Page 48 of Heart of Danger
Where she touched him, heat rose, painless fire, searing him inside out. Light glowed from him, from her. For a second he wondered whether they’d been irradiated, it was that intense. Her hands melted into his wrists, or at least that was what it felt like. As if they were fused, as if they would never be separated again. Tendrils from her hands sank into his, invisible tendrils tethering him to her. He couldn’t move his hands, not an inch. The mere thought of separation from her was too painful to even think about.
He felt his blood pulse into her body, he felt parts of her inside him. He could hear her heart beat. He could freakingfeelher heartbeat—not through his hands but through his own heart, because it was as if her heart were beating inside his chest.
Light and heat filled him up and his head buzzed, became light, threatened to float away. He swayed as if in a wind, but there was no wind here, only her hands on him, in him, reaching deep inside him.
An explosion behind his eyes, lighting up everything in the room with a surreal light, like a flashbang only without the noise. Everything brilliantly illuminated as if on a stage.
Emotions. Intense and sharp. Fear and loneliness and desire. Intense desire but it didn’t have the taste of his own desire. Someone else’s desire. Someone else’s emotions. Somehow he was in someone else’s head and he was feeling desire, hot lust for someone…
He saw himself from the outside, as if looking out through someone else’s eyes. Throughhereyes. Catherine’s eyes…
…so very attractive…
The vagrant thought, as clear as if someone had whispered directly into his ear, wafted across his consciousness. It galvanized him, broke the spell.
Holy shit, that thought was abouthim! He jerked away from her touch as if from an electric prod, his movement so abrupt her plate toppled and fell to the floor.
He didn’t pay it any attention, he barely noticed over the sudden thudding of his heart, the adrenalin of danger pumping way too late through his system. Whatever the fuck had happened to him, he hadn’t been fast enough to stop it. No warning signs at all, just that one lightning-fast fatal blow.
“Shit!” His fists clenched. He couldn’t hit a woman, didn’t have it in him, but by God…He bent and put his face next to hers, making sure he didn’t touch her anywhere.
She’d gone dead white, gray eyes huge in a shocked face, pupils dilated. She shrank back, face pinched, nostrils white with tension.
“Did you just drug me?” he barked.
She had to swallow first. Even her lips had gone white. “No,” she whispered in a shocked voice. “No, of course not. I keep telling you that.”
Mac picked up the sheet and grabbed her hands using the sheet as a barrier. It would have been better to have latex gloves but he didn’t have them with him. The sheet would have to do. And even if it didn’t protect him, it provided at least a psychological barrier because he knew, the certainty like a deep dull ache inside him, that touching her was bad for him.
Or good for him.
Or…something. Something overwhelming.
He scrutinized the palms of her hands, checking carefully, inch by inch. There had to be something there…maybe microneedles embedded in the skin, some capsule that she could break and that worked on contact. Something.
He was rough but she didn’t protest. Just let him study her hands. They were beautiful. Slender, long-fingered, soft. A pianist’s hands, an artist’s hands. And however hard he looked, devoid of any drug delivery systems he could see.
He looked up from her hands, which trembled in his. “Do you have some way to hypnotize me?”
Her voice was stronger now. “No.”
“Then tell me what the fuck just happened here!” He threw her hands down, took a step back, furious. “I fucking touch you and it’s like my lights went out. What the fuck was that?”
She straightened up, pulling up the bedclothes, bunching them around her neck as if a few yards of material could provide a barrier if he chose to attack her.
If he had been capable of laughter just then, he’d have laughed because a blanket wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t going to hurt her, but he was goddamned going to find out what had happened. How the fuck she’d caused him to lose control of his senses just then.
And how the hell she’d managed to convince him that a woman who looked like her could feel desire for him. That was a crazy trick.
Hypnosis made sense. He’d had an out of body experience for just a second, as if seeing himself outside himself. And he’d hypnotized himself into feeling she wanted him. What he’d felt was his own freaking desire, not hers. Those whispered words, there and gone, not a voice really but the faintest breath of a thought…so attractive.
It had seemed to come from her. Somehow she’d planted lies in his head, hallucinations, because no way was Catherine Young going to findhimattractive.
He was a man of iron self control but he was hanging onto it by a thread. He wanted to smash something, hurl something across the room, break something.She’d been in his freaking head!
She’d come here, found him against all the odds. Come with this hare-brained story of Patient Number Nine, which he and Nick and Jon had half-believed so maybe the brainwashing had started right away. Then she insinuated herself into their community—what was that if not the work of an infiltrated agent? She worked for their enemy anyway—Arka.
Arka dealt with some nasty shit. It was altogether possible she carried a canister of something—some new psychotropic drug that altered reality.
