Deadly Secrets, Loving Lies (30 page)

She hesitated for an instant before placing her hand in his. Just the touch of her skin against his sent an uneven jolt to his heart. Seeing her like that, seeing her hurt and broken, lying on the floor had sucked something out of him, and torn down the walls securing his heart. He felt nothing but raw now as he looked at her. He couldn’t lose her again. Not now. Not ever. No matter how many deserts and mushroom houses he had to chase her down in.

He held her hand tightly as if that alone would keep her with him, and led her out the room and down the hallway. “I’m really sorry about your dad,” he said, keeping his voice quiet and soothing—and not letting his fears shine through. He knew how much her father meant to her, even if Kyle didn’t approve of the way her dad had treated her.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“You going to be okay?” he asked, though he knew it was a stupid question. After everything that had happened today, there would be no going back to the old Genie. She wouldn’t be okay, not for a long time.

“Yes,” she murmured automatically.

They walked in silence for a few moments longer. A silence that ate away at his insides.

“So what now?” he asked, trying to keep the pleading hope out of his voice. How much of what he was feeling could she pick up on?

“What do you mean?” she asked, her tone dull, noncommittal and making him more than nervous. He’d seen Genie angry, brilliant and unreasonable, but he’d never seen her like this. Apathetic. Listless.

She definitely wasn’t okay.

“Are you going to come back to D.C. with me?” he asked.

“No.” The finality of the word, said quick and sharp, whipped through him.

He stopped walking, his hand reaching for her arm. “Wow. Not even a maybe?”
Please
, he stopped himself from saying.

“My life isn’t in D.C. Not anymore.”

“It could be,” he said, hating the hope that sounded in his voice. “I miss you. I thought…I thought we’d come back to each other these past few days.” He took a step toward her, terrified that this could be his last chance to tell her how he really felt. “I love you, Genie. I want you to come home, whatever we have to work through to make that happen. I know you’re upset and afraid and hurting. But I want you to be with me. Tell me how to make that possible.”

She looked up at him, her eyes locking on his, but there was no warmth there, only bleak isolation. “I am home, Kyle. I’m moving back into my dad’s house. There’s an FBI office here in Seattle I can transfer to. As long as you don’t tell Cameron what you overheard, there is no reason anyone has to know the truth about us. We can all go on as before.”

“Cameron knows about the Amelia Project.”

“True. But he doesn’t know what we can do. Will you keep our secret?”

He wanted to laugh, the irony of it. “Genie, how can I tell him what I don’t know? He knows as much as I do, that somehow you and Becca were able to communicate psychically with Cat who was across country. What else is there?”

He waited with baited breath as she stared at him, her eyes flat.

“If it doesn’t work out, and the field office here doesn’t have an opening, I’ll just take some time off. Get myself grounded, figure out who I am and what I want. Get a dog or something.”

“A dog?” He took a step back, his hands dropping to his sides. “Seriously? That’s all you’re going to say?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with a dog? I had a dog. Once.”

“What about us? What about everything you’re
not
telling me?”

“There is no us, Kyle. There can’t be. We don’t trust each other, and we never have. Not trusting destroyed my family. I won’t live like that any longer.”

“You’re wrong. These past few days I’ve trusted you more than I’ve trusted any other human being. I trusted you with my career. I trusted your judgment when you made plans and went off without me. I trusted you with my life. And as I recall, you trusted all those same things in me.”

She regarded him for so long he thought she’d gone catatonic. Except that her cold, hard eyes had slowly melted, so he knew she was thinking. And that maybe he had a chance.

At length, she said, “Even if that’s true… You don’t understand, Kyle. There’s more. Things that—” She shook her head. “There are too many secrets.”

“So tell me. Tell me you’re intuitive or psychic. Do you really think that would matter to me? I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I didn’t notice after four years that my partner and lover always knows what I’m thinking even before I do. And we both know I’m very good at my job. Otherwise, I’d never have accepted Cat’s
hunch
and found you and Becca in the first place.”

“Intuition is one thing…”

“Gut feelings, psychic abilities, they all come from the same place.”

Her eyes narrowed, as though she were sifting through his mind, and not liking what she saw. “Do you truly understand what you heard Becca say about what we did with Cat?”

“You mean the whole telepath-empath thing? How it works? No. Not really. But does it matter?”

She looked at him as though he had sprouted horns. “Uh, yeah it matters.”

He shrugged modestly. “Well. Not to me.”

She snapped her mouth shut. Shook her head. “Cute. But it’s obvious you don’t understand the full implications, or you wouldn’t be standing there looking so smug.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, then. Explain it to me.”

Her stance turned almost belligerent. As though she were ready to do battle. “All right. I’m an empath, Kyle. My sisters and I. I can read emotions, feel people’s—feel
your
feelings, for instance. Sometimes your emotions wash over me so intensely I can barely figure out where yours start and mine end. I feel your anger raging so hot it burns me up, and your disappointment leaves me cold and shaken. Right now, I can feel your disbelief, and the fear mushrooming within you.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Fear that what I’m saying is that I can read your mind.”

He took an uncertain step backward. “And can you? Read my mind?”

“I can read your emotions, which is just as invasive, and just as telling.”

He blinked. Speechless. Unlike inside his mind and body, where the emotions felt like an orchestra tuning up sounded. A pure cacophony. And she could read that mess? Hell, she was welcome to it.

“Okay,” he said. “No big deal.”

“Nice try,” she said witheringly. “Second thoughts?”

He remained silent while he tried to gather his thoughts, to tell her how he really felt. But she didn’t give him the chance.

“Hard to love someone who can crawl inside your head, isn’t it?”

He swallowed.
No
. No, it didn’t matter. He could live with this. People who love each other shouldn’t hide their thoughts from one another anyway.

“I love you. For you, for us, I can handle this.”

The corner of her mouth lifted. “You might be able to convince yourself for a nanosecond that you can live with it, but the truth is you won’t be able to. Never being able to keep anything from me. Never being able to have a private feeling. I know you, Kyle. And right now, as much as you don’t want to admit it, you want to turn around and run.”

No, he wouldn’t admit it. “Cat manages it,” he argued. “She’s married, and they seem really happy.”

“Cat’s husband doesn’t know.”

He was taken aback, and then appalled. “She’s never told him she can—”

“No. And for the sake of their marriage, she never will. Don’t you get that?” She pushed out a long breath and gave him an unhappy look. “There.
Now
you know the whole truth about my abilities. Surely, you have to realize we can never be together. That we can never have the picture-perfect forever you’re envisioning for us.”

“I don’t want picture-perfect. I just want you,” he said, taking a tentative step toward her.

She made an impatient gesture. “No. You
do
want that perfect-picture marriage; you always have. You see? I can feel what you want more easily than you’ll admit even to yourself. And that’s why it can’t work for us. I can’t give you the perfect marriage. And you won’t be able to lie to me that you’re okay with that. You won’t even be able to lie to yourself because I’ll know. And trust me, we all need to lie. We all need our secrets.”

“You’re wrong, Genie. You’re the one who can’t live without your secrets, not me.”

She turned away then, and walked down the long hospital corridor, back to her sisters.

And leaving him alone, once again.

Because in the end, the one who needed to hold onto her certainty that she could never lead a normal life, could never make love work, was Genie. Kyle didn’t need to be psychic to read that loud and clear.

…

It had been two days since Genie had come home, but it seemed like a year. As she walked through her father’s house, drifting from room to room, she wondered how she was ever going to live here. It was too big, too full of memories. The master bedroom was still exactly as it had been when her mother was alive. Her mom’s out-of-date clothes still hung in the closet; her shriveled makeup was still in the bathroom. Her father had never moved past her death, even to the point of sleeping in the guest room downstairs next to his study. He never got over her. Never moved on. Because of guilt?

And who did
that
remind her of?

Genie hadn’t done experiments on Kyle, nor had she killed anyone. But she was just as guilty. She’d broken his heart, and killed his hope. That was almost worse. Okay, not really. But she felt just as guilty. And so damn alone.

Cat had gone back to her family. Who knew where Becca had skipped off to? But they’d both seemed okay when they’d parted at the hospital. More than okay. Like they’d gotten closure. And then there was the big gaping hole her dad left in her life. Even though Genie hadn’t been with him all the time, she had always known he was there for her. And now…now he wasn’t.

No one was.

Genie closed her eyes against the sadness and loneliness that washed over her. The walls of her father’s home reeked of solitude, making the air so thick she could barely breathe. She wanted to be here, to feel closer to her dad, to her family, to what she’d lost. But it wasn’t helping. The house didn’t bring her comfort. How could it? The happiness she’d once had here was just a whisper in the wind, a shadow in time.

She should sell this house. Let a happy family move in. Give it a chance to exorcise the ghosts once and for all.

And her? Would she ever be happy again? Or would she live like her dad had, alone and stuck in the past, throwing herself into her work just to forget… If she actually had any work.

Kyle’s perceptive blue gaze crept into her mind. She shook her head, pushing the image away. Like her dad, happy relationships were not in the cards for her. In their world, people they loved paid the price, people who loved them—died.

Not that Kyle couldn’t take care of himself. He could. Couldn’t he?

She pushed the doubts out of her mind and wandered into her father’s study and sat down in the leather chair behind his massive desk. Her gaze wandered around the room, lingering on all the little trinkets and knick-knacks from his travels.
Things
. Pretty. Valuable. But nothing meaningful. It struck her, there was nothing personal in this room. Not a single photo of her mother, or her sisters, or herself. Nothing to prove Cat’s kids, little Mark and Annie, even existed. Nothing to remind him of the family he’d thrown away, the one he could have had back again if only he’d let himself reach out.

At the thought of his rejection, a dart of pain struck her square in the heart. Oh, she knew now that it wasn’t really a rejection. His actions had been far more complicated than that. But it hadn’t hurt any less.

Was that how Kyle was feeling? Kyle, the man she loved with all her boarded-up heart, and the hurtful rejection she’d dealt to him. According to Becca she’d thrown away the perfect man because she was scared shitless. That she was destined to be just like Daddy, miserable and alone.

Maybe Becca was right.

She glanced at the desktop again and imagined a photo of Kyle’s handsome face sitting there in a silver frame. Or one of the two of them, laughing and embracing on some far-off, sunny beach. Or of him in a gray morning suit and her in a lacy white gown…

Her eyes filled.

Was she making exactly the same bad choices as her dad? Letting him control her life, even after he’d gone? It was a sobering—and depressing—thought.

Was she destined to be alone?

She took off her mother’s necklace and dropped it in the top drawer. The truth was, she’d lost her father a long time ago. On the night her mother had died, she’d lost her entire family. She just hadn’t known it. She sat absolutely still in the silence, watching the room darken with the setting of the sun, blending into the woodwork, her body becoming just another piece of the furniture.

And it felt good to sit like that. Not to see, not to feel…anything.