Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
“Nice attempt at a save,” Anna said. “We can certainly play it that way, if you like.”
He laughed at that, but she could tell he was still extremely embarrassed.
“Just for the record,” he said. “Under other circumstances—”
“Oh, God,” she said, closing her eyes. “Please don’t.”
“But considering the current circumstances, I can’t,” Bach told her, “ever be more to you than a friend.”
Oh, good. Her humiliation was now complete.
“Right now, though, I, um, have to go,” he told her. “Stephen Diaz brought in Devon Caine. I need to go down to Security and attempt to get inside of his head, see if we can’t locate Nika that way. And just so you know, I made sure she was sleeping before I left her, because she grabbed onto me as a lifeline pretty quickly. I want to get back to her as soon as possible. It helps her to not be alone.”
Anna nodded, her heart sinking. “Does that mean I’ll need to go to sleep again?”
“Yes. When I get back,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s okay,” she said. “Maybe this time I can dream that
we do a little S&M, B&D, whips-and-chains thing. And yes, I’m kidding.”
He laughed, but it was a shade nervously. “I’m glad you see the humor of the situation.”
“It’s a laugh riot,” she agreed.
“As soon as I can get Nika to lower her shields,” Bach tried to reassure her, “I can teach her a few things that … With luck and her natural talent, I’ll be able to establish direct contact with her—and keep that contact open twenty-four/seven. At that point, I’ll no longer need your help.”
And somehow, hearing that news—which should have been great—instead disappointed her. What was
wrong
with her? Anna nodded. “May I come with you? Down to Security?”
A great big, giant
no
was in his eyes, but he said, “If you like.”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I know that the last thing you probably want right now is the nympho following you around—”
“I
don’t
think
that
,” he said. “And you shouldn’t either. People dream about sex all the time—I think it’s the third most common dream. Right after flying and teeth falling out. And there are definitely reasons—quite a few, in fact—that would make you … form an attachment. To me. It’s not that surprising, Anna. And it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Okay, then,” she told him. “I’d like.”
Mac stood with her eyes closed on the sidewalk where Nika Taylor had been abducted.
It wasn’t going well—Shane could tell that just from watching her, just from the way she was standing.
Shoulders hunched as if against a cold wind, even though the early evening was still quite warm, she was clenching her teeth—along with every cell in her body.
Shane moved closer. Spoke quietly. “How can I help?”
Mac opened her eyes and looked at him, and she didn’t even bother trying to hide her bitter disappointment. “You can’t,” she said, as she headed back to the car, where Charlie was idling at the side of the busy street. “I got nothing.”
“You said that might happen,” he reminded her as he followed. “That these kinds of emotional disturbances are more likely to dissipate in the open.”
“Please don’t try to make me feel better,” she said. “I’m pissed. I thought this would work, now that I’m a Sixty-two, and I really don’t want your gee-gosh-and-golly optimism right now. So just … go help some old lady cross the street.”
“Wow,” Shane said. “
That
was pretty bitchy.”
“Get used to it,” she said shortly, climbing into the backseat. “Or better yet, get lost.”
He climbed in after her. “Look, I know you’re really upset,” he started.
“Let’s get the hell back to OI,” Mac told Charlie.
“Yes, ma’am.” He met Shane’s eyes briefly and sympathetically in the rearview mirror before he pulled away from the curb.
“Mac,” Shane said, and she turned to him.
“Please, I need to close my eyes. Just for a few minutes. I need … silence.”
Shane nodded. Fair enough.
So they rode in silence through the busy city streets, finally pulling onto the Mass Pike, where Charlie kicked it into high gear.
They’d traveled nearly the entire way back to OI before Mac spoke again.
“You know, if this had worked?” she said with her eyes still closed. “If I’d’ve been able to find Nika that easily? I was actually going to do it. I was going to sacrifice us both for the greater good of mankind. But it didn’t, so congratulations. We’re done. I’m cutting you free.”
“What?” Shane said.
“You heard me.” She opened her eyes and looked at him, and great, the icy stranger was back.
But he’d come to know Mac pretty damn well over the past few days, and he knew that the ice was just a front to hide her inner terror.
“The experiment, part one, is officially over,” Mac told him. “Thank you very much. On to part two.”
“Part two,” he repeated warily.
Mac raised her voice slightly. “Charlie, you wanna hook up? Be my little lab partner, see if you can’t raise my integration levels sufficiently, via the exchange of some bodily fluids?”
“Mac, come on,” Shane said. “Don’t embarrass the kid. Charlie, ignore her, she’s not serious.”
“Yes, sir.” Charlie turned on the radio and kicked their speed higher, even as he pulled onto the off-ramp that meant they were nearly home.
Home. Funny how Shane had come to think of OI as
home
after such a short amount of time.
“I’m dead serious,” Mac was saying. “How do I know that you’re the only person who can raise my integration levels until I try raising them with someone else?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not the first man you’ve slept with,” Shane pointed out, trying to keep his voice even.
“But you’re the first man I’ve slept with while checking my levels,” she countered. “If I want to be thorough, and as a scientist, I do—”
“How about as a human being?” Shane asked, because he was starting to believe that she wasn’t just being an asshole. He was starting to believe she might actually do it—that her fear had pushed her over the edge and was making her actively try to ditch him. And what better way to do it, than this? “How about as a woman?”
“I’m a Greater-Than,” she said as if that were a counterargument. “Don’t worry, Charlie. One of the new Potentials will be happy to participate.”
“So you’re just going to have sex with a stranger,” Shane said, as they pulled up to OI’s gates.
“You were a stranger when I first had sex with you,” she pointed out, as up front Charlie desperately started singing along with the song that was playing on the radio.
“But I’m not a stranger anymore,” Shane argued.
“Yeah, because now I’ve known you all of … what is it? Two days. You know, I think I’ll set it up like speed dating. Put the interested Potentials around the edges of a room. I can sit on their laps, one at a time, have a little conversation, see who makes my levels rise just from the body contact—”
“Okay, now you’re just being cruel,” Shane said, as the gate finally opened and Charlie raced up the hill. “Knock it the fuck off.”
“It was an experiment,” she reminded him. “And I’m telling you that your part of it ended. If it means my levels drop back to fifty, so be it.”
“I know I signed that paper,” he told her, “and maybe that makes you think that it’s just about the sex for me, but it’s not.”
“What,” she said, leaning hard on her sarcasm and tough bitch attitude. “You’re going to sit there and try to make me believe that you
love
me?”
“Why not?” Shane said. “You’re sitting there and trying to make
me
believe that you
don’t
.”
Mac laughed, but it came out sounding far more like a sob. “This isn’t about me, it’s about you. You say it doesn’t matter, but it does.”
“What doesn’t matter?” he asked. “When did I say—”
“My talent,” she cut him off. “You’re not sitting in this car with me because you
want
to.”
They were back to this.
Okay.
At least now Shane knew the source of her fear. “We’ve had this conversation before, and I respectfully disagree.”
“And I
respectfully
point out that I’m sitting here, treating you like
shit
, yet you have absolutely no desire to run away.”
Charlie, however, did just that after pulling into the parking lot and slamming the car into park. He was out of there.
“That’s just fucked up,” Mac continued.
“No, it’s not,” Shane said, as he watched Charlie run for his life toward the main OI building, “because I happen to think you’re worth fighting for. Because I know you don’t mean what you’re saying. I know you.”
“No, you don’t!”
“Yeah, I do,” he said.
“Oh!” she said shouting so loud that Charlie glanced back at them before he pulled open OI’s door. “Damn it! You’re not going to walk away, you fool, regardless of how badly I treat you, because of what I
do
to you with my stupid fucking powers!”
“I’m not going to walk away, because I like what you do to me,” Shane said.
“Do you?” she shouted. “You do, huh? That’s because you’re thinking with this.” She reached over and grabbed him right
through his pants, and okay, yeah, he was already aroused. He couldn’t ride in a car with this woman without getting turned on. So sue him.
And God, he loved her touch, but he caught her wrist and pulled her hand away. “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to touch me like that if you really do intend to ditch me.”
“But that’s my point,” she said, breaking. “I don’t need to
touch
you. You know what I can do without even
touching
you …?”
She hit him with a wave of her voodoo that was so incredibly strong, it was all he could do not to reach for her. And Jesus, he’d thought he’d been hard before, but now he was a rock.
“Okay,” he ground out between clenched teeth, “I get your point.”
“No, you don’t,” Mac said, and even though he would never have believed it possible, she ramped her power up even higher.
“Oh,
shit
,” Shane said, as he came, just suddenly, just right there, in the car, in his pants, without her even looking at him, let alone touching him.
“Shiiit. Holy shit …”
It was mind-blowing just how good it felt. In length and intensity, it was, without a doubt, the big one, and it left him gasping and spent.
“Okay,” he said, when he could once again finally speak. And wow, now he was a total mess. And awesome—in order to get inside, he was going to have to go through security, take off his jacket, and get wanded. That was going to be awkward. “All right. Now I know, for an absolute fact, that I love you.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Mac said and opened the car door, obviously intending to bolt.
Shane caught her arm. “I’m not done.”
“Yeah,” she said, struggling to break free. “You are. You’re really that shallow—”
“I know that I love you,” he told her, speaking loudly over her, “because as great as that was, with your voodoo cranked to eleven? It didn’t come
close
to what I feel when we’re together, when we make love. Frankly, it doesn’t even rate,
Michelle
, compared to
what I feel when you get your head out of your ass long enough to smile at me.”
Her eyes filled with tears and her face was filled with anguish and pain that she didn’t hide. “But it’s
not. Real
.”
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I. Don’t. Care.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, pulling her arm free. “You may think you don’t care. You may even really not care. You might honestly think you like it, but …
I don’t!
I fucking
hate
it, all right? I hate it because I could love you. I really could. But I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do this. I can’t.”
“Wait,” he said, as she got out of the car, as he scrambled after her. “Mac. Wait. Why? You’re right—I
don’t
understand.”
She stopped, but she didn’t face him. “You don’t love me, Shane—you
can’t
love me. You can say the words, you can say them constantly if you want to, but that won’t make them true.”
“But if it’s what I feel—”
Mac turned to face him, and the sadness in her eyes nearly did him in.
“I was ten years old,” she said, “when my powers first made an impact on my life. My father, who was an asshole and a drunk, beat the shit out of me, and then told my mother that he
had
to do it—to keep himself from having sex with me. Apparently, I was irresistible.”
“Jesus,” Shane said.
“Yeah,” Mac said. “I’ve never told anyone that before, because it was just too awful. She kicked him out, but we didn’t press charges, because she needed the child support. My brother, Billy, had special needs, and … I spent the next four years dodging creepy old guys who would follow me around at the state fair, or at the mall. It got so that I just stayed home, because it was worse after I hit puberty. Except then, when I was fourteen, Billy and my mom were killed when the brakes in the car failed. There was a lawsuit that the lawyer was sure we were going to win, and she was right, but it made my father petition for custody, and he won, so I went to live with the asshole instead of my aunt.”
“Oh, shit,” Shane said.
“I won’t leave you in suspense,” Mac said. “He didn’t touch me. Although what
did
happen was worse. I would have preferred …” She cut herself off and got back to her story. “Dad was onto his third wife by then. Janice—she was a piece of work. He’d married her for her money, but blew through that really fast.
“When I moved in, they had just downsized to a really shitty two-bedroom apartment. I had to sleep under the dining room table. I used sheets to make walls, for privacy, but I knew they wouldn’t keep me safe. You and I both know that the asshole didn’t touch me, but back then, I had no idea what was going to happen. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep. Not until he got a job overseas. See, Janice didn’t like the way he looked at me, so he went to work as a contractor in Libya, which paid really well, but somehow made her hate me even more.