Canyons of Night lgt-3

by Jayne Castle

  He drew her onto the blanket and then he went down on his knees in front of her. He pulled her down with him. She pushed her hands inside his shirt and let the heat of his body warm her. She was about to unfasten her jeans when he stopped her.

  “Let me,” he said, his voice low and dark.

  He eased the zipper down and worked the jeans over her hips. When he could not get them any farther he pushed her gently onto her back and peeled the denim all the way off. Her panties went with the jeans.

  For a moment he knelt beside her, studying her with burning eyes as though he had never seen anything quite like her before, as if he did not want to forget a single detail. With his strong shoulders silhouetted against the night sky, his features starkly etched in psi-light, he could have walked straight out of her most intense fantasies.

  He put one hand on her thigh and moved his warm palm upward until he cupped the full, damp place between her legs. Her body reacted instantly to the intimate touch. She lifted her hips, straining against him. He stroked her slowly until she was as tightly coiled as a spring, until she was trembling with the force of the urgent need inside her.

  She seized his wrist and pulled him down alongside her. He rolled onto his back, taking her with him. She tumbled across his granite-hard body. His rigid erection pressed against her bare thigh.

  He arranged her so that she straddled him and then he worked her with his hand until she was almost screaming with need.

  He gripped her hips and pushed himself slowly inside her. As badly as she wanted him, her body resisted at first. He was too big. She hesitated, not knowing if it was going to work.

  He felt her go still and he stilled, too. She did not need to view his rainbow to know that he was fighting for his control. The heat of his body and the sweat on his chest told her very clearly. She also sensed that he would not lose the battle. Slade was always in control.

  “Okay?” he got out hoarsely.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  Tentatively she allowed him to go deeper. Her body slowly opened to accept him but the steady invasion caused the tension inside her to heighten to a level that was almost unbearable.

  “Yes,” she said. She tightened around him. “Yes.”

  He locked his hands around her hips and started to move, driving in and out of her in a powerful, relentless rhythm.

  In the end, she could not resist temptation. She had to know the truth. She touched her pendant with her fingertips and opened her senses to the fullest extent.

  Slade’s dark rainbow blazed in the night. She knew then that he was not holding anything back this time. He had told her the truth. He wanted her and he did not give a damn about the consequences, whatever they were.

  But her intuition told her that he still expected to pay a heavy price.

  There was no time to second-guess what was happening and she had promised herself she would not ruin things by trying to analyze him. She took her fingers off the pendant.

  “Slade.”

  In the next moment the tension inside her was released in wave after wave of deep, satisfying currents. She was flung into the heart of the glorious storm.

  Slade’s fingers tightened around her thighs. He thrust one last time. With a hoarse, husky growl, he came in a surging, pounding climax.

  The silver meadow blazed around them.

  Chapter 16

  HE FELT CHARLOTTE STIR BESIDE HIM. HE OPENED HIS eyes and his senses to the night and watched her sit up on the blanket. She reached for her panties and jeans. Her hair had come free. In the otherworldly glow of the meadow she looked magical, mysterious, and incredibly sexy. He could have looked at her for the rest of the night, the rest of his life.

  Something twisted deep inside him. How much longer would he be able to see her like this, with all of his senses? Whatever happened, he would never forget this night. He wondered if she would remember him in the years ahead.

  He pushed the dark thoughts aside. He had made his decision and he was content. He would not destroy what was left of the night with questions that had no answer.

  He levered himself up on one elbow. “Hey there, gorgeous.”

  She paused in the act of wriggling into the jeans and looked at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were still gently luminous.

  “Hey there, yourself, handsome,” she said.

  Her voice had a sexy, throaty quality that stirred the embers all over again. He tried to come up with something clever in the way of postcoital conversation but nothing occurred to him. He did not want to chat. He wanted to drag her back down onto the blanket and make love to her again and again before he lost his talent forever.

  But for all its heat-retention and waterproof capabilities, the sheet of high-tech plastic did nothing to soften the ground underneath it.

  He watched her shimmy partway into her jeans. Then she got to her knees in order to pull the pants up over her hips.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. She stood and adjusted her top and the jacket. “We both have to go to work in the morning.”

  He sat up reluctantly. The plastic crinkled under him.

  Charlotte watched him close his jeans.

  “I’d like to hear the story,” she said.

  “What story?” He leaned down to pick up the blanket. It dawned on him that he felt incredibly relaxed, better than he had in months. Maybe better than he ever had in his entire life.

  “Earlier you said that some doctors at a clinic had slapped you with the ‘delicate’ label. I asked you why. You said it was a long story. We have a long walk out of here. I thought it would be a good time to tell me the tale.”

  “Damn. Should have seen this coming.” Talking about his problems was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Charlotte stiffened. “Don’t ask.” Her voice had gone very cool.

  He concentrated on folding the blanket into a small square. “Don’t ask what?”

  “Why women always want to chat after sex. Speaking personally, I don’t. Not usually. In my experience it invariably leads to a bad outcome. But, then, all my dates end badly.”

  “At least you’re consistent.”

  “True. But I think I need to know why you wound up here on Rainshadow.”

  He thought about it while he crammed the blanket back into the pouch.

  “What the hell,” he said finally. “It’s not like it’s not in both my Bureau file and the Arcane clinic files.”

  “My goodness,” she said. “What on earth happened?”

  He was saved from an immediate answer by a familiar chortle. Rex fluttered across the glowing meadow. When he reached them he bounded up to Slade’s shoulder. He was still holding the small purse.

  “Well, well, well, where have you been, Big Guy?” Charlotte said. She reached up to pat Rex. “I’ll bet you went hunting, didn’t you? I don’t even want to think about what you dined on this evening.”

  Slade knew he was probably anthropomorphizing, but judging by Rex’s jaunty attitude, he had a hunch the dust bunny had gotten lucky. Probably hadn’t had to have a complicated, mood-shattering postcoital chat afterward, either.

  He slung one strap of the small pack over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  They tromped across the sparkling meadow, past the obsidian pond and into the trees. Slade gathered his thoughts, searching for an entry point into a nightmare he relived every night.

  “It happened on my last assignment,” he said finally. “It was supposed to be a straightforward investigate-and-take-down-if-necessary job. A researcher from a low-profile government lab died in a diving accident on an island in the Harmonic Sea. Seemed routine, but any time a government lab employee goes missing or dies unexpectedly, the Bureau looks into the situation.”

  “So you went to check out the accidental death and concluded that it was murder?”

  “No, I concluded that there had been no death at all,” he said. “Well, there was a dead guy and he had been murdered while diving but he was not the missing r
esearcher. He had, however, been killed by paranormal means in an attempt to make it look like a heart attack. The missing lab tech’s ID was on the body.”

  “So you investigated further,” Charlotte said.

  “That’s the job. Turned out the lab tech was very much alive and working for a drug lord named Masterson, who had a walled compound, more like a fortress, on one of the other nearby islands.”

  “What on earth would a drug thug want with a government researcher?”

  “You may be surprised to learn that the drug trade is highly competitive,” Slade said.

  “Gee. Who would have thought so?”

  “For obvious reasons a successful drug lord needs to stay one step ahead of the competition. It just so happened that the lab tech’s expertise was in pharmaceuticals. Masterson wanted him to produce a new designer drug for the gray market.”

  “A club drug,” she said. “One that’s not quite illegal because the chemical composition has been tweaked just enough to keep it off the list of banned pharmaceuticals.”

  “Law enforcement is always one step behind the chemists in the drug trade.”

  “So this drug lord abducted the researcher with the goal of forcing him to make a new drug?” she asked.

  “As far as I could tell, there was no strong-arm work involved,” he said. “Masterson used a more traditional business approach. He paid the lab tech a hell of a lot of money up front and offered to cut him in for a share of future profits.”

  “You interrupted the plan, I assume?”

  “I went into the fortress one night with the intention of searching the lab. I was about to crack a mag-steel vault when things got complicated.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “What I didn’t know until then was that Masterson had rounded up a few end-of-the-line alcoholics and junkies to use as subjects in the drug experiments. The poor bastards were locked up in a lower level of the basement. I went down to get them out.”

  “Of course you did,” she said, sounding very certain. “It’s what you do. What happened?”

  “I got the prisoners out of the basement but when I went back in to open the safe, Masterson, the lab tech, and a couple of Masterson’s enforcers were waiting for me. I took down Masterson first. Evidently they had not expected me to be able to do that.”

  “Because of his talent?”

  “He was some kind of hunter. I never did discover the exact nature of his ability.”

  “So, how did you manage to take him out?”

  “The old-fashioned way. Mag-rez pistol.”

  “Oh. Right. That would work.”

  “It does if you’re faster than the other guy. The enforcers fled. With their boss dead there was no reason for them to stick around. But they laid down a lot of covering fire on the way out. One or more of the shots struck a gas canister in the corner of the room. There was an explosion. It killed the renegade lab tech instantly because he was standing so close to the canister. Next thing I knew the whole lab was going up in flames and a lot of dark smoke.”

  “How did you survive the explosion?” she asked.

  “I was in the basement stairwell, using it for cover. The stone walls shielded me from the worst effects of the explosion but not from the gas that was in the canister. There was no way I could avoid inhaling some of it when I made a run for the door.”

  “What kind of gas was it? Some sort of illicit drug?”

  “No one knows what it was,” he said. His hand tightened around the flashlight. “A team went into the ruins of the lab later but they didn’t find anything aside from traces of a few chemicals known to have some psycho-pharmaceutical properties. The assumption is that the gas was a new experimental drug.”

  “What effect did it have on you?”

  “It didn’t do any damage to my lungs but it acted like acid on my senses.”

  Charlotte came to an abrupt halt. “You were psiblinded?”

  He stopped because he didn’t have much choice. “Temporarily. Couldn’t use any of my talent for a couple of weeks.”

  “How awful. But your senses recovered, thank heavens.”

  “Only partially,” he said. “The experts tell me they probably won’t come all the way back.”

  “I don’t understand. You used your talent to determine that Jeremy Gaines was murdered by paranormal means and you can navigate here inside the Preserve.”

  “For now I’m at a Level Seven on the Jones Scale.”

  “That’s very strong. Well above average, certainly.”

  “I used to be a Nine,” he said.

  “I see.”

  She was silent for a moment, taking in the full meaning of what he had just said. She understood, he thought. The loss of two full points on the scale was dramatic. Now she would feel sorry for him. That was the last thing he wanted.

  “Are you sure that the new measurement is accurate?” she asked finally.

  Might as well tell her the rest, he thought. She would continue to feel sorry for him but she would also realize that she had to put some emotional distance between them. The sex had been great but he knew that in spite of her decision to enter a no-strings-attached relationship, deep down she wanted something a lot more intimate and enduring. That meant a lover who was psychically compatible. He could not promise her that kind of bond. He might as well get to the bottom line and get it over with before any real damage was done. Correction, he thought, make that before any more damage was done to either of them.

  “According to the parapsych doctors at the clinic there’s an eighty-five percent chance that I won’t remain a Seven for much longer,” he said. He started walking again. He kept his tone calm and clinical. “They warned me that my aura is unstable in the regions that are linked to the psychic senses. I was told that in all likelihood my condition will continue to deteriorate.”

  She hurried to fall into step beside him. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I have to find a new line of work, among other things,” he said. “Which, as I mentioned, is what I’m trying to do here on Rainshadow.”

  “Please don’t try to brush me off, Slade. I want to know what’s happening to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” She spread her hands wide in a gesture of frustration. “Because of what we just did back there in that meadow, for heaven’s sake. We’re lovers now.”

  Okay, this was where things were going to get dicey, he thought. He realized he wanted the lovemaking to mean something to her, something important. But he also knew that it would be infinitely better for both of them if she stuck with the resonate-with-the-moment approach.

  “Look,” he said, “the truth is, no one knows what’s going to happen to my talent. The experts don’t know if I’ll stabilize at some point or if I’ll lose my para-senses altogether. I was told to plan for the worst-case scenario. Any other questions?”

  “No.” She touched the pendant at her throat and then she shook her head firmly. “But I think the experts misread your aura. Or maybe they couldn’t see far enough along the spectrum. Or maybe they just did not understand what they were viewing. That happens a lot when it comes to analyzing high-end talents, you know.”

  “So now you’re a trained aura-reader?”

  “No,” she said. “But I know what I see in your rainbow. I’ve told you that rainbows are a reflection of the primary ultralight colors in a person’s aura.”

  “Are you saying that you can see something in my aura that none of the experts saw? Thanks, but no thanks. I can’t afford to waste time with that power-of-positive-thinking crap.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she shot back. “Think negative. That way you’re never disappointed.”

  The sharpness of her tone caught him by surprise. She was usually so cheerful, so sunny and warmhearted. Like a dust bunny, he thought. But dust bunnies had teeth. He thought about that night fifteen years ago when Charlotte had tried to fight off a bigger, stronger attacker with only a flashlight.
Underneath all that sweetness and light, Charlotte was a fighter.

  “I’m just trying to be realistic,” he growled, feeling defensive now.

  “What happens when you push your talent to the upper limits?”

  “I was told not to risk it.”

  “Why?”

  “The theory is that the more I use my talent, the harder I push it, the faster it will deteriorate,” he said.

  “I don’t understand. Everyone knows that if a strong talent runs in the red zone for a prolonged period, he or she can certainly exhaust his or her senses temporarily. But it takes only a couple of hours to recover completely.”

  “The folks at the clinic warned me that I probably wouldn’t recover from a serious burn,” he said quietly.

  “But knowing you, you have experimented a bit, right?”

  She knew him too well, he thought. How had that happened? He had never let anyone get close. But somehow she was right next to him, physically and psychically. She had somehow slipped through the invisible barricades he had spent a lifetime building and shoring up.

  “I had to see for myself,” he admitted.

  “And?”

  “Let’s just say that I learned my lesson. I saw my future and there’s nothing good waiting there. All I can do is try to buy as much time as possible.”

  “What, exactly, did you experience when you rezzed your talent to the max after the explosion?”

  They were inside the trees again. The silver meadow disappeared behind them. The thick darkness dropped like a shroud. He jacked his talent up just enough to guide her through the trees and summoned the scenes of his recent nightmares.

  “A storm of energy,” he said. “It was like looking at an advancing hurricane or a tornado.”

  She touched the mirror pendant. “That’s not what I saw reflected in your rainbow earlier tonight when you took me into the night canyon.”

  “I was only partially jacked then.”

  “It was enough for me to see your true colors. I saw them the other night when you kissed me and I saw them again tonight when you made love to me.”

  He studied the tiny mirrored pendant at her throat. Moonlight glinted on it. He was uncomfortable with the knowledge that Charlotte seemed to be able to dig out his secrets. But he knew a few things about her, too. One of the things he knew was that she would not lie to him.