Strangers of the Night Read online

  “Like children bred and raised in a cult designed to create extrasensory mental abilities?” He turned to face her. His headache was softening. His mouth, though, had gone dry, his throat scratchy. If he’d been asleep as long as she’d said, he’d missed several doses of meds. This was going to hurt.

  “Yes, like that. Are you sure you feel all right?”

  He frowned. “Of course I don’t feel all right. I just got busted out of a top secret research facility to prevent my murder. Unless you still plan to off me.”

  “No!” She looked startled and shook her head, moving closer. “No, look. I know you have no reason to trust me...”

  “I can feel if you’re lying to me,” Jed interrupted in a low voice, very conscious of her body heat and the faint smell of her shampoo.

  She studied him for a moment with a curious tilt of her head. A faint smile. “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you feel anything else about me?”

  Jed looked into her eyes. “Yes. I can tell that you want to touch me. I told you, I don’t have a fever. But if you need to check, go ahead.”

  “I don’t need to check you for a fever if you’re feeling all right. But I do want to touch you. Yes. Can you feel that?”

  He could feel something inside her, but it was so much a part of everything that made Samantha who she was that he couldn’t untangle it from the rest. She moved closer to him. He tensed, unsure of what she meant to do. At the brief brush of her fingertips across his forehead, he sighed and closed his eyes.

  “What do you feel about me?” she asked quietly.

  He tried to show her, but although it was easy enough to make things happen around him, making a person feel something was completely different. There was more to it than emotion. Desire. Longing. Anxiety. There was also sensation.

  The touch of fingertips on the inside of his wrist.

  The smell of her shampoo.

  The sound of her voice.

  He tried his best to give her all of this, everything that made up who she was, to him. Convinced he’d failed, Jed opened his eyes. Samantha’s eyes glistened with tears.

  She kissed him.

  Chapter 17

  Even as Samantha slanted her mouth against Jed’s, she wondered if he was manipulating her into this. She knew all too well what his talents could do. Yet, there’d never been anything in her life that she wanted to do more in that moment than to kiss him, and she hadn’t even tried to resist it.

  His lips were soft and warm. They parted instantly when she put her mouth on his. He was surprised, she thought as she cupped the back of his neck. He wasn’t trying to get his tongue inside her mouth. She’d startled him. It didn’t matter. The kiss deepened in the next minute, and she couldn’t tell and didn’t care who’d initiated it. There was an ebb and flow to this kiss she could not deny.

  Neither of them could.

  She did not break the kiss, but she did ease her mouth away. She pressed her cheek to his. Her other hand went to his chest, over his heart. Hers was beating so hard she could feel the throb of it at the base of her throat, and after so many months of checking his vitals, she could tell at once that his was beating much faster than normal, too.

  “The other day. When you were giving me the checkup,” he said.

  She remembered. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have...it was wrong to do that to you.”

  He was serious. She sat back, frowning. “What?”

  “I shouldn’t have touched you like that, without asking. Without you saying it was okay.”

  “You didn’t touch me, Jed.”

  He furrowed his brow. “I did, and you know it. I don’t have to use my hands. You know that, too.”

  “Did it feel like I didn’t want you to?” She sat back, but only a little. She let the hand over his heart slip down his arm to circle his wrist. Then to take his hand, linking their fingers. He wouldn’t look at her.

  She’d never seen Jed react emotionally to much of anything. She’d long assumed it was the meds they kept him on. The years of isolation and lack of normal social contact. Now, though, he pressed his lips together and swallowed hard, blinking away tears.

  “Jed.” She turned his face gently to face hers. “Did it ever feel to you like I didn’t want you to touch me?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted, and pushed away from her to stand and pace.

  She’d chosen the small, empty bedroom off the safe house kitchen because of its first-floor access, in case they needed to get out the windows, which had been covered with blackout curtains. It was little more than the size of a walk-in closet, barely big enough for the sagging twin mattress on the floor, so he didn’t have much room to move. He spun on his heel when she stood, moving in front of him so he had no choice but to face her.

  “You know how I feel. If I had ever once thought or felt like you were manipulating or hurting me in any way, you’d have known it.” Samantha wasn’t positive if this was true. There’d been hundreds of tests done to research what Jed could do. Nothing about how it affected him emotionally or mentally. “Right?”

  Reluctantly, he nodded. “Yes.”

  “You didn’t hurt me. You didn’t do anything to me that I didn’t...want.” It was her turn to swallow hard.

  “But why?” he demanded. “Why would you want anything like that from me?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Pity,” he said with a sneer that hurt her to see. “Curiosity.”

  She couldn’t deny that at least a little bit of that was true. But not all of it. “Why does anyone ever want something like that from another person? Who knows why two people connect? I’ve never been able to figure it out. And you know what, I’m not sure I care, to be honest. I haven’t been with anyone for a long time. Sex feels good—”

  He snort laughed, half choking. “Sex!”

  “It feels good,” she continued. “Especially with another person, especially with someone you care about. So maybe it wasn’t right, what you did. It wasn’t right for me to allow it or enjoy it, then. I was your caregiver. It was crossing a line. But it felt good and I didn’t stop it. So, who’s the one in the wrong?”

  “It made you feel good?”

  Heat crept up inside her as she lifted her chin. “Yes. Very good.”

  “It wasn’t sex,” Jed said. “Not real sex.”

  He was a virgin, Samantha thought suddenly. All those years locked up. She wanted to take a step back, but his expression told her he knew what she was thinking. She didn’t move. She reached for him instead, snagging his wrist to tug him a step closer to her.

  “You didn’t do anything to me that I didn’t want, even if I didn’t know until you did it that I wanted it. And I won’t...” She coughed lightly, unsure how to go on without embarrassing them both. Screw that, she thought. They were on the run from people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill them. She’d gone off plan and had no backup from the organization who’d hired her to protect him. They were in a tiny box of a room with nothing more than a candle and a mattress on the floor. If she couldn’t be honest with him about this now, there wasn’t going to be any better time. “I won’t touch you unless you want me to.”

  “How could you think I wouldn’t want you to?”

  Because it was crazy, she thought as Jed moved toward her. Because there wasn’t time for this here or now. When he kissed her, there was no more thinking. No more excuses. Jed kissed her as though he’d been waiting a lifetime for the chance to put his mouth on hers, and in a way, maybe he had.

  At the stroke of his tongue, Samantha gave a small moan. His hand tightened in her hair while the other found her hip and anchored there. He pulled her against him, and the heat of his erection nudged her through the thin fabr