The Color of Courage (9 page)

I nodded. He waited. When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Can I come in and see for myself?”

Ambivalent, I shrugged, then turned and walked to the sofa. Despite the heat, I drew a chenille throw around my shoulders and gazed out the window instead of at Evan, who sat next to me.

Don’t mention Adam
. He wouldn’t be a very good distraction if he talked about yesterday. He didn’t. I could feel him watching me, but he didn’t say a word. I slowly relaxed against the cushion, though my updrawn knees and tightly wrapped blanket probably sent a pretty good hands-off message.

“It was my father.”

The words were incongruous enough to make me turn my head to look at him.

“Who was?”

“The person who died.”

After several beats, I understood. “The grief I saw last Sunday.”

“Yeah. He died a few weeks ago.”

I rested the side of my head against my knees. I hadn’t slept the night before, and holding it up took too much effort. “I’m so sorry. But you don’t have to tell me. You were right. I violated your privacy.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

He drew one ankle up to rest on the opposite knee and spread his arm across the back of the sofa. His fingers were right next to my shoulder. I wanted to shrug my way under his hand, but kept still.

“You’re right that seeing what you can see isn’t very different from what a private investigator does.”

“Ah. I get it.”

His eyes crinkled, though he didn’t smile. “You do?”

“You’re an investigator and you violate privacy all the time.”

He shrugged. “You could look at it that way. But I’m not changing my viewpoint about you because I’m a culprit. I’m changing it because you were right. Your justification for delving into someone’s feelings is the same as my justification for delving into their information. Both are private, but privacy can sometimes be trumped by bigger things.”

“Thank you.” I studied him. “Were you close to your father?”

Sorrow and regret rippled over him. “My whole life, until a couple of years ago.”

“What happened?” I realized that was just as prying as seeing his feelings, so I quickly added, “If you want to talk about it.”

“There was a . . . situation that caused a rift in the family. My mother and sister ended up on one side, my father and I on the other. It changed our relationship.” The grief he’d been keeping so tightly controlled swelled out of him, then diminished again. He’d been dealing with it. It swirled with colors instead of being a heavy, dark mass, and didn’t overwhelm him when he let it out. Big improvement in only a few days.

“Dad died suddenly. My mother was a mess, because she’d always assumed they’d get over the . . . situation, and now they couldn’t.”

“There’s always something that prevents closure when someone’s in an accident,” I murmured. “But that’s got to be harder. The bigger the issue that was unresolved, the more pain there is.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t in an accident.” Now he was angry, though he didn’t show it. “He was murdered.”

I gasped despite myself. I lifted my head, then gasped again when I realized what that might mean. “You don’t think HQ had something to do with that! That’s not why you’re here!”

Evan chuckled. “No. That’s pretty far from why I’m here.” He shifted on the cushion, coming closer so he could reach my hair. He wrapped some strands around his fingers, and the tug on my scalp felt wonderful.

“I meant here in DC.” The words came out almost slurred, and my eyelids started to close as he drew his fingers repeatedly through my hair. I frowned. He’d distracted me enough from my own unmanageable blend of emotions that I’d relaxed. Sleep was trying to take advantage of that while it could.

Evan’s hand shifted to the back of my neck and gently massaged. My eyes closed the rest of the way, and a sound of contentment vibrated in my throat.

“That’s what I meant, too.” He coaxed me toward him until I rested against his chest. He was warm and solid and smelled like sun-dried laundry and Ivory soap. I didn’t know if he said anything else, because I fell completely asleep.

I didn’t think I slept that long. The sun was still high when I woke, my position unchanged. Evan had stretched his legs out in front of him. His left arm was still around my shoulders, but his right lay at rest by his side, and I could sense by his breathing that he, too, had fallen asleep. I didn’t want to wake him. Also, I was still very comfortable. I let my eyelids close again but relaxation had disappeared.

His chest, as I’d noticed before, was rock solid under my cheek. I wanted to test the rest of him for firmness and had to tighten my fingers on the blanket still wrapped around me. Ian had been fit, but not muscled, so his flat stomach wasn’t the six-pack I imagined Evan to have. The sun angled in the front windows now, and with my air conditioning on its lowest setting, Evan had to be hot. He’d taste salty when I put my mouth on his neck. But he’d smell even better than he had before I fell asleep. I slitted my eyelids. His lower body was right in my line of vision. His jeans sat low, and his T-shirt had bunched up, probably because he’d slid down to rest his head on the back of the couch. A strip of bare, tanned skin showed in between, exactly one fingertip wide. I mentally traced it, imagined sliding my hand below the waistband.

“You should tame those thoughts,” Evan’s voice rumbled under my ear. I barely managed not to jump. “Or they might turn into invitation.”

I tilted my head back to find his light green eyes, so different from Adam’s dark blue, glittering at me. “You reading minds now?”

“Darlin’, the tension in this room became so thick in the last five minutes, if Trace walked in that door he’d back right out again.” I didn’t move except to lick my lips. When his gaze shifted to my mouth, my breath caught. Anticipation gripped me. He didn’t move, but his muscles had tightened anywhere our bodies touched. Desire surged, then moisture, then the ache of need. And he hadn’t done a damned thing.

“What do you want from me?” It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. I wanted him to kiss me, not be reminded of his conflicts and goals. His eyes narrowed. His right shoulder came off the cushion and he turned toward me so his head was now above mine, which he still cradled in the crook of his arm.

“A helluva lot more than you’re probably willing to give,” he murmured before he lowered his head.

My body sighed an “oohhhhhh, yeaahhhh.” His mouth was that perfect combination of firmness and satin, and fit mine just right. There was no slobber in his kiss, just want. I pressed upward and his mouth opened, his tongue touching mine without invading. I moaned. Evan lifted his free hand and slid his fingers under my head. He broke the kiss and took a deep breath with his lips still touching me.

“Stop me now, Daley.”

I couldn’t. He felt too good. Tasted and smelled too good. He surrounded me, made me focus so completely on him that I couldn’t think about anything else. I closed the gap between us and pushed the kiss deeper, sucking his tongue into my mouth and stroking. His hand left my head and slid down my back, urging me closer and smoothing the blanket away at the same time. He gripped my hip, then let his fingers slip up under my shirt to stroke my waist. My skin tingled, and sensation burned a path from his fingers deep into my womb. At that moment, I was willing to take him all the way.

Then he stopped again. He rested his forehead on mine, his breathing heavy and his body still tight against me.

“I mean it, Daley. I want you. But if this is rebound from Ian, or escape from what’s going on at HQ . . .”

The spell broke. I relaxed away from him, and as parts of us stopped touching, I felt dazed and blurry.

“What’s going on at HQ?”

Evan frowned at me. Then he straightened, his expression smoothing into neutrality, and I was reminded that I had no idea what he was doing here. My sensual haze disappeared.

“What’s going on at HQ?” I repeated, standing.

Evan remained seated, his shoulders slumped. He didn’t look at me. After a moment, he shook his head and stood, moving quickly away. “I’ve got to go.”

“Evan!” I followed him to the door, my chenille throw still clutched in one hand. “What’s going on? Why are you here?”

He looked back over his shoulder at me. His emotions were strange, blinking in and out between nothing and anger, regret, grief . . . and the combination of desire and suspicion I’d seen that first day.

“I have to talk to Adam,” he said. “I’m sorry, Daley. I told you, you wouldn’t be willing to give.”

I stared as he went out and closed the door, dumbfounded by his comment. He’d never told me what he wanted from me, so how did he know I wasn’t willing to give it?

And what the hell did he mean, what’s going on at HQ?

Chapter 9

The next day, I hovered in the hall of Adam’s hospital room, clutching a bouquet of yellow roses and Peruvian lilies. Adam wasn’t a flowers kind of guy, but it had seemed necessary to take them.

He was alone, surprisingly, his eyes closed. I didn’t think he was sleeping, but he was calm. Back to normal. His dark hair was a mess and looked like it might still have concrete dust in it. He had a splint on his right arm and a cast on his left lower leg, but Trace had said the doctors reported no internal injuries. Which was good, because we’d realized that surgery would have been impossible.

“It’s about time you showed up.”

His voice was gravelly. I stepped into the room as he opened his eyes. They looked bright blue against his pale skin.

“I’m sorry.” I hurried to set the flowers on the windowsill and help him with his pillows so he could sit up more. “They wouldn’t let me in when you first got here, and yesterday . . .” Yesterday. My cowardice and my transgression with Evan threatened to reveal themselves. I had to work hard to push them out of my mind.

“Trace said you were overwhelmed.”

I dragged a chair over and sat next to the bed, where I could reach Adam’s hand. “You could say that.”

“You get your case resolved?”

I frowned. “Case?”

“Crystal.”

“Oh!” Leave it to Adam to remember and care about someone else’s petty activities. “Yeah, it was done when she called.”

“I heard Evan laying into you about ethics.”

“It’s probably something we could debate for hours. Or years.” I tried to smile, but that ability hadn’t really come back to me yet.

Adam’s fingers tightened reassuringly around my hand. “Someone could find ethical breaches in everything we can do. You use your power for good, Daley, so don’t worry about what Evan says.”

“Oh, Adam.” I lifted his hand and rested my cheek on it. “You just came a few breaths from dying, and you’re worrying about my little problems.” I straightened. “I talked to Evan. We’re cool.” My brow furrowed. “Kind of. What’s he doing here?”

Adam rolled his head on the pillow. “Don’t know. I haven’t talked to him yet. He asked if he could meet me tomorrow.”

I hated the delay. “He said something about ‘what’s going on at HQ.’ What was he talking about?”

He blew out a breath. “No idea.”

“There isn’t a power play between you and Trace or anything, is there?”

“Seriously?” He laughed, and my heart gave a little bounce. He didn’t do that often, and when he did . . . oy. He was gorgeous.

I smiled back at him. It wasn’t so difficult this time. “Okay, no. But there’s nothing with Summer or Kirby?” Or me. But I couldn’t ask that. He wouldn’t answer, if there was.

“No. Everything that’s going on, you know about.”

I didn’t believe him. That felt very strange. I didn’t think he’d ever lied to me, and he wasn’t lying now. But something was going on, something maybe he didn’t even know about.

His eyes darkened a little as he looked at me. “So Evan’s accusation isn’t bothering you.”

“No.” I really had much bigger issues than his questions about my ethics. “Did Trace tell you what I said about someone—”

“Targeting us. He mentioned it. I had similar thoughts.”

Stupidly, relief trickled through me. Adam believing it should have made it more real, and therefore more frightening. Instead, it made me feel less alone, and closer to him, and suddenly staying away for two days seemed exceedingly foolish.

“We’ll talk about that stuff at the meeting,” he said. “If whoever it is will go to that much trouble to publicly attack us, they’re not likely to try to do something to us individually.”

I suspected he was just trying to make me feel better, as there was plenty of fault to that logic. But I doubted we could do anything now, so I just nodded.

“You’re tearing yourself up over something else,” he noted.

“A few things.” I’d always thought my hatred of people going blank was because I didn’t know how they felt about me, and maybe there was some of that. But now I knew it was more. I was afraid of losing my ability, or even of being imperfect with it. Losing empathy meant losing HQ. And it wasn’t a baseless concern. Evan’s blinking in and out might not have been because of him, but because of me.

“When that corner fell,” I said, “I lost sight of you. Empathically. I thought you were dead. I was convinced you were, but I couldn’t make myself tell the others.” Two kinds of terror frissoned through me, and everything started tumbling out. “What if I had told them? What if we’d given up on you? I can’t rely on an ability that fails like that. And I’m not sure why it did. If—”

“Daley.” Adam let go of my hand and stroked my hair. “It wasn’t you. It was me.”

Ian popped into my head, the way he looked when he broke up with me. I couldn’t help laughing at the incongruity. I cut it off fast, appalled. But Adam smiled at me, and it seemed to come much more easily to him than my own had. It soothed, even as he went blank. I understood, then, just before he explained it.

“I found the woman and was carrying her toward the front when the wall collapsed.” He hesitated. “No one has said . . .”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry. The last two people were killed in the second collapse. They’ve found six additional dead so far.” I assumed no one had told him because he already took too much personal responsibility. He couldn’t have prevented what happened.

He nodded, his aura turning blue-gray, sad. “I was afraid of that.”

My heart ached. “You were amazing, trying to save her. Just because I wanted you to. I didn’t want that, Adam, I didn’t want you to die saving someone else.”

“It’s a risk we all take,” he dismissed. “But, Daley, when the corner came down, and I knew I was going be crushed, I thought about you.”

I’d known that, even if I hadn’t wanted to admit it.

“So your aura disappeared because all your focus . . . shifted to me?” It sounded arrogant out loud.

But Adam nodded. His hand found mine again, and he wound our fingers together. “I was still thinking about you,
feeling
about you, when I lost consciousness.”

“So there was no remnant for me to detect.” I felt immensely better, but now had a fluttering in my abdomen I’d never associated with Adam before the last few days.

“Right.”

He watched me for a minute as I waited for him to elaborate on what those feelings had been. Questions filled my head. But it didn’t feel right to ask any of them. I wanted Adam to take the lead.

And suddenly, I was furious with myself. I was doing it again. Holding back. Not trusting. Not taking a risk that could lead to something amazing. I’d done it with Ian, who wouldn’t have found it so easy to give in to attraction to someone else if I’d given more of myself to him.

But . . . what should I say? It had barely been days since I started seeing Adam as anything more than a mentor and friend. So what if he’d been thinking of me when the rubble came down? That didn’t mean I was anything special. Maybe he was just afraid I’d blame myself and he was worried about me, as he would worry about any of us. There wasn’t a guy who cared more deeply about the people around him than Adam. What if I said something stupid and ruined everything? How could I stay at HQ if we couldn’t work together?

No, I had to wait, had to let him speak first. The air charged, and I held my breath.

And Trace, Kirby, and Summer walked in. The tension dissipated immediately, and I watched Adam’s blankness fill with pleasure, pride, relief, protectiveness . . . all the usual things I no longer registered in him when we were all together, I had become so used to seeing them.

“You’re looking good, man.” Trace swung his arm out, then into a wrist-clasping handshake with Adam. “Much better than when we pulled you out.”

“Thanks. And thanks for doing that, by the way. Not sure I remembered to say that yesterday.”

“You’d have done it for us,” Summer said.

Kirby and Trace nodded. Summer saw Adam holding my hand and raised one eyebrow at me. I shrugged. Adam didn’t let go.

“How are you feeling?” Kirby asked, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t, all wrapped up in myself.

“Well enough to go home. I think the doc plans to discharge me this morning.” He shifted and released my hand to hold up his splinted arm. “I may need a little help with things for a while, though. Rachel’s back in Europe for the next three weeks.”

I flushed. I’d totally forgotten about Rachel. What an idiot. I had to have misread what was between us, misunderstood the phone conversation I’d overheard. How could there be anything romantic when he had her? Thank God I hadn’t said anything.

I fought to act normally. “I’d have you come stay with me, but Trace is taking up all my extra space,” I said. “Plus, I have two flights of stairs to challenge your broken leg.”

“My mother’s actually coming to take care of me,” Adam replied. “But thank you. It’s just with HQ I’ll be useless.”

“Phew,” Trace said. “For a second there, I thought Daley was going to kick me out.”

“Speaking of which.”

He shook his head. “I need a few more days.”

I nodded, unsurprised. And I didn’t really mind. Trace was an unchallenging roommate, to say the least. He’d bought groceries, cleaned up after himself, and didn’t act like he wanted to sleep with me. He treated me like a little sister, something I should have paid attention to, I realized. Because all this time I’d thought that was what Adam was doing, and he clearly wasn’t.

“My meeting with Tulie is this afternoon,” Adam went on. “Kirby, you’re the only one with a car. Can you help me get to HQ when we leave here?”

“Sure.”

“Summer, the quarterly report is due to the mayor’s office.” And he was off and running, delegating and planning and preparing. The earlier moment was firmly lost, and my readiness to know what he felt about me, what he wanted from me, faded.

It was much easier that way.

We went in different directions shortly after that, planning to meet back at HQ later. I made a verbal report to Josh’s psychologist and scored a few more referrals, which I spent a couple of hours following up on before I headed for HQ. Summer and Trace weren’t there yet and Adam’s office door was closed, so I put my duffle in my locker, found hot coffee in the break room, and tracked down Kirby, who sat sniffling in our shared office.

“What’s wrong?” I set my coffee mug in front of her and retrieved her nearly empty one. We drank our coffee the same way, and she looked like she needed it more.

“Thanks.” She wiped her nose with a tissue, dropped it in the trashcan, and smeared some hand sanitizer on her hands before lifting the mug to take a sip.

“Nice try,” I said, sitting in the visitor chair. “I know you don’t have a cold. What happened?”

She sighed. “Nothing in particular. I think I’m just tired. Chad’s dating someone else. Adam’s hurt. Tulie looked really bad when he came in. And this fucking loan”—she shoved some papers across the desk, and several fluttered to the floor—“won’t get resolved.”

She was definitely tired. “You don’t care about Chad. He bored you.”

“I know.” She laid her arm on the desk and dropped her head onto it.

“Adam’s going to be fine.”

“I know.”

“The loan will get resolved eventually.”

She snorted. “Not at this rate. Now the new lender is balking at sending me a copy of the canceled check to prove it was paid. I’m afraid I’ve been scammed.”

I had no reassurances for that. I also had nothing to say about Tulie. I hadn’t seen him, and “bad” was relative.

“I’ll get through it. I always do.” She straightened and frowned at the coffee mug. “You gave me your coffee.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You’re a good friend, Daley.” She drew in a deep breath and raised her hand. A moment later, the coffee pot zipped into the room. She grabbed it and poured me a cup, collecting a creamer and packet of sugar for me to add. “Oh, hey, speaking of friends, thanks for taking Crystal as a client.”

“Have you talked to her?” It was rare that I knew what happened after a job was over, and I couldn’t help but be curious.

“No, but my sister said Crystal’s husband admitted he was trying to find a new job. The woman was an employment counselor. He didn’t want to tell Crystal because he didn’t want her to worry about their finances.”

God, people were stupid.

“Evan says I acted unethically,” I blurted, surprising myself. Talking about Evan cracked the lids on several cans of worms. On the other hand, I had told Josh that I talked to my friends when I had problems, and they were starting to pile up to more than I could keep in my head.

Kirby frowned. “How did you do that?”

“I invaded Crystal’s husband’s privacy.”

“He was in a public restaurant! And you were hired by his wife.”

“People’s emotions aren’t normally on display, even if they are in public. Evan said reading him without his permission crosses the line.”

“Bullshit. Wait, reading Crystal’s husband, or reading Evan?”

“Both, I guess.”

She nodded. “It’s still bullshit. People display their emotions all the time. Some are better at hiding them than others, and some are better at interpreting them. You just have less guesswork than normal people.”

That made me feel even better than Evan’s apology had. It was hard to compare yourself to “normal” when you weren’t. The easing of guilt hardly put a dent in things, but it helped.