Hidden Hearts

by Eva Chase

  “There’s so much that you deserve,” he murmured, his lips traveling over my jaw and down my neck. “So much they made you give up, always following their whims. That ends now. You get to live for you.”

  I moaned encouragingly, and then his mouth was closing over my breast with a graze of his teeth, and all I could do was gasp and clutch the back of his head. As he flicked his tongue over my pebbled nipple, he yanked my dress farther down until I could wriggle right out of it. His hand dipped between my legs, gently testing the dampness there until I was outright panting.

  “Nick,” I murmured.

  “Where do you want me?”

  I growled in frustration. “I think you know.” And he was wearing entirely too much clothing still.

  I wrenched at his shirt, and we peeled it off together. For a minute, his bare chest pressed against mine, the muscles flexing against my tender breasts, as we kissed wildly. I tugged at the fly of his jeans, but he was already dipping down again. His mouth charted a scorching course over my collarbone and down my belly. I sucked in a breath as he eased down my panties and lowered his face to my sex.

  His tongue slicked over my clit, and I moaned. Sparks danced behind my eyes. As he worked me over with lips and the teasing edges of his teeth, he slid one finger inside me, and then another. They pumped into my channel in a steady, rising rhythm that set all my nerves trembling with greater need. I bucked against his mouth.

  “Oh, God. Nick. Yes.” He suckled harder, and my orgasm surged over me, so hard my eyes rolled back. Fuck vibrators. If I could have this man between my legs, there was nothing that could be half as stimulating.

  I groped for his jeans again. He helped me tug them down. I stroked the line of his cock through his boxers, and Nick let out a stuttered breath.

  “You’re brilliant, Carina,” he said in that faint British accent of his. “You feel brilliant, you taste brilliant. I could listen to the sounds you make forever.”

  “I’ll make even more sounds if you hurry up and get inside me,” I muttered raggedly, and he laughed, sounding equally breathless.

  He knelt between my legs and grasped my hips to raise them up to meet him. I pressed my head back into the pillow as he filled me, stretching me with an exquisite burn. Fuck, yes. Why couldn’t we just stay here in this haze of bliss for the rest of our lives? The touch of his hands, the thrust of his cock inside me, drove all that awful past away.

  A second orgasm built inside me with each pump of his hips, slower but even more powerful than the last. I whimpered, clenching my thighs around him. “So close.”

  “I’ll take you there,” he murmur. He bent closer, adjusting the angle, as he thrust faster. “Anywhere you want.”

  There was only one place I wanted to go right now. As he plunged even deeper into me, I found it. His cock filled every inch of me, and I toppled over the edge in a blaze of pleasure.

  Nick clutched me tighter as I trembled with bliss. A groan slipped from his lips. He pumped even harder, even faster, his rhythm jerky now, and then with a harsh breath he spent himself, sending one last ripple of ecstasy through me.

  He sank down next to me, tucking me against him front to back, his chin against my shoulder. “Did that one make an impression?” he said, sounding sleepy and sated.

  A giggle tickled up my throat. “Um, yes. If you couldn’t tell, maybe I need to get louder.”

  He laughed. “Get as loud as you like, lovely.”

  All the tension had bled from my body with the release of the orgasms. I hugged his arm against me and let my eyelids slid closed, and this time I actually slept.

  Warmth pulling away from me and the jangle of a ringtone broke through my sleep, both sensations waking me. I rolled over, blinking. My head felt muggy. Beyond Nick, beyond the window, the clouds were turning purple with the coming sunset.

  “Yes?” Nick was saying into his phone. “That’s great. That’s— Can you send it the usual way? I have my laptop here. You’re amazing, mate.”

  I sat up as he grabbed his pack. “What’s going on?”

  He shot me a grin. “Liam came through. He’s found your mother.”

  19

  Nick

  Carina scrambled over the bed to join me as I popped open my laptop. The email from Liam had already come in. Carina leaned close, tension wound through her body where it touched mine but a giddy gleam in her eyes. Her hand had risen to her necklace, which had settled against her bare collarbone.

  “What did he find?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said as I skimmed the email. “Only that he’s almost completely sure, between the facial similarities and the DNA match, that this woman is your mother. Are you ready for this?”

  She nodded, her gaze glued to the screen. “More than ready.”

  Liam had sent a hotchpotch of files: a few photos, an arrest record, juvie files, and more. At the first photo, Carina made a choked sound.

  The girl staring defiantly back at us really was just a girl—mid-teens. Her dark hair fell in loose waves and her face was pale, but the resemblance was uncanny. If I’d met this girl on the street, I’d have taken her for Carina’s lighter-skinned younger sister.

  “Melanie Wells. She got sent to juvie at fourteen,” I said, skimming the records. “Repeated petty theft. They never figured out how she stole the stuff, but they caught her with a few of the things. She must have been using a talent. Two years in juvie, and then she was placed with a foster family at sixteen. I guess the home situation wasn’t so good. Then…”

  One of the last files was a missing person report. My mouth twisted. “She disappeared a few months after she started at the foster home. They figured she’d probably run away. But Liam says he couldn’t dig up any record of her being found.”

  “Alpha Project took her,” Carina said quietly.

  “It looks like.” We’d guessed it must have happened that way, but I couldn’t imagine it was pleasant for her to see definite proof.

  She pointed to the top of the missing person report. “It says 1989. I was born in 1995. I mean, if they told me the right birthday… I can’t be that much older, though, or I’d have memories from before ‘95. So if that’s my mom, she hadn’t had me yet when they took her. She couldn’t even have been pregnant with me yet.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. The possibilities spun in my head. Only one of them made sense.

  “She must have gotten pregnant in the Facility.”

  “But how— For what you’ve said about how strict they were, when would she have had the chance?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “People who are in love can be pretty ingenious at finding ways to be together. It would only have taken one time. Or…”

  I stopped myself. I wasn’t sure I wanted to say that part out loud.

  “Or what?” Carina demanded.

  I swallowed thickly. “Or Langdon arranged it. He did that to my parents once. Let them think they’d managed to sneak off together when he’d set them up so he’d have proof that they’d been communicating psychically. He found out my parents had children after they escaped. Maybe he started wondering whether that would result in kids with greater talents, like we talked about. The genetic component.”

  Carina’s jaw tightened. “You’re saying he might have bred my parents together like they were animals. Like he was looking for the perfect combo to make a great show dog or something.”

  “It could have been by chance,” I said quickly. “It could have been partly that he encouraged it, but they really did care about each other. We can’t know.”

  “No, but we can guess.” She turned away from the computer screen. “There’s no way of knowing whether she’s still in that ‘Facility,’ is there? Whether she’s still alive.”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t even know if it’s still in the spot my parents escaped from. Back then Langdon had things set up in a remote part of New Mexico, but he might have moved operations after. They tried to send in tips ab
out kidnapped people to the local police after they got away, but as far as they could tell nothing came of it.”

  “The compound is in Arizona,” Carina said. “I’d bet whatever he still has going, it’s in the southwest somewhere.”

  Her hand was still clenched tight around the moonstone pendant. She looked down at it. Her jaw worked. With one swift movement, she unclasped the chain.

  “What impressions do you get from this?” she said, holding it out to me. “Tell me if you get any sense of my mother from it.”

  I hesitated, but the urgency in her gaze compelled me. My fingers closed around the cool stone. I closed my eyes, focusing on the sensations that tickled into my head as I opened up my mind.

  Most of them were of Carina. Carina grasping it in moments of uncertainty or fear. A much younger Carina listening to Langdon tell her how her parents had left that necklace for her before they’d been murdered. And then…

  My gut clenched. I looked at Carina again. “I saw a guy handing it off to Langdon along with a receipt from the store where he bought it. I don’t think it had anything to do with your parents at all.”

  A frustrated noise broke from her throat. She snatched the necklace back from me and pushed herself off the bed. Yanking her dress back on, she went to the Juliet balcony. The canal waters rippled below the building.

  “Carina,” I said, but she didn’t stop. She shoved open the window and hurled the necklace into the canal.

  It landed with a splash so faint I barely heard it. Carina stood there for a moment, her chest heaving. She looked dazed and a little queasy.

  The sight of her distress sent a pang through my chest. I joined her by the balcony and hugged her gently.

  “Hey,” I said. “This is just a start. And it’s a lot to take in.”

  “I couldn’t stand to wear that thing, thinking about all those lies they told me, any more,” she said in a small voice.

  I nodded, tightening my embrace. “We haven’t had a real meal all day. Why don’t we go out and grab dinner someplace out of the way? A walk and some food to clear your head.”

  Carina looked as if she might argue, but then she sighed. “Yeah. That would probably be good. Thank you.” She turned to give me a pained smile and a quick kiss.

  I got dressed quickly, and Carina straightened her dress—the one she’d been wearing since yesterday. I made a mental note that when we saw a decent clothing shop, we’d better get on with replacing all the outfits she’d left behind. Not that I minded seeing her in the casual silky number that hugged her curves so well. A twinge ran through my groin, remembering stripping that dress off her early this afternoon.

  A couple streets over, we found a little place serving take-out fish and chips and sat on a bench by a canal while we ate. Carina’s color returned as she dug into the battered haddock. By the time she was licking the grease from her fingers, she looked almost normal again.

  Ethan texted me, mentioning he’d been talking to a client who might have some work for me. Maybe I can do a favor for you for once.

  I tucked my hand around the phone surreptitiously as I responded. You do me plenty of favors. But send it along.

  “Your brother?” Carina asked.

  I didn’t quite know how to tell her that I had more than the two I’d already mentioned. Maybe this wasn’t the time for it anyway, when she was so raw about her own family. I could honestly say, “Yes. But nothing urgent,” and leave it at that.

  I gulped down the last of my salty vinegar-y chips and tossed the wrapper in the garbage.

  “I don’t want to go right back to the hotel,” Carina said. “Is it okay if we walk along the canal for a while?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “We look just like any other tourists.”

  The street along the canal was busy with other pedestrians ambling by. We blended in so well that I felt almost relaxed as I took Carina’s hand in mine.

  We’d made it here. Langdon and his goons had no way of finding us. As long as we were careful, maybe we’d already found a place we could settle into. It wasn’t London, but with the watery breeze tickling over me and the rows of quaint old buildings on either side of me, I thought maybe I’d come to like this city just as much.

  We crossed a little bridge and strolled along the other side for a few blocks. My gaze caught on something brightly colored lying in the shadow beside the steps of a restaurant. Instinct kicked in. I’d bent to pick the object up before I’d even thought about what I was doing.

  It was a pink gauzy scarf, small enough that I could barely have tied it around my own neck if I’d wanted to. As my fingers closed around the delicate fabric, my mind opened automatically to the impressions it would hold.

  An image swam up of a woman who looked around twenty, squeezing someone’s hand around that scarf. It’ll be perfect for you. Sometimes you need that little pop of color. The warmth of love colored the memory.

  That impression slipped away to one that tugged a lump into my throat: an older couple in black morning clothes, You can’t wear that to your sister’s funeral.

  The high voice of a teenage girl shouting back, She’d have wanted me too. She’d have liked it.

  I took a step back, and the impression faded. My mind closed off to the other sensations that might have risen up while I recovered from that burst of emotion.

  “What is it?” Carina said beside me. She touched my arm. “What’s the matter?”

  I gripped the scarf tightly. “This belongs to someone who’s going to miss it a lot. I might be able to find her.”

  Carina blinked, and then her expression tensed. “Nick—no. Doing stuff like that is how Alpha Project found you in the first place. We can’t take the chance right now.”

  “After five years. It’s just a little thing. I know how to be subtle around this stuff. No one’s going to fight me for a scarf.”

  Her voice dropped. “You don’t know that for sure. You didn’t think they’d catch on to you at all, did you?”

  No, I hadn’t thought they would. I understood why she was worried. But the girl’s grief at the loss of her sister was still echoing through me. If something ever happened to Jeremy, to any of my younger brothers…

  If I just left it here, someone else would probably pick it up for themselves or throw it in the trash. She’d lose this tie to her sister forever.

  “The chances that anyone from Alpha Project will happen to notice when they don’t have any idea where we even are—they’re pretty much nothing,” I said.

  “Why are we even arguing about this?” Carina said. “It’s a little piece of cloth. It belonged to some stranger. How is that worth risking our safety over?”

  If she’d had any idea how many times I’d waged similar debates with myself. I gave her a grim smile. “Carina, do you know why I started returning things—around London, and occasionally in the places I traveled through before? It was always a risk. It was always something that could put me and my family in danger. But I did it.”

  “Why?”

  I looked down at the scarf. My chest felt suddenly heavy. “Because I have a talent that no one else I know does. I can do something good for people with it—as cheesy as it sounds, I can make the world a better place, if only on a small scale. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Langdon and his Alpha Project or anyone else turn me into a selfish bastard who only thinks about what’s best for his people and never about anyone else. Will I really be that much better than him, if that’s how I act?”

  The fierceness in Carina’s eyes faltered. “It’s different,” she said. “It’s not selfish when it’s a matter of survival.”

  “I survived five years in London even doing this once every week or two,” I said. “I only do it when I can tell it’ll make a big difference to the person I’m returning the thing to. I only do it when I can avoid being noticed. Let me at least figure out whether I can return it?”

  I held her gaze. She let hers fall to the ground. “Why do y
ou have to be so good?” she muttered.

  I laughed. “I’d have thought that’s what you liked about me.”

  “It is. So, go ahead.”

  I shifted the scarf in my grasp and opened my mind to it again. Letting impression after impression trickle through my senses. Breathing in the smell of the canal and the murmur of tourists around us, hoping that would stir up something closer to here.

  After the first few fragments, I got something I could use. A girl of maybe eighteen or nineteen standing in front of a mirror in a room with three bunkbeds and bright green walls—a hostel, from the looks of it. A couple of her friends were putting on make-up beside her.

  It’s too hot for a scarf, even that little one.

  I’ll wear it somewhere else, then. Tying it around her thin wrist, where it must have fallen from later that day.

  Pinned to the wall next to the mirror was a sketchy map of that neighborhood in Amsterdam. I didn’t have time to examine it closely, but I caught the hostel’s name on the upper right corner.

  “Okay,” I said, shutting off the stream of impressions. “I know where we’d have to go.” I pulled out my phone and brought up the map. A quick search showed the hostel, one canal over and farther along. “It’s about a ten-minute walk from here. That’s all.”

  I glanced at Carina. She let out her breath in a huff, her stance still tensed. Then one corner of her mouth quirked up.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

  We ambled on, still playing casual tourists, but I took the turns to get us to the hostel. The outside of the building was hard to miss, painted neon orange with red lettering on the sign. I took it in as we approached, deciding on the best strategy. My pulse sped up, even though I’d done this sort of thing more than a hundred times before.