shook his head. “I might have agreed with you before I read the Shadowseeker books. But I think you’ve been close to me all along.”
She was shredding the edge of her paper coffee cup into a fringe. An unconscious thing she did whenever she didn’t have a pencil in her hand. Another of Edie’s little closet full of compulsions, as her mother had called them. She tried to stop, then gave into it, and started tearing again. Why not? What the hell? She had nothing to prove to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, watching her precisely tearing uniform strips in the cup’s edge. “I didn’t mean to make you nervous.”
She kept her mouth shut and her eyes on her cup fringe. The silence grew impossibly long, but she resisted the impulse to pump chatty filler into it. After several quiet minutes, he spoke again.
“What happened, in the bookstore? The girl ahead of me in line?”
The awful memory made her gut clench. “Oh, that,” she mumbled. “Just my evil genie, poking out its head.”
He waited for more, but she no longer freely confessed what happened when she sketched people. It never went over well. Her parents had gone bananas. Her therapist tried to put her on antipsychotic meds. The one time she’d confessed it to a boyfriend, he’d dropped her flat and never called again. Other friends and lovers had found out, too, when one of her fits came over her. They always had the same reaction, in the end. So she didn’t go there, anymore. Not ever.
“Tell me,” he prompted, gently.
She opened her mouth, let it fall out. Secrecy seemed irrelevant with this guy. After all, he was already inside her head. He lived there.
“It happens when I sketch,” she said. “I sometimes, ah…I pick up things. From their heads. I, um, tune into their frequency, I guess.”
He didn’t look alarmed, or even surprised. “What did you see?”
“I saw her boyfriend strangling her to death,” Edie said.
His eyelids contracted, a quick flinch. “Ouch. Jesus,” he said. “How reliable are these perceptions?”
“I can’t verify all of them,” she said. “Of those I can verify, one hundred percent. I’ve had no luck in changing outcomes, but not for lack of trying. I saw my mother’s heart attack, but I couldn’t persuade her to go to the doctor. I sketched my father a few weeks ago in a restaurant, and I…ah, never mind. So what do you want? An introduction to my father? I’m not really the one to ask, with the low opinion he has of me.”
“No.” He patted her hand. “I don’t want to make difficulties for you. I can get in touch with your father and Helix with no introduction.”
“So what do you want, then?” She felt lost.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just keep existing.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, come on. Give me a freaking break.”
A shadow of a smile flashed over his face. “I don’t know. You could walk with me.” His voice sounded almost shy. “Just keep me company. Talk to me for a while. I like the way it feels. To be with you.”
Did he? Wow. He knew all her deepest, darkest secrets, and he wasn’t afraid of broadcasting something compromising to her? Was his heart so pure? Was he so fearless, so free of shame? Maybe he just didn’t believe her. Maybe he thought she was nuts. That was a classic.
She was flushed, charmed. Was he coming on? She didn’t have a lot of experience with come-ons. She wouldn’t recognize one if it bit her in the butt. He fell into place beside her on the sidewalk, and they walked in silence. So much for keeping him company. She didn’t have a thing to say. She was flustered, bashful.
She reflected on what he’d told her. He was a man who had made his peace with silence and solitude, and it had changed him, made him different from other men. She felt it. With him, silence could be as eloquent as speech. Each silence had its own tone and flavor, its own subtle tints and nuances. Each silence said something specific. And she understood each one. Or thought she did. Maybe she was projecting, or deluded. But she couldn’t resist that leap of silent understanding. Raw emotion in the center of her chest. Emotion she could barely control.
Play it cool. This man is a stranger, babbled the shrill voice of reason. She knew nothing about him, except that he was more or less brain damaged, full of weird notions, and intensely interested in her.
She should not be having these trembly, hot, gooey, hopeful feelings. It was fatuous. Dangerous. Stupid, too. She was going to get taken for a ride, made to feel like an idiot at best, and worst, who knew?
So run, the voice of reason bleated. Say hey, it’s been real. Flag a cab. Sprint. Parrish bodyguards were hovering nearby. They would pick her up, give her a ride home. Lecture her, too. Tell her dad.
He took her hand.
She dragged in air, as energy flashed through her. Every cell in her body got a sharp, wonderful little jolt of it. She tried to breathe.
Her hand liked his hand. Oh, so much. It was big, smooth. Callused skin, like polished wood. Warm and strong. She was too shy to meet his eyes. Her thoughts scrambled helplessly, here and there.
She couldn’t bear to pull her hand away. Tingling rightness flowed from him, right up her arm. It uncoiled slowly through her, swirling, pooling in the classic places. Tightening her nipples. Making her thighs clench, her clit tingle and throb. Just from holding hands.
They walked, silently, hands linked, eyes down. Barely noticing where they went. Over the Steel Bridge, traffic roaring around them, but it didn’t matter. They were struck mute. Neither was willing to break the surface tension of that huge, gentle shyness. It was a rainbow-tinted bubble. Improbable and lovely. She would just let it float along, shining bright, and enjoy it while she could. It would meet its end soon enough.
Bubbles always did. It was a natural law.
She didn’t realize where she was walking until she was standing in front of her own more or less grotty building on NE Helmut Street.
She hadn’t meant to bring him home.
Oh, hell. Get real. Maybe she had.
CHAPTER
7
Edie Parrish had loosened gravity’s hold upon him. Kev floated beside her, lucky for the touch of that slender hand to anchor him to earth, or he’d float right off up into the sky, as light as a cloud.
He was so jazzed, he could hardly breathe. Edie Parrish blew his mind. So beautiful, so smart. Deep and strong. Thorny like a rose. The photograph hadn’t begun to catch all that she was.
His memory of her child self was frozen in time, like a medieval icon, but this Edie Parrish was no icon. She was warm, soft, perfect in every delicate detail. That translucent skin made her look like a forest sylph. Big, expressive silver-gray eyes, rimmed with indigo, shadowed with delicate purple smudges. Sooty lashes. Her face was narrow and delicate, brows dark and tilted up. Her hair a mass of unruly dark waves that brushed the top of her rounded ass.
She dressed down, tried to hide, but she
