Illicit Senses (Illicit Minds Book 1)

by Rebecca Royce

  “Pull up right there, Greg. Mr. Lewis is already outside.” Did her voice sound as stiff to Greg as it did to her own ears?

  As the car slowed down and finally stopped, Addison unbuckled her seatbelt and opened the door. She smoothed down her gray skirt before she stepped out of the car. She tried her best to smile as she met Spencer’s sharp gaze. Her head felt fuzzy and unclear.

  “Hello, Mr. Lewis. I’m sorry if we kept you waiting.”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t.” He motioned to the guard standing to his right, and she followed the direction with her gaze.

  The other man was holding out a clipboard. After a moment, he snorted. “You need to sign him out.”

  “Sign him out?” She was having a hard time following what was going on. She felt confused, and she could only blame Spencer Lewis’ presence for it. The man was dangerous to her nerves.

  “Yes, like a Jet Ski from a resort in the Caribbean.” The fat guard snorted, and Addison bit her tongue. She should tell the man that at the type of resorts she stayed at you didn’t sign out a Jet Ski. Someone ran and got you one or bought another one if they were out. But he wasn’t worth the effort, and he wouldn’t think any better of her for the jibe. In fact, he would probably think she was a stuck-up bitch.

  “You’re responsible for my welfare and those I’m around while I’m not here.” Spencer’s voice was like the warm apple cider that she loved in the fall. “Will explained this to you when you were here earlier.”

  He paused and ran his hands through his hair. She watched, transfixed, as his golden locks seemed to move in slow motion through his fingers and back down onto the top of his head.

  “Are you okay?” Spencer’s voice sounded far away.

  “Huh?”

  Whirling around, he stared at the gray fortress behind them.

  “Ben, cut it out.”

  Blinking, Addison felt her thoughts speed up, and for a moment, she was dizzy. She shook her head, her mind finally not feeling sluggish or confused. “What’s going on?”

  “Ben is fucking around with your mind a little bit. Go on, sign me out so we can get this over with.”

  “What do you mean he was fucking with my mind?” Addison signed the paper that gave her responsibility for Spencer, a daunting thought at the very least. Her hand shook, and she hoped no one noticed.

  “He’s a teenager and should know better. But he’s completely harmless—he’s not capable of doing any damage, just sort of confusing you. He thinks he’s amusing, like somehow it’s funny that you can’t follow conversations. Another minute and he would have exhausted himself.”

  Addison felt rage pulse through her bloodstream. “That’s an invasion of my privacy. It’s illegal for him to do that to me.” She was shouting, and she didn’t care. Not only had this Ben violated the sanctity of her mind, but he could have affected her coping mechanism and then she might have exposed herself as being afflicted, as being Conditioned.

  Spencer pointed to the exit of the complex. “Right through those gates, it’s illegal. Where you’re standing right now, it’s annoying.” Gripping her arm, he ushered her back to her car door and pushed her gently inside. “Just another reason to get you out of here. Later, when you return me, you can lodge a complaint with Will. I’ll witness it. Ben will end up doing kitchen cleanup for a week. Unless, of course, you have more important things to think about than getting a fifteen-year-old you will never see again punished for a harmless mind trick. Like finding your missing nephew.”

  Addison felt a moment of shame and immediately resented Spencer for bringing it on. How dare he lecture her on what she should or should not be offended by? She opened her mouth to tell him so and closed it. This was not going well.

  Sliding in closer to her, he shut the door and looked around the inside of the car.

  Nodding toward Greg, he grinned. “Who is he?”

  “This is Gregory Bradley. He’s worked for my family for a long time. He’s our driver.”

  “Hi, Gregory, I’m Spencer Lewis.”

  Addison could see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror as he nodded his hello.

  “Greg, would you mind closing the divider? I need to speak to Spencer for a moment. It concerns company business.” Gregory nodded and raised a window between them.

  Spencer motioned to the divider. “Do most town cars have that feature?”

  “No. Grandfather had it custom-made. He doesn’t like driving around in a limo, but he wanted the privacy that a limo allows for business transactions, so he made his town car limoesque.”

  “If I could drive, I would never let anyone chauffeur me around.”

  “You can’t drive?”

  Half of his mouth raised in a smile. His eyes glowed with an emotion Addison couldn’t identify. “Ms. Wade, you just had to sign me out. Do you think they let me operate a motor vehicle?”

  Addison’s cheeks warmed in embarrassment. It had been an honest mistake, but a silly one. Damn it. In less than two minutes, he’d made her feel foolish twice.

  She would try again. “Then I guess this must be nice for you, to get out of Safe Dawn and see the world outside those walls.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  He shifted in his seat, and she admired the strong lines of his profile. Spencer seemed to radiate heat, more so than most men she knew—more alive, somehow more vibrant.

  “It must get trying, always being stuck in the same place.”

  “Actually, I prefer it. Very few things tempt me away. Missing children happen to be one of them.”

  “How can you prefer it?” The idea of being stuck behind the walls of that place and never allowed to leave made her shudder.

  “Would you want to be somewhere where everyone around you treated you with suspicion and disdain? Even if you were doing them a favor? And that’s all I do—favors—considering that I can’t get paid, not directly.”

  And strike three. She’d officially stuck her foot in her mouth in all three attempts to speak to him. “I can see how that would be… difficult.” She took a deep breath. Everything with Spencer was proving to be complicated. She couldn’t seem to say anything at all without it being the absolute wrong thing. “But surely there must be something you’d like to one day see outside Safe Dawn?”

  He nodded and turned his head to look away from her to stare at the scenery. Evidently, his brief nod was the only response he intended to give her. Well, two could play at that game, and why did she care what he wished he could see? He was a means to an end to find her nephew, and a potentially dangerous one at that.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your nephew? Finding him will be in the small details.”

  “I thought you’d just go into his room, do a reading or whatever it is you do, and then you’d be able to tell us where he went or who took him.”

  “That would be efficient, wouldn’t it?” He turned his attention back to her, his blue eyes claiming all her attention. Was it her imagination, or did the temperature in the car rise several degrees? In another few seconds, she was going to start sweating.

  She cleared her throat and took off the gray jacket that matched her skirt. Underneath it, she had put on a simple white blouse that she wished was short sleeved.

  Spencer’s eyes followed her every movement. She wondered what he was thinking about. Whatever it was, she imagined it was intense, because his eyes seemed to glow with some unknown thought.

  Nearly shaking now with nerves, Addison knew she was about two minutes away from having to resort to her rhyming. Once she started doing that, she would barely be able to speak at all. That meant she needed to answer all his questions before it was too late, and he became suspicious or somehow the Fury caught on. Addison had no idea how it worked. Could they be monitoring her in the car?

  Spencer reached out and grabbed her shaking hand. She jerked but didn’t pull her hand away.

  “I’m having a terrible time figuring you out, Ms. Wade.”


  Her tongue felt dry in her mouth but she was glad to find it still worked. “I don’t know why you think you need to figure me out; you’re working for me, nothing more.”

  Even as she said the words, her brain could only think one thing: liar. Spencer was proving to be much more than an employee; if anything, he was going to be a hazard to her health. But she’d be damned if she’d let him know that.

  He smiled, but there was no joy in his eyes. “To answer your earlier question, if Priscilla, my anchor, was still with us, then I could easily go into the boy’s room, do a deep reading, and with a ninety-percent certainty come out with at least a sense of where he is. Even if he were dead that would still be true. Now that I have to keep the reading shallow, it may take more than one shot at it to find him.”

  “Jeremy.”

  “What?”

  Addison huffed out her frustration. “My nephew’s name is Jeremy. I would prefer that you didn’t call him ‘the boy.’” She didn’t know why it mattered so much to her, but it did.

  “Okay. Jeremy.” Was that admiration in his eyes? “I might be able to locate him in the first attempt just by going to the room where he was taken, and then we’ll be done. But I might need more than that. We might have to go to his school, to the park where he plays. I might have to handle his favorite toys. I don’t know. So, I’ll need you to keep thinking of things that are inherently ‘Jeremy’ and keep throwing them at me until we come up with something that works.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry it’s not going to be an exact science.”

  “We’ll do whatever we have to do. I’m not losing Jeremy.”

  Spencer shifted in his seat so she could see him even more clearly. His eyes were bottomless pits of blue, like the color of the sky on a perfectly clear day when she managed to be far away from the city. There was something else, too. The very center of his eyes… they seemed to swirl with color. Not just blue, but gray and green. How was that possible?

  “What if you’ve already lost him? Are you prepared to deal with that?”

  Letting go of his hand, Addison sat back in her seat and crossed her arms. She put on her best-practiced haughty expression and shot daggers at him. Forget looking at his amazing eyes. What did they matter when they belonged to a man with no feelings at all?

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Addison…”

  “I said it’s not possible.” And that was all she was going to say on the subject. She knew what her expression said, since she used it often enough in business. It dared him to contradict her if he was brave enough. Actually, she kind of hoped that he would. It might be cathartic to really let loose her temper and damn the consequences. Bring on the Fury.

  Forcing herself to swallow her anger, she tried desperately to get her thoughts back on track and off her distaste for Spencer Lewis. Jeremy was what mattered. She needed to stay focused on that.

  “All right.”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “All right, he’s not dead. If ever there was someone who could keep a missing child alive through sheer force of will alone, it would be you, I suspect. So, for right now, I’ll acquiesce and say that he’s alive.”

  Nodding, she bit down on her lip. Little did he know he had just described her grandfather, not her, to a T. Most of the time, Addison was missing the Wade gene that let her control the world with just a thought.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He moved closer to her, and she abruptly pressed up against the wall of the car to try to put some space between them. Spencer countered this by pressing even more tightly against her. She gulped.

  “Someday I would like to see the ocean.”

  Addison’s eyes filled with tears and she blinked them away. He’d never seen the ocean, and she took it for granted that she got to see it all the time. “Which one?”

  “Doesn’t matter. The open sea. That’s really all I wanted in the world.”

  “Past tense? Wanted?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Let’s just say that now there’s something else I want even more.”

  He was so close she could smell the ivory scent of his soap. Using every bit of willpower she possessed, she stopped herself from taking a deep breath to bring his scent even further into her mind. He would know immediately what she had done, and she refused to give him that kind of power.

  He moved back in his seat, giving her space again. As she tried to regain her breath, she couldn’t help but feel that she’d just been warned. He wanted her. That much was clear.

  His face had turned back into the mask she couldn’t read, and she felt momentary disappointment because, despite her best intentions, he made her heart flutter. And she wanted him.

  Five

  All Rhodes had asked of him was to behave around the Wades, to make a good impression, and yet Spencer couldn’t seem to help acting like a brute in front of Addison Wade. Two more minutes in the car, smelling the sweet vanilla wafting from her hair or the natural, clean scent of her soap, and he would bang her over the head and drag her off to some cave where he could ravish her. Hell, maybe he could just bang her in the car.

  He was usually better at controlling his baser instincts. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t harbor sexual fantasies about skinny blonde cheerleader types with pissed-off attitudes. He liked his women curvaceous, with black gypsy eyes and long, glorious dark hair. Women who were confident in their own sexual appeal, who didn’t try to hide it, who said what they wanted and did what they desired.

  Addison Wade was so bundled up in her plain gray suit, with her ordinary nude pantyhose and sensible black shoes that he wanted to scream. And there was nothing rational about his reaction.

  What would it be like to push her down on the seat and screw her until her pouty, strained mouth smiled with sensuous desire? This woman, for some bizarre reason, was causing his senses to go into overdrive. It wasn’t acceptable. He needed to get it under control before he embarrassed himself. If there was one thing he could be sure of, it was that Addison Wade, granddaughter of the man who had practically invented torture for the Conditioned, was not going to be spreading her legs for him.

  She probably thought he was less than an animal, which was why she stared at him with so much contempt. Hell, the woman could barely stand to be in the car with him. Her hand shook from the strain of being in his presence. He rolled his eyes. So what on Earth had possessed him to tell her he wanted to see the ocean and was desperate to have her?

  Maybe he was as deranged as people thought his kind were.

  “We’re here.” Her voice, which was only slightly above husky, broke his internal musings, and he raised his arms to stretch his body. Addison looked down and tapped her foot again. What should have been an annoying habit was, for no discernible reason, adorable when she did it.

  “Before we go inside, I have to tell you something.”

  He rubbed his jaw, surprised by how much stubble he felt there. When was the last time he’d shaved? Lately, he forgot more and more to do that type of thing.

  “What’s that?”

  “My grandfather is furious that I brought you here.”

  “You did this without telling Oliver Wade?” He didn’t know if he should have been impressed or horrified. As a member of the community Wade had devoted his life to trying to destroy, Spencer knew better than anyone just how dangerous he could be.

  She nodded. “Jeremy is mine. He was entrusted to me. I’d walk through the gates of Hell for him if I had to.”

  “Do you love him like he’s your son?”

  “I do.” She nodded. “I really do. He knows I’m not his mother. He’s only four, but he remembers Jeanne, and he loves her. But he comes to me for mothering, and I can’t imagine I could ever love a child more.”

  Just when he thought he could categorize Addison Wade as a spoiled, entitled brat, she went and said something like that. “So I should watch out for your dear old granddad, then?”

&nb
sp; “He said if you got out of line, he’d call the Fury down on both of us.”

  Spencer saw terror pour out of Addison’s ice-blue eyes. She wasn’t even doing anything to disguise it. Before he could stop himself, he reached out to grasp her hand in his and wasn’t surprised that it shook. “If that’s what is scaring you, don’t worry. I always have the Fury watching me when I leave Safe Dawn. They might even monitor me when I’m inside the walls of the institution. I have no idea. If they were going to kill me, they would have done so when they let the police take Priscilla’s life.”

  Her eyes widened even farther and he bit back a curse. He was trying to comfort her, and evidently he’d only added to her fear.

  “What happened?”

  Nope, he wasn’t going there. “It has no bearing here. Priscilla did something stupid.”

  “So the Fury only went after her because she broke the rules?”

  He wouldn’t go that far. They were unfair laws, and he wasn’t going to act like they were otherwise. “It’s all a lot of bullshit. She didn’t do anything a human being shouldn’t be allowed to do. But, yes, technically she broke some rules.” He needed to get off this topic before the anger made him let loose on the woman in the car. If that happened, he might not be able to help people anymore.

  Spencer didn’t have much to qualify him for salvation, but when asked to help people with his strange powers, he always did his best. That much he would be able to claim if he was ever in front of the pearly gates.

  Of course, if people were to be believed, he was doomed to Hell simply for having been born the way he was. But Rhodes didn’t believe that, and Spencer had never known the older man to be wrong about anything.

  Gregory, who had not shown himself through the screen since Spencer had first gotten into the car, pulled the vehicle to a stop in front of a large building. Moments later, the door opened from the outside as a doorman made his greetings to Addison. She stepped out onto the street and Spencer followed her.