Page 74 of I Dream of Danger
He totally ignored the stunned expressions on Mac’s and Jon’s faces. They looked as if Nick had sprouted wings and flown loops in the air.
“Hi, honey,” he smiled. He felt new muscles in his face, because sure as shit he hadn’t done much smiling these past years. He’d never been a smiler. But seeing Elle sitting there, now officially a part of Haven and officially his—well, that was worth a smile. “Everything okay?”
She sighed and leaned into him. Oh yeah. Nick put an arm around her and didn’t know who was more comforted. Him or her. Whatever it was that was coming, they’d face it together.
“We need to talk,” Catherine announced. “Because there’s something we’re all going to have to decide. I’m going to let Elle talk, but first I think you all should know something about her. You know that I am an empath? That I can read emotions and, lately, thoughts? Though—trust me on this—I make a real effort to stay out of your heads.”
Nick and Jon chuckled. Right now if she was in Nick’s head, she’d back out fast, blushing hard. Because a part of him was sitting there ready to absorb information. A briefing. This had all the hallmarks of a briefing, and he’d been doing briefings all his adult life. So he was paying attention, but there was another bit of him free to just…play.
Think about other things.
Like, how incredibly soft Elle’s hand was. And her cheek. And her neck. She was just so fucking soft all over. It seemed impossible to him that human skin could feel that soft. How he’d loved kissing her all over, moving his mouth down over her pale breasts, heartbeat showing in the left breast, his hand moving down over that flat belly, down to the cloud of light-brown hair covering her sex…
“Elle?”
Nick started slightly. Fuck. He had the beginning of a hard-on. Christ. Bad news. Mac and Jon were as observant as any two men could possibly be. Had they noticed? Nick crossed his legs uncomfortably, glad that he was too tanned to blush. Not that he ever blushed, but still.
Catherine was standing in front of them, holding her hand out to Elle.
Shit. Nick had completely zoned out. If Mac knew, he’d have his ass.
Well, Elle was moving to stand beside Catherine, so he wouldn’t be tempted to think of how very, very soft she was between her…
“You know me, of course. My name’s Elle Connelly.” He still couldn’t get used to that name. And it still bugged him that she’d changed it. “I’m a biologist with an interest in the biology of the human brain. There’s one other thing about me you should know.” Elle glanced at Catherine, who nodded imperceptibly. “I can astrally project.”
Whoa. Nick sat forward with a frown. What?
Jon leaned forward too. “The fuck?”
Catherine held up her hand, palm out. “I know this is going to be hard to absorb, but you’ve taken me on board, so this should be a bit easier to swallow.”
Damn straight it had been hard to swallow that Catherine could read emotions by touch. Nick and Jon had been hostile to her, though happy for Mac that he’d found someone who could put up with his ugly mug. But when Catherine came to them with some totally crazy story about Lucius Ward being held prisoner in a clinic not far from Mount Blue and wanting them to rescue him…well he and Jon had nearly mutinied.
Lucius had abandoned them. Betrayed them for money and left them for dead on a bogus mission that had blown up in their faces. The three of them, Mac and Nick and Jon, had taken the fall for blowing up a lab. Their intel—false of course—had been that the lab was brewing a weaponized version of bubonic plague. A nightmare. One of the many nightmares Ghost Ops had been set up to avert. They’d gone in, blown up the lab, killed what turned out to be totally innocent scientists, and had been taken down and accused of treason. Lucius had disappeared and they read afterward that he’d had a big financial stake in the lab’s rival. So they’d been sold out by a leader they revered.
That was what they knew—it was the new bedrock of their lives, and here Catherine came, leading Mac around by the dick with some cockeyed story about Lucius not betraying them after all, that only a shit-for-brains who was getting laid like nobody’s business—that would be Mac, who in his previous life had been as unassailable as a stone cliff—could believe.
What was the proof?
Catherine had touched Lucius and had somehow learned the truth. So they had to go risk their lives on a wild goose chase on the say-so of some dame who’d found them, when the entire US government and its military hadn’t been able to find them.
Both Nick and Jon had been about a hair from pulling a gun and tying Catherine up—probably having to shoot Mac in the process—when she’d touched them.
Nick had never known anything like it. It was as if an entire world was there, in her touch. And she knew everything about him. It just slipped from his skin to hers. Everything he’d kept absolutely hidden for almost ten years—it was somehow right there for Catherine to read.
She didn’t know Elle’s name and she didn’t know the details, but she caught exactly his sorrow and his deep desperation at not knowing if Elle was alive or dead, sick or well. Happy or needing him. She’d known all of that at a touch. And she knew something about Jon as well, though he wasn’t talking and neither was she. But whatever it was she’d found out, it hurt and it was true.
So, yeah, Nick and Jon were going to believe her if she talked about woo-woo stuff. Mac wasn’t an issue. Catherine could say that the moon was a hologram and Mac would believe her.
There was silence in the room. Nick frowned. “What does that mean exactly?”
This time Elle spoke. “It means that I have out-of-body experiences during sleep. Except I’m not really asleep when that happens. It’s more like a coma. I had an EEG of my brain during an out-of-body experience and it almost flatlined. It’s only in the past year that I’ve tried to analyze this, as opposed to hating it. Three months ago, I enrolled in a program to study what used to be called paranormal abilities. The study was funded by Arka Pharmaceuticals.”
Nick’s teeth ground and Mac issued a low growl. Arka Pharmaceuticals had kidnapped and tortured Lucius and three of their teammates—Romero, Lundquist, and Pelton—nearly to death. So anything connected to Arka was pretty much on their shit list.
Elle pressed a button, the lights dimmed, and a hologram lit up. There were ten faces in two rows of five. Nick saw Elle in the second row. “These are the people who were originally enrolled in the program, and two of us, myself and Sophie Daniels, drew up the experimental protocol and oversaw the tests.”
One of the photographs zoomed out and filled the hologram. A pretty dark-haired woman with deep-blue eyes.
