Seeing Is Believing

by Lindsay McKenna

  “But why would they have told his family he was dead?”

  Wes shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think Ruth has all the answers, and I know we don’t. Like I said, the government operates in gray areas, not black-and-white ones.”

  “It’s all so macabre, Wes. Frightening. Our own government!”

  “Honey,” he said, putting the glass aside, “being in Delta Force taught me a lot about the quirks and foibles of our government. Things aren’t always as they seem.”

  “Yes, but to imprison people for the rest of their lives just because they had burned out…”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Do you think the report you make out to Psi-Lab will be sufficient? Do you think they’ll send someone else to hunt Ruth down?”

  “I don’t know.” Wes squeezed her fingers, longing to lean over and kiss her ripe, soft lips. “You can help me write the report. You’re the psychic. You’ll know what to say to throw those goons from Psi-Lab off her track.”

  The warmth of his fingers, the way he caressed her hand, filled Diana with an undeniable need. Need for him. “I had so many questions to ask Ruth. How do they recruit their clairvoyant people? And what’s this about killing? Mother said that she’s been in some psychic battles where, if she lost, she would not have been able to go back to her physical body, and over time, she would have died.”

  “That possibility right there would stop me from wanting to be a psychic,” Wes said wryly.

  “Believe me, when you grow up in a psychic household like I did, you see all sides of the gift. I guess that’s why I’ve resisted becoming a medicine woman in training with my mother. My sister went her own way, and she’s a shaman, but that’s dangerous work, too. No,” Diana murmured, turning over her hands and looking at her palms, “I like being something simple, like a psychometrist.”

  “Simple?” Wes teased. “There’s nothing ‘simple’ about you, honey. You’re complex and you have a lot of facets.” He kissed her fingers. “Like a diamond.”

  She flushed. “Is that how you see me?”

  He eased out of the booth, drew a couple of dollars from his billfold and placed them on the table. He smiled down at her. “If I told you the truth, I wonder what you’d say or do?”

  Rising, Diana slid her hand into his as they exited the restaurant. “No matter what you told me, Wes, it wouldn’t scare me into leaving you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She thought about his childhood, the fact that the one person he loved most in the world, his mother, had left him and later died. Did Wes think, because she was woman, she was capable of abandoning him, too?

  The heat of the day hit them as they stepped out of the restaurant. Wes led Diana to the rental car and opened the door. He leaned down and kissed her quickly on the mouth.

  “I’m glad you can’t read my mind.”

  Her lips tingled, and she reached up and grazed his cheek. “Why?”

  “Because,” he said lightly, holding the door for her while she got into the car, “I feel like some wretched, impoverished gold miner with you. You’re the biggest, most beautiful gold nugget I’ve ever seen, and now I’m feeling greedy—like I want to keep you to myself forever. I’m afraid if I let you out of my sight, you’ll disappear like a dream I’ve been dreaming all my life.”

  Touched, Diana waited until Wes got into the car. As she strapped on the seat belt, she turned to him. The heat in the car was stifling until he turned on the air conditioner. “What have you been dreaming, Wes?”

  He sat for a moment, his hands resting on the steering wheel. “After college I entered the army, and I saw a lot of marriages go on the rocks. I saw friends who loved each other get torn apart by the long duty hours, the overseas time apart. The duty put incredible strains on a marriage. I decided I wasn’t going that way.”

  He turned to her. “My foster parents had a good marriage, Diana. Growing up with them gave me a whole perspective on life. They loved each other deeply. They could never have children, and they were happy to have me. When I left for college, I was determined to have a marriage like theirs.”

  “Not all marriages in the military break up, do they?”

  “No, not all, but a high percentage do,” he said wearily. “What I wasn’t counting on was getting drafted by Delta Force right off the bat. It’s too high-powered an organization, Diana. The time you spend in training alone is enough to shatter any except the strongest marriage. I saw my fellow officers struggling to hold it together, and I knew I didn’t want that.” He picked up her hand and held it gently in his. “I wanted one marriage. I wanted forever. I didn’t want to lose the woman I fell in love with.”

  Diana’s hand tingled. “You were afraid of love?”

  “No. I wanted it. I’m human. I wanted to be able to settle down, go home at night, kiss the wife, hug the kids—all that stuff.” Wes gazed down at her work-worn hand—a hand that made his heart sing, made him want her all over again. He looked up at her. “I made a decision,” he told her heavily. “I knew then that love and marriage couldn’t work for me because of the demands and stresses of my job in Delta Force. The other thing I worried about was what if I got killed and left behind a wife and children?”

  Diana nodded, seeing the roots of his logic. “Your mother gave you up and died,” she whispered, a catch in her voice. “You didn’t want to leave anyone behind, didn’t want them abandoned as you were abandoned.”

  “That’s right,” Wes admitted softly. “I knew what it felt like to be alone. For so many years, Diana, I lived off an anger that fueled me. That’s partly why I agreed to join Delta Force—I was a living time bomb of rage. I had to work it off, work it out somehow.” His eyes grew sad. “I didn’t want my own children ever to have to suffer the kind of rage and hatred I felt for so many years toward my real mother and my situation.”

  “You aren’t angry with her any longer, are you?”

  He gave a sharp laugh and released Diana’s hand, leaning back against the seat. Staring out the window at the blue, cloudless sky, he said, “Not anymore. Ten years of aggression is enough to wring out any amount of bitterness and rage.”

  “And that’s why you left the army? Delta Force?”

  Wes rolled his head to the right and held her gaze. “When the anger had finally worked through me, I felt hollow. Empty. I woke up one morning in the B.O.Q. and wondered what the hell I was living for. I realized a lot that morning, Diana. I realized my mother had done the best she could for me under the circumstances. To this day, I wonder how she managed to give me up for adoption, because there is plenty of evidence that she did love me.” His mouth quirked. “When I was eighteen, my parents gave me a small box of letters my real mother had written to them. I still have them.”

  Diana felt pain in her heart for him. She reached over and gently caressed his arm. She could feel the tension Wes still held over his painful childhood. “The fact she loved you enough to give you up tells me she had an incredible kind of courage.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed, “she loved me more than she did herself. Figure that one out. She thought so little of herself that she let drugs run her life and kill her.”

  “But she wanted a better, more positive life for you.”

  “Yes.” Wes’s lips thinned. “So, once I realized all of this, I quit Delta Force. I had a lot of leave accrued, and I just wandered for about a year, all over the face of the earth. But everywhere I went, I felt empty. I drank a lot. I partied a lot. I tried to find out why I couldn’t feel anymore.” He tapped his gut. “I didn’t find an answer, so I came back stateside. That’s when one of my friends told me Morgan Trayhern of Perseus was hiring qualified mercenaries.” His mouth curved slightly. “I was hired within two weeks, after a lot of testing and snooping into my background. Trayhern doesn’t hire just anybody. He’s got to know his staff is trustworthy.”

  “And you’ve been working for Perseus for how long?”

  “A year.”

  “Do yo
u like the work?”

  The corners of his mouth curved a little more. “It’s been okay. At least with Perseus there’s satisfaction in getting a mission accomplished. That was a new one for me. At Delta Force, we had a lot of scrubbed missions. We would train for months, even years, then go out on a possible mission only to have it scrubbed. It was frustrating. With Morgan’s company, I’m able to go in, do the job on my own terms, complete it and walk away from it.”

  “But you didn’t want this mission, did you?”

  Wes laughed as he picked up her hand and squeezed it. “No. But I’m awfully damn glad now that I took it.”

  Her heart beat a little harder. “Do you understand the psychic gift I have now?”

  He held Diana’s uncertain gaze, seeing the fear in her eyes. “Are you asking if I believe in your gift?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I am. It’s important that you accept me for who and what I am, Wes. I know at the beginning, you thought I was a fake.”

  “Not a fake,” he remonstrated gently. “Never that. I just hadn’t run into the kind of world you lived in. It was foreign.”

  “You used the word alien.”

  “Yes, I did. That’s how I felt—at first.” Wes held her hand more tightly, aware how much it meant to Diana to have him accept her abilities. “Try to put yourself in my place for a moment. Try to understand that I had no education whatsoever in metaphysics. To you, it’s like breathing air. To me, it’s something strange that I can’t prove.”

  “But you’ve seen it work, Wes. I was accurate on all counts about what I felt in that casita. What I saw after holding that gourd.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I realize that now. I still can’t prove how it works, Diana, but I do recognize your gift. I believe in you, in your abilities, whatever they are. Okay?”

  Relief splintered through her and her eyes grew as she stared at Wes. He wasn’t kidding her at all; he was serious. “Oh…good.”

  He grinned. “What do you say we go back to the hotel?”

  *

  A feeling of satisfaction soared through Wes as he left the hotel office. The night was alive with a swath of stars that blanketed the wide sky above Sedona. He whistled softly, happier than he could ever recall being. The fax detailing his report on Ruth Horner had been sent to Morgan at Perseus, and he was very sure the Psi-Lab officials would stop looking for her after receiving it. Shrugging his shoulders, feeling many loads he’d been carrying slip free, he smiled to himself.

  Could anyone have predicted that in three days’ time he would feel like a new man? Feel real hope for the first time in his life? He thought not. Diana’s compassionate face filled his vision, filled his heart. She was soft in so many ways—ways in which he was still hard and unyielding. Diana would teach him about dissolving those barriers he’d lived behind for so many years. She’d teach him about living fully, with all his senses and emotions engaged.

  He found Diana out on the deck of their cabin overlooking Oak Creek. The starlight gave a mute radiance to the darkened deck and emphasized the knee-length white cotton nightgown she wore. She turned, as if sensing his presence, because he knew he’d made no noise in approaching. The nightgown was simple but revealed her lovely curves, the lace at her throat emphasizing her femininity. A hair brush was in her hands, and Wes smiled as he drew near.

  “Come here, I want to brush that beautiful hair of yours.” He pulled up two lounge chairs and placed them one in front of the other. Wes liked the way her eyes smiled, the way her lips parted at his unexpected request. Taking the brush, he guided her to the chair. She sat with her back to him.

  “This is something I’ve been wanting to do ever since we met,” he told her in a low voice as he began to unbraid her thick hair.

  With a moan of pleasure, Diana closed her eyes. “You are spoiling me absolutely rotten, Wes McDonald.”

  He allowed the glistening strands to fall between his fingers. “I’m spoiling both of us. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to brush a woman’s hair.” Picking up the brush, he whispered near her ear, “Now I’m going to find out.”

  A shiver of pleasure raced up Diana’s ear and neck as he placed several small, moist kisses beneath her earlobe. “You talk of dreams,” she said as he began to gently move the brush through her hair. “You’re one to me.”

  “I don’t see how,” Wes said with a grimace, being very careful not to pull her hair and hurt her. “I was a hard son of a bitch when you met me.”

  “Still,” she said, “there was something about you that drew me, Wes.” Her eyes remaining closed, she absorbed his touch as her hair cascaded about her shoulders. “I could tell you were hurting. I could sense it.”

  “But I was taking it out on you.”

  “I know.” Her lips parted and the corners turned upward as he tunneled his fingers through her hair. He began to gently massage her scalp, and she lost all thought and simply felt his gentle assault upon her. For a warrior, Wes was incredibly tender. In her mind, Diana replayed their earlier conversation in the car, about him wanting a home, a wife and a family.

  Easing away just enough to turn around, she faced him. The satisfaction burning in his eyes made her respond effortlessly as she framed his face with her hands. She could feel the prickle of his beard beneath her palms, feel the warmth of him as a man. His shadowy eyes burned with desire for her.

  “When we go home to Cherokee, I’ll take you to a small cabin on a stream that by mom owns. I’d like to stay there for a week just hiking, fishing and sharing with you.”

  “Sounds good,” Wes rasped as he slid his hands around her waist and drew her onto his lap. Diana settled against him, her arms going around his neck. As she rested her head against his jaw, he sighed. “I’m still afraid this is a dream,” he admitted slowly. “That you’re a figment of my desperate imagination. I’ve dreamed so long of being able to fall in love, Diana. To dare to think that someone might love me as much as I loved her. To marry and—” he ran his hand gently across her curved abdomen “—to watch a baby grow inside the woman I love, knowing it belongs to both of us. Knowing that the child would have two loving parents who would never give her or him up—ever.”

  Diana caressed his hair with her fingers and felt his pain and his dream. There was such fragility in Wes, so much hope linked to so much desperation from his past. “Among the Cherokee people, children are sacred,” she whispered near his ear. “Sacred and greatly loved and protected. An outsider might say we spoil them, but we spoil them with love.”

  Wes closed his eyes, his hand resting gently against her belly. She was warm and soft against him, and the light scent of gardenias filled his nostrils. “Morgan’s going to be awfully disappointed that I’m taking all this time off, but he’ll understand. He loves his family with a fierceness I’ve rarely seen in a man. But then, he lost a lot, too, so he knows….”

  With a gentle smile, Diana raised her head just enough to connect with his shadowed gaze. “And you will, too. People who lose that much very often cherish what is given back to them. I don’t think you’ll be an exception, darling.”

  Burying his face in her thick, silky hair, Wes held Diana with a fierceness that spoke of his love, his commitment to her—to their future—forever.

  *

  New York Times Bestselling Author

  LINDSAY MCKENNA

  brings you into the line of fire with her action-packed Shadow Warrior series.

  ON FIRE

  E-Novella

  TAKING FIRE

  RUNNING FIRE

  “Readers will find this addition to the Shadow Warriors series full of intensity and action-packed romance. There is great chemistry between the characters and tremendous realism…a great read.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Breaking Point

  Pick up your copies today!

  Connect with us on Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!

  Other ways to keep
in touch:

  Harlequin.com/Newsletters

  Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks

  Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks

  HarlequinBlog.com

  ISBN: 9781460392126

  Seeing is Believing

  Copyright © 2015 by Lindsay McKenna

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com