refrigerator took up the other. The tables were occupied, one with businessmen in suits and another with a mother and her young son.

  “Smells great in here,” he said.

  She took a deep breath. Fresh bread. “It does.”

&nbs
p; She watched him watch the crowd, seeing it with his eyes. Mostly, the customers seemed to be on their way to work. Alec seemed particularly interested in the little boy at the table. The boy must have been about four and he kept up a constant, if somewhat incoherent, chatter with his mother while stuffing a blueberry muffin in his mouth. What Alec didn’t notice was the two younger women in the line who were checking him out. Beth couldn’t blame them. There was the great body, strong shoulders and the gorgeous hair. What was not to like?

  “Have you had much experience with kids?” she whispered to Alec.

  He shook his head and switched his attention to the bakery case. His gaze settled on the stack of apple turnovers.

  “You could try eating something that’s not full of sugar,” she said.

  “Why? I get enough stuff that’s good for me at the Resource. I want something new. Anyway, it has fruit.”

  There was no way to argue with that, so she made no objections. She stuck with a bagel and cream cheese. Not exactly good for her but it would be filling and it was better than donuts.

  The girl behind the counter briskly handed over their breakfast, the turnover in a bag and the bagel wrapped in wax paper. As they turned to leave, the little boy knocked into Alec and a bottle of lemonade flew out of the boy’s hand.

  The bottle froze in midair. So did the lemonade spilling out of it.

  Alec grabbed the bottle and the liquid went back inside without spilling a drop.

  “Hey,” Alec said, staring at the kid. “Be careful.”

  The boy’s mouth fell open in disbelief, exposing his lack of front teeth. Beth froze, having no idea what Alec would do next. She glanced around, checking to see if anyone else had seen Alec’s trick, but nobody was staring.

  The boy’s mother rushed forward, yelling “Kyle!” and the boy hung his head. He walked the two steps to his mother looking so dejected that Beth wanted to hug him. His mom took his hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” the mom said.

  Alec nodded. “It’s okay. No problem.”

  Kyle’s mom leaned down and whispered something in the child’s ear. He nodded, solemn, his blond hair falling over his messy, blueberry-muffin splattered face.