Page 33 of Lion's Share
“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea,” I said slowly, and he shrugged.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” he said, steadily meeting my gaze. “Not anymore.”
Maybe he didn’t. He’d certainly come clean about his original motives for coming to Silver Hollow…up to and including how he’d met my long-lost father in a bar in San Francisco.
Still, even if Ben was facing me with a clean conscience, I didn’t know whether it was such a great idea to deliberately attempt to walk around in his thoughts.
“I don’t know….” I began, but he only gave my fingers a gentle squeeze.
“It’s okay,” he said. “If nothing else, this could help you prove whether you have any conscious control over this gift, or whether it’s something that comes to you on its own terms.”
Gift. There was a joke. I didn’t want to have glimpsed Rebecca Morse’s thoughts, and I really didn’t want to see Ben’s, either. If I were going to be perfectly honest with myself, I wanted to go back to the time before my mother and grandmother disappeared, when there might have been a little weirdness in my life, but nothing like this. I’d been moving steadily toward getting my DVM degree, not thinking about the future much beyond going to work in an established vet clinic for a few years before I struck out on my own.
Of course, back then, I hadn’t known Ben Sanders, and now that he was a part of my life, I knew I wouldn’t willingly give him up.
Either way, while some strange talent might have begun to awaken in me, I still didn’t have the ability to change the past. The only thing I could do was try to keep blundering forward and hope it would all turn out okay in the end.
“I’m not even sure how it all works,” I said, a note of helplessness in my voice that I didn’t much like. Wasn’t I supposed to be the tough, capable one, the person who kept going no matter what? I told myself I needed to keep it together as I added, “It’s not as if I did anything consciously when I heard what Agent Morse was thinking.”
“Maybe that’s the secret,” Ben replied. “You don’t need to actually do anything. Just be still and see what happens.”
Easier said than done. I’d always been one of those people whose thoughts were going a mile a minute, and slowing down and being calm and Zen wasn’t exactly in my repertoire.
But because he was looking at me so earnestly, an encouraging light in his hazel eyes, I knew I needed to try.
“Okay.”
Gently, I pulled my hand out from under his, since I thought it might be better not to be touching one another, just in case I was able to detect something of his thought processes simply through the pressure of his fingers on mine. He didn’t protest, a signal that he understood what I was doing.
And I sat there quietly and calmly, letting myself breathe in and out…and not a damn thing happened.
“Nothing,” I said after an uncomfortable minute or two had passed.
“Not even an inkling?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Whatever that was with Agent Morse earlier today, it came on its own volition. I don’t think this is the sort of thing I can make happen on my own.”
And I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. No, I didn’t want to be a full-on psychic, but at the same time, I didn’t much like the idea of other people’s thoughts popping into my brain at inopportune moments.
Not that it looked as if I was going to have much control over the situation either way.
Ben was silent for a moment, and then he gave me a smile that didn’t look forced at all.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk to clear our heads.”
He stayed with me all afternoon, and we had a quiet dinner at the Sundown Grille, one where we didn’t talk about anything except the sort of stuff anyone in Silver Hollow might have been discussing right then — the recall election, the power outages, the possibility that we might get a streak of above-average temperatures the next week.
Listening to us, no one would have ever thought we were actually dealing with magical portals and unicorns and griffins…and unwanted telepathic powers.
At the end of the evening, he kissed me goodbye — a warm, lingering kiss, one that told me he wasn’t put off by that weird psychic flash I’d experienced earlier in the day and that he didn’t much care if I was able to see into his thoughts.
All in all, I was feeling pretty good about life at that particular moment.
And then I saw a glimmer of white through the kitchen window, and I realized the unicorn had come onto my property again.
I put down the glass I’d just gotten out of the cupboard and hurried into the yard. Even then, I knew I was going to be too late, since the unicorn was already vanishing into the outer edges of the forest.
But he’d left something behind.
