“Everybody’s cooking,” he said. “Are you doing okay?”
I studied his face, his expression open and concerned. I could still feel where the stubble on his jaw had rubbed against my neck, and a twinge of desire echoed between my legs. I wanted him again. Over and over again.
“Not really.”
I watched his lips move as he said, “All those years when you wanted a Talent…it wasn’t like this, was it?”
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” As if the floodgates opened, I began to sob, awful wrenching sounds that seemed to come from some other person. Not again.
In moments he was beside me and I was in his arms, weeping—and not the romantic kind, but the sweaty, heaving, gasping kind. I burrowed my face into his neck, smelling his sweat and sex, still on us both.
“I don’t want a Talent,” I babbled into his skin.
“Ah, but you did, didn’t you? All those years of claiming you wanted a nice calm life and a white picket fence. What you wanted was a huge Talent, a Talent for making, a Talent for healing.” His voice was kind, and he patted my hair as he spoke.
“Not a Talent for burning, for destroying, for setting the world on fire.” My tears dried up, leaving me damp, cold and empty.
“Oh, baby.” He rocked me, back and forth. “Fire is light, and warmth, and survival. Control it, and you’ll be a miracle bringer.”
I buried my face again, breathing him in, comforting myself with his scent. With a final hiccup, I sat back, scrubbing at my face with my sleeve.
“Better?”
I nodded, gulping. “There’s no going back.”
“That’s right. But somewhere, a door is opening…” He smiled at me, and it lit up his whole face from within. “Come on, darlin’. Talents need fuel. Let’s get some gruel into you.”
I laughed despite myself, and followed him into the kitchen.
Crying had unlocked something in me, and I found myself chatting away at dinner, in between stuffing my face, suddenly starving.
I sat next to Jamie, which was part of the reason for the warm sense of belonging I felt. He ate one handed, and the other squeezed my thigh under the table. To begin with it lent comfort and moral support. After we ate and talked with the others for a while, he started kneading my inner thigh gently, sending reminders of earlier in the day through my mind and lower body.
“I’ve never asked,” Miller said, “but how did you end up at the Institute? Eric, Catrina?”
Eric’s hand tightened on his fork, and Justine, who had been quiet this whole time, put hers on his arm.
“Mom died,” he said. “God knows what Dad was doing.”
I bit my tongue, because I wanted to hear his version of the story, despite the urge to defend my dad—the only family I’d known for most of my life.
“They split up when Catrina was born. Mom had been working at the Institute as a remote viewer. She got sick when I was eight. Catrina was only little.”
“I don’t remember her at all,” I said. It had haunted me for years, especially after Dad died, too.
“They had a school at the Institute, for Talented kids, kids without families. They took us in, raised us, gave us everything, trained us.” His eyes got a faraway look. “I loved it there. The program brought out the best in me.”
“What about you, Cat?” Miller said. “Obviously you left a bit earlier than your brother.”
I took over the tale. “One night, when I was eleven and Eric was thirteen, a man came into my room. He climbed in the window. It was our dad. He’d come for us. I left with him.”
Eric’s face showed the flicker of a sneer. “I didn’t. Why would I? He left us behind. He didn’t care about us.”
“Dad didn’t know Mom had died, but as soon as he found out, he came to get us.”
“Oh yeah? Where was he, all those years?”
“He was in the services, fighting in the Middle East. He didn’t leave us deliberately. Mom didn’t like him being in the military. She moved while he was posted overseas and never told him where we were.”
“How do you know that’s true?”
I shrugged, helplessly. “That’s what he told me, like Mom told you what she told you.”
“The truth is probably somewhere in between,” Jamie said, from the sidelines.
My tale continued. “He was in the military for years, in Special Ops. When he got out, he heard from a friend that Mom had died. It took him some time to track us down, and when he did, he didn’t like what he found out.”
“We were in a good place. She made sure we were looked after.”
I could not stop the involuntary shudder that rolled over me.
“What, Catrina?” Miller said.
“It wasn’t a good place for me.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Nothing much.” I kept my voice deliberately neutral. Kids’ memories were often distorted. It was a long time ago. “They tested me a lot. I never fit in with the other kids, because I didn’t have a Talent. I was happier when Dad came and got me.”
“I know nothing about your life after that,” Eric said.
Words came spilling out, the things I’d never discussed with anyone all these years. “The Institute was my legal guardian, and I was kidnapped by my own father. We spent my entire childhood on the run. I still don’t even know my own social security number. We never stayed in one place for long. Dad took whatever jobs he could—farm work, tending bar, working on the road—and schooled me himself.
“Dad was convinced that the Institute was evil, and that they were coming after us. He taught me how to run, how to hide in plain sight. How to live undocumented. How to hunt, and fish, and shoot, and fight. How to shoot every kind of gun he could lay his hands on. How to make IEDs—improvised explosive devices. How to kill a man in his sleep without flinching.”
The room went very quiet, and everyone stared at me.
Chapter Twenty-One
I turned my head to assess Jamie’s reaction. Amazingly, he was grinning from ear to ear, his eyes shining.
“I never knew you were such a troublemaker,” he said. It was not the reaction I had expected. I should have known he’d be delighted that I, too, knew how to walk on the wrong side of the law. Perhaps one day he’d understand that was exactly why I wanted nothing to do with any of it.
I continued, “When I was seventeen, Dad started coughing. He’d never been a smoker, but God knows what he was exposed to in the Middle East, or at any one of the shitty jobs he worked at all those years. He faded away before my eyes.”
“You were seventeen?” Darla said. “Imagine that, Tiffany, being all on your own at seventeen.” The girl did not respond with more than an eye roll.
“What did you do then?” Eric asked.
I shrugged. “The same as before. After a while, without Dad there to talk about the evils of government and the Institute, I started to think about settling down. They’d never come after us. Why would they? I had nothing they wanted. When I was eighteen, I got my GED. I discovered it’s not easy to make a life for yourself when you’ve always been undocumented. I’m like an illegal immigrant. I don’t have a birth certificate.”
“They must have it at the Institute, somewhere.”
I didn’t want to think about some piece of myself still inside that place. “Probably. Anyway, I started feeling a little safer. I stopped having nightmares every night about the Institute coming after me. What could they do to me, now I was an adult, after all? And then one night I came home and they had been there…I went with Jamie, and the rest is history.”
The temperature had plummeted in here while I talked. I folded my arms around myself, shivering.
“Why didn’t your dad trust the government?” Jamie asked.
“He fought in wars that he believed were about politics and not morality. Dad was a black and white kind of guy. He spent his life killing people for a cause he didn’t believe in, and he couldn’t stand his own hypocrisy. Af
ter that he hated the government, the military, and most of all, himself.”
“Sounds like a hard upbringing.”
I shook my head. “He was a good parent. Paranoid, yes, but I never wanted for anything: food, a roof over my head, someone to look after me.”
The room fell silent for a minute.
“We all know why I left the Institute,” Eric said. “And why Justine came with me.” She slid her chair in closer to him. “What about you, Jamie? How did you get involved with my sister?”
Jamie explained about the Order. Noticeably, he left out any mention of his background and his arrest record. He also didn’t say anything about how we arrived here, or our experiences in Vegas. I didn’t either.
Eric said, “All right. You say you came to help me. How would that work?
Jamie nodded. It was a question he’d been expecting. “For all we are seen as a commune full of rich hippies, various police departments have sent us their problem Talents. Think of us as a diversion program.” Like Jamie himself. The program worked, on some level.
“How exactly does that work for murderers?” Eric’s voice was cold, clipped. His words sliced into my heart.
Jamie continued, calmly, “For other people with law enforcement issues, they have either not been charged, or been sentenced to house arrest at the Order’s headquarters in Maryland. It’s not unlike a home for the criminally insane.”
That hadn’t been how he’d pitched it to me. I wondered which of the old people playing cards were there under house arrest.
“I see.” Eric rocked back on his chair. “The thing is, I need to get this under control before I can go anywhere. I can’t risk burning anyone else to death. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” Jamie said, his tone matching Eric’s, cold and businesslike. “The training will continue.”
“For Eric, and for Cat as well, now, I think,” Miller offered.
I laughed, nervously. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Jamie said.
The warmth that had been building inside me as Jamie massaged my leg was gone, and now I was cold, cold as a February night.
“See you in the morning then, both of you,” Miller said. “Catrina, Jamie, you can take another cabin. Try to take better care of this one.”
I didn’t appreciate the joke. We filed out of the Quonset hut into the darkness, and I randomly made for a dark cabin.
Inside, this one was a little nicer—or at least more to my taste—than the one I had destroyed. No cow skin rug adorned the floor, and crocheted pillows and needlepoint decorated the room.
Jamie closed the door behind me. I turned to him, saying nothing, watching. He moved toward me, graceful, his swinging stride eating up the floor between us, until he arrived in front of me and took my face in his hands.
“Catrina,” he said, “you look spooked.”
“I don’t know what to think or how to feel about myself after today. I don’t know what you must think of me. I don’t know where we go from here.”
He kissed me softly, and took me in his arms. “One day at a time, like the rest of life. We take it one day at a time.”
His hands gentled me as if I was a fractious animal, stroking me down. I trembled at his touch.
He swung me up into his arms and carried me through to the bedroom, where he undressed me down to my undershirt and panties, not urgent like he had been earlier, but tender and slow. Placing one hand behind my head, he laid me back on the pillow, and then stood and shucked his own clothes. Once naked, he crawled in beside me and turned off the light. He wrapped me in his warmth, cradling me with his body.
I turned my face to him and kissed him hungrily in the dark. His mouth was hot, and he tasted good. We lay there kissing, like teenagers, not the lovers we had been, for several minutes. Each touch of his lips against mine made me feel better, wanted, needed. At last I broke away and rested my head against his shoulder for a moment, and the next thing I knew, it was dawn.
I put my face against the skin of his shoulder, inhaling him, tasting him against my lips. He was a little salty, the remnants of yesterday’s sweat, or perhaps my tears. I realized I should have showered before bed, but it had been the last thing on my mind.
I rolled out of the bed quietly, headed for the bathroom. After taking off my T-shirt and panties, I washed them in the bathroom sink and hung them over the radiator in the main room. Hopefully they would dry before training began this morning. I didn’t relish the prospect of running through the woods in damp underpants.
Back in the bathroom, I climbed into the shower, which was over a sixties-style pink bathtub. Hotel sample sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner lined the soap dish. Grateful, I turned the water up as hot as I could stand it, and buried my hair in suds.
I had aches in all kinds of odd places, some from the training, and some from yesterday’s adventures with Jamie. My thighs were stiff. It had been a while since I’d been with a man, having sworn off them after the last bad boy and I went our separate ways when he turned out to have a girl on the side—and that girl was me.
As I rinsed my hair the door creaked and my eyes flicked open to see Jamie entering the bathroom. He slid back the screen and stepped into the shower with me. For the first time, I got a good look at him naked in the warm bathroom light.
I raised the soap to his chest and drew a sloppy circle of suds in the dusting of dark hairs across its center. “Good morning,” I said. “You look like you need a wash.”
He smiled at me, his eyes hungry. “Maybe you can help?”
“Maybe I can.” I began to soap him, pausing over his left nipple to look again at that tattoo. “What language is this in?”
“Gaelic,” he said, and then the words rolled off his tongue, like the lilt of a sunlit brook.
“What does it mean?”
“‘In heaven half an hour before the Devil knows I’m dead’.” He smiled down at me.
I laughed, and traced the words with my fingers. “Why Gaelic?”
“I don’t know much about my parents, but I do know they were Irish.” He shrugged. “When you have almost nothing, you cling to what you have.”
I continued soaping my way down his chest, and followed the lightning bolt down the center of his flat stomach, to where the dark hair between his legs began, then skidded back up. “Turn around,” I said, “I’m sure your back is dirty too.”
He complied, and I caught my breath at the grace in this big man, and then at the broad span of his shoulders. There was another tattoo, here, on his right shoulder blade, and again I outlined it in the soap. This one showed the outline of a primitive-style horse.
“It’s the Uffington White Horse,” he said preemptively. “It’s carved in a hilltop in England, hundreds of feet high. No one knows how it got there, who made it, or why. Like me.”
I traced this one too, wiping away suds. “I like it,” I said. “You know, when I first saw you, I thought you’d have a Celtic knot tattoo, like everybody else.”
“Like all the other bad boys you’ve ever known? I’m not like them,” he said.
“And how do you know that?” I said, teasing him with my voice, and my fingers sliding down his spine.
“Trust me,” he said, “I am nothing like them.”
My hands caressed the curve of his buttocks and down to his muscular thighs. He didn’t need the tattoos. His body was a work of art.
He turned back around, caught me by surprise as I found myself looking now at his erection, beaded with water from the shower.
“Your turn,” he said, taking the soap from me. He drew circles around each breast, then ran the flat of his hands across my stomach, dipping down below my belly button for a moment, then up again. My nipples hardened, tightening something between my legs. I wasn’t just wet from the shower now.
“Let me wash your back,” he said, and I nodded, submissively, turning my back to him. His hands began at the ba
se of my neck, and I arched my spine, stretching myself under his fingers as he stroked his way down, down over my lower back, over my buttocks.
I put my hands on the wall to steady myself, and his came around in front of me, cradling my breasts as he pressed his body against me from behind.
The hard length of him nudged at me. He reached between my legs from the front, stroking, rubbing, making me gasp.
“Hey,” I managed to say, “last time we did this, the building burned down.”
“I’m willing to take the risk. You’re worth it,” he breathed in my ear, thrusting himself against me.
I arched again, as much as I could, lifting my butt and spreading my legs to allow him better access.
He rocked his pelvis back and forth against me, sliding himself between my thighs, against the hot spot between them. I let out a moan, involuntarily, and pushed back against him harder.
“One second,” he whispered in my ear. “Just one.”
My back was instantly cold while he stepped away, and then he was back against me, this time reaching around to the front with both hands, one to angle himself, and the other to stroke me.
I cried out as he pushed himself slowly, surely, into that slick heat, and we began to rock back and forth under the hot water, his hips thrusting at my buttocks, his fingers busy playing with me at the front.
He lifted his other hand to steady himself against the wall, and breathed hard in my ear, biting it, then letting go to cry, “Cat, Cat, Catrina, Catrina,” as he rocked himself deeper and deeper inside me.
I pushed back against him, imprisoned against the wall by his body, impaled upon him and loving every minute of it. He moved deep inside me. I felt wanton, open, taken.
My climax began to tremble through me, waves of warmth beating an overwhelming rhythm out from the place between my legs over my whole body. My legs shook and I cried out, “Oh God, Jamie, oh God,” as he thrust one last, deepest time, inside me.
He whispered in my ear again, “Catrina, Catrina, my Catrina,” as he shuddered his climax inside me, holding me against him, emptying himself into me.
Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) Page 16