Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Catherine looked Mac straight in the eyes. His dark eyes were watching her intently, unblinking. “It was minutes before I understood he wasn’t actually speaking. Not with his vocal cords. His mouth wasn’t moving. This was all done . . . mentally.” Her hands lifted, spread, dropped helplessly back on the table. “Or telepathically, psychically. Or something. I have no idea how he was talking to me. It had never happened to me before.”

  He didn’t question any of this. “Was he using words? In . . . your mind?”

  She shook her head sharply. “Some words. It was hard to tell, a lot of it was a jumble. But I got the heart of his message. Images, mostly. A building, in the snow. Voices shouting. Men pouring out of hidden recesses, armed, attacking other men. Funny-looking guns. Shots being fired. An explosion and a fire so hot the snow melted almost instantly. Men with some kind of luminous stripe on their helmets, going down.”

  Mac’s eyes grew even darker. She could feel his attention sharpen to a point.

  “You have to understand that this had never happened to me—I’d never seen so clearly before. Usually all I get are feelings. This time I saw the images and felt the emotions at the same time. Danger, like a knife cutting through me. Some deep sense of betrayal, something dark, something that cut off my oxygen. Over it all . . .” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Over it all was your face.”

  He didn’t move, didn’t betray any emotion, but Catherine felt his surprise like a whip. “My face? You sure?”

  She nodded and swallowed heavily. In the vision given her by Patient Nine, the entire right side of Mac’s face had been black with burns, raw red skin showing underneath the charred skin. Horrible burns, out of a nightmare, now just scars. “Yours. And the emotions connected to it were pain and sorrow. His. Patient Nine’s.” She searched his eyes. “This is making sense to you, right? The burning building, the firefight and the massive fire afterward? Betrayal?”

  He nodded slowly. “That’s all you got?”

  “That day, yes. That, and an overwhelming sense that no one should know. It felt . . . imperative that we keep this a secret.” She remembered staggering back, nearly faint from the intensity of what had been blasted at her. Feeling naked and bare, as if her skin had been flayed. Wondering if she’d had a psychotic episode, or maybe even some type of seizure. “The next day I wasn’t taken by surprise. I was also very aware that the sessions are recorded. The sense that this was a secret—that people would die if it weren’t kept a secret—was very strong, almost crippling. It was one step short of full-blown paranoia, and I tolerated it because it felt so very real. Back in my office, I ran the tape of our session to confirm that from the outside, no one could tell anything had happened. A patient had grasped my arm, that was all. Advanced dementia patients have lost all fine motor skills. Unless they are sedated, some flail wildly. There was nothing on that tape that could have raised eyebrows.”

  Mac was so still he could have been a statue. “And the next day?”

  The next day she broke with protocol and started the process that led step by dangerous step to this hidden place and to this moment. “The next day I turned my back to the camera and took my right glove off and held Patient Nine’s hand,” she said softly.

  He understood, pursed his lips and blew out a silent whistle. “I take it both those things were no-nos.”

  “Absolute no-nos,” she agreed. “Being-kicked-out-and-blackballed-forever no-nos.” She closed her eyes for a moment. Even in retrospect what happened next was overpowering.

  “Lose-your-job, security-called, your-things-packed-in-a-box no-no?” he persisted.

  “Yeah. All that good stuff.”

  “It was brave of you to do that, then.”

  Catherine looked at him, startled. Was he making fun of her? But looking at the grim lines of his face, she decided no. He wasn’t making fun of her. That face looked as if fun was not in its vocabulary.

  “Yes, well, um . . .” That face was so absolutely fascinating. It had been in her head for days now, had been her obsession. She’d risked everything to find the person it belonged to and she had. Mission accomplished.

  But that face was even more of an obsession now that she’d found him. Concentrate, Catherine.

  “This time, it was more forceful than the day before. Almost as if new neural pathways had opened up in me or in him.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. It was the same as before, very clear but somehow . . . weaker, too. With a sense of huge struggle to get to me. I checked his chart and he’d been sedated with a stronger than usual dose. His eyes—” She closed her own, remembering.

  “His eyes?” Mac prodded.

  “Tragic and lost,” she whispered. Patient Nine’s eyes still haunted her. A look so desolate it alone had been enough to propel her into possible danger. “Trying so hard to communicate with me. He was struggling desperately with the effects of the drug. It should have knocked him out yet there he was, weakened terribly, but still awake and aware. I had the sense of . . . of an iron will underneath it all. The sense of a man who simply would not—could not quit. Didn’t know how to quit.”

  He nodded abruptly. “Yeah.”

  “But the cameras showed him as awake, when he shouldn’t have been. So I squeezed his arm, closed my eyes. He got the message and pretended to sleep. Then I—” She closed her own eyes as she remembered taking that big step straight into sedition. “I changed the nurse’s orders, canceled the next day’s dose. The next morning, from my computer, I established a long loop of Patient Nine sleeping, overrode his video monitor and pasted the loop in before I went back to him.”

  “Yeah, you said.” For the first time a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “Sounds like you’re as good as Jon at hacking. That’s scary. So what happened?”

  The memory of what happened next was so intense it almost hurt. “We did this Vulcan mind-meld thing.”

  His eyes widened. “Mind meld?”

  “Yes. It’s the only way I can describe it and believe me when I say that has never happened to me before. Not that I ever tried.” She shuddered. “I never wanted to crawl inside anyone’s head, ever, but I did then. Right inside, like falling down a rabbit hole into a completely new reality. I almost forgot I was me.”

  “What did you see? Inside . . . inside his head.”

  “You, mainly,” she said baldly. “I’d seen the scenes the day before but now they were clearer. You were front and center, wearing black like you are now, only a thicker jacket that looked funny and thick black glasses. Goggles, really. At times with a helmet with a bright point of light on it. Slumped against a steel wall with half your face nearly burned off. Then rising again, bleeding. I saw other men but they weren’t as clear to me as you were. Throughout it all, watching this battle, watching you, Nine was blasting me with a compelling desire to find you, no matter what. Like I’d die if I didn’t find you.”

  Desire wasn’t the right word, it had been more than that. A compulsion—a dark one. A craving. A deep drive to find Mac—a man she’d never heard of, never seen before, a man she had no reason to believe even existed in real life as opposed to existing only in the smoky ruins of Nine’s head—had been as strong as the drive to breathe. Vitally, crucially important.

  “Though you don’t know me.” His voice sounded thoughtful.

  “That’s right. I had no idea who you were.” She didn’t want to but she leaned forward, for no other reason than simply to be closer. Shades of the compulsion she’d been infected with, but also sheer . . . attraction. This man was like a lodestone, like some huge planet exerting gravity to her satellite moon. “I don’t know how to describe what went on. He wasn’t speaking to me except in images and the images weren’t in any order. But what blasted through me was your face, a name—Mac—and Mount Blue.”

  His face tightened and his eyes narrowed.

  She sighed, preparing herself to navigate the shoals of suspicion. If she weren’t in her own head, if she were Mac, she’d be suspicious,
too.

  “I understand you, um, didn’t—don’t—want to be found. That was in the mix, too, the fact that finding you would be hard, dangerous. The emotions, the visions were clear about that. Nine wasn’t tricking me into thinking it would be easy. He knew it would be tough-going. But then he also gave me a way to get to you. He was sure you’d be somewhere on the mountain. What was in my head was a trail, a dirt road. Then a roadblock, something that would stop me. I was supposed to go around it or over it, somehow get past it and continue. And then I saw myself stopped in my car. I could see it. Me, in a stalled car, unable to go any farther. I should just sit and wait and you would find me. And when you found me, I was supposed to give you that small pin. I have no idea if he knew what season it is because the images in my head were of summer, not winter. The road was a dirt track but clear. Maybe he didn’t realize we’re in the dead of winter. Dementia patients lose all sense of time and of the seasons and I think he’d been drugged for a long time on top of that, though his charts showed nothing. Still, yes, it was incredibly stupid of me to set out on a quest to find you when the forecast was for snow. All I can say is that it was either try to find you or have a heart attack or have my head blow up, the drive to find you was that compelling.”

  She let out a deep breath. There. It had all been said.

  “Show me,” he said suddenly, fire in his eyes.

  Show me. Her breath caught.

  All of a sudden, an image bloomed in her head of her stripping for him. Standing up, pulling her sweater up and over her head, shimmying out of her pants and panties, unhooking her bra. All while he watched with those dark dark eyes which had turned blazing hot.

  Show me. The vision came unbidden but she couldn’t pretend it came out of nowhere. It came from somewhere deep inside her, some place that had iron filings all of a sudden aligned with the magnet that was Mac.

  A man who was in hiding, a man who distrusted her. A man who might at any moment blast her mind into next week, as he so charmingly put it.

  And right now, every move of his made the muscles deep in her belly pull and clench.

  “What?”

  A big hand unfurled, palm up. He moved his hand to the center of the table.

  “Show me.” Impatience in his voice. Calling the crazy lady’s bluff. “Read me. Do that thing again, only not my feelings. My thoughts.”

  Suddenly, that hand seemed so enticing and inviting. Huge and hard and there, waiting for hers. An invitation that had never been extended to her, ever. Everyone ran away screaming the instant they got a whiff of her talent—her curse— never to return. But not this man. He wanted a demonstration. He wanted to touch her.

  Had she ever held hands with a man before? She’d been to bed with a couple of men after a few kisses and some dates, but holding hands? Like walking home after a date, hand in hand? Hmmm.

  No.

  Her last date ended after dinner, without the movie, the balding banker leaving her at her doorstep, burning rubber in his desire to get away from her just as fast as his BMW could carry him because somehow she’d brushed against him as he radiated lust for the hot, hunky male waiter and without thinking she let on that she’d tuned in to his attraction.

  She’d had to switch banks.

  There was no touching anyone she didn’t trust and she trusted no one. Maybe that explained this wild desire—this driving compulsion—to lay her hand in his. It had nothing to do with reading him and everything to do with touching him.

  “Read me.” Again that impatience in his deep, rough voice. Eyes blazing with challenge. “Tell me what I’m thinking.”

  It doesn’t work that way, Catherine wanted to say, except—who knew how it worked? It just did, completely independently of her will or even desire.

  There was absolutely no disobeying this man, though, not when he was sitting like a force of nature across a small table, hand outstretched, emanating huge vibes of attraction. He was a natural leader, the true alpha male humans had been programmed to follow by thousands of years of dangerous history.

  Her hand moved of its own accord.

  Without thinking about it, without willing it at all, Catherine reached out and put her hand in his. His large hand immediately curled up around hers until her hand was surrounded by warm, hard male flesh.

  Oh my.

  It felt so very good. He felt so very good. Her hand tingled, warmth prickled all the way up her arm. It was like being encased by hot steel.

  “Well?” he asked impatiently. “What am I thinking?”

  She was completely overwhelmed by the physical sensations buzzing through her, rattling around in her head as she looked at her hand which had disappeared in his. His grip was strong, unbreakable, yet painless.

  “What?” He tightened his grip for a second, breaking the spell.

  Castle gates clanging down, defending the citadel. Iron control like a wall, dark and impenetrable.

  “I don’t know what—” she began in a whisper when all of a sudden she did. She did know what he was thinking. Feeling, rather. And . . . oh my.

  The dark, impenetrable wall fell, crumbled. Behind it was a white-hot blast of desire, like walking in front of an open furnace. Blinding heat that reached right past her skin into her body.

  He scowled, shook himself as if rejecting something, but didn’t let go of her hand. “What are you getting?” he asked impatiently.

  A lifetime of training, years and years of suppressing the truth when it was unpalatable and unwanted crumbled, too, and the truth simply plopped out of her mouth.

  “Desire,” she breathed. “You feel desire. For me.”

  Waves of it, lapping up against her like a hot sea.

  Utter silence. Neither of them breathed. He finally broke the silence, his deep voice low, quiet in the quiet room. “And what do you feel?”

  The truth. It came out of her like water upwelling from a spring. Unstoppable, real. “Desire,” she whispered. “Back.”

  He stood up so suddenly the chair toppled over, skittering to the wall unnoticed as he rounded the small table without letting go of her hand. He used her hand in his to pull her up and out and straight into his arms and his mouth came down on hers and the world spun around her and she was lost.

  Chapter Eleven

  Desire.

  Christ, she called it desire but it was more than that. Whole worlds and universes more. Something bigger, something unfathomably greater. Something completely outside his ken.

  Mac had felt lust plenty of times, he knew exactly what it was and what happened to him when it struck. There was this matrix, this pattern, and he was intimately familiar with it, followed it, every time. It had never occurred to him that there was something else.

  It was something learned by rote, followed instinctively, like a playbook. ABC.

  See a woman who wasn’t a dog, didn’t smell, had all her teeth, sniff her out and, if she was up for it, tell his dick to rise and stay up. And it did, of course. It always did. He never had to think about it. Never had to feel about it.

  Fucking was fun, good sweaty exercise. The aftermath . . . not so much. It was true that Mac had perfected all the get-out-of-Dodge-fast moves and wasn’t often caught in bed in a post-coital glow. He wasn’t looking for love and neither were the women, just some fun and release in bed and that’s what they got. No more, no less.

  That was sex.

  This? This was something else. Something infinitely more powerful, overwhelming, something that hadn’t even crossed his horizon in thirty-four years of living.

  He looked down for one second at Catherine’s beautiful face. He had a soldier’s ability to grab impressions in a second and in that split second before he kissed her he marveled at just how fucking beautiful she was.

  Huge light gray eyes with that dark blue rim around them, reflecting all the light in the room in silvery flashes, pale perfect skin, high cheekbones rounding down to a firm little chin and right there the world’s most delectable mouth, s
oft and puffy and quivering.

  Shit.

  Her whole body was quivering, shaking, he could feel it in his hands, against his chest. She was what? Scared? Of him?

  No. She wanted him.

  He fisted his hand in her soft, shiny dark hair and plunged into her, like a high diver going off the deep end. A very very deep end. Like he was falling endlessly down to the bottom of the world with nothing to stop him.

  Oh, right. There was something stopping him.

  Clothes. His, hers.

  Shit, they had to be gone, right now, because anything standing between his skin and hers had to go. Now.

  He’d undressed plenty of women in his time, but this stumped him because he had no idea how he could undress her when his mouth refused to leave hers and his hands were filled with warm woman and had no desire to lift them away, none.

  Her mouth—oh God. Soft and warm, tasting like wild honey. He held her tightly against him so he could feel her all along his front and it was like electricity buzzing against one side of him while the other side of him was in coldest outer space.

  For a second he wondered how he could get to a place where he was being touched by her all over, front and back, head to toe, but the laws of physics were a bitch and wouldn’t let him. But by Christ he wanted it.

  They broke for a second, two microns of distance between their mouths. Mac pulled in a deep breath, pulled her back to him and latched onto her mouth like a dying man. If he were dying, her mouth would revive him, no question, her tongue alone gave him jolts like those patches reviving dead men. The hand holding the back of her head slid down and his fingers touched petal-soft skin. He ran a finger along her neck while he bit her lower lip and felt her vibrate, felt her tongue flutter.

  Fuck, fuck. Not only her tongue. Felt her cunt flutter! Felt her muscles pull hard from her stomach to her groin and felt his cock lengthen at the same time in answer.