I knew he would do this.
Gray had told Mace that too—she was sure of it, because he didn’t seem surprised at her statement, didn’t try to tell her that wasn’t the case.
The non-rush to reassurance was oddly comforting.
“With Jeffrey … I knew he was bad. I’d known it forever. He scared the hell out of me when he was just in the room, never mind when he was torturing me by cutting up my toys, stealing anything I valued and generally terrorizing me with his stories and drawings. He was mutilating neighborhood animals and no one knew he was doing it, except me. I stopped telling my parents because they didn’t believe me. Didn’t want to. He passed for normal, everywhere but my house. I think maybe my parents were afraid of him, worried what people would think. Worried that no one would believe them.” She paused. “It was easier not to believe me. If they didn’t believe what I said, then none of it was real and they had the perfect family. And then I went out of my way to avoid him. He tried—he knew I could see things when I used my gift, and he tried to make me see inside of him.” She rubbed her covered arms as a sudden chill blasted through her, the way it always did whenever she talked, thought or dreamed about her brother. “The irony was, if I’d just done what he wanted, if I’d laid my hands on him, I would’ve known what he planned. I could’ve stopped everything.”
“And maybe you couldn’t have. He’s a sick guy, Paige.”
She nodded. “Yes, he is.”
“You were a kid. You should’ve been worried about getting invited to the freshman dance, not stopping your brother from opening fire on people in the school cafeteria.”
“Not just people—my friends,” she whispered. “My best friends in the whole world. He made sure, from that day on, that I wouldn’t be able to have any close friends, just like he couldn’t.” He was charismatic, sure, always had a crowd around him. He was popular, well liked. But he’d once told her, in a surprising moment of self-reflection, I’m never going to be able to connect with anyone. I feel dead inside, even when I know I’m supposed to feel happy or sad … or just feel anything.
“Maybe you can talk to someone,” she’d urged. His sneer had come back immediately, coupled with a threat to keep her mouth shut or else. She’d never wanted to find out what the “or else” was, and so she had.
“I didn’t think he was capable of doing what he did to my friends. I thought … if anything, I thought he’d kill me. If I’d put my hands on him, they might’ve had a chance.”
“You feel responsible because of your psychometry?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered quickly, to yank herself away from the memory of that night. Not that it was ever very far from her psyche.
“How does that work, exactly?”
She knew he was asking more for self-preservation than anything else, but that was okay. By not touching him—or anyone—she was in self-preservation mode herself.
“I absorb feelings and images from people. And objects, sometimes, although I’m able to block that more. I always have been, which has been a small blessing,” she explained. “It’s not like this with every person who has my ability. It’s not that cut-and-dried, although some people try to make it like that. Sometimes, the reality is very different from the descriptions in textbooks or articles on the Internet.”
“You’ve dealt with this a lot.”
“I’ve tried to learn about what I have. Wanted to find ways around it, ways to deal with it. Wondered if there were other people out there like me.”
“And there are.”
“Yes.”
She’d met another psychic or two in her life, mostly when she would try to find ways to shut her own gift off or get rid of it. It was only then she realized that she was truly lucky. Some of the people she’d spoken to could never turn it off—they didn’t like to go out in public and they were plagued by other people’s feelings—or spirits—all the time.
She could just wear gloves.
“Still, that must make it tough to touch … everything,” Mace was saying.
“It’s not bad unless the object has a history,” she said. “I can pick up a box of cookies from a grocery store shelf and it’s not a big deal. But if it’s something like a gun used in a crime, maybe.”
Mace seemed relieved at that—but no less than she was. Her ability could be a nightmare—if she were able to pick up feelings from every inanimate object she touched, she was pretty sure she’d go insane.
Technically, insane was what he brother wasn’t. He’d been born without a conscience, the same way she’d been born with her gift. He had been formally diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder by the court-ordered psychiatrist.
But she hadn’t needed the gift to feel the evil inside of Jeffrey. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name.
It’s not your fault no one listened.
She told herself that a lot. It would help if she could truly believe it.
“You picked a tough line of work,” he said. “Although I get it. You wanted to save people because you couldn’t on that day.”
He made it sound so simple—and he was so completely right. “Most days, knowing I can save someone helps a lot.”
Most days, she convinced herself it was enough. It was at night when the doubt reached in, took her by the throat and told her that it would never be enough. She could atone for a lifetime and she wouldn’t make up for the carnage.
Gray—protective, fun, handsome Gray—was so very young to be dead and buried. The ultimate truth was that people close to her died violently—some, like her mother, by their own hands. Staying away from people, preventing intimacy, was something she always did now.
Sure, the touch thing was a big barrier. It was also a wonderful excuse.
“Were you with Gray when he died?” she asked, and watched Mace’s face blanch.
“I lost my best friend, the guy I trusted most in this goddamned world. Don’t try to play me with guilt, all right?”
She’d been doing just that—she would stop at nothing to learn the truth. Whether or not it would alienate the man helping her was something she couldn’t worry about now.
All she knew was that while Mace had healed physically after what happened to him, he was nowhere near healed emotionally.
Murder. Fear. Danger. All of it radiated from him … and from her as well.
He emptied the last box and threw it toward the back door, into the pile of the other empty ones, raked a hand through his hair. “About the thing with Caleb. Look, I want him to remember. Need him to. But when he does, nothing will ever be the same.”
“It never is,” she said quietly.
CHAPTER
5
Caleb brought in a late lunch from a local restaurant, laid out the round foil trays and some plates and utensils.
“Dig in,” he told her. “You must be starving.”
He obviously was and her stomach began to growl from the smells wafting from the food. It looked good and fresh and she made herself a plate and sat at a table near the bar where Cael had parked himself.
She looked around as she ate slowly and watched Mace working behind the bar. He had finished in the storeroom and gone straight to work, not stopping to eat like her and Cael. It felt … normal and comfortable. Safe, despite the fact that Mace was still not letting her in much.
“Gray loved it here,” she said suddenly, without thinking.
Mace turned to her, and at first she didn’t think he’d answer, but then—“Yeah, he did. More than I do,” he said, but there was no rancor in his voice. “The whole team liked coming here, gave them a chance to unwind.”
He spoke in the past tense. If Caleb noticed, he didn’t say anything, just continued eating. She wasn’t even sure if he was really listening, as he had a paperback book—lying open because he’d broken the spine—next to him.
These men were a family, one Gray had belonged to. By extension, they would become her family too. If Mace could accept her …
if he could stop viewing her like a ticking time bomb.
Even though, in so many ways, she was.
“How did you and Gray meet?” she asked.
Mace gave her a look. “Gray never told you?”
“He kept his Delta life pretty close to the vest.”
“Gray … ah, he got into a bit of trouble in boot camp.” There was laughter in Mace’s voice. “Let’s just say that his computer skills definitely improved over the years. But he hacked somewhere he shouldn’t have and he got caught. Got put back into the training class I was helping with at the time. Wasn’t happy at all.”
“What did he do, exactly?” she asked, and was surprised when he told her the story.
“He kind of borrowed a credit card number.”
“How do you borrow a credit card number?”
“He ordered strippers to go to the CO’s house. He rationalized that the man got what he paid for, so no theft.” Cael grinned. “He didn’t know the CO could trace him. But that made Gray more determined than ever to do better the next time.”
That sounded just like Gray. Mace hadn’t stopped stocking the bar as he spoke, the fluid movement of him handling the heavy glass bottles nearly mesmerizing.
He was wasted here. Those hands were capable of so much more. They could save people.
So could yours.
But he was here saving Caleb now, and her, whether she’d let herself admit it or not.
“Gray saved my life once,” Caleb said suddenly, and then stopped cold. Looked at Mace with a question in his eyes.
Mace nodded, questions in his own eyes. “He did, Cael. It was a long time ago, on the firing range. He pulled you out of the way of some backfire set off by a new recruit.”
“And you guys didn’t get along when you first met,” Cael continued. Paige listened with interest and Mace tried to act nonchalant.
“He hated me at first,” Mace agreed. “Told me I was too fucking suspicious of everyone and everything. Said I was an asshole.”
“So what happened?” she asked.
“I told him I thought he was an asshole too. Then we went out and got drunk.”
She waited for the end of the story and realized that she’d gotten one. “And that’s it? Just like that, ‘You’re an asshole, have a beer, we’re friends’?”
“That’s all guys need, Paige. We’re not all that complicated.”
But she didn’t buy that for a second. Mace was way more complicated than she’d anticipated.
“You hated me when you first met me too,” Mace said, without the hint of a smile on his face as he waited for her answer.
“Pretty much,” she agreed.
Both Caleb and Mace snorted at her answer. “No one likes Mace when they first meet him,” Caleb said. “Although that’s never stopped him from hooking up.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
“Thanks for that, Cael.” Mace’s face was deadpan as he watched Paige for her reaction. She tried not to give him one but she wasn’t sure she succeeded as Cael answered, “Anytime, my friend. Anytime.”
Then Cael grabbed his empty plate and the book. “Got some stuff to do.”
With that, he disappeared into the stockroom, leaving Paige to finish eating alone while Mace kept working.
“Did me mentioning Gray bother him?” she asked. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s good for him to talk about Gray,” Mace assured her.
“I gave Gray a hard time at first,” she admitted. She’d rather talk than think about what Caleb had said, because it caused more than a tinge of jealousy, and that was pretty ridiculous.
“I can see that,” he said. “I guess the last thing you wanted at that point was another brother.”
Mace was so right. Her mom and Gray’s dad hadn’t been dating that long—the marriage happened quickly and she’d been told about her new stepbrother over dinner.
She’d refused to meet Gray the first time he came home, right after their parents got married, and her mom hadn’t pushed. But the next time he was on leave, Gray himself had stomped up the stairs to her room and knocked on the door.
“The faster we get this over with, the better,” he’d said with an easy smile and a grace most nineteen-year-olds didn’t have. He’d stuck out his hand and would later tell her that he knew about her hands, from his dad.
Even then, he wasn’t afraid of very much. And after that first tentative handshake, she knew she didn’t have anything to fear from the tall, good-looking man in front of her. He was as open as he’d appeared to be. As brave too.
In the months to come, she would admit to him that she’d known Jeffrey was bad. He’d tell her that she had nothing to feel guilty about, something he would repeat often.
“We didn’t have all that much time to spend together. Gray was already in the Army when our parents married,” she said. “I guess we met him around the same time.”
“Sounds like it. We weren’t in basic together—I enlisted a year ahead of him. Already in the LRS unit. Recon,” he added.
“And so you knew everything about the shooting before you met me, right?”
“Yes.”
“And Gray had already told you that if anything ever happened to him …” She couldn’t finish and he just nodded into the silence.
“Gray was a damned good man,” he said after a few moments.
“You’re a lot like him.”
Mace shook his head. “He was better than me, any day of the week.”
“I’ll bet he would disagree with you on that.”
Mace didn’t answer, stared out the window as if the parking lot held all the answers. “He was really good at listening. Women loved that about him.”
“Was there anyone special?”
“No, not really. He wasn’t ready to settle down. Neither am I, if that’s the next question.”
“It would’ve been. And Cael?”
“Right before all this happened, there was a mission … and a woman.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. Our CO is dealing with her.”
“Don’t you think she could help?”
“Maybe. She could also hurt too. Doc said it’s important for Caleb to remember in his own time,” Mace explained. “As a medical professional, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
She did. It was the reason she’d refused to help him with her hands in the first place and Mace knew that. But still, the thought of the woman who loved him waiting and wondering … well, that tugged at her heart. This whole place did. Mace did.
“Look, Paige, Gray was my best friend. Always there for me. No bullshit. He also didn’t ask a lot of questions.”
His last statement was aimed directly at her. She shrugged it off, knowing Gray could be a bulldog with questions when he wanted to be. “What about Caleb’s brothers?”
“He’s just starting to remember them. I’m the only one he feels comfortable around right now—the only one he really remembers. Me and …”
Gray.
The unspoken name floated in the air between them. Gray’s death hit her like a freight train every time she thought about it. It had to get better someday, but certainly not today. “That must be really hard on them.”
“They’ll live. They know this is the best place for Cael to be now.”
“And when he remembers?”
Mace’s face darkened. “I’ll be here to help him pick up the pieces.”
Power was restored to the town sometime after four o’clock, just in time to get the beers cold for the evening rush—the generator had kept the boiler and the main fridge functioning, but it wasn’t attached to more than the kegs behind the bar. Cael had walked her through the basics for a couple of hours while Mace moved around, ignoring both of them, but even though she was a quick study, Paige was nervous when people started trickling in.
She looked over at Mace, to find him watching her. One glance was enough to ground her. It wasn’t necessarily the friendli
est look, but it smoldered, made her tingle with possibilities despite the anger he barely kept sheathed.
She understood anger. And secrets. Given time, she would understand Mace too; she knew that with an inevitability that should’ve scared her, but didn’t. Not yet anyway.
The bar was more crowded than the night before, if that was possible. Even so, Paige fell into a rhythm quickly—it wasn’t exactly a mixed drinks kind of crowd, mainly beer and shots and with Cael’s help, plus that of a third bartender, Keagen, things were moving along.
It was nice. She didn’t really have to touch anyone—could mingle from behind the bar without the threat of reading anyone.
The music played constantly, but it seemed to grow louder sometime around midnight. She realized she’d been at the bar for only twenty-four hours. It seemed like far longer.
She couldn’t really get a handle on the patrons as individuals—they were crowding the bar, their faces blending. She caught snippets of conversation—men hitting on women, flirtatious laughter, the breaking of bottles—an accident rather than part of a fight—and she began to relax.
She’d missed this growing up. College was never about partying for her—it was about staying in and studying and holding her breath and praying no one made the connection between her and Jeffrey. She’d wasted so much damned time because the past always caught up with her.
She had a feeling that here, none of that would matter.
“Come on, honey.” Keagen, a tall, lanky blond, hauled her onto the bar, where he was dancing, and before she could really protest she got an immediate reading on the smiling man in front of her. Keagen knew nothing of her gift and therefore held nothing back.
He was no saint, but he was relatively honest, and right now that was more than enough for her. She was relieved and they danced and it didn’t matter whether she was any good or not. People applauded—really drunk people—and she was laughing, really laughing for the first time in ages.
In the Air Tonight Page 7