“It’s all right, baby. I’m right here. You’re safe.”
She shook her head. “I’m not. He saw me.”
Kadan drew her into his body, his arms tight around her. “
We
saw
him
. We can find him, Tansy. No one even knew he existed. Hell, if I hadn’t been there with you, I might not have believed it.”
He spoke aloud in a cool, calm voice, mostly to bring her wholly back to him.
“I’ve never run into anyone who can do what I do. He’s a tracker.”
Kadan was already aware of that and the ramifications of it. Whoever had realized she was on his trail was going to have to go on the offensive and hunt her. Kadan had felt the man’s shock and then the sudden interest in Tansy. The puppet master had recognized female and a bright shining light. She didn’t have violent energy, but she was a magnet for it. Kadan didn’t want her to know how disturbed he was over finding the puppet master, as Tansy had dubbed him.
“Yes, he appears to be a tracker.” He hadn’t known they existed until he’d found Tansy and realized exactly what she could do. He kept his tone mild, realizing she was really afraid.
“Not just a tracker, Kadan,” she corrected. “An
elite
tracker. I left footprints all over those scenes. If he accesses them, he’ll find me there.”
“It will be a faint trail, probably thinner than the one he left behind. In any case, he won’t be able to identify you any more than we can him.”
The puppet master had been all too curious about her, all too aware of her as being his equal. That would arouse his fascination, and that was the last thing Kadan wanted.
“Come on, baby, let this go for this evening. We have to plan a rescue.” He needed to divert her attention to give himself time to think about the best way to protect her.
She shook her head. “I have to give you details before I’m all the way back.”
Her response unraveled the knots in his belly. It hadn’t been as bad this time. The short times she was slipping her exercises in, even a few minutes at a time, seemed to be helping. Their connection grew stronger with each time he shared her mind, and she was turning to him more and more without realizing it, allowing him to strengthen her barriers while she worked. It offered her a little more protection to lessen the adverse affects of both the killer and the victims on her unprotected brain.
Tansy took a deep breath and pushed down the fear that threatened to choke her. She would never forget that chilling moment when the puppet turned his head and looked right into her mind. Kadan had no concept of what an elite tracker could do. She wasn’t at the top of her game. She’d burned out, fried her abilities, but the voices of the killers amused the puppet master. He ignored the victims. They were nothing to him, nuisances only.
“Tansy?” Kadan prompted. “You’ve done enough tonight. All the detectives working on these cases, the FBI task force—no one has found a link to this man. This is a huge break.”
“We know he exists, but we have no idea of his identity or how he fits in yet. Let me go over everything. The snake enjoys inflicting pain. He’s been in Vietnam, but not during the war. I got the impression of tunnels in a cane field.” She shuddered. “He did terrible things to the farmers. A man and his son. He remembered the details very vividly.”
“Don’t,” Kadan said. The details were in her mind, just as vivid. Every cut, every sadistic torture the bastard snake had conceived of—Tansy had it in her mind now. Kadan was already trying to push the memories behind the door for her, trying to protect her from the stubborn streak that kept her pursuing evil killers when it cost her so much.
Tansy visibly made an effort to stay focused on him, to keep the voices from scraping her mind raw. “The camera is really important to him, but he worries it will be found. He’s a long way from it and has to go back to retrieve it.” Her brows drew together as she tried to bring the details into sharper images. “Have your team look up, a good distance away. He camouflaged the camera so it looks like an old piece of machinery and could easily be overlooked. He worked on it a long time, and he made the metal to wrap it in. If you find it, I should get some very good impressions of him, maybe even somewhat of a description.”
His fingers tightened. “That’s good, baby. Now let it go so we can combat the headache before it starts.” It was already swelling in her head, rolling through her like a wave. She’d used her talent too often and too close together and her mind was raw. Now she was just scraping over old wounds. Even he could hear the whispers of the victims, when the previous times he had only heard the killers.
She shook her head and he gritted his teeth, shoving down the urge to shake her hard and force her out of the half-hypnotic trance.
“The other one is the important one—the puppet master. I see him surrounded by paper. And a desk. He doesn’t want anyone to notice him. He prides himself on blending into the background. He’s very nondescript and strives to keep it that way, although he has a bit of a problem hiding his . . .” She touched her eyes. “He wears tinted contacts to keep people from seeing.”
That sheen in her eyes, blue to violet and then a shimmering silver or opaque. Sign of a tracker. He’d never seen it or heard of it before, but now he knew what he was looking for, now he knew what that peculiar shine really was.
“He’s very clever. He’s surrounded by killers, by . . .” She frowned again. “I feel Whitney’s taint on him. He knows Whitney. They’re connected somehow, but I can’t see it. Papers. That’s all I’m getting. There’s money. Lots of money, but . . .” She shook her head. “Whitney doesn’t know. His killers don’t know. He’s the boss, but none of them know.”
She blinked at Kadan, unable to comprehend the rush of images and impressions, shivering with cold, fighting hard to keep the voices at bay. “What does that mean?”
Kadan brushed back her hair and leaned into her, taking possession of her soft, trembling lips. “It doesn’t matter, honey, come back to me.” His voice was a velvet-soft lure, stroking and caressing along her skin, teasing at her nerves until she was wholly aware of him—just him.
She made a little sound in her throat, distress pouring into his mind, and she stepped into his arms. It was the first real move she’d made for comfort, and he tightened his hold around her, caging her in with a protective gesture. Lips skimming her hair and temples, he murmured soft, soothing words, uncaring what they were, only wanting to push out evil and fill her with warmth.
She buried her face against his chest. She didn’t make a sound; there was no outward sobbing, but in her mind, he could hear quiet weeping, and when he lifted her chin, there were tears tracking down her face. He bent his head and licked at them, following the tracks to the corner of her mouth.
Kadan lifted her. “You’re going to spend a lot of time in bed if you keep this up.”
She didn’t smile, just circled his neck with her arms and let him carry her without protest back to his bedroom. He undressed her, careful not to jar her, when he could feel the pain pounding in her head. He found the headache pills and gave her one with a glass of water, then stretched out again beside her, fully dressed, after snapping off the light.
“You don’t have to stay,” Tansy protested. “I’ll be all right. The dark helps.”
“I’m staying, baby. I have to chase away the nightmares if any are stupid enough to visit you tonight. Go to sleep.” He flipped her onto her side, her back to him, curving his body around hers, one hand sliding beneath her shirt, palm locked over her rib cage. His breath was warm and rhythmic on the nape of her neck. He couldn’t resist curling his fingers into a fist and allowing his knuckles to run along the underside of her breasts with gentle caresses.
Tansy found his touch soothed and relaxed her, easing all the tension out of her when it should have done just the opposite. Maybe because she’d spent her life without skin-to-skin contact, the tactile feeling of the pads of his fingers, the brush of knuckles, or the heat of his palm took the tightness from her muscles and melted her body.
She floated on a sea of pain, the waves crashing in her head, voices rising and sinking, the whispers loud and then soft, but instead of fighting it, curling up in the fetal position and enduring hours, or even days, of agony, she drifted also on a tide of warmth and security, feeling Kadan riding out the pain with her.
His breathing steadied her own. The stroke of his knuckles distracted her from the pounding in her temples. If the pain threatened to overwhelm her, he leaned in and brushed kisses along the nape of her neck, and then tugged at her earlobe with his teeth. She was caught between pain and pleasure, drifting . . . drifting . . . until finally the pain began to ebb and she slipped into sleep.
Kadan dozed for a while, waking every now and then when she moved. He cuddled her and whispered until she settled down. He closed his eyes briefly again, drifting a little himself, continuing to stroke her soft skin, the undersides of her breasts and down her flat belly. She didn’t ever think of stopping trying to track the killers. Not once. He monitored her thoughts carefully, and once she’d started on their trails, no matter what she saw or how loud the voices called to her, even now, with the direct threat of an elite tracker, she was scared, but there was no thought of stopping.
He let his breath out slowly, his belly tight with knots, everything in him protesting her choice, when he’d been the one to draw her into the mess in the first place. And now someone had her parents. The bodyguard had been a plant, probably Whitney’s, and he most likely was a GhostWalker. He was too cool, staying with the parents, living in their home, side by side, watching Tansy . . . And what had her father said when her mother had screamed? His voice wasn’t surprised by what the bodyguard had done. In fact, he’d sounded for a moment as if he was still in charge.
Kadan rubbed strands of her silky hair between his fingers. She’d been in danger the entire time, and hadn’t known it. She couldn’t read thoughts, only objects, and wearing gloves had prevented her from seeing the danger. If she’d sensed that any of them felt guilt, she would have never connected the emotion to her. She believed in them. All of them. Even the bodyguard.
Fredrickson’s betrayal had hurt her. Kadan had felt the piercing pain knifing through her heart. The protest in her mind. Sadly, it was Fredrickson’s betrayal that had shaken her steadfast belief in her parents’ love. She hadn’t said anything to Kadan, and he tried not to let that bother him, when she should be sharing everything, but part of him didn’t blame her. He wasn’t sympathetic to her parents in the least.
Fredrickson had been around the Meadows family for years. Tansy believed him to be more than a friend, part of her family. She trusted him almost as much as she did her parents, and he’d made her mother scream in pain. Kadan replayed the sound in his head. He was sound-sensitive, and few things got past him, even over the phone. The sound had been genuine, but then the bastard part of him knew he could hurt an ally just for the necessary effect. And it brought results. If Kadan hadn’t stopped her, Tansy would have delivered herself into their waiting hands.
As her father had said she would.
If Whitney had planted Fredrickson into the Meadows’ home to keep an eye on Tansy, why didn’t her father know? Or had he known? Had there been a break in trust? If so, why hadn’t Whitney simply killed Don Meadows? And why hadn’t Meadows turned him in for the childhood experiments? Kadan turned the pieces of the puzzle over and over in his mind, but nothing fit. The moment he realized all the thinking in the world wasn’t going to solve anything, he turned to the problem at hand. Tansy.
She was so unexpected. The man she called the puppet master was going to come after her. Kadan knew it with an absolute certainty. There had been shock, of course; an elite tracker was the last thing the man had expected. He must have been very shaken, although he recovered fast. There had been respect, and that made sense. Few could do what Tansy did, walk in blood and death and the filth of a killer’s mind, hear the screams and pleas of victims dying, and emerge intact as she tracked the killer to his lair. Yeah, the puppet master would feel respect, but it would be more than that.
No one wanted to be truly alone.
Tansy had taught him that. He’d walked the path his entire life, thinking he wanted it. He hadn’t felt lonely. He’d chosen his path and kept to it, was comfortable with the way things were. And then he’d met her and he knew he never wanted to be alone again. Tansy might just be able to put up with his dominant, cold-as-ice personality and the raw need that only increased his craving for her. She had to be able to, because he wasn’t going back.
And now the puppet master knew he wasn’t alone. He had a companion who could tread the same minds if she chose. Tansy had noticed the smug amusement, but she hadn’t caught the flair of male interest, the scent of sex. There was intrigue. Finally, someone to share his quiet genius with. Someone who would appreciate him for his camouflage. She would know what it took to control killers, to manipulate everyone around him and not get caught. The puppet master hadn’t been alone for those few moments, and he wouldn’t want to go back.
Kadan frowned as he buried his face in the thick mass of her hair. The puppet master wouldn’t be able to stop himself any more than Kadan could. The tracker would think about it first, but she wouldn’t leave his mind, any more than Tansy could get the killers out of hers. He would obsess about her. Fantasize. Want to show her he was stronger and could beat her at her own game. He’d want to show off, because finally, there was someone who truly could understand and
see
him. The puppet master wouldn’t be able to resist that lure. In the end, self-preservation, discipline, and common sense would go, and he would begin to hunt her.
Kadan inhaled sharply, drawing Tansy’s scent into his lungs. His. Talk about obsession. He could go from not feeling a damned thing to—
this.
Need. Hunger. His hands shaking with the desire to touch her. His mouth hungry for the taste of cinnamon and sex. He skimmed the pads of his fingers down Tansy’s bare midriff, careful to keep the bristles velvet-soft, moving in the direction that prevented sticking. She liked the sensation, arching toward him even in her sleep. She was very responsive sexually, her body ripe for his with a few touches. She seemed just as starved for skin-to-skin contact as he was. When one had had a lifetime of emptiness, perhaps overindulgence and feasting were the only cure.