The Protected

He handled bare skin contact just fine as long as no stress was involved. But looking at her did something bad to the way his brain functioned—something he’d figured out already—and he suspected he’d go on overload if he spent too much time touching her. One slipup and she’d pay the price. He already knew for a fact what happened when he lost control. That wasn’t happening. Not with her.

“How about we focus on the job?” he suggested softly as he whipped the car around.

“You are just no fun, Tucker. How can you be so cool and controlled when I’m sitting here squirming and thinking about you and me and bare skin?”

He disconnected the call. She’d call back in a second; he knew it. So he took the brief moment to drag a hand over his face and force his recalcitrant body under control. The leather of his glove slid over his face, smooth and worn from years of use. He’d had the gloves specially designed. He pulled them on first thing in the morning, and pulled them off right before he went to bed. He stripped them off for certain things, of course, but for the most part, those gloves were as much a part of him as breathing.

They protected everybody in the world from the wild charge that lived inside him. It seemed his body was one big, giant conductor of electricity half the time, although it wasn’t that simple. He pulled the energy from somewhere, he knew, and he could channel it out when he was focused. When he wasn’t focused, when he was pissed, he also affected the ebb and flow of electricity around him.

Once, he’d unintentionally stopped a person’s heart because of it.

Bare skin on bare skin. Terror pulsing out of him.

Yeah. Control was pretty vital to him.

And Nalini managed to shatter it.

When the phone rang a few seconds later, he was as much in control as he could expect to be. After a ring or two, he answered with a curt, “Yeah?”

“Wow. I must really be getting under your skin. Okay, we’ll focus on the job,” Nalini said, her voice heavy with amusement.

The woman was bizarre. Most women get hung up on and they are irritated. He does it to her? She laughs.

“Why don’t you just give me a better idea of what I’m looking for and then we can be done with the chatter?” Tucker said.

“I already explained I’m not sure what you’re looking for,” she said, her voice low and soft. There was a long pause and he thought he heard a rapid series of taps. Like somebody firing away on a keyboard. “I . . . I just think there’s a kid involved. I’m almost positive the item is a child. I hear one . . . in my head, if you get my drift. He’s screaming. I think it’s him. And I think they are looking for him because he’s . . . well . . . unique.”

“Drop the codespeak, Nalini.” He slowed at a stop sign and then turned left, taking the highway that would lead him into Orlando. He didn’t live in town. That just wasn’t smart for a guy like him. But his place was only a few miles out and already traffic was closing up around him. “You mean psychic.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I mean psychic.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what this site is for. It’s where people go to find others, it’s where they go to connect . . . and I think others go to recruit. It’s bad news, though, because sometimes people disappear.”

“Disappear.” He stared at the license plate of the car in front of him and tried to blank his mind. Wild, chaotic energy crackled inside him and he had no place to put it, no place to direct it. All he could do was focus and ride it out until it eased off. “And you think a kid’s the next mark?”

“Yes . . . but this is different. Usually, they recruit here. This isn’t recruiting. It’s . . . hunting,” she said, her voice grim.

Hunting—

Just thinking about that had his hands tightening on the steering wheel and he wanted to hit something. Pound it bloody and then do it all over again.

Seconds ticked away, and then softly, Nalini asked, “Are you okay?”

“I’m just fine, darlin’.” Everything built to a screaming roar in his brain and he shunted it off, splicing that part of himself off until it was like two people rode inside his mind. Tucker who was in control, pressing on the gas as the cars around him started to move. Tucker who was ready to fry the next thing he touched. He could control it. He’d spent the past twenty years of his life learning how to do just that, and control it was exactly what he’d do.

“How certain are you that your boss isn’t behind any of those disappearances?” he asked dispassionately. He knew more than a few federal types who’d tried to make people like him disappear. One had tried to make him disappear. Permanently. Not long after—

The car shuddered around him and he cut that line of thought off. Couldn’t go there. Not right now.

“I couldn’t be more positive if I had to. Jones and his unit are clean. I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, but they aren’t dirty. They aren’t behind any of this.”

Nalini continued to talk, her voice soft and low, and even though he barely heard her words, he let himself focus on the low, soothing sound of her voice until some of that rage banked, until the energy surging inside him ebbed down.

“So. You got any idea how to help me out here?”

Tucker spotted a familiar sign up ahead and hit his turn signal. “Yeah. If the kid I’m looking for is psychic, I just go trolling. The human mind is an electrical construct, basically. And the mind of a psychic feels different. I’ll just keep circling and hoping I’ll find something.”

“That . . . could take a long time.”

He grunted. “Yeah. But there’s already been something around here moving. I’ve been ignoring it. Guess it’s time to check it out.” He got in line at the drive-thru. “Is that all?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He didn’t say anything as he went to disconnect.

“Hey, wait . . . you can really sense things just by the way our minds feel?”

“Yeah.” He rubbed his brow.

“And you can sense the minds of all the people around you, too. All the time?”

“If I let myself.” He’d already lowered his shields a little and he knew, within a fifty-foot range, there were one hundred and fifty-two people. One of them had a pacemaker. He felt that as well.

“Doesn’t that drive you crazy?”

He pulled forward in the line. Softly, he said, “Yes.”

SEVEN

VAUGHNNE didn’t run because she liked it.

She didn’t hate it, but she sure as hell didn’t love it, and in her expert, professional opinion, all of those who talked about a runner’s high were just deluding themselves. The only time she got high off exerting herself was after a bout of particularly good sex.

Which she hadn’t had in so long, she could be delusional.

No, she ran because she knew it was necessary.

Keeping her body in top physical form was just part of the job.

It was the same reason she lifted weights and the same reason she trained in a variety of fighting styles, ranging in everything from standard tae kwon do to kickboxing to muay thai. Even though she’d spent so much time on the streets, she couldn’t rely on street fighting to get her everywhere, and she didn’t. There was always room for improvement, so improvement was what she pushed for.

After the shit way she’d felt ever since the last job in Orlando, she’d been knocked down to where she could barely manage three miles on average, and the first few times she’d run, she’d been hard-pressed to make two.

She was back up to five now, and today, she planned on going for six. It was annoying as hell, having to do