the evil. What if it touched him, this man with his unexpected smiles and his eyes that
Max tugged on the hook, his biceps defined as he placed his weight on the ugly object. “Strong, but it had to be—he was hanging here for at least an hour or two before he was found, wasn’t he?”
She forced herself to think. “Time of death suggests that.” Years of experience sparked her neurons to life, notwithstanding the chill of terror. “However, he wasn’t seen for two days beforehand.”
Max’s eyes met hers. “Good girl.”
Disconcerted by the moment of perfect understanding outside of any psychic connection, she vocalized her conclusions. “You believe someone was holding him drugged and hostage during the time it took to install the hook.”
“Maybe not the whole time, but part of it, yeah.” Jumping off the chair, he returned it to its previous position. “The whole thing smells like a setup—theater for the public.”
“Councilor Duncan was able to keep a lid on the details.”
Max raised an eyebrow. “You telling me no one whispered about it on your PsyNet? According to what I’ve heard, it’s a clearinghouse for pretty much every scrap of data known to Psy around the world.”
She rarely entered the Net these days. There was too much there, too many voices, too many thoughts—it was akin to being battered in a storm-tossed sea, each stray whisper, each murmur, a body blow. “Yes, you’re probably correct,” she said, suddenly realizing that Max had a tiny scar high up on his left cheekbone. The tips of her fingers tingled, wanting to touch, to trace, to learn.
Max’s expression changed. “Do it.” A quiet, intense command from a human who saw far too much.
“I can’t.”
Not won’t, Max thought, can’t. “Why?”
She looked away . . . but then returned to hold his gaze. Strong, he thought, she was stronger than she knew, this J who’d told him she didn’t have much left in her. “I’m now a Sensitive.” She spread her fingers between them. “I pick up thoughts through touch.”
He sucked in a breath as his mind filled with images of her sitting in that room with Bonner’s malicious presence only inches away, the skin of her face, her neck so naked, so very vulnerable. “What would happen if someone disturbed touched your skin?”
“If I was lucky, I’d go into shock. More likely, the avalanche of images would shear my telepathic shields and kill me.”
He didn’t move, staring at those slender gloved fingers he’d fantasized about having all over him. “How long since you’ve touched another person?” It came out harsh, raw with a need that felt as if it had had years to grow, to mature.
Eyes the color of heat lightning met his, overflowing with a loneliness so absolute, it had no end. “Four years.”
CHAPTER 11
Sascha Duncan, cardinal E-Psy, mate to the alpha of the strongest leopard pack in the country, and a woman known for her calm in the midst of a crisis, threw a half-a-million dollar book against the wall.
Regret struck almost immediately, and she caught the book using her minor telekinetic ability before it hit, but frustration continued to churn within her. According to Alice Eldridge’s seminal work on E-Psy, a cardinal empath should have the capacity to stop a riot of thousands in its tracks, but Sascha couldn’t even control five people. Those five had been volunteers, packmates who trusted her enough to allow her to attempt to feed peaceful emotions into them—after they purposefully got themselves excited.
“But it doesn’t work!” Rubbing her hand over the hard mound of her pregnant belly, she stomped outside to find her shirtless mate replacing a window on the left-hand side of their cabin. The aerie above that cabin was now off-limits. Lucas tended to snarl at her if she even teased him about trying to climb up.
“Sascha darling,” he now said, wiping finger marks off the newly installed pane of glass using his discarded T-shirt, “next time your hellion fan club wants to play catch, I suggest Dorian’s place.”
Her “hellion fan club” was composed of twin cubs, Roman and Julian—and Dorian’s house was made of glass. Normally that kind of a distinctly feline comment would’ve made her laugh. Today, she kicked bad-temperedly at the forest floor. “That book just
“Sascha?”
She snapped up her head, all but growling, “What?”
Her mate leaned forward in a deceptively slow move, snagged her shoulders, and kissed her. And kept on kissing her until she melted, closing her hands over the warm silk of the skin that covered his muscular shoulders. “You need a haircut,” she murmured into the kiss. The black strands were long enough to brush the backs of her hands.
He kissed her again, his lips smiling against hers. “I’m scared of scissors.”
“Excuses.” She stroked her fingers through the strands. “You just like girls going crazy over your hair.”
“Busted.” A warm, loving stroke over her belly. “How’s our rock star doing?”
“Loud as always.” She’d been able to sense the life force of their baby from a couple of weeks after conception. At five months, that tiny life was now a constant presence in the back of her mind, normally content, often happy, and sometimes delighted. Like now. Their baby knew its father’s voice, his presence. “Thank you for the kiss.” The unspoken support.
“It’s a hardship keeping up with your demands”—a mock sigh—“but someone’s got to do it.” Another nibbling, laughing kiss when she snarled at him—and she was getting quite good at it after the number of times he’d done it to her.
“So,” he said after he had her breathless, “the funneling emotion trick didn’t work?”
“No—it did. But only for a short period. I can’t hold it for longer than maybe thirty seconds.” Turning, she leaned her back against his chest. “There’s something I’m missing.”
Lucas’s arm came around her upper chest, holding her to him. “Have you considered talking to Dev?” he asked, referring to the leader of the Forgotten—Psy who’d left the Net over a hundred years ago and formed their own society.
“I was thinking of doing that.” She gripped his arm. “I wish . . . I wish Nikita had known the joy I feel now. I wonder sometimes if she heard me like I do our baby, or if Silence blocks that connection.”
“It must,” Lucas said, brushing his lips over her temple, the scent of him a stroke of wildness touched with clean male sweat. “How else could a woman carry a child for nine months and not love it with every beat of her heart?”
Sascha felt a deep sorrow for the indescribable beauty of what her mother had missed. “Do you think she’ll care that she’ll soon have a grandchild?” They’d managed to keep the pregnancy under wraps from the general public so far—helped in part by the way the baby sat on her frame, and by clever use of clothing—but it’d soon become impossible to hide the wonderful truth.
Lucas’s free hand slipped between them to massage her lower back with strong, circular strokes. “Better?”
“How did you know?” She pressed a kiss to his biceps. “I’ll melt if you keep doing that.”
But her panther had turned serious. “Do you want to see your mother, kitten?”
“I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 12
