by Deanna Chase
Kate removed his hand from her cheek. “You know what? I just lost my appetite. If you don’t mind—I’d like you to take me home.” The fact that he had driven her over didn’t allow her the privilege to storm out on him.
Jared reached for her, but she jerked away. He flinched at her reaction. “Don’t get angry with me. Let’s just talk about this…”
She cut him off, “Are you going to drive me or am I walking home?”
After a long sigh, he grabbed his keys and followed her out of his apartment. Entering his black BMW, she restrained herself from slamming his car door. She understood some of the points Jared was making, but she didn’t like how his rejection made her feel. Now she was embarrassed for throwing herself at him when he clearly didn’t want to take things to that level.
Their disagreement made Kate further question whether he really wanted to be with her or not. They had been thrown into an extreme situation together last month and maybe the intensity of the kidnapping case was what drew them together. Now that the adrenaline rush was over, maybe a relationship between them was destined to fail.
Jared remained silent as she stewed on the ride home. Franklin was small enough that it only took five minutes to travel between their homes. Living in the New Jersey suburbs also promised little traffic which Kate was thankful for at the moment. The sooner she could get some time to herself and sort out her mixed emotions, the better.
As he parked in front of her house, Kate reached for the door handle. He put a firm grip on her wrist to prevent her from leaving. She turned to face him and looked at him with irritation. She was about to protest, but the words became lodged in her throat at his contrite expression.
“Listen, I wanted it to be a surprise,” he emphasized before continuing, “but I actually have something planned.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been arranging a special night for us,” he explained. “You mean a lot to me and I want our first time together to be amazing.”
As Jared spoke, he used his fingers to trace small circles on her hand. It was strangely sensual and she felt hypnotized by his touch.
Kate loved Jared’s sweet side and instantly felt bad for overreacting. If he wanted to show her an amazing time, who was she to protest? “What kind of night? Is it soon?” she questioned eagerly.
He laughed and exited the car. Opening the passenger door, he lifted her up into a warm embrace. He had the ability to make her feel very feminine when he showered her with affection. Relaxing against his muscular chest, she tilted her head up to gaze at him. Moving her light brown locks away from her face with a sweep of his callused fingers, he peered down at her.
“I’d like to keep it a surprise if you don’t mind,” Jared said with a slight smirk playing at the edges of his lips. “And yes, it’s very soon. I’m not a saint, Kate.”
Kate gave a solemn nod and summoned up her most somber expression. “Ok, I accept your terms. But I’m warning you, all this build-up may end up blowing up in our face. I don’t have a tendency to do well under pressure.”
“Good thing we’ll have the whole night to try again and again until we get it right,” he whispered and then nibbled on her ear. She tried not to swoon as he moved his mouth to hers. He didn’t hold back on the intensity of the kiss as she concentrated on not letting her knees buckle out from under her. If he was able to do everything else as good as he kissed, Kate had no worries about their first time together.
It was agonizing to break away from the kiss. From his labored breathing, Kate presumed he was feeling the same way. Waiting until this romantic evening was going to be torture. She’d have to stay distracted in the meantime. Luckily, she had made it a priority to work on honing her psychic skills.
Kate leaned against him and wrapped her arms around his waist. The fight was already forgotten in her mind. She didn’t need sex to solidify her relationship with Jared. She had to just let go of her neuroses and take a more laidback approach to things. It seemed likely that Jared sympathized with her inexperience and was only making sure she didn’t have any regrets.
“Ok, you better go inside before I say to hell with it and throw you over my shoulder and bring you back to my place,” he grunted.
Kate chuckled. “Fine. But after that kiss I’m sure I’ll be having a vision about you this evening.” Preferably unclothed, she thought silently.
Chapter Two
The next afternoon Kate was enjoying a turkey sandwich at one of the outside tables at her college. The September weather had been gorgeous lately and sundresses and shorts were still worn on a daily basis. The sunshine soaked into her delicate skin. Kate hoped being outdoors would help her maintain the tan she had held onto since Labor Day. Kate had spent the weekend at the shore with her father, Robert, who had moved about an hour away last year after her parents’ divorce. On the final day of their trip, he arranged a dinner for her to meet his girlfriend, Carly.
Surprisingly, Carly was a lot nicer than she expected. She didn’t come across as a dumb floozy who was the catalyst for the demise of her parents’ marriage. Although it pained her to be friendly to the woman due to loyalty to her mother, she couldn’t find a major fault with her. At the very least, maybe she could mellow her father out a little bit.
Focusing back on the present, Kate looked over the notes she had taken from her American Literature class. After a couple minutes of studying, she felt her mind wander. It was hard to concentrate while she was still in this new relationship stage with Jared. She couldn’t wait to head over to his apartment again tonight to see him. Maybe she would even attempt to cook for him to make up for last night.
Taking a highlighter to her notes, Kate stiffened as she felt eyes bore into her back. Slowly, turning around in her chair, she locked her gaze with a pair of dark unfamiliar eyes. In the few seconds that she allowed herself to stare back, Kate did a quick inventory of the man. He wore his brown hair very short and had it spiked in a sort of messy style that required lots of hair product. His hand grazed over the small amount of scruff he had growing on his chin. The movement lifted his arm and made visible to Kate the corner of a tattoo on his bicep.
The guy was about her age, but Kate did not recognize him from any of her classes. He seemed amused at something as he looked at her unabashedly. His stare did not waver when she turned to face him. Deciding to ignore him, she spun back around. Gathering up her things, she dumped out her trash without another glance in his direction and headed towards the parking lot. The papers had done a lot of coverage on her during the Cori Preston case and he probably recognized her from one of the photos that accompanied the articles. Her cell phone rang as she made the long trek across campus. Her best friend Julie Mitchell’s name appeared on screen.
“Perfect timing, there was this scruffy looking guy staring me down as I ate lunch,” Kate said in greeting.
“Scruffy creepy or scruffy hot?” Julie inquired.
“There’s a difference?”
“Of course there is,” she retorted with a derisive snort. “Scruffy creepy makes me think of the hobo that stands outside of the McDonald’s on Third Avenue flashing high schoolers. Scruffy hot is more like Ryan Gosling in The Notebook.”
“I guess scruffy hot,” she admitted. Kate clutched her books tighter to her chest and picked up the pace to her car. “It made me very uncomfortable the way he was looking at me. It seemed like he knew me although I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Kate, I know you’ve been a shut-in for awhile, so I’ll bring you up to speed on a few things. Guys like to check out pretty girls. He was probably just trying to work up the nerve to talk to you,” Julie impatiently explained.
She let out a long sigh. “I guess you’re right. So, what’s going on?”
“Nothing much, finished class for the day and now I’m waiting on Gage so we can head to the movies. I haven’t talked to you in a couple of days and wanted to see how things were going with the hottie boyfriend.”
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“Everything’s good. I’m heading there for dinner again tonight and maybe to watch a movie.”
“So…are you going to make me ask? Did he seal the deal?”
Kate remained silent for an uncomfortable moment. She wondered if it had been a good idea to have confided in Julie about how slow things were moving with Jared. Julie had provided her with several suggestions on how to speed things up. “We actually had an argument about it last night. He wants us to wait for a special night before we take things to that level.”
“When? Like your wedding night?” Julie asked incredulously.
“Nothing that extreme. He wants it to be romantic, so he’s planning something,” Kate explained. Unlocking her Toyota, she did a quick check of the backseat before entering. She wanted to make sure the scruffy guy wasn’t back there with a knife ready to slash her throat.
“You’re certain that’s the only reason? I mean you’ve been dating a month…” Julie trailed off before questioning, “You don’t think he has a problem with his equipment, do you?”
“No, we’ve gotten to third base…”
Julie cut her off with a snort. “Third base? What, are we in middle school?”
“Anyway,” Kate continued, “my point was that his equipment is in perfect working condition.”
“Well, I hate to say it, Kate, but it’s your fault things haven’t gotten as far as you want them to.”
Kate countered incredulously, “My fault? Why do you say that?”
“Because you probably gave him your whole born again virgin spiel about how you only had sex one time and it was the worst experience of your life,” Julie chided.
“Well…I may have mentioned it,” she said as she pulled out of the college parking lot. She had a few hours to kill before Jared got home from work, so she headed to her house.
“It’s actually kind of sweet if you think about it. He wants to erase the memory of your first time and give you a night that will knock that god-awful memory of Pete completely out of your head.” Julie paused before continuing, “I don’t know why you even bring that loser up. After you broke up, I heard a rumor that he collects his own belly button lint in a jar.”
“Julie, you spread that rumor,” Kate reminded her matter-of-factly.
“Anyway,” she said pointedly, “you normally have terrible taste in men. I think you should appreciate the fact that Jared cares enough about you that he wants your first time together to be incredible.”
“I hope that’s his intention. I’m just concerned that maybe he’s not really ready to jump into something serious again after breaking up with Nikki. Maybe he’s just not into me,” she wondered aloud.
“Believe me, he’s way into you,” Julie emphasized each word. “Remember when I met him? I had totally awesome cleavage going on and he didn’t sneak a peek once. He could barely tear his eyes off of you.”
Kate smiled to herself. Jared and Julie had met briefly a couple of weeks ago when he met the friends for coffee. Thankfully, Julie’s boyfriend Gage hadn’t been around to scare Jared off with his potent blend of extreme obnoxiousness and boorish manners.
“I am not used to these boyfriend problems,” Kate confessed. “Thanks Julie for letting me vent.”
“No prob—I do really miss our girl talks. Now that we both have boyfriends, I feel like we hardly see each other,” Julie complained.
Kate pulled into her driveway and noted that her mother’s car was parked outside. She must have finished up dropping off her orders. Her mom sold beauty products and had a pretty successful business going. Along with the money from the divorce settlement, it allowed her mother to keep them in the house Kate grew up in.
“Let’s make plans, I miss you too,” she replied to Julie.
“Why don’t we go on a double date? Maybe the boys will become best buds and we can hang out all the time,” Julie enthused.
Kate would have to dump Jared immediately if he and Gage got along like long lost best friends. Despite this, she said, “Sounds good. I’ll see when Jared is off of work and we’ll all have dinner together.”
“Great, can’t wait! Me and Gage need to have more couple friends,” she replied. “Speaking of Gage, have you had any visions about him?”
Kate groaned. Julie had been asking her for weeks to use her psychic powers to spy on Gage. For some reason, Julie had suspicions that Gage was seeing other girls on the sly. Since her best friend had been accepting about Kate keeping secrets from her in the past, she felt like she owed it to Julie to comply.
“I really wish you would stop asking me to get into his head,” she pleaded. “I did in fact have a vision of him the other night. It was at some party and he was participating in a rousing game of naked mattress riding.”
Kate almost gagged at the memory. Gage was tall and blonde, but Kate thought of him more as an inbred moron than an attractive human being. Kate didn’t have guilt over these thoughts since she knew the feeling was mutual. “I could have lived without that visual, thank you very much. You know I can’t control what visions I have,” she complained.
Julie couldn’t contain her laughter. “Jeez Kate, you have some lame psychic powers, but thanks for trying. I actually was there that night and he was too stinking drunk to even stand up, no less get it on with another girl.”
“I promise if I happen to see anything inappropriate, I’ll let you know. I’d rather focus on my boyfriend when I lay in bed at night sexually frustrated, if it’s all the same to you,” Kate said before entering the hallway to her house. She shut the door behind her. “I actually just got home, so let me call you back later.”
“Ok, bye and let me know when we can plan our date night.”
Kate disconnected the call and tossed her keys on the end table. Walking into the house, she made out the outline of her mother sitting at the dining room table. Kate studied her for a moment before entering the room. Darlene Edwards had the exact same hair coloring and eyes as Kate. In happier times, her father used to joke that they could be sisters. Her tawny hair was now pulled back tightly in a bun and she had on a pair of reading glasses that she was usually too self-conscious to wear.
As Kate moved closer, she realized tears were streaming down her mother’s face as she clutched a letter she held in her hands. Hearing Kate enter the room, she shot her a forlorn expression. Panicked, Kate rushed over. “Mom, what’s the matter?”
Darlene took off the glasses and wiped at the tears glistening on her cheeks. “I’m sorry, honey. I was cleaning and I saw this letter open on your desk. I shouldn’t have pried.”
Kate swallowed hard and fidgeted with the hem of her tank top. “It’s ok, Mom. I would’ve told you about it, but it’s pretty depressing. I haven’t had any visions about him so I’m really worried that something horrible happened to him.”
The past week she had been trying to connect with a little boy missing from Blaine, a town in Washington State. The five-year-old boy named Max was taken two weeks earlier while out shopping at the mall with his grandmother. There had been no witnesses that came forward and no surveillance footage that showed what happened to him. His mother had sent Kate the most heartfelt letter begging for any help she could offer.
Before Kate had gone to sleep each night this week, she had looked at Max’s picture and tried to concentrate on getting into his mind. When she woke up each morning, she had been disappointed that Max had not been in any of her visions. Alarmingly, one of the patterns she had noticed concerning her psychic gift was that she never had a vision of someone who had died. It made her fear the worse for the little boy’s life.
She sank down in the chair next to her mother. “I wish I could do more. I’ve been reading a lot of books trying to understand more about psychic phenomenon. I haven’t found anything useful yet about how to control my visions.”
Focusing on someone before she went to bed seemed to be the most helpful thing, but it was still no guarantee she’d see a vision of the person. Plus, the vis
ions could be a random memory from their past, not always something useful. After she had found Matt Spencer two years ago, people from all over the country had sent her letters asking for her help in finding their lost loved ones. Many also sent her letters asking her to predict the future—something she was thankfully unable to do. She would never want to give anyone dire news about their future.
Her mom covered her hand with hers. “You’ll learn more about your power as you go through life, honey. It may take you a long time to find the right book or talk to the right person.”
Kate leaned back into the upholstery of the chair and gave her mother a quizzical look. “While I try to figure everything out, I still want to help people. I’m just not sure how to go about it, you know? Should I just search for cases online? Or only help those who want my assistance and contact me?”
“I’m not sure, honey, what’s the right answer to that question. Have you talked to Jared about it?”
“He actually doesn’t think it’s the greatest idea to go around and chase abduction cases. He’s worried it may be too dangerous and I could end up in another situation like last time.”
“That makes sense. Obviously, it’s a concern that you would make yourself a target again.” Her mother nodded in agreement. “You should probably try to remain anonymous if you do offer any help.”
“Well, we know how well my anonymity was protected last time,” Kate replied dryly. Remaining silent for a minute, Kate then gave her mother an earnest expression. “It’s really great we can talk about the psychic thing now. It’s nice no longer being alone and trying to deal with all this craziness.”
“You can talk to me about anything, Katie,” her mother assured. After a second’s hesitation, she gave her daughter a thoughtful look. She ran her fingertips over her pearl necklace before she continued. “Speaking of having a talk…I was wondering how things were going between you and Jared.”