Heart of Danger (20 page)

So Lee was going to have to goddamn get going or Flynn was cutting off the teat Lee’d been sucking on.

Mount Blue

His eyes widened in surprise. Catherine understood very well Mac wasn’t often caught by surprise. She’d felt his vigilant nature under her hands, but even if she hadn’t, his body language was clear.

He scowled at her. “He didn’t type? He can’t fucking talk at all? He told you how to find me, didn’t he? Or is all that a lie, too?”

She searched his eyes. Deep brown except for those lighter striations of yellow.

She closed her eyes but it didn’t help. His striking face seemed tattooed on the inside of her eyelids. Strong features, weather-beaten skin, a nose that had been broken several times, a firm mouth that never smiled. The scar rippling over the left-hand side of his face that looked as if it were a river of flesh flowing down him. The other scar like a memento in skin of pain.

She saw his features but she saw so much more, not only through the projections of Patient Nine, who loved him like a son, but now through her own fingertips, her own skin speaking to her.

There was violence there, yes. But also such goodness and loyalty. He had the fearlessness of a man unafraid to die. He wasn’t suicidal, by any means, but his head and his heart believed there were many things worse than death. Betrayal, treason, cruelty. They were worse than death for him and he’d die rather than be guilty of them.

He was towering over her, trying to intimidate her, and if she hadn’t been what she was, if she hadn’t felt the core of him under her hands, she would definitely have been terrified. This man emanated danger and violence. He looked like he could snap her in half without breaking a sweat. He looked like he’d enjoy doing it.

But that wasn’t what he was about and she knew it. Knew it deep in her bones, deep in her very cells.

The intense ferocity he was directing at her was the color of fear. Not fear for himself but fear for the people he held dear, the people he clearly led and protected. Bridget’s feelings for this man had been so sharp and intense. He’d saved her from something. There had been bright gratitude, the jewel tones of admiration, threads of affection running through it. Almost love, though nothing like the love that had been in her for Red and for their little girl.

Mac was their leader and he stood for them, was their bulwark against a world that had not been kind to them.

It was fear for his people that had him narrowing his eyes, making his deep voice so rough and dark, had him leaning in so close.

And because she knew him, knew the essence of him, Catherine narrowed her own eyes and snapped, “Back off.”

His eyes flared, a deep frown between his black eyebrows. The frown was almost permanently etched into his face, which meant he frowned a lot.

“What did you say?”

“Back. Off.” Catherine waved him back.

It was bad enough keeping her wits about her when she was exhausted and stressed. With this man right in her face, it was almost impossible.

Not to mention the fact that there was that annoying
tug
toward him. Almost a tropism, like a sunflower to the sun.

Patient Nine’s love for him had rubbed off on her. And now that she’d seen him, been close enough to feel his heat, smell the clean smell of him, touch him . . . she was one step away from the precipice of falling for him herself. Firsthand, not secondhand. Mentally, she windmilled her arms because falling for this man, right now, would be a disaster of epic proportions.

Still . . .

He’s so attractive . . .

The thought wafted through her mind once again, as it had before. Since when was she susceptible to beefcake? Beefcake was definitely not her style. Definitely a brains-over-brawn woman. The few men she’d dated had been the weedy type, made for lab coats hanging off narrow shoulders.

This warrior who looked like something out of the mists of the dawn of time, this man somehow had a hold on her.

. . .
so attractive. . .

Get a grip,
she told herself sternly. And she
did
have a mission.

He’d backed off. But lying in bed meant a huge disadvantage. She stood up facing him, gingerly testing the ground, remembering the moment when everyone’s emotions had overwhelmed her, remembering the moment her knees had weakened. She swallowed as she surreptitiously tried to find her balance.

A large hand steadied her.

God, he towered over her, watching her out of narrowed eyes, dark pupils reflecting a pinpoint of light from the bedside lamp.

He let go of her arm, ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, lady. And you’re not leaving here until I understand what the hell is going on.”

“Let’s sit down,” she murmured. Her legs felt weak but she managed to make her way to the table without betraying any physical weakness. She made it just in time before she would have collapsed.

The weakness was devastating and a whiplash contrast to the powerful strength that coursed through her while touching this man. He infused her with . . . something. Extraordinary. In all her life, no one had ever given
her
something via her curse, her gift. It had all been one way, their emotions crowding into her, swirling inside her, overwhelming her. Never had she received something that could be considered a gift.

It had been incredible, feeling all that steely energy, but now that she wasn’t touching him it was gone, just when she needed it.

They sat, facing each other, like adversaries. Which, of course, they were.

Remember that, Catherine
. However much she liked him—and she liked him against her will—he wasn’t her friend.

She clasped her hands in front of her, to still them.

He mirrored her gesture, but unlike her, it definitely wasn’t to still them. “Okay,” he growled. “This has gone on long enough. I’m grateful—we’re all grateful—for your help with Bridget and . . . the baby.” His mouth quirked, unable to say the baby’s name. Mac. “But that doesn’t change anything. The fact is we’ve got some vulnerable people here, people I want to protect. People you might hurt. I have no idea how dangerous you are to us, and that bothers me. No one should be able to find us here, but you did and I want to know exactly how you did that. And if I don’t hear something that convinces me, please believe me when I say I will blast your mind back to last week. After which I will make damn sure you never find your way to us again.”

“Oh, I believe you,” she said softly. And she did.

He stared at her unblinkingly, then leaned back a little. “I’m listening. And I particularly want to understand how the hell this Patient Nine of yours gave you all that information on me. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t type. What the fuck could he do?”

Something terrible was happening. Catherine needed all her wits about her. She needed to explain something that was inexplicable, outside the bounds of anyone’s experience. She needed to convince this tough man she wasn’t a threat. She needed to convince him to help Patient Nine.

All of this while she couldn’t think straight.

She thought straight for a
living
. Clarity of mind, an ability to focus—that’s what she was about. She was a scientist and her mind was her weapon. Right now it was misfiring badly.

Just seeing him across the table from her messed with her head. Possibly messed with her neurons.

Was there a scientific explanation for this? She’d gone into neurology with a hope of understanding who and what she was, but so far science hadn’t helped her.

One thing she had known up until now as a bedrock fact was that without touching, her connection didn’t work. The instant she lifted her hand, the person she’d been touching turned back into an enigma and she moved straight back into her own skin, totally unable to read the person who a second before had been open to her.

The connection was lost in an instant.

And yet . . .
She still felt him.

She was still attuned to Mac in some unfathomable way. Oh God, was this permanent?
She was still connected!

She looked at him, disconcerted. It was like being in two heads at once, like having double vision, only worse.

She closed her eyes, tried to distance herself. Pictured herself turning her back on him and walking away.

It helped. When she was a tiny dot on the horizon she opened her eyes and felt whole again. Alone again.

“Okay. I need to backtrack a little. Tell you—tell you a little about myself.”

He didn’t answer, merely bent his head.
Go ahead.

“Yes, um.” Catherine licked her lips and he stared at her mouth. She stopped immediately because—God!—a bolt of heat shot through her. Heat and a thick feeling, pooling in her groin.
Desire
. Hers?
His?
Her eyes locked with his. “I need to tell this all my own way.”

He dipped his head again, dark eyes never leaving hers.

O-kay. Time to do this. Catherine had never laid it out for anyone. All there, on the table. Everything she was. The freakishness of it. The weirdness of it. Being completely different from every other person on the planet. Everyone she knew had run shrieking without ever even understanding the whole of it. How could he be an exception?

But—and it always came back to this—this was her mission. A desperate man had pinned all his hopes on her and she had to do this.

Showtime.

“I’m, um . . . I’m different. I’m not like other people.”

“Go on.” His voice was low and steady.

Here goes.
“You know that I can—I can feel people’s emotions when I touch them,” she said carefully.

“I got something of that yesterday.” He was watching her cautiously.

She bit her lips and nodded. It was impossible to read his face except that he did not look happy.

“It’s—it’s sort of a gift. But it feels like a curse most of the time and it comes and it goes. I was twelve before I realized that this didn’t happen to everyone. Luckily I had very cold parents who hardly ever touched me. So it wasn’t until adolescence that I discovered what I could do.
Really
discover it, I mean.” Her parents had loathed each other, and every time as a little girl Catherine touched either her mother or father all she got was an arctic blast of hatred. Instinctively, as kids do, she avoided the source of discomfort.

“After several instances of people looking differently at me when I said something I shouldn’t have known, I finally got it that what was normal knowledge for me wasn’t for other people.”

Looking differently at me.
The words sounded so normal, everyday fare. Everyone got askance looks, didn’t they?

Catherine had had iced drinks thrown in her face, like in that ancient TV show
Glee,
only less fun. Her first car had been a ten-year-old Economo she’d bought her senior year with money working in a supermarket weekends and one afternoon she’d come out from school to find the tires slashed.

Kids avoided her in the hallways. Nobody wanted the locker next to hers.

In high school more or less everyone’s emotions were raw and scorching just under the surface. The most popular girl in the school—at home, her father was abusing her. Surrounding her was a bright mirror-like surface of happiness and beneath was darkness shot through with a burning desire to die. The linebacker who couldn’t see a female without wanting to fuck her, a dark and painful compulsion. The science nerd who hated everyone with a viciousness that shocked her. It had all been too much. The only solution—don’t talk to anyone, and above all, whatever you do, don’t touch anyone.

High school had been her own solitary private hell.

“What do you know? What do you pick up on?” The questions sounded reluctant, as if asking them meant he bought into the whole thing, was diving into the madness headfirst. “What kind of intel—info—do you get?”

She thought carefully. “I can’t read minds, if that’s what you think.” Until Patient Nine at least. “It’s not like a radio station that broadcasts the thoughts in your head as if they were the evening news.” He relaxed slightly. He was hiding something. That was cool. Everyone had secrets. God knew she had her own. “I don’t know what’s on your grocery list or what’s in your bank account or who you’re meeting for a date. I don’t know specifics. But . . . I’d know if you were worried or happy or sad.” Or suicidal or homicidal or schizophrenic. She suppressed a shudder.

He sat still, processing this. She let him work his way through it because it was a lot to swallow. Blinking as if just coming out of a cave into the sunlight, he leaned forward a little. “Let’s fast-forward to Patient Nine.”

“Okay. You believe me then?” She looked at him hopefully.

“Let’s say I’m suspending disbelief.” He drummed long fingers on the table. She stared at his hand, so big and powerful. The skin was rough, not a pampered manicured hand at all. A long white scar covered the back, flanked by tiny white lines, like a ladder. A wound, stitched up. “It’s a lot to take in.”

She nodded. It was.

“So . . . Patient Nine. At Millon Laboratories.” His face was impassive. No expression at all, except grimness and intense focus. “How long have you worked there?”

A sudden bust of impatience seized her. “
Come on!
Stop that! I saw the computing power you’ve got here, Mac. Don’t forget that. A clever man—and you all strike me as clever men—can find out just about anything with that kind of crunching power. You probably already know my grade point average in high school, the classes I took in college, you most certainly know how long I’ve been working at Millon.”

She didn’t even try to keep the sharpness out of her voice. What the hell. She was baring her soul here and he was playing games with her.

He wasn’t taken aback by her outburst. He just dipped his head.
Point taken.
“So let’s cut to the chase. Tell me what you do there. Your duties.”

“Running a dementia project. I told you.”