Chapter 5 #2
There’s no one out there to see.
Without giving herself time to think, she did as he asked. She felt his warmth behind her, and in front, the coolness coming from the window glass. It made her nipples pucker more than they had been before.
Again, his knowing fingers did the things she craved, wringing a cry from her.
She had gone this far with some of the men she had dated.
She had even had one disastrous night in bed with a guy she met at a bar, after she’d drunk enough to stop thinking about what she was doing.
It had never felt good enough to want to continue.
But he was bringing forth feelings in her that she had never experienced before.
It wasn’t simply sexual need building inside her body. Her mind was tuned to his more solidly now.
He knew exactly what she needed, and he was giving her what she craved. As she arched against him and her arousal built, she drew knowledge from his mind. Knowledge that had been hidden from him.
There was a moment of startling understanding for both of them.
She was the one who spoke, feeling excitement sweep over her. “Your name is Travis. Travis Carson. You have a boat named The Far Horizon.” And she knew that he had picked the name because of a longing that he had known he could never fulfill. Until now.
The reality of that insight seemed to explode inside her, and with the throbbing came a headache that was almost unbearable.
She felt him start to pull away in fear—fear for her. God, what am I doing to you? I have to stop.
But her instinct was stronger than his fear. No! If you do, you’ll make it worse.
A kind of desperation seized her as she grabbed one of his hands and pulled it to her center—the part of her that most needed his attention.
You’re sure.
Don’t stop.
Responding to her urgency, he pressed his fingers to the throbbing place between her legs, then slid downward through her wet folds. She felt two fingers slip deep inside her, stroking in and out in a maddening rhythm.
A small part of her mind wondered how he could do that as he stood in back of her. But most of her didn’t care how he was doing it. Frantically, she moved her hips against his hand, striving to find satisfaction.
“I know. I know,” he answered, as he pressed and stroked, his every move guided by her unspoken needs. She caught his exaltation as he brought her higher and higher, and she sensed that he was experiencing what she felt in his own body.
He kept up the maddening attentions, one hand at her center, the other playing with her breasts until she felt an explosion of sensation shake her, rocking her being.
She collapsed back against him. If he had not been holding her, she would not have been able to stand. She leaned against him, her breath coming in gasps.
Across the room, she heard a sharp crack. Her eyes flew open, and she saw shards of glass from the bulb in the bedside lamp. As the noise faded, the sparks she had seen before swam around the room in an excited dance.
“My God, what?”
“Something spectacular.”
It had been that, all right. She had experienced an orgasm the likes of which she had never imagined, and with that came a stab of guilt.
“You...”
“I felt it through you,” he answered. “Like nothing I’ve ever felt in my life. All through my body, not just a spasm in my cock.”
The sparks around them had faded. He held her up as she wobbled toward the bed and fell onto the horizontal surface, where she lay with her eyes closed, breathing hard.
He came down beside her, gathering her to him.
“Thank you,” he breathed.
“I think I’m the one who should do the thanking.”
“Not worth arguing about.”
She lay in his arms, still trying to take in what had happened. She felt different now. The headache had vanished like a storm cloud after a torrential shower, and she knew that something momentous had happened to her.
* * *
Far away in New Orleans, Rachel Gregory wavered on suddenly unsteady legs and dropped the tarot card she was holding.
Her husband, Jake, was instantly at her side. “Rachel, what is it? Are you sick? What?”
When she didn’t answer, he swept her up in his arms and lowered himself into a comfortable chair where he cradled her in his lap.
She had come to her shop because she had sensed something strange happening, and she needed her cards to help her figure out what it was. Jake had come along because she was acting strangely, and he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone.
She nestled against him, dragging in drafts of air. Ever since they’d met outside the murder scene of a clandestine operative, they’d forged a bond that neither one of them had ever expected to experience.
Both of them had been alone—just like all of the children born from the crazy experiments of Dr. Douglas Solomon.
His fertility clinic had been a way to obtain human embryos he could use to create super-intelligent children.
The experiment had failed. And when the government cut off his grant money, nobody realized that his brain experiments had created something else: telepaths who felt utterly unable to form a meaningful relationship with anyone until they met another of Dr. Solomon’s children.
Then everything changed—for the spectacularly better or spectacularly worse.
Either they forged an unbreakable bond, or they died together in bed from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Rachel and Jake, along with a small group of other telepaths, were the lucky ones. At least lucky that they had survived and bonded. The downside was that they’d found themselves pursued by evil forces bent on controlling them or wiping them out.
The couple spent about half their time at the colony of telepaths they’d established at the plantation Gabriella Bordeaux had inherited from her mother.
The rest of each week, they were in New Orleans, where Jake attended to his restaurant and antique business, while Rachel did tarot card reading in her shop in the French Quarter.
Rachel blinked up at her husband. “I’m all right,” she murmured.
“What happened? Did...did you sense another couple making it past the initial crisis?”
Rachel had extraordinary mental powers and seemed to sense when two more of Dr. Solomon’s children had forged a link to each other. This time, she looked perplexed.
“What?” Jake pressed.
“It’s not like with the others.”
He grimaced. “Are...are you saying that one of them made it through their first lovemaking—and the other didn’t?”
“No, that’s not it.” Rachel licked her dry lips. “It wasn’t the same as with us or any of the others. I think...I think...”
When she hesitated, he urged, “Just spit it out.”
“Okay, I know it sounds impossible, but I’m pretty sure one of them was already dead.”
His curse filled the small room, “You must be mistaken. How could...a living person bond with a deceased one?”
“I’m just telling you what I sensed, although I could be dead wrong.”
“Dead wrong. Yeah.” His laugh wasn’t quite steady. After several moments of hesitation, he asked, “Um, which one...um...do you think is a ghost?”
She could tell from his shaky voice that he wasn’t entirely committed to the concept.
“I’m not sure. They’re pretty far away.”