Mind Game (17 page)

“Which is why you fall.”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

“Lily will be so thrilled to hear you talk about this. She was going on about how you do what you do when we were watching the tapes of you in training, but I’m not certain any of us understood a single word she said. She mentioned the gravity field and superconductor. She noticed a wire above you moving as you ran across a cable and that tipped her off.”

Dahlia felt a surge of anticipation, of excitement. “Everything above me is going to be caught in the antigrav field as well. You were too busy looking at me, but there were pens floating in the air as well as my amethyst spheres.”

“Lily will want you to show her how to do it,” he warned.

She shrugged, trying to look casual, but her eyes were bright, giving away her pleasure at the thought of showing Lily. “I have so many theories I’ve developed trying things out. I’d love to discuss them with her. I’ve spent a great deal of time reading the latest discoveries and seeing if my work matched closely with anyone else’s. I’d love a chance to talk with her.”

“She’ll love the chance to talk to you.” He could see how much it meant to her that she and Lily had something in common. “Speaking of which, what were you going to tell me before I distracted you with all the superconductor questions? Or was that you, hopping from one subject to another? I can never keep up.”

She knew he was teasing. His tone was nearly the same, but she felt the little flutter of butterfly wings brushing against her stomach, something that seemed to happen when he was bantering with her. “What I wanted to tell you, before you so
rudely
brought sex into the conversation, is, I don’t know that this is all about me. The killings. Why did they shoot Jesse right there? In the leg that way?”

“They thought he would tell them where you were.”

She shook her head. “If they were Jesse’s people, they’d know I
never
tell Jesse anything. He has no idea where I am at any given time, nor can he contact me. It’s always worked that way. Jesse could tell them the target, but not much else.”

“You’re certain his people know this?”

She nodded. “I’ve done recovery work for them for several years. We’ve always done it the same way—always. His people have to know that he would never know where I was or how to find me. Other than at the target location. They didn’t hit me there, they hit me at home.”

“What are you saying, Dahlia?”

“You thought they were destroying all the evidence of my existence by killing Milly and Bernadette and burning down my home.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Nicolas said. “Lily made inquiries and probably raised a red flag somewhere. If they aren’t legitimate they would have to destroy all evidence, anything that might lead back to them.”

“True,
if
they aren’t legitimate, but Jesse Calhoun is no traitor. He believed in what he was doing. We had quite a bit of contact over the years, and even though I’m not telepathic, I still have a good feel for people through energy. He wasn’t betraying his country. And he was no mercenary either.”

“He might have been duped, Dahlia. I volunteered for the GhostWalker program. The contract was a military one and a colonel was overseeing it. The rot went all the way up the chain to a general. Calhoun could very well believe that his superior officers are telling him the truth. We believed—until people started dying.”

“That doesn’t make it the same situation. In fact, that only adds more doubt. If they were operating outside the government, they would have made sure they kept tabs on the relationship between Jesse and me. They’d know he couldn’t tell them where I was.”

“Do you have another contact for these people? I’m not convinced, but it’s worth investigating.”

Dahlia drew up her knees and rubbed her chin back and forth. “I could find them. I have contact numbers, but I’ve never used them. Jesse is always the contact.”

“Dahlia, how could you be so careless when you were working with these people? You seem like someone who pays attention to details.” Her behavior seemed out of character to him. He didn’t know her that well, but she didn’t seem like a woman who would work for an agency without knowing exactly what she was doing.

“I knew Milly worked for them. She watched over me, and she could contact them if needed. I’ve spent my entire life staying away from people. Separated from them. I didn’t trust them, but it was something to occupy my mind and use my skills, so I did it. And I felt it was important.”

“I think we need to have Lily run a check on both Milly and Bernadette.” He said it carefully, knowing it would bother her. “She’s looking into Calhoun now, and I hope she has something for us.”

Dahlia shook her head, ignoring the reference to Milly and Bernadette. The moment he mentioned their names her chest burned with grief. “I just don’t buy it, Nicolas. Jesse was too squeaky clean. And he’s intelligent. Really, really smart. I think if something was off-kilter, even a little bit, he’d begin to suspect.”

“Maybe he did suspect something and they wanted to get rid of him.”

“Then they would have killed him.”

“Not if they needed him as bait for you to follow,” he said patiently.

“Then why shoot him in the leg so he can’t walk? They had a long way to go to get him out of the bayou. It doesn’t add up.”

“I hate to disillusion you, but some men torture others for the sheer pleasure of it.” Nicolas reached out and tucked the curtain of hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering in the silky strands. Touching her seemed as necessary as breathing. Electricity sizzled in his bloodstream. He forced his mind to think of something else. Something besides petal-soft satin skin and a sexy, intriguing mouth. “Something with teeth. A big cat. Really large, maybe a saber-tooth.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“I’m occupying my mind with things other than sex.”

She glared at him. “We are discussing something
very
important here. You might want to participate and then you won’t be thinking about sex.”

“As long as you’re sitting in front of me, Dahlia, I’m afraid sex is going to be uppermost on my mind. The saber-toothed tiger was to keep all other images out of my head,” he added piously.

She bared her teeth at him. “How’s this for an image?”

He closed his eyes and groaned, vividly picturing her small white teeth nipping over his skin. “That wasn’t nice.”

Dahlia smiled at him, a soft, feminine smile. Sheer poetry. Nicolas was certain she didn’t need many other weapons. “I suppose it wasn’t, but you deserved it.” The smile faded and she rubbed her chin against her knees again. “Follow me on this for a minute. Let’s say Jesse is really working for the government. If we’ve been doing our job, and it was all aboveboard, then there would be no reason for the destruction of my home and family.” She could feel the anger begin to coil inside of her, to wrap itself around the tight knot of sorrow. The emotions were dangerous both to her and to anyone near her if she allowed them to rise out of control.

Nicolas was so tuned to Dahlia he could feel the energy gathering around her, generated by her own intense emotions, no longer sexual, but turbulent. He reached out and circled her ankle with his fingers, making a loose bracelet, but maintaining contact. At once the energy lessened, gave her breathing room.

“I’m sorry, it just happens sometimes.”

“It’s normal to feel grief and rage over the loss of your people and your home, Dahlia. The energy doesn’t invade me the way it does you. I don’t know why it can’t really connect with me. I almost wish it could, especially if it meant I could run across the ceiling.”

Dahlia took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m fine again. Thank you.” It amazed her that just by touching her, Nicolas could ease the burden of the continual assault of energy, even when it was her own.

“So, what you were saying is, it may have been someone else who attacked you. Do you have that kind of enemy, Dahlia?” Nicolas tried to keep the conversation moving. Each time they stuttered to a halt, sensations seemed to overwhelm them both. The awareness was acute and intense and threatened to consume them at every turn.

“I don’t know about enemies. I don’t know people well enough to accumulate enemies, but I do steal things from companies. Mostly things that have to do with submarines and new weapons, things they shouldn’t have in the first place. I only go in at night and slip past the guards and the security system, copy the data, and get out, or, more often, I go in and recover the stolen work so no one else has access to it. I could have been caught on a security camera, although it’s highly unlikely. Or maybe I was traced through Jesse. There very well could be a traitor in the group I’m working for who sells that kind of information to others. There’s big money in new weapons on the open market.”

“You copied or stole back sensitive data and turned it over to Calhoun?”

Dahlia nodded. “In the last three years, that’s just about all I’ve been doing.”

“Dahlia, don’t hedge. What the hell are you talking about?”

“There’s a reason for a high-security clearance, Nicolas. I don’t even know you.”

“You know me. And for the record, you don’t even exist, let alone have a high-security clearance. If you got caught, they would hang you out to dry.”

“Well, of course. That was understood. I’m the poor girl raised in the sanitarium, as batty as they come, seeing conspiracy theories everywhere. They’d put me back in the sanitarium.”

“Only if you were arrested. The kind of thing you’re talking about can get people killed.” Nicolas felt the first stirrings of a black, swirling anger in his gut. She was risking her life, and Jesse Calhoun and whatever agency he worked for knew it. As far as he could see, they did nothing to help her. They simply used her.

“Nicolas.” She swept her hand lightly down his face. A mere brush of her fingertips. Her touch jolted through his body, set his heart pounding, and heated the blood in his veins. “Don’t get upset over my life. I enjoy my work. It’s an outing and a chance for me to utilize the skills I’ve developed. I
wanted
to do it. The thing that’s important to understand about me is, I don’t do anything unless I want to do it. Not anything. Not even when I was a child. I may seem impulsive, but I’m actually not. I think things over and weigh the pros and cons and make a decision. Once I make it, I make the best of it, no matter how it turns out, because it was
my
choice and ultimately, I’m responsible. I like it that way. The rear admiral or whoever he was, couldn’t talk me into anything I didn’t want to do. Neither could Jesse or Milly or even Bernadette. I’m just not like that.”

“They used you, Dahlia.” There was ice-cold rage in his voice.

Dahlia was grateful for the bracelet of fingers around her ankle keeping the shimmering energy already radiating violence away from her. “Is that how you see yourself, Nicolas? A victim? They send you out into a jungle or a desert and you have no backup, no one to help you if you did something so simple as to break a leg. If you were captured or shot, how much help would you have?”

“It isn’t the same thing, Dahlia.”

She tilted her chin at him. A small thing, but the gesture told him a great deal without words. He was tramping on some idiotic feminine code she had, and if he didn’t back down, he was in serious trouble. He held up his free hand. “Don’t attack me—I can’t change who I am any more than you can. Regardless of whether or not we agree on this, it was dangerous. If Calhoun suspected there was something going on that was a threat to national security, he should have pulled the plug.”

“With no proof?”

“So what do you think was going on? You must have looked at the data.”

“I think Jesse was right. I think the three professors given a grant by the defense department came up with an idea for a stealth torpedo that would really work, and someone stole it from them. An investigation was launched, by Jesse’s people, and when they thought they knew who stole the research, they sent me in to recover it.” She watched his face closely as she deliberately mentioned the stealth torpedo.

Nicolas was silent, fear and anger washing through him. The anger deepened into full-blown rage. “They had no right involving you in something like this.”

Dahlia tried to repress the relief flooding through her. If Nicolas was a plant looking for information, she doubted he was a good enough actor to conjure up the violent energy his anger was generating. “Are you going to listen or not?”

“I’m listening, and then I’m going to hunt down the bastards who sent you into a minefield while they sat back risk-free in their comfortable offices.”

She blinked, her gaze riveted to his face. He was made of stone, perfectly expressionless. She couldn’t read him at all, but the energy rolling off of him was not as low level as it usually was. It was furious and purposeful. In spite of his fingers shackling her ankle, the violence struck her hard, taking her breath, pounding at her head, building until she was afraid she would explode.

Dahlia threw herself sideways, away from him, rolling off the bed, breaking the light grip Nicolas had on her ankle. He made a grab for her, but she caught him off guard.

Glass fragmented in the windows, the sound loud in the night. Spiderweb cracks raced across the windows and mirror. The lightbulbs shattered, the pieces exploding like a bomb and raining down in slivers onto the floor. The room itself seemed to shift, the walls flexing, bubbling outward as if something pressed against them, then receding abruptly as if the invisible force could not find an escape. The temperature soared in the room. Nicolas peered over the edge of the bed. He couldn’t see Dahlia’s body, but a red glow burst from the floor, casting her small shadow on the wall briefly before the flickering color died down and winked out.

“Dahlia? Are you hurt?”

She coughed. “No. Are you?”

She sounded hurt, her voice shaky. Nicolas reached down and picked her up, dragging her against him. “Nothing touched me. Are you certain?” Her skin was hot to the touch, searing his fingers and palm.