Cipher
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Andrew lay sprawled out in nothing but his jeans. Comfortable as the couch looked, he was too damn tall for it, and a dangerous tenderness stirred inside her. He was exhausted because he probably hadn’t slept a damn second of the fifteen hours she’d spent unconscious. Two straight days of driving, fighting and worrying, and the stubborn bastard wouldn’t even claim the bed when she was short enough to fit on the couch just fine.
Kat smoothed blond strands of hair from his forehead and smiled. “Hey, sleepy. Why don’t you get up and pass out someplace where your feet don’t dangle off the edge, huh?”
He mumbled something unintelligible and rolled over, almost pitching himself off the couch in the process. Kat planted both hands on his shoulders and pushed him back to the cushions. “Wake up, Andrew.”
His hands latched around her arms, and he lifted her clear off her feet and dropped her to the couch. The breath whooshed out of her, stealing her squeaked protest. When he loomed over her, his eyes were blank, dark. Unseeing.
Three heartbeats stretched out to a lifetime. Her stun gun was in the other room, but even if she had it in her damn hand she wasn’t sure she could have forced herself to use it on Andrew. Knowing it was futile, she couldn’t stop her hands from flying up, bracing against the dangerously hot skin of his chest. Pushing him was like trying to push a brick wall, and the first hint of real fear uncurled inside her. “Andrew–”
His eyes cleared, and a roar of fear eclipsed that tiny thread inside. His fear, not her own, though it vanished in the space of a heartbeat as Andrew released her. “Sorry, that was–sorry.”
She hadn’t expected her powers to recharge so quickly. After a burnout it could take days for them to come back online at full strength. Kat reinforced her shields to be safe, but didn’t move. She barely breathed. “I know better than to poke a shapeshifter when he’s asleep. It’s my fault.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Something inside her broke at the utter lack of self-forgiveness in his eyes. He looked exhausted. Worn out. “I was just going to let you know that I’m ordering some room service…and that you can take the bed. I’ll fit on the couch better than you do.”
He rubbed both hands through his hair and stood. “It’s a king. Plenty big enough for both of us.”
Share a bed with him? If she’d had a masochistic streak, maybe. Or if he was going to sleep in a parka. Fear had a funny way of waking up all of her nerves, and a lot of them seemed to be tracing the memory of his chest under her palms.
Which made her feel warm–and she could only hope it wasn’t an obvious kind of warm. “We’ll figure it out. You need to eat something before you go back to sleep. Wanna look at the room-service menu?”
Andrew shook his head. “Whatever you get is fine. I’m not picky.”
Kat swallowed and eased herself upright, then rose to her feet. “Okay, but if you leave me to my own devices, I’m ordering like, every expensive dessert on the menu.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Two for me.”
Maybe that was how she looked when she was shaking and scared that her empathy was a weapon that would destroy the people she loved. Not the mirror she’d expected to look into, but a powerful one.
So she did what he’d done. Reached up and framed his face with her hands, and shivered at the texture of his beard against her palms. “I will never be afraid of you, Andrew Callaghan.”
His chest heaved with shaking breaths, and he groaned as he grabbed her wrists. “It’s dangerous, Kat. I’m dangerous.”
“So am I.” She swiped her thumbs over his cheeks and willed him to believe the same words he’d told her the day before. “Andrew, I’m still mostly burned out, and you’ve got strong shields for someone who’s not a psychic. But I couldn’t just hurt you–I could destroy you. I could drive you to your knees and make you crawl for me. I could take away everything you are.”
He closed his eyes, but he didn’t release her. “Then that makes this a doubly bad idea.”
Andrew was going to walk away from her again, and the tense parts of her that had started to unwind over the last few days would shatter. The only way to save anything was to let him go before he came up with a polite, stilted reason. “I understand.”
“No. No, you really don’t.”
He bent his head and kissed her.
The world stopped.
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The series:
This book is available from Samhain Publishing. You can buy it here in e-format.
, someone breaks into the apartment of one of the secondary characters. It was a tiny detail, but it was one of the many ones we put there deliberately, knowing the day would come when that apartment break-in would set the stage for the fourth book in the series.
