Illicit Senses (Illicit Minds Book 1)

by Rebecca Royce

  Leaning back, he tried to see the top of the building the Wades called home. It wasn’t the biggest building on the street, but it screamed money and prestige. Looking to his left, he caught sight of a street sign. They were nearly on the corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-First. Not that he’d be going anywhere without Addison, but he always liked to have a general idea of where he was, in case he needed that information later.

  Two seconds standing on the street, and he was thoroughly impressed with the sound proofing in Addison’s town car. He’d been to New York City before, and the noise of the place was always what struck him first. There was so much traffic on the streets that the automobiles almost took on a life of their own. Cars honked, people shouted, and hammers and construction drills blasted all around him. It was a huge change from the quiet of Safe Dawn, where there weren’t even any neighbors for miles around.

  He liked New York. He liked the energy, and the way the city seemed to be just as alive as the people who lived and worked there, as if it had become a living, breathing life form from having sheltered so many souls over the years.

  “You okay?” Addison stood in front of the building and stared back at him. Her blonde hair whipped around her in a halo of gold and yellow. For a moment, he wished he could paint so he could capture her at that exact second and look back on its perfection for the rest of his life.

  He walked toward her and the doorman rushed ahead of Addison to pull open the entrance to the dark-gray concrete building. The awning they walked under was burgundy, a similar shade to the aging doorman’s nose and cheeks. Spencer wondered if he was cold or if he’d spent too many years drinking and now his face was showing the effects. He smiled as Addison introduced him, and nodded. She seemed to know all the people who worked for her on a first-name basis.

  Addison called the man Charlie, and Spencer held his breath as he waited for the ice-blonde goddess to inform the other man just who Spencer was. All pretense of politeness would disappear. He waited. Addison moved forward to the elevator without explaining his presence.

  Spencer took a deep breath. What the hell? They—meaning the people he was signed out to—always told everyone around them who he was and what his purpose was. Addison hadn’t. What was she playing at?

  He followed her to the elevator. The doorman, who acted as the first line of defense for security in the building, should know who he was. If Addison belonged to Spencer, he’d be pissed as hell at her for not telling the people who were supposed to protect her that she’d deliberately brought danger into her apartment. Spencer knew that, if he was nothing else, he was dangerous to those around him.

  Stepping into the elevator, Spencer waited for the doors to close, sealing them in before turning to her. “Why didn’t you tell Charlie who I really am?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not his business. He’s two seconds away from losing his job, considering someone got in and out of this building without his noticing. Turns out he was asleep. There’s a rotating group of four personnel who hold that job. It was designed to prevent anyone from getting tired and doing just what he did. Grandfather hasn’t fired him yet, but it’s coming. He won’t want publicity about Jeremy, so he’ll find another reason to do it, or he’ll have one of the other tenants get the co-op board to do it.”

  “Or he was drugged.”

  “We considered that. Grandfather had him tested. He was totally clean. He just fell asleep.”

  “Oh, your grandfather had him tested.” He couldn’t help the sneer in his voice.

  Addison narrowed her eyes. “Yes, he did. Grandfather wants Jeremy found as much as I do.”

  Just not enough to come to Safe Dawn himself. Spencer did have some sense of self-preservation, which fortunately let him keep that particular thought to himself. He didn’t want to make the woman any more defensive than she already was. Even if Oliver Wade’s tests were legitimate, his gut was telling him this was more than just a story of an employee falling asleep at his post.

  Maybe the man had been in on the whole thing. Maybe he’d been manipulated psychically to fall asleep. There were any number of possibilities. None of that was his concern. His job was to get a psychic reading, get a sense of who’d taken the kid, figure out, as best he could, where the child was, and get himself back home.

  The conspiracies involved could be the Wades’ personal problem. They had nothing to do with him, and he needed to stay out of them unless it related to Jeremy.

  An image of Addison standing on the street with the wind in her hair appeared before his eyes. Usually, he didn’t have visions unless he tried to. Controlling when they happened had been part of his training. This felt different. It was channeled, but not from the dark place; it was more like his mind wanted him to see her like that again.

  He couldn’t imagine why. He’d taken a pretty good look at her the first time. Her glorious hair floating like that had made him take temporary leave of his senses and think whimsically. There was something else, though; something he could see now that he couldn’t earlier. She had looked so… unguarded.

  He blinked as he cleared his mind and looked down at Addison as she stood with him. Hands at her sides, back straight, eyes focused directly ahead as if there were something interesting happening at the front of the lonely elevator.

  “What floor do you live on?”

  “Grandfather, Jeremy, Aunt Morgan, and I reside in the penthouse.”

  “Must be sort of awkward.”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “Living with your grandfather and Aunt Morgan. You and Jeremy must get very little alone time.”

  “Aunt Morgan is around quite a bit, when she isn’t living in the house in Grand Cayman. Grandfather spends most of his time in the office.”

  The elevator dinged and opened directly into the apartment, which Spencer gathered meant that they literally lived on the whole floor of the penthouse. He’d never been able to accumulate wealth of his own, and he didn’t care very much how rich his so-called clients were. For the most part, it was only the exceptionally wealthy who came to Safe Dawn looking for help. Rhodes never told the residents what he charged for their services, but he guessed it was pricey. He’d once asked the old man if he would turn away the poor if they came to him for help. Will had said that of course he wouldn’t, but never—not once in the thirty-four years he’d run Safe Dawn—had they been asked by anyone who couldn’t pay.

  Since they didn’t advertise, it might have been fair to say that only people with influence in the upper crust of society knew they were available for help.

  The Wade apartment had clearly been designed to impress and possibly to intimidate. He raised an eyebrow as he looked around. The walls were painted a deep gold beneath a silver trim. A crown molding jutted out from the top of the wall directly beneath the ceiling and accentuated the colors. The actual design of the molding looked to be something circa turn of the nineteenth century, and Spencer wondered just how old the building was.

  The older the facility, the harder it could be to go into the dark spaces he would need to visit to find Jeremy. In the past, people had been more superstitious and taken steps to ward their homes, even if they hadn’t known they were doing it. Lately, since the Condition had started appearing more regularly, people had returned to old-fashioned notions of paranoia. Some of those theories, it turned out, had been completely correct. They built buildings with materials that made shifting into the other level of consciousness more difficult. For most readers, if there was lead-based paint on the walls, it was downright impossible to get into the dark land. Not to mention not healthy for the people who lived there, but that part wasn’t his problem.

  Of course, he managed it.

  Spencer crossed the room to a large window—there were six total in the foyer—and looked down at the street below. “So it’s not likely they carried him out of the window. Someone down below would have seen.”

  “Do you want to see his room now, or can I get you so
mething to eat? Would you like to rest?”

  He grinned and turned to look at her. “We can go now. Then maybe you can return me tonight and be done with this.”

  “You talk about yourself so strangely. ‘Return you’ and ‘sign you out.’ You can’t possibly think of yourself as property.”

  “I don’t, but you do, so it makes it easier if I speak the language you’re comfortable with.” He walked toward a large, ornate, black-rimmed staircase that stood at the left side of the room. Now that was impressive; he’d never seen a two-story apartment in Manhattan before. “Jeremy slept upstairs?”

  “Don’t presume to know how I think, Mr. Lewis.”

  She’d gotten formal, which must mean that he was in trouble. “My apologies.”

  “You know, from someone else that might be genuine, but I can’t get over the feeling that when you say things like that you’re just being condescending and disguising it as manners. I do not accept your apologies, Mr. Lewis, and yes, Jeremy lives upstairs. Follow me.”

  He walked behind her, pissed off about being called on his bullshit. Nobody ever did that, not even his friends back home or Will. Where had she gotten the courage? Wasn’t she afraid he was going to mind-rape her or set the curtains on fire with his outrage? After a moment, his attitude changed considerably as he noticed the sway of her hips and the firm, supple mound of her behind.

  Without too much effort, he could reach out and grab her firm rear end and give it a pinch. Her squeal might be worth it… up until the point she called the police on his dumb self. The escapade would be far from worth it. Or maybe not.

  He shook his head. What the hell was the matter with him? He hadn’t been this desperate for a woman since he’d lost his virginity at sixteen. The longer he stood in the apartment, the more aggravated he became by it. Everything in it was so formal; it looked like it belonged in a museum, just like her gray skirt. Addison had to be less than thirty years old, and yet she seemed to grow more ancient by the minute.

  All he could do was hope that he got this job done quickly, before he did something stupid and told Addison Wade that she was too hot to be so cold and too young to be so gone already.

  She whirled around, her eyes venomous as she pointed her index finger at him. Wow. She was really mad, and it made him even harder. He wished he could find a subtle way to adjust his pants, except he didn’t see how that was possible. She hadn’t spoken a word yet, but she was like a cyclone, ready to whirl and destroy whatever was in her path… which at that moment happened to be him.

  “I do not think of you as property. I can’t get over that you said that to me. I came looking for help.” Her hands swung left and right as if of their own volition, and he realized just how distressed she really was.

  “Addison…”

  “I have no idea whether you’re dangerous, whether you or anyone you live with needs to be locked up. I didn’t make the rules. All that happened eight years before I was born. I know Grandfather is terribly involved and that Wade Corp did things, when I was a small child, to make things even worse for you, but I would never”—she poked her finger hard into his chest—“ever, ever think of you or treat you that way.”

  He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her closer. She gasped and stared up at him with huge blue eyes that looked anything but ice-cold now. They were fuming with anger and heat. “That was very unfair what I said to you. I’m not a nice guy.”

  “You’re actually apologizing?” She seemed confused as she chewed on her bottom lip.

  “Yes.” He let go of her shoulders and brushed her blonde hair off her forehead.

  It was softer than he’d expected, like cotton balls. “I was wrong. Let’s start again. I’m Spencer Lewis. I can travel to dark places, read energies, and find missing children, but I’m currently without an anchor, so I’m working at half capacity. It’s making me edgy, and I’m not a nice guy when I’m in a good mood, so a bad one makes me even worse. And you?”

  The smallest smile appeared, and her eyes seemed to glow with mischief. “I’m Addison Wade, spoiled granddaughter of the third wealthiest man in America. I’m desperate to make a name for myself in my family’s company. I’m not good with people, and I act haughty when I’m uncomfortable. I need you to find my nephew. I miss him desperately.”

  Her last word ate at his soul. What must it be like to be missed desperately? To have someone care that much? Anger made his head pound. This child was loved, and someone had dared to remove him from that love. Spencer didn’t know love but, if it was possible, he’d find a way to give Jeremy back to Addison.

  “Let’s go to his room, Addison Wade.”

  Forcing himself to move, he took a step back. Maybe it would be smart not to touch her again. It had been too perfect, too right, and God knew he was not entitled to those kinds of feelings. At least not in this lifetime.

  Six

  Jeremy’s room had always been a haven for Addison. At the end of the day, she would find him sitting on the floor playing, his nanny having just gone home. Joining him was like having a chance to enjoy part of the childhood she’d been too terrified to actually have. Now it just felt empty, deserted—the way she imagined Hell would be. Complete and utter loneliness.

  She crossed to the bed. Too rattled by her explosion at Spencer, she picked up Jeremy’s brown, slightly tattered teddy bear and squeezed it. It was going to lose an eye soon, which meant she’d have to find someone to sew it back on, since she had no idea how to do that herself.

  “This is it, then?” Spencer walked around the room. Someone else might have called his gait aimless, but she could see that he was zigzagging purposefully to cover the most space in the least amount of time. A serpentine maneuver, it was an impressive approach.

  “This is his room, where he was taken.” Saying it hadn’t gotten any easier in the month that had followed her first horrifying discovery.

  “And it was what time?”

  “Sometime between one and six in the morning.”

  “How do you know he was here at one?”

  She sighed. “I checked on him at one.”

  He stared at her in the way that made her feel like her insides were about to melt. He was doing it again, whatever it was that made his eyes swirl in the strange hypnotic way she had noticed earlier. “Do you do that every night?”

  “A lot of parents check on their kids every night.”

  He shrugged. “I guess. I wouldn’t know. I grew up sleeping in a hospital bed in a room I shared with fifteen other boys. No one checked on us till morning.”

  Her heart broke a little, and she swallowed the lump that formed in her throat. “Oh.” There really wasn’t anything else to say. He’d been so matter-of-fact in the way he’d said that—it hadn’t seemed like he was trying to elicit sympathy.

  Experience told her that men in general didn’t want to be pitied. As Spencer seemed even more macho than most of the men she knew, she thought it better not to test that theory on him.

  “Besides, that wasn’t the question I asked you.”

  “What?”

  “I asked if you checked on him every night.”

  He wasn’t going to let this go. Even having just met him, she could tell by the hard line on his brow that he was going to be stubborn about this. Maybe she could still get away without him knowing about her issue. She just needed to lie… a little bit.

  “I check on him every night before I go to bed. One in the morning is a little bit late for me to look in on him, but I happened to be up getting a drink of water, so I peeked in again.”

  His eyebrows furrowed, and she wondered if he didn’t believe her. Wow, if she couldn’t even convince him of that small untruth, she was never going to get through this ordeal without him finding out what she was.

  None of that mattered. For Jeremy, she would expose herself, if need be.

  “And then at six in the morning, he was just gone.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let’s s
ee if we can do a reading.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  Just at that moment, the door slammed open and Aunt Morgan ran in.

  “Addison, dear…” The other woman’s face went slack with horror. “Oh, he’s here.” She gripped the doorway like she might fall over.

  Spencer’s eyes popped open, and Addison gasped and covered her mouth. For a moment, before he blinked, his eyes had been pitch-black. Almost immediately they returned to their natural blue and not even the swirl in the center of them was noticeable.

  Addison rushed to her aunt. “It’s okay, Aunt Morgan. This is Spencer. You met him earlier today in Mr. Rhodes’ office.” Her aunt wasn’t usually so delicate.

  “I just didn’t realize what it would do to me to have one of them in the house.” Her aunt said them like she might say the word plague or cancer. “Oh, I think I might faint.”

  Holding her aunt’s side, Addison looked over to where Spencer stood. If she hadn’t known it was impossible, she would have sworn he’d become a statue. His gaze was straight ahead, his expression unreadable. Gone was the passionate, exasperating man who had made her lose her temper earlier, and in his place was someone she didn’t recognize, even though he looked exactly the same.

  Morgan started to shake in her arms. “I’m sorry, Addison, I’m so sorry, but you have to get it out of Jeremy’s room. It’s too much; it’s just too much.”

  “You can’t be serious. He’s here to help us. He’s going to find Jeremy for us so we can bring him home.” What the hell was going on?

  “Addison…” Spencer’s voice startled her.

  Aunt Morgan turned around, pulling out of Addison’s arms, evidently able to stand. “Don’t you use her name, you freak of nature. Don’t you dare address Addison Wade as if you have the right to use her first name.”

  “Aunt Morgan,” Addison yelled, wishing the other woman would just shut up.

  “I apologize that my presence here offends you, ma’am.” Spencer’s voice was cold. “As you recall, you came this morning to Safe Dawn to seek me out.” He turned his attention to Addison, and his tone did not change. “Perhaps, Ms. Wade, you might tell me where I can find the room you want me to stay in, and I’ll wait there while you determine whether or not you actually want me to do what you hired me to do.”