Clint checked his side-view mirror, then swung out into traffic. “I know how surveillance cameras work.”
She checked her own side mirror, half expecting to see Sergei running after her. Or maybe one of the Bellagio’s security vehicles, lights flashing. Instead, they slipped seamlessly onto the Strip, merging with the other late-night traffic. Teddy sank deeper into her seat. The car was quiet, nothing but the steady hum of tires against pavement, until Clint broke the silence by turning on the radio. Sitting down, he was far less intimidating than he’d been in the casino.
She corrected herself immediately. Not once in their brief encounter had she felt threatened by Clint. Sure, she’d been creeped out when he put a hex—or whatever that was—on Sergei and the others, but she’d believed him when he’d said he wasn’t going to hurt her. Actually, there was something about him that made her feel protected. And, she might as well admit this, if only to herself: she was intrigued. As she watched the road, Teddy realized she hadn’t given him her address. “At the next light, you’ll need to make a left—”
“I know where you live,” he said.
“Of course you do. Let me guess—you read my mind.”
“No, I read your file.”
Her brows shot up. “I have a file?”
“You were banned from every casino on the Strip. Of course you have a file. What I found interesting was that you never got caught cheating.”
“Goddamn right. Because I didn’t.”
“The casinos thought you did. So many players complained about you that the casinos assumed you’d developed a new system for doing so.”
“Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
“It’s private property. They can ban anyone they want,” he said. “The point is that’s why you caught my eye. It’s not unusual for untrained psychics to get into trouble. But you’ve been keeping a low profile lately. Avoiding your Serbian friend, maybe?”
“I had things under control,” Teddy said. “Until you showed up.”
Clint ignored Teddy’s jab. “I really should have found you after you got kicked out of Stanford.”
Teddy’s body tensed. Stanford. The day she’d opened the big envelope had been one of the happiest in Teddy’s life. But that hadn’t lasted long. “I still don’t buy this whole psychic nonsense.”
“I’m going to have to prove it again, aren’t I?” Clint said.
Does this guy really think I’m going to fall for that David Blaine crap?
“David Blaine’s a hack,” he said. “And he’s a stage magician, not a psychic.”
“I—,” Teddy started. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t just go around butting in on private conversations in people’s heads.”
“You’re the one who wanted proof.”
He had her there. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll play along. If there really are psychics, why would they even bother to go to school? Why wouldn’t they just play the lottery and get rich?”
“Fair question. Let me ask you one. Why play poker? Why not the lottery? Or the slot machines?”
Because she couldn’t predict numbers out of thin air. But she could read people. At Stanford, all she’d had to do was have a quick conversation with the quarterback before kickoff to know how to bet. Despite his bravado, when she’d felt that familiar anxiety, she’d known the quarterback was lying and that his game would be off.
“You’ll find that psychics aren’t that easy to read,” Clint said. “You’ll have to break down a few walls before you know if they’re telling the truth.” He smiled. A warmer smile than she had expected from him.
So he knew that she couldn’t use her lie-detector skills on him. Interesting. “Just on you or on all psychics?”
“I have extra defenses in place. But our brains are wired differently. You’ll find that you can’t read us as easily as you do your opponents at a poker table.” Keeping one hand on the wheel, he dug inside the glove compartment and retrieved a glossy brochure. The cover featured an impressive-looking redbrick building situated on a craggy rock overlooking the sea. Whitfield Institute for Law Enforcement Training and Development, the caption read. Did he think a slick brochure was going to impress her? Or did he just want to convince her the place was real?
He shook his head. “I get it. Back when I was approached, I was every bit as stubborn as you. Maybe more.”
“You went to Whitfield?”
“It wasn’t around then, but someplace like it, yeah.” He tapped the brochure. “The point is, we don’t just train people to work with local law enforcement, although obviously, that’s the route I took. We place students with Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, private security details, the military, customs . . . you name it. And they go on to do important work.”
The car slowed, then came to a stop. Clint shifted into park. She looked up, startled to find they’d already arrived at her parents’ tidy suburban home. A knot formed in her stomach. What was she going to tell her parents? Sergei would stop at nothing to get his money. She had screwed up before—not just by getting kicked out of school but by pissing off bosses at crappy waitressing jobs, getting evicted from lousy apartment after lousy apartment, and more—but nothing compared to this. They’d have to take out another mortgage on the house.
She turned to thank Clint for the ride and found him studying the house with an odd expression. “They were good to you? The people who raised you?”
The people who raised me? They’re my parents. She hoped he wasn’t going to start asking whether she had ever tried to track down her birth parents and their families. Besides that assignment for Mrs. Gilbert’s class, she hadn’t asked any more questions. She didn’t need to know. She had made a policy early in life of not wanting anyone who didn’t want her in return: boys, Stanford, families . . .
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not their fault I’m running from a loan shark.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“They were better
