Eleanore took a few seconds to digest this. There was a part of her that simply couldn’t believe her position at that moment. She was being cornered by Christopher Daniels, against her own customer service desk, and asked out on a date. But despite the impossibility of it all, she knew she wasn’t dreaming. This felt too real.
He was so
big
. So tall and . . . he looked hard—everywhere. And his nearness was doing strange things to her. He smelled good. The leather of his jacket and whatever aftershave or shower gel he’d used were a heady, highly tantalizing combination. There wasn’t an ounce of him that wasn’t pure masculinity, from the set of his jaw to the smooth, determined sound of his voice.
“You’re not answering,” he said, once more glancing at her lips as he’d done before. He seemed to be leaning in closer now, and Eleanore was finding it more difficult to breathe. “Does this mean you’re considering it?”
Christ, I’m falling for this jerk. I’ve barely met him and I’ve already got it bad.
She tried to swallow past a spot in her throat that had gone dry. She wondered then, as she gazed up into those impossibly colored eyes, how many women he’d done this to lately. He was good at it
.
He’s an actor
, she told herself.
Of course he’s good at it.
That was a sobering thought. She blinked and felt her own gaze harden. He seemed to notice, because something flashed in his eyes and his gaze narrowed in response.
“You’re serious,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t know anything about me and you want me to just agree to go out on a date—in another city—with you.”
“I know enough,” he told her plainly. “And yes. I want you to go out on a date with me.” He paused and then added meaningfully, “Very much so.”
She stared back at him for several more heartbeats, and then, before she realized what she was doing, she had the customer service desk phone to her ear and was pressing a button behind her on the carriage.
Daniels seemed as surprised as she was and only watched as she put the speaker to her mouth.
“Attention guests! It is my pleasure to announce to you all that the star of the evening, Mr. Christopher Daniels, is here with us now and is making his way to the front of the store to begin signing autographs for all of his much-appreciated fans.”
The sound of cheering rose from the front of the store and spread through the aisles. Daniels glanced up, not moving from where he had her ensnared between his arms.
Eleanore glanced behind her to catch frantic movement at the front of the store.
When she turned back to face him, it was to find Christopher’s jaw tensed and his teeth clenched in obvious irritation. But his ice-green eyes returned to Eleanore’s face and once more trapped her gaze in his. He took a deep, calming breath and seemed to ponder the situation.
Then he smiled and straightened, stepping away from the desk. Eleanore stayed where she was and watched him warily. For a moment, his eyes flicked to her neck, her shoulders, and back up again. She could have sworn she saw a troubling indecision cross his handsome features. He looked as if he were tempted to grab her, throw her over his shoulder, and abscond with her.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Ellie,” he said instead, locking gazes with her a final time. “I’ll be seeing you again soon.”
With that, he turned and strode down the aisle toward the front of the store.
Eleanore was too stunned to move. She watched him go, and as he disappeared, she listened. The ecstatic greetings started up almost immediately. They were crazy about him.
And now she could see why.
He asked me on a date
, she thought.
The gorgeous, famous movie star from
Comeuppance
asked me on a date.
A part of her wanted to be thrilled at the thought. But there was another part of her that knew better. It was that other part that had forced her to cut their exchange short by announcing his arrival. Because
that
part of her had a feeling that Christopher Daniels was not who he pretended to be. Not just on the screen—but in real life.
He knows something
, she thought.
She didn’t know how it was possible; even the very idea was unfathomably weird. But somehow, Christopher Daniels seemed to know that Eleanore had caused the storm. He’d told her as much.
You’re the reason it’s storming,
he’d said. She was willing to bet a dollar that he even suspected her healing powers after Jennifer’s untimely exclamation in the bathroom.
And now he also knew her name and where she worked.
Several more long, tense seconds passed and Eleanore’s body finally relaxed a little and she slumped against the desk. She closed her eyes and ran a somewhat shaky hand through her long hair.
Life had just gotten a little too interesting for her taste. Maybe it was time to move again.
CHAPTER THREE
S
he could have stopped the rain from hitting her if she’d wanted to, or if she’d even thought of doing it, but neither was the case as Eleanore ran from the back—and broken—door of the store to her car, which was parked in the rear lot. She hurriedly beeped the lock, jerked the door open, and slipped inside, slamming and locking the door behind her. There, she sat in the seat and stared at the back edifice of the place where she worked. She wondered whether she would ever see it again.
The darkness pressed in on the windows of her car. Christopher Daniels had been signing autographs for hours. It was eight o’clock and the store would close at eleven. She wondered where he would go then. To his hotel? Where
was
his hotel?
A multitude of questions were chasing one another through her head at that moment—all of them unanswerable. She blew out a big sigh and laid her forehead on the steering wheel. Then she closed her eyes.
If she left, this would be the thirteenth time she’d moved in the last four years. She was beginning to have dreams about houses that were bizarre amalgamations of the different places she’d lived, various styles and cultures all lopped together like some sort of leaning, precarious Dr. Seuss dwelling. They were always fragile and rocked a little in the wind.
And they made her feel that way, too. Fragile.
“What am I going to do?”
Was Christopher Daniels worth another move? Did he really pose some kind of threat to her? Even if he did somehow know that she was the one who had caused the storm and even if he had figured out that she could heal, it wasn’t Daniels himself she was afraid of. It was the fame that came with him. He was forever being followed, always in the public eye. If he brought this kind of attention upon her, it could be disastrous.
Eleanore blew out another sigh and squeezed her hands into fists. She could call her parents. But if this really was the beginning of yet another dangerous situation, then her mother and father would be better off not hearing from her about it. She didn’t want to get them involved anymore. They’d earned the right to keep out of it. And it would do them some good to believe that their daughter had finally found a place where she could reside peacefully.
God knew that they’d done their own brand of time with her. When she was little, she’d spent kindergarten in three different cities before her parents had realized that they were going about things the wrong way and decided to homeschool her with the help of highly paid tutors. It was difficult back then because she was far less careful about what powers she used and when she used them. And kids like to brag. That was part of it. The other part was that, when she was little, her powers were still developing, and she’d often discovered them accidentally.
And that was always a scene.
Like the time when she was five and had begun placing things in the cart at the grocery store, even though her mother had told her she couldn’t have them. Lots of children did this, of course. But not many use telekinesis to do so.
And when she and her parents had gone camping—and she’d sent the flames from the campfire out into the surrounding brush with no more than a thought. She’d wanted to see the fire dance. It would have been disastrous if her parents hadn’t recognized what was happening by that point and talked her into bringing the fire back under control.
Doing a rain dance with her stuffed animals and actually making it rain was a bit of a scene as well since she did it every day for a week in order to water the wildflowers she and her mother had planted.
Eventually, her parents got used to her surprises—more or less—and chalked them up to the wonder that was their ever-changing daughter. But that didn’t mean that raising her was easy for them.
Eventually, they began to fear that their daughter’s special abilities might be noticed by someone powerful—and maybe not so nice—who would want to use her for their own gain. After a while, they realized someone was indeed after her, but they didn’t know who. They would return home to find locks jimmied. Strange vehicles with illegally dark windows would idle at the ends of alleys. They had their suspicions; Ellie’s gifts were extremely attractive. Were these people government agents? A terrorist group? There wasn’t enough evidence to support any of their guesses. The thought of their daughter being used by someone who would take away her freedom to make her own choices and live her own life was too horrible for them to bear. So regardless of whose attention Eleanore had unwittingly gained, avoiding any further attention became an overriding precaution that wound up ruling their lives.
They moved around frequently, never remaining in one place for very long. They kept Eleanore out of the public school system. They taught her to live cautiously and to always be prepared to have to leave at any given moment.
Now the rain pelted the roof of Eleanore’s car, steering her thoughts toward a similarly rainy day ten years ago. She had been fifteen and fully engrossed in the 3 Doors Down video “Kryptonite,” which had fast become her favorite that year. Suddenly, her father was bursting into her room and tossing her jacket to her.
Strange vehicles had been spotted by friends around the neighborhood. Eleanore’s parents were convinced that their worst fears were coming true and someone was coming to take her from them. And so it was with a strange and numb resignation that Eleanore had quickly pulled her “escape” bag out from under her bed, swung it over her shoulder, and followed her parents out the back door of the house and down the mud-soaked alley to the backyard of an unoccupied house on the same block.
Her father kept a car parked in the abandoned house’s garage. It was a gray SUV with dark tinted windows and out-of-state license plates. It would have made the perfect, nondescript getaway car if it hadn’t been for the dogs.
When the animals heard her family making haste down the alleyway in the rain, they did everything they could to draw attention to them. The barking was loud and furious. Eleanore couldn’t make out their furry bodies through the slats in the wooden fences, or she would have used her telekinetic powers to slam them into one another. Anything to shut them up.
Within breathless seconds, a white van pulled up at the end of the alley and two men got out. Eleanore remembered one of them starkly. He wore a tight gray T-shirt over massive muscles and black army fatigues. In his right hand, he carried a needle. The wet metal glinted menacingly in the gray light of the rain.
She did manage to yank the needle out of his slippery grip and send it flying with her powers. But then her father wrenched her to the side and shoved her through an opening in a gate in the alleyway. They half dragged her through the yard, and in the distance, she heard men shouting. She heard the sound of tires tearing at wet asphalt and gravel.
She and her parents made it to the garage and her mother pushed her down on the floorboards of the backseat just as her father muscled the garage door open.
Eleanore’s memory became fuzzy after that. She remembered that the car started up and she was slammed from side to side. There was a lot of sound—violent and chaotic. Glass breaking. Metal chinking like the sounds dishes make in a dishwasher.
And then darkness.
Eleanore came to understand on that day just how dangerous her abilities were—and realized fully just how much trouble they caused her parents. No, raising her wasn’t easy for them.
But fortunately for her, they accepted her powers as a part of her and loved her anyway—endlessly and deeply and unconditionally. Jane Granger swore up and down that her daughter had some purpose on this planet and that it would make itself known when the time was right. Walter Granger was a bit more on the scientific side of the argument and wondered whether his wife shouldn’t have had so much artificial sweetener while she’d been pregnant with Eleanore. Either way, though, they were okay with it.
Her father was a professor, and professors went wherever universities were hiring, so it was easy for him to move around the country. Her mother was an attorney in her own practice, so she was mobile as well. And the two of them working together were affluent enough that they were able to protect their daughter with a fair amount of efficiency, which Eleanore had been well and truly grateful for on that fateful day.