Raintree: Inferno (Raintree 1)

He muttered a curse, gave a quick look over his shoulder to check traffic, and slotted the Jaguar between a semi and a frozen-pizza truck. At the next exit, he peeled off the interstate. “Take a deep breath and hold it,” he said, as he pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. “Damn it, I should have thought—this is why you need training. I told you that you’re a sensitive. You’re picking up all the energy patterns around you—has to be all the traffic—and it’s throwing you into overload. How in hell did you ever function? How did you survive in a casino, of all places?”

Obedient to his earlier suggestion, Lorna sucked in the deepest breath she could and held it. Was she hyperventilating? she wondered dimly. She supposed she was. But she was cold, so cold, the way she’d been in Dante’s office before the fire.

He put a calming hand on her bare arm, frowning a little when he felt how icy her skin was. “Focus,” he said. “Think of your sensitivity as this shining, faceted crystal, picking up the sun and throwing rainbows all around you. Envision it. Or if you don’t like crystals, make it something else fragile and breakable. Are you doing that? Can you see it in your imagination?”

She struggled to concentrate. “What shape crystal? Hexagonal? How many sides does it have?”

“What difference does it—never mind. It’s round. The crystal is round and faceted. Got it?”

She formed a mental picture of a round crystal, only hers was mirrored. It didn’t throw rainbows, it threw reflections. She didn’t mention that, though. Concentrating helped dispel that debilitating coldness, so she was willing to think of crystals all day. “Got it.”

“Okay. A hailstorm is coming. The crystal will be shattered unless you build a shelter around it. Later you can come back and build a really strong shelter around it, but right now you have to use whatever materials you have at hand. Look around. What do you see that you can use to protect the crystal?”

In her mind she looked around, but no handy bricks and mortar were nearby. There were some bushes, but they weren’t sturdy. Maybe she could find some flat rocks and start stacking them in layers to form a barrier.

“Hurry,” he said. “You only have a few minutes.”

“There are some rocks here, but not enough of them.”

“Then think of something else. The hailstones are the size of golf balls. They’ll knock the rocks down.”

In her mind she glared at him; then, desperate and unable to think of anything else, she mentally dropped to her knees and began scooping a hole in the sandy dirt. The sides of the hole were soft and kept caving in, so she scooped some more. She could hear the storm approaching with a thunderous roar as the hail battered everything in its path. She had to get under shelter herself. Was the hole deep enough? She put the crystal in the hole, and hurriedly began raking dirt around and over it. No, it was too shallow; the crystal ball wasn’t completely underground. She began raking dirt from a wider circle, piling it on top of the crystal. The first hailstone hit her shoulder, a blow like a fist, and she knew the dirt wasn’t going to do the job. With no time left and no other choice, she threw her own body over the dirt mounded over the crystal, protecting it with her life.

She shook herself out of the image and glared at him. “Well, that didn’t work,” she snapped.

He was leaning very close, his green eyes intent on her face, his hand still on her arm. “What did you do?”

“I threw myself on the hand grenade, so to speak.”

“What?”

“I was trying to bury the damn crystal but I couldn’t get it deep enough, so I threw myself on top of it and the hailstones beat me to death. No offense, but your imagery sucks.”

He snorted and released her arm, sitting back in his seat. “That wasn’t my imagery, it was yours.”

“You thought of the stupid crystal.”

“Yeah. It worked, too, didn’t it?”

“What did?”

“The imagery. Are you still feeling—I don’t know how you were feeling, but I’d guess it was as if you were being attacked from all sides.”

Lorna paused. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m not feeling that now. But it wasn’t as if I were being attacked. It was more of an anxious feeling, a sense of doom. Then I got so cold, just the way I did in your office before the fire.”

“Only then? You’ve never felt overwhelmed like that except in my office?” He considered the idea, frowning a little.

She rubbed the back of her neck, feeling the knots of tension. “Contrary to what you seem to think, I could pretty much go anywhere and do anything without feeling all those swirls and currents, or like the world was coming to an end. I thought you were the one doing all of it, remember?” Whatever this new stuff was, she didn’t like it at all. She wasn’t a happy-go-lucky person, never had been—it was tough to be Little Miss Sunshine when you were getting slapped every time you opened your mouth—but neither had she felt hopeless, overwhelmed by a dark despair that went way beyond depression.

“I’m not a sensitive,” he said. “I’ve never felt what you’re describing. I know I give off a force field of energy, because other sensitives have picked up on it, but no one has ever said I made them feel as if the world was coming to an end.”

“Maybe they didn’t know you the way I do,” she said sweetly.

“You’re right about that,” he replied, smiling a little, and just that fast the air between them became heavy and hot, as if a summer thunderstorm were approaching. His gaze dipped down to her breasts, stroked over the curves with an almost physical sensation. He’d never touched her breasts, hadn’t touched her sexually at all unless she counted the times she’d been able to feel his erection against her. Come to think of it, that was pretty damn sexual. With a jolt of self-honesty, she realized she’d liked knowing she could make him hard; thinking of how he’d felt made her abdominal muscles clench, low in her belly.

How could he do that, make her respond so fast? Her nipples beaded, so that every breath she took scraped them against her bra, which made them even harder. She almost hunched her shoulders to relieve the pressure, but she knew that would be a dead giveaway. Her bra was substantial enough that he couldn’t see her excitement, which was a good thing. He might suspect, from the heightened color she could feel in her cheeks, but he couldn’t know.

His gaze flashed up, caught hers. Slowly, but not at all hesitantly, he lifted his hand and rubbed the back of one finger over her left nipple, letting her know that she’d been wrong: he knew. Her cheeks got hotter, and she felt that delicious clenching again, the softening deep inside. If she hadn’t been thinking about having sex with him…if she hadn’t been thinking just a couple of hours ago about seeing him naked…maybe she wouldn’t have responded so readily. But she had been, and she did.