Imminent Thunder

by Rachel Lee

  She hesitated, remembering her fear of him and the fact that he had looked into her mind.

  “I promise I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “I swear. Let’s just get out of here. Come with me.”

  Turning her head, she looked up at him, and some part of her realized that she was committed to riding this train to the end of the line, wherever that might be.

  “All right,” she said. And acknowledged that if Ian McLaren was the villain, she was going to curl up and die.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They drove past Fort Walton Beach and nearly to Pensacola before Ian pulled over at a motel and took a room. One room.

  The sun was up, and the curtain was open. Ian stood in a puddle of golden light as Honor looked around and finally sank onto the edge of one of the double beds.

  “I’ll go rustle up some breakfast for us,” he said. “And then we’ll talk.”

  She nodded. “How far do you have to go to escape a ghost?”

  “Damned if I know.” He came over and squatted before her, taking one of her hands. “If you get any urges to run, or anything like that, fight them.”

  She stared at him, absorbing the meaning of his words. “You…you think that when I…that I…”

  He squeezed her hand. “You don’t strike me as the kind of person who reaches for a knife too readily. And you definitely don’t strike me as the kind who would lunge at me with one. It would be more like you to try to evade me.”

  She nodded slowly. “I know. I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe that was me. It was like being caught in a dream of some kind. A bad dream.”

  And maybe that was exactly what it had been. Alone again while Ian went out to find some food for them, she curled up tiredly on the bed and thought about what had happened. She still didn’t entirely trust him, but she no longer felt as endangered as she had last night.

  And that was the creepy thing, she thought. That thing had affected her mind. Had made her feel emotions that perhaps hadn’t been entirely her own. In retrospect, now that she was free of the dark feelings that had haunted her last night, she found herself far more disturbed by the thought that the ghost might have planted thoughts in her head than by the idea that Ian had read her mind. It was far, far less distressing to have someone know what she was thinking than to have someone—or something—make her think things.

  A sudden shiver passed through her, and she curled up into a tight ball. There was no doubt that she had been manipulated. No doubt. And the thought was horrifying. The question now was who, or what, had done it?

  “Are you reading my mind right now?” Honor asked him while they ate eggs and biscuits and drank hot coffee at the small table by the window.

  “No.” Ian put down his plastic fork and leaned back in his chair, looking at her. “I never did it purposely. Never. But sometimes…it’s as if you broadcast. Or shout. It’s impossible not to hear.”

  “Could you do it on purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn,” she said, putting down her coffee. “I hate the way you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Those single unvarnished syllables. No. Yes. Either way, it drives me crazy. Elaborate, why don’t you?”

  He almost smiled. She caught the glimmer of it in his eyes. “Yes, I can sometimes read minds on purpose. It’s something I avoid doing, for obvious reasons.”

  She shook her head. “Not so obvious to me. And what do you mean, sometimes you can do it on purpose?”

  He really didn’t want to discuss this. It was apparent in the way he turned his head to one side and fiddled with a plastic spoon.

  “It’s a wild talent,” he said finally, his voice rusty with suppressed feelings. “When I was little, it just happened sometimes. It wasn’t something I did consciously, or that I was actually aware of doing. I think the first time I knew there was something different about me was when Mrs. Gilhooley killed her husband.”

  He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, and there was something about the way he did it that told Honor how difficult it was for him to remember these things.

  “I saw it,” he said after a moment. “I saw it in her mind, just as she saw it standing at the attic window. I saw it from inside her, saw her push the ladder away from the wall. She pushed hard. Really hard. It was no accident.”

  Her scalp prickled, but then, almost before she thought about how creepy that was, she thought how terrifying it must have been for a six-year-old boy to witness. Worse, to witness it from inside the head of the murderess.

  “I remember…I remember how scared I was when no one believed me, because I knew Mrs. Gilhooley was furious with me and was planning to get even. I had nightmares about it for weeks.”

  Imagine, she thought, how terrifying it must have been for a six-year-old boy to know such things. To know that someone capable of murder wanted to get even with him.

  “How,” she asked, “did you ever stand it?”

  He shrugged slightly. “You get through things because there’s no alternative.”

  It was as if he had spread out his life before her and let her see the gray, bleak world in which he had lived. You get through things because there’s no alternative. She had felt like that at times. Occasionally there was no other way to feel. But she had the sense that this man had lived his entire life that way, and sadness tightened her throat.

  “Was this, um, before or after the goat?” she asked, hoping he didn’t notice how her voice had thickened.

  “Before. The goat was the last straw, I guess. My memory of events isn’t too clear, because I was so young, and because I wasn’t part of a lot of it. I don’t know what she did, what she said or why she was believed. All I know is, not too long after the goat, they tried exorcism on me.”

  Again she felt the impulse to reach out, but she stifled it. He kept evading her gaze, as if he were afraid she might read emotion in his eyes. He would hardly appreciate her touch, or her overt sympathy.

  “Anyway,” he continued after a moment, “after three or four days, the preacher decided the exorcism was a success. After that I screwed up a few more times. I just…sometimes I just knew what people were thinking. And I was young enough not to know how to conceal the knowledge. I slipped. Again and again. After a while, I was shunning other people as much as they were shunning me.”

  He rose from his chair and went to stand at the window, looking out at the sun-drenched day, as if the light could drive away the darkness inside him. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, and for a long time he didn’t speak.

  “It was…like it was with you,” he said eventually. “I slipped. I don’t know if you can understand, but for me it’s the same as hearing you say something. I react to it in the same way, and even if I’m on guard, sooner or later I say something or do something that reveals the fact that I know something the other person doesn’t think I should. It’s just about impossible in retrospect for me to distinguish knowledge gained one way from knowledge gained the other. So I slip. Or I get involved so deeply in what’s happening that I slip. And nobody on earth likes to be around a telepath.”

  He was silent for so long that Honor felt he was waiting for some kind of response from her. She wasn’t sure what she felt about what he was telling her. He was a telepath. An exceptional one, to judge by what he was telling her. And, yes, it was unnerving to have someone read your mind. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea at all.

  But something else had also gotten into her mind. Something evil. And that was worse by far. Shuddering inwardly, she shook away the memory of last night and tried to focus on Ian. He needed something from her right now, and she wasn’t sure what it was. Or even if she could give it.

  Finally he spoke again, his voice low, tense. “The business about the witchcraft, well—” He broke off abruptly and shook his head. Honor couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to. The difficulty of this for him was apparent in his tension, in his voice.
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br />   “I was seventeen,” he said flatly. “Mrs. Gilhooley had two daughters. Annie—Orville’s mother—and Maggie. Maggie was fifteen. She…got herself pregnant by…um…by her stepfather, Bill Gilhooley.”

  “Mrs. Gilhooley remarried?”

  “Yes. I guess I forgot to tell you that. She married Bill Gilhooley about eight months after she buried her first husband. Anyhow, Maggie claimed I was the kid’s father. Said I’d, uh, witched her and had my way with her.”

  “Oh, my God!” Honor scarcely breathed the words, horrified and aching for him. Such terrible, terrible things to have lived through. “Nobody believed that, surely!”

  He gave a snort, but he didn’t look at her. “Oh, yeah, lots of people believed it, even when it was proved that I was somewhere else the night she claimed all this happened. The cops investigated, but they didn’t bring any charges, because there wasn’t any evidence. Some folks believe that was witchcraft, too. Then…then one night Maggie called the cops and said she’d taken poison, and that she didn’t want to die with a guilty conscience. Said I hadn’t touched her. She died and…everybody believed I’d done that, too.

  “So I left. Joined the army and left.”

  And left the human race, too, Honor thought, staring at his unyielding back. How awful. How unspeakable. No longer restraining the impulse, she rose and went to him, touching him gently on the arm, aware that he might reject her touch.

  But he turned suddenly and faced her, and there were no secrets left. There, in the anguish stamped on his face, in the redness of eyes that could not weep, she saw just what it had cost him to tell her. Just how deep his scars were.

  “Oh, Ian,” she whispered on a broken breath. Stepping toward him, she wrapped her arms around his waist and held him close.

  At first he remained rigid and unyielding, as if he were resisting her concern with all his might. As if he had forgotten how to open himself in even this small way. But then, with jerky reluctance, he wound his arms around her and squeezed her closer.

  For a long time neither of them spoke or moved. Honor absorbed all that he had told her and suspected that he was reconstructing the inner walls behind which he had probably entombed all those memories. How awful, she thought. It was a miracle he had survived such a childhood.

  “Come on,” he said after a while, his voice calm and expressionless once more. “You haven’t finished your breakfast, and you need to get some sleep before we go back.”

  She tilted her head and looked up at him. “What are we going to do?” As soon as she spoke the question, she wished she hadn’t because there didn’t seem to be any answer.

  He didn’t answer, just shook his head. “Eat,” he said. “Then sleep. When we’ve had some rest, we’ll brainstorm.”

  Honor had fallen asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. Ian, cursed with insomnia, lay wide awake in the next bed, his hands clasped behind his head.

  Years ago he had done his best to bury his abominable talent, and until a few days ago he had succeeded, relatively speaking. It was possible for any skill to atrophy through lack of use. His telepathy might have been born of genetics, but it was also a skill that could atrophy.

  And it had. But not nearly as much as he had thought, and he was recovering it more quickly than he would have dreamed possible. He hadn’t tried to read Honor’s mind—he’d been telling the absolute truth about that—but it was getting so he was receiving flashes from her all the time. Never before in his life had that happened with anyone to this extent. It made him uneasy.

  Even now, the flashes of her dreams were dancing around the edges of his mind. Just random snatches that told him she was having a mild nightmare about some inchoate threat. If she started to get really frightened, he would wake her…or would that be an invasion of her privacy?

  The thought had troubled him ever since he’d grown old enough to be concerned with such things. If he couldn’t help doing it, how could it be an invasion? But perhaps he should leave the illusion of privacy intact, for the sake of the person he was eavesdropping on?

  He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he even cared anymore. In his adult life, he’d had a couple of intimate relationships. Each time he had carefully chosen a woman in uniform, one who would understand the demands of his job, the fact that he might leave without warning and offer no explanations when he returned. Someone with whom the army provided enough impersonal topics of conversation that he could avoid getting too intimate, too involved.

  And each time, eventually, he had slipped in a way they could not ignore. Each time he had seen horror in their eyes. Uneasiness. Condemnation. He was an abomination.

  Mrs. Gilhooley had first called him that, and the word had been echoed by many in his childhood. Away from the atmosphere of his parents’ church, the epithet had changed, but not its meaning. Weird was the word he’d heard most often. Creepy was another one.

  Lifting his head a little, he looked over at Honor. She was still dreaming, and a little more anxious now. He wondered how long it would be before she turned from him in horror again. She had last night. He’d known the instant when she realized that he had looked into her mind. He’d felt her horror and fear.

  That seemed to have faded considerably since their lovemaking, but he never for an instant doubted it would return. He’d grown up hearing that he was some kind of unnatural genetic accident. A mutation. An abomination.

  And nothing in his life since had convinced him that he wasn’t.

  Honor woke slowly, feeling more comfortable than she had in a long time. It was as if she had reached some kind of resolution in her sleep, as if some internal equilibrium had finally been established. Or maybe, she thought drowsily, it was just a protective reaction to all the stress of the past few days. At the moment, she didn’t care. It was enough that, for right now, the tension had let go.

  For now the looming black shadow was gone.

  She opened her eyes and looked straight into Ian’s cat-green ones. He was on the next bed, just three feet away, but suddenly Honor felt he wasn’t close enough. She wanted him here, beside her. Touching her. Exploring some of the incredible possibilities he had opened up for her last night, in those all-too-brief moments when they had lost control together. It was as if some fire in her had been ignited last night and only slightly damped down by fulfillment. As if a craving had been planted in her, a craving that could never quite be satisfied.

  He saw it. Read it. Perceived the yearning, however it was that he did such things. And this time she didn’t mind. There was only a momentary uneasiness that quickly fled.

  “Yeah,” he said, and sat up. Crossing his arms before him, he tugged his olive T-shirt over his head and bared his chest. “I hear you,” he said roughly. “I feel you. I’ve never been so in tune with anybody in my life. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I’m through pretending it isn’t happening. This is the way I am, lady. If you can’t handle it, let’s find out now.”

  He stood and unbuttoned his jeans, never turning away, just watching her steadily, waiting for some objection. She didn’t object. Instead, she held her breath as expectancy grew heavy at her core. He shoved his jeans and briefs down together and kicked them aside. Then he stood there and looked down at her, waiting. He was completely exposed to her, completely vulnerable to whatever she might say or do to him. He was making himself as vulnerable to her as she felt to him. As vulnerable as he could make himself. Her throat tightened at the understanding.

  Whatever her mind might be broadcasting to him, she realized, he was going to wait for her to say yes or no. He understood that her desire for him might not be something she wanted to acknowledge or give in to. He was granting her the right to decide, regardless of what she was thinking and feeling. And that eased her discomfort a little more.

  And, oh, he was magnificent! Honed to a peak of physical perfection in every respect. And so perfectly male. Slowly she lifted her arms and reached for him.

  He sank down be
side her on the bed and wrapped her in his arms, drawing her flush against him. The layers of her clothing were only a small impediment as she felt the strength of sinew and muscle against her.

  “I can hear you,” he murmured roughly, touching her tousled hair. “I can feel what you want. Do you want me to pay attention? Or do you want me to try to ignore it?”

  Her breath caught a little, and she gave a moment’s serious thought to the degree of intimacy he was talking about. Making up her mind proved surprisingly easy. “Listen,” she said. “You’re right. If I can’t handle it, let’s find out now.”

  He nodded and closed his eyes. For a moment her heart stopped beating as she realized he was listening to what was going on inside her, to her scattered thoughts and powerful yearnings. To every barely formed desire.

  And then he caught her chin gently in his hand and took her mouth in a breath-stealing, soul-searing kiss. His tongue plunged deeply, roughly, coaxing hers into erotic play. And, as always, just his kiss was enough to ignite her smoldering hunger.

  He broke away from her mouth long enough to tug away her shirt and shorts, just long enough to pull away her bra and panties. Then he rolled half over her, pinning her to the bed with a thigh between her legs, and his chest against her aching breasts.

  And then he caught her face between his hands and stole her breath by the simple act of whispering her name as if it were torn from the depths of his being.

  “Honor…”

  Her eyes fluttered open, and she gazed into the depths of his. And saw into his soul. Saw loneliness. Terrible, terrible loneliness. And a yearning. White heat. Hunger.

  “Touch me,” he whispered. “I need…”

  She understood, though she didn’t know how. Even as her own hungers made her restless, she felt his needs in her heart. Touch him. He hadn’t been touched in so long, hadn’t allowed himself even that very human contact. He had held himself aloof, and now he was asking her to shatter his isolation. She spared one last hope that this wouldn’t prove to be the biggest mistake of both their lives.