Page 56 of Heart of Danger
Catherine looked at him, startled. Was he making fun of her? But looking at the grim lines of his face she decided no. He wasn’t making fun of her. That face looked as if fun was not in its vocabulary.
“Yes, well, um…” That face was so absolutely fascinating. It had been in her head for days now, had been her obsession. She’d risked everything to find the person it belonged to and she had. Mission accomplished.
But that face was even more of an obsession now that she’d found him.Concentrate, Catherine.
“This time, it was more forceful than the day before. Almost as if new neural pathways had opened up in me or in him.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. It was the same as before, very clear but somehow…weaker, too. With a sense of huge struggle to get to me. I checked his chart and he’d been sedated with a stronger than usual dose. His eyes—” She closed her own, remembering.
“His eyes?” Mac prodded.
“Tragic and lost,” she whispered. Patient Nine’s eyes still haunted her. A look so desolate it alone had been enough to propel her into possible danger. “Trying so hard to communicate with me. He was struggling desperately with the effects of the drug. It should have knocked him out yet there he was, weakened terribly, but still awake and aware. I had the sense of…of an iron will underneath it all. The sense of a man who simply would not—could not quit. Didn’t know how to quit.”
He nodded abruptly. “Yeah.”
“But the cameras showed him as awake, when he shouldn’t have been. So I squeezed his arm, closed my eyes. He got the message and pretended to sleep. Then I—” She closed her own eyes as she remembered taking that big step straight into sedition. “I changed the nurse’s orders, cancelled the next day’s dose. The next morning, from my computer, I established a long loop of Patient Nine sleeping, overrode his video monitor and pasted the loop in before I went back to him.”
“Yeah, you said.” For the first time a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “Sounds like you’re as good as Jon at hacking. That’s scary.”
Wow. This man in black, huge and strong and armed thoughtshewas scary? A tiny part of her fist-pumped the air. Yeah! Catherine Young, shy and weird science nerd, scary.
“So what happened?” The vision faded at his harsh voice. The memory was so intense it almost hurt.
“The next day we did this Vulcan mind-meld thing.”
His eyes widened. “Mind-meld?”
“Yes. It’s the only way I can describe it and believe me when I say that has never happened to me before. Not that I ever tried.” She shuddered. “I never wanted to crawl inside anyone’s head, ever, but I did then. Right inside, like falling down a rabbit hole into a completely new reality. I almost forgot I was me.”
“What did you see? Inside…inside his head.”
“You, mainly,” she said baldly. “Front and center, wearing black like you are now, only a thicker jacket that looked funny and thick black glasses. Goggles, really. At times with a helmet with a bright point of light on it. Slumped against a steel wall with half your face nearly burnt off. Then rising again, bleeding. I saw other men but they weren’t as clear to me as you were. Throughout it all, watching this battle, watching you, Nine was blasting me with a compelling desire to find you, no matter what. Like I’d die if I didn’t find you.”
Desire wasn’t the right word, it had been more than that. A compulsion—a dark one. A craving. A deep drive to find Mac—a man she’d never heard of, never seen before, a man she had no reason to believe even existed in real life as opposed to existing only in the smoky ruins of Nine’s head—had been as strong as the drive to breathe. Vitally important.
“Though you don’t know me.” His voice sounded thoughtful.
“That’s right. I had no idea who you were.” She didn’t want to but she leaned forward, for no other reason than simply to be closer. Shades of the compulsion she’d been infected with, but also sheer…attraction. This man was like a lodestone, like some huge planet exerting gravity to her satellite moon. “I don’t know how to describe what went on. He wasn’t speaking to me except in images and the images weren’t in any order. But what blasted through me was your face, a name—Mac—and Mount Blue.”
His face tightened and his eyes narrowed.
She sighed, preparing herself to navigate the shoals of suspicion. If she weren’t in her own head, if she were Mac, she’d be suspicious, too.
“I understand you, um, didn’t—don’t—want to be found. That was in the mix too, the fact that finding you would be hard, dangerous. The emotions, the visions were clear about that. Nine wasn’t tricking me into thinking it would be easy. He knew it was be tough going. But then he also gave me a way to get to you. He was sure you’d be somewhere on the mountain. What was in my head was a trail, a dirt road. Then a road block, something that would stop me. I was supposed to go around it or over it, somehow get past it and continue. And then I saw myself stopped in my car. I couldseeit. Me, in a stalled car, unable to go any further. I should just sit and wait and you would find me. And when you found me, I was supposed to give you that small pin. I have no idea if he knew what season it is because the images in my head were of summer not winter. The road was a dirt track but clear. Maybe he didn’t realize we’re in the dead of winter. Dementia patients lose all sense of time and of the seasons and I think he’d been drugged for a long time on top of that, though his charts showed nothing. Still, yes, it was incredibly stupid of me to set out on a quest to find you when the forecast was for snow. All I can say is that it was either try to find you or have a heart attack or have my head blow up, the drive to find you was that compelling.”
She let out a deep breath. There. It had all been said.
“Show me,” he said suddenly, fire in his eyes.
Show me. Her breath caught.
All of a sudden, an image bloomed in her head of her stripping for him. Standing up, pulling her sweater up and over her head, shimmying out of her pants and panties, unhooking her bra. All while he watched with those dark dark eyes which had turned blazing hot.
Show me. The vision came unbidden but she couldn’t pretend it came out of nowhere. It came from somewhere deep inside her, some place that had iron filings all of a sudden aligned with the magnet that was Mac.
A man who was in hiding, a man who distrusted her. A man who might at any moment blast her mind into next week, as he so charmingly put it.
And right now, every move he made sent made the muscles deep in her belly pull and clench.
“What?”
