by Linda Howard
“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 t
ook 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.”
He had his door open and was getting out when, in tones of astonishment, she said, “You brought me to get breakfast at McDonald’s?”
“It’s those gold enarches,” he said. “They get to me every time.”
SEVENTEEN
“They’re going into McDonald’s,” one of the Ansara watchers reported.
“Sit tight,” said Ruben McWilliams, sitting on the bed in his motel room. Why the hell didn’t motels put the damn phone on the stupid little table so a man could sit in a chair when he talked on the phone, instead of sitting hunched over on an uncomfortable mattress? “Keep them in sight, but don’t get any closer. Something spooked him. Let me know when they leave.”
Something had prompted Raintree to abruptly cut across two lanes of traffic and take the exit ramp at seventy miles an hour, but Ruben doubted it was a sudden urge for a McMuffin. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have gone another couple of exits and found another McDonald’s, without the dangerous maneuver.
He didn’t think it was anything his people had done that had caused the aberrant behavior, but he wasn’t on-site, so he couldn’t be certain. His people were supposed to watch and follow, that was all. Raintree wasn’t a clairvoyant, so he shouldn’t have picked up any warning that way, but he could have had a premonition. Premonition was such a common ability, even ordinary humans had it. Raintree might have felt a twinge of uneasiness, but because he was one of the gifted, he would never dismiss the warning; he would act on it, where most ordinary humans would not.
Since there had been no immediate danger—that would come later—maybe he’d sensed an accident in his immediate future if he stayed on the interstate, so he’d gotten off at the next exit. That was possible. There were always variables.
Staging the planned incident hadn’t been possible on such short notice. They hadn’t known when Raintree would leave his house, or where he would go when he did. Now that they had a tail on him, they could direct the amigos to him wherever he was; then they would fall back and let the amigos do their job.
Over a McMuffin, Dante said, “Tell me exactly what you felt when you were in my office.”
Lorna sipped her coffee, thinking. After the weird feelings she’d had in the car, she’d wanted something hot to drink, even though Dante had dispelled all the physical chill. The heat of the coffee couldn’t touch the remnant of mental chill she still felt, but it was comforting anyway.
She searched through her memory. It was normally excellent anyway, but everything had happened so recently that the details were still fresh in her mind. “You scared the crap out of me,” she finally replied.
“Because you’d been caught cheating?” he prompted when she didn’t immediately go on.
“I didn’t cheat,” she insisted, scowling at him. “Knowing something isn’t the same as cheating. But, no, it wasn’t that. Once, in Chicago, I was going home one night and was about to take a shortcut through an alley. I used the alley a lot—so did a bunch of people. But that night, I couldn’t. I froze. Have you ever felt a fear so intense it made you sick? It was like that. I backed out of the alley and took another way home. The next morning a woman’s mutilated body was found in that alley.”
“Presentiment,” he said. “A gift that saved your life.”
“I felt the same way when I saw you.” She saw by his expression that he didn’t like that at all, but he’d asked, so she told him. “I felt as if this huge force just…slammed into me. I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid I’d pass out. But then you said something, and the panic went away.”
He sat back in the booth, frowning. “You weren’t in any danger from me. Why would you have such a strong reaction?”
“You’re the expert. You tell me.”
“My first reaction to you was that I wanted you naked. Unless you’re terrified of sex, and I don’t think you are—” he gave her a hooded look that had her nipples tightening again “—you weren’t picking up anything from me that would cause you to feel that way.”
Heat again pooled low in her belly, and it wasn’t from the coffee. Because they were in McDonald’s and there was a four-year-old sitting in the booth behind her, she looked away and forcibly removed her thoughts from going to bed with him. “At least part of it was from you,” she insisted. “I remember thinking that even the air felt different, alien, something I’d never felt before. When you got closer, I could tell the feeling came from you. You’re a dangerous man, Raintree.”
He just watched her, waiting for her to continue, because he couldn’t accurately deny that particular charge.
“I could feel you,” she said, her voice low as she became mired in the memory. “Pulling at me, almost like a touch. The candles were going wild. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move.”
“I was touching you,” he said. “In my imagination, anyway.”
Remembering how she’d been snagged by his sexual fantasy, drawn in, stole her breath. “I knew something was wrong,” she whispered. “I wasn’t in control. I felt as if I’d been caught in a power surge that kept blinking out, and then coming back, pushing me off balance. Then I got so cold, just like in the car. Not a normal cold, with chill bumps and shivering, but something so intense it made my bones hurt. Then that feeling of dread came back, the same feeling I had in the alley. You were talking about how I was sensitive to the currents in the room—”
“I was talking about sexual currents,” he said wryly. “The summer solstice is in a few days, and control is more difficult when there’s so much sunshine. That’s why the candles were dancing. I was turned on, and my power kept flaring.”
Lorna thought about that. She’d been attracted to him from the first moment she’d looked him in the eyes. Regardless of the fear and panic she’d felt at first, when she had met his gaze, she’d fallen headlong into lust. The debilitating coldness had come afterward and hadn’t affected her physical response to him, because when the coldness left, the attraction remained—unchanged.
“The cold went away,” she said. “Like something had been pressing me into the chair and then suddenly was gone. I thought I might fall out of the chair, because I’d been pushing back so hard, and all of a sudden the pressure was gone. That was it. We talked some more, and then the fire alarm went off. End of scene, beginning of even more weirdness.”
“And you felt the same thing in the car?”
She nodded. “Exactly the same. Except for the sex. The farther we got from the house, the more anxious and depressed I felt, as if I were really exposed and vulnerable. Then I got really cold.”
“You were definitely picking up on external negative energies, probably from the traffic around us. You never know who’s in the car beside you. Could be someone you wouldn’t want to meet even on a crowded street at high noon. What puzzles me is why you felt the same way in my office.” He shook his head. “Unless you sensed the fire that was about to burn down the casino, which is possible, if you have some precognitive ability.”
“I think I might, but only as things relate to numbers.�
� She told him about the 9/11 flight numbers, and the fact that she hadn’t had any visions of airplane crashes or buildings burning, just the flight numbers interjecting themselves into her subconscious. “What I felt before the fire was different. Maybe it’s because I’m—”
She stopped and glared at him. He raised his eyebrows. “You’re…what?”
“I have a hang-up about fire.” He waited, and, exasperated, she finally said, “I’m afraid of it, okay?”
“Anyone with any intelligence is cautious of fire. I’m cautious with it.”
“It isn’t caution. I’m afraid of it. As in terrified. I have nightmares about being trapped in a burning building.” He might be cautious with fire, she thought, but it still turned him on. He would make a jim-dandy firebug. Standing in the burning casino, she had felt his fascination and appreciation for the flames, felt his excitement, because he had expressed it very physically. “Anyway, maybe that’s why I felt so panicked then, and so anxious. But why would I feel that way today—unless you’re going to force me into another burning building in the next hour or so, in which case tell me now, so I can kill you.”
He laughed as he gathered up the debris of their meal, loading it on the plastic tray. She slid from the booth, walking ahead of him as they left the restaurant. “Where to now?”
“The hotel.”
They were back on the interstate within a minute. Dante slanted a glance at her. “Feeling okay?”
“I feel fine. I don’t know what was going on.”
She did feel fine. She was riding around in a Jag with the most unusual man she’d ever met, and she was thinking about going to bed with him. She glanced over at him, thinking of how he’d looked wearing just those boxers, and feeling the pleasant warmth of anticipation.
She liked watching him drive. Sunday night, going to his house, she hadn’t been in any shape to appreciate the smoothness, the economy of motion, with which he handled a car. Good driving was very sexy, she thought. The play of muscles in his forearms, bared by the short-sleeved polo shirt he was wearing, was incredibly sexy. He had to work out somewhere, on a regular basis, to keep that fit.
