The Unwanted

up—one more debriefing, she’d told them, and then she’d ended up picking them up a good hour earlier than what was really necessary. Now they had nearly an hour to kill before their flight.

The silence was a little heavy, even for her. She glanced over at him. “You hungry?”

Caleb made an odd little hmmm under his breath. A man of few words. The sound could either be, Yeah, I could eat or No. Shut up so we can get this over with and I can get the hell away from you.

Destin decided it was probably the latter and she was petty enough to want to drag things out. Petty…and lonely. Damn but she’d missed him. Being close to him again, having him this near, it did the strangest things, soothed the ragged gaping hole in her heart and left her feeling a little more at peace. And it made her ache. That wound inside her that had never healed started to bleed again and she wanted to yell at him, scream at him. Beg him to come back. All of it, any of it. And there was no way she’d give in to any of those urges.

“I’m hungry,” she lied, climbing to her feet. “If you want me to bring you back something, I can.”

She couldn’t eat. But she wasn’t going to keep sitting here next to him with his silence weighing down on her and his disapproval and disappointment choking the air around them.

She needed at least a short reprieve, even if it was only for five minutes while she hid in the women’s restroom or tucked inside one of the little bars that seemed to grace every airport she’d ever been in.

Actually, a bar didn’t seem like a bad destination…

Caleb got to his feet. “I guess I could eat,” he said, his voice low and smooth, the lingering hint of the South still echoing in his voice after all these years. “What are you in the mood for?”

Solitude.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” she said, shrugging and turning on her heel. She caught the handle of her carry-on and started down the main corridor. Anything would be fine, as long as she could have a drink.

Caleb didn’t know whether to be relieved or frustrated when they ended up being seated in opposite sections of the plane. Both of them were in business class—nice of Oz, that. Destin was two rows ahead of him on the opposite side of the plane and he could see the business exec trying to put the moves on her.

And then he saw the man go rigid when Destin turned to face him fully.

Fury lanced through him as he figured out what she’d done. Using that scar as a shield. Yeah, he knew there were plenty of assholes in the world who’d back off over a thing like that. Assholes, the lot of them.

It was a bare sliver of a scar and didn’t take away from her beauty, didn’t do a damn thing to detract from who she was.

But she let people decide to make that her defining characteristic.

It pissed him off.

It wasn’t anything she wore as a badge or a mark of courage…she used it to keep people away from her. She deserved better than that.

I was careless…

Her words echoed in his mind and he closed his eyes, blew out a breath. He could find out what had happened. A few phone calls, an email or two and he’d know it all. The surface details, at least. But the information he wanted was Destin’s. He knew she wasn’t going to share it with him easily.

Maybe not at all.

Guilt lodged in his gut and part of him kept wondering, Could I have helped…

He didn’t even know. For months after he’d left Destin, he’d had to work to get his own gift back under control and it had taken him even longer to find a way to mesh with somebody other than Destin. He’d had his own screwups to deal with and those screwups were legion.

Because of those issues, it had taken more than a year before he was stable enough to work regularly in the new unit.

Now, thinking about the months that had followed his leaving, thinking back to the way she’d looked at him, and he was left wondering…had he done the right thing after all?

Chapter Three

The flight from DFW to Richmond was uneventful enough after Destin had convinced the yuppie sitting next to her that he wasn’t really interested in her. All it had taken was turning around to face him so he saw her completely.

Once she’d met his gaze, once he’d had a chance to see her scarred face, he’d decided she wasn’t really worth a quick flirtation and he’d spent most of his flight with his nose buried in an urban fantasy. She couldn’t fault his taste…she loved the author herself.

But she had given up on casual flirtations a while back. Caleb had started out as a casual flirtation and she’d tumbled head over heels into love with him, then head over heels into heartbreak when he left.

“What was with the guy on the flight?”

Destin shot Caleb a look. Surprise barely had a chance to form before it died. Of course he’d noticed. Caleb noticed everything. It was one of the things that made him excel at his chosen profession. His psychic skill might be classified as a sub-ability but he had a unique ability to filter through the shit, as Oz had once termed it, and he noticed everything, saw everything. Hell, he could probably give a written report, five pages in length, on the visual details he’d noted in Oz’s Spartan office.

“There was nothing with the guy on the flight,” she said, shrugging.

“He’d been checking you out since before we boarded. Then five seconds after he tried to talk to you, he was all but crawling inside the book.”

Destin smirked. “He saw the scar, baby. It freaks people out, haven’t you noticed?”

He didn’t say anything else and as they approached the upcoming exit, he took it, slowing down only when he had to either hit the brakes or they’d go flying off the road. She braced herself. “I see your driving hasn’t improved much.”

“Did you expect it to?”

“Not exactly, but then, you showed up in Oz’s office looking like the typical cookie-cutter Bureau boy, shiny shoes, perfect suit… I guess some part of me thought you might have gone all straitlaced.”

A faint smile curled one side of his mouth. “Yeah, that’s me, all right, Destin. Just your typical bureaucratic FBI boy. I’m a dime a dozen now.”

Like hell, she thought.

Some part of her mind that she couldn’t turn off made her think about pushing that slate-gray suit jacket back from his shoulders. Wonderful, wide shoulders, and that suit was just a little too nice for him to look like a cookie-cutter Bureau boy. Especially with those shoulders.

Forget his shoulders, Destin. He walked, remember? She shoved a hand through her hair, flicking her bangs out of her eyes. She needed to get it trimmed again. Grew too quick. Keeping it short kept her from messing with it, and she’d discovered a serious pleasure with the wash-and-go look but it was a pain in the butt getting it cut every couple of months.

“When did you cut your hair?”

She turned to look at Caleb, but he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the road as he slowed and turned into the parking lot of the restaurant. “Couple of years ago,” she said, shifting her attention away from him as he pulled into the parking lot of a little mom-and-pop diner.

She had no idea where they were, but she knew the sort of place. The food would be plentiful, filling and cheap, the coffee would be excellent and they may or may not take credit cards.

“I take it we’re getting dinner,” she said blandly.

“We can eat at the hotel if you’d rather, but I need to get out, hit the restrooms and get some coffee at the very least.”

The second he pushed the car into park, she was out, slamming the door and striding away. Food. I can do food. A break from him…yeah, that works…

It wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to get away from him, to quit thinking about the fact that she missed him,