“Just tell me who you are and why you’re here.” She started toward the trail again and this time he fell into step beside her. When he made a movement toward the inside of his shirt, her breath hitched, but he only pulled out his wallet and flipped it open, holding it out to her.
His eyes fascinated her. Midnight blue, so blue they were almost black, unblinking and intent, much like those of the predator she’d been studying for the last year. He focused completely on his prey, and right now that was Tansy. He held her mesmerized, unable to look away from him until he allowed it.
The movement of the wallet allowed her to tear her gaze away from those dangerous eyes, and she glanced with dismay at his identification. FBI. Only she didn’t believe it. Everything about him screamed military. She shook her head. “I’m not buying your story.” She started up the trail with a forced sigh. “Just tell me what you want and get off my mountain.”
“I need your help.”
Her heart stuttered. The breath caught in her lungs and stayed there. Fear skated through her body. Her throat closed, panic rising while she battled with the sudden roaring in her mind as a door creaked open and voices began to spill out. She shook her head, afraid to speak, afraid she might scream, afraid once she started she would never stop. She counted her steps instead, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, forcing her mind to go blank, forcing air through her lungs while she mutely shook her head.
“Tansy?” There was concern in his tone.
She’d gone pale beneath her tan, and little beads of perspiration dotted her forehead. Tansy wiped them away with a leaden hand, holding the door closed while it shook and moaned, pushing hard against her will. “Go away.” Her voice was a mere whisper of sound.
He kept pace easily, even though he wasn’t walking on the trail, but in the rougher, thicker grass. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Go away, Mr. Montague. I can’t help you.” She continued to climb, averting her face so that it was impossible for him to see her mouth trembling.
“That’s not the truth, Tansy. I’ve got a file on you four inches thick. You’re the real thing, and whatever bullshit you’ve been feeding law enforcement across the country about losing your abilities in a climbing accident doesn’t cut it with me.”
She swallowed hard, braced herself, and turned to face him. “If you have a file on me, I’m certain it included the fact that I spent eight months in a hospital. You seem a very thorough kind of man to me, and you’re not FBI, so your little badge doesn’t cut it with me.”
Kadan moved in behind her, crowding so close she could feel the heat emanating from his body. She might look angry, but he was far too well trained not to have noticed the hint of desperate fear in her eyes and she
detested
that he knew she was afraid. “Not of you,” she murmured aloud, pouring contempt into her voice. “Never of you. Get off my mountain and leave me alone.”
“What happened?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath, her fingers closing to form two tight fists. “You’re a perfect stranger—a man I don’t want to know. I’m a photographer, working with permits on this reserve. As far as I know, you don’t have the right to be here, or to question me. If you really are FBI, then go talk to my lawyer.”
“Now you’re just being rude.”
She felt rude. He was getting to her because she was so shaken. Tansy took another breath and let it out.
The sudden buildup of hostile energy hit her. It was hard and fast and came from just beyond Kadan.
Kadan felt the surge of aggressive, threatening energy blast him, and he caught Tansy by the wrist, whirling around, thrusting her behind him, placing his body between her and danger. She stumbled and nearly went down, but he continued moving in a circle, pulling his weapon, finger on the trigger, squeezing as the enemy attacked.
No! Back!
The voice filled his mind even as Tansy leapt over him, directly in between his gun and the attacking cougar. His finger was already pulling the trigger, his aim true. He managed to jerk just enough to miss Tansy by a breath, but the mountain lion hit her full-force on her chest, driving her back and into him so they both went down. For one moment he stared into the cat’s eyes, its breath hot on his face, and then it was gone, leaping off Tansy into heavy brush and disappearing.
Everything in him stilled. Kadan locked his arms around Tansy and rolled, pulling her beneath him so he could run his hands over her body, checking for damage. “Talk to me.”
The cougar had knocked the breath from her body, hitting her with the force of a locomotive. She’d likely be bruised, and she wasn’t getting air, but there were no slash marks as he’d expected. The cat had pulled in her claws when she struck, and she hadn’t bitten Tansy’s exposed throat—and neither had his bullet hit her. He hung his head for a moment, breathing his fear away.
“What the hell were you thinking, protecting the cat like that?” he demanded, fury replacing terror. “I could have shot you. I came a whisper away from killing you.” He found he was shaking her, and, shocked, he drew a deep breath, trying to pull back from the edge of disaster. He was trembling, something he never did, but he had come so close to blowing her head off. It took a moment for him to realize that his hands were wrapped around her slender throat, thumbs pressed up into her jaw, tipping her head up so her huge eyes stared directly into his.
Tansy tried to swallow, but his hands were wrapped around her throat, thumbs pressing tightly. She remained very still, shocked at the truth. She hadn’t been saving the cougar’s life—she’d saved his life. It had been imperative to save his life. The moment she’d felt the threat and knew the cougar was going to attack, she’d leapt over him from a crouching position, giving away another hidden secret, to keep him from harm. She blinked up at him as he slowly removed his hands from around her neck.
“You could get off of me.” Her chest hurt. She was feeling every single rock digging into her back. “You weigh a ton.”
He merely looked down at her for a long moment without responding, his blue-black eyes holding heat and a raw lust, making her heart pound, but then he blinked and his eyes went flat and hard, impossible for her to read. He stood up, drawing her with him, holding her steady until he was certain she was able to stand on her own.
Tansy dusted off her jeans and then rubbed her palms down her thighs, looking around for the sunglasses that had flown off her face when the cat slammed into her. “Thanks for not shooting me.” She would never admit to him that she’d leapt in front of him to save his life, not for one moment. At a much later date, when he wasn’t around to confuse her, she’d take out her motives and examine them, but for now, she’d put it down to saving human life.
“You’re damned lucky.”
She nodded. “I know that and I really do appreciate that you’re that good.”
“Are you going to tell me how you made that leap from a crouch to over the top of me so fast?”
Tansy shrugged. “I don’t know how I do things. I just do them.” There were a lot of things about her that couldn’t be explained.
“Have you ever heard of a man named Peter Whitney?”
She blinked. Her face went expressionless as she searched the ground for her sunglasses, giving herself time to think. “I think most people in scientific communities have heard of Dr. Whitney,” she answered carefully as she retrieved her glasses from under some brush and wiped them off on her shirt. “I believe he was murdered.” She looked him straight in the eye so he could see she meant exactly what she said. “If you’ve found some piece of evidence you want me to ‘feel’ for you, I can’t do it.”
“You believe he’s dead?”
Tansy frowned. “It was big news. He disappeared and everyone thought he was murdered. Wasn’t he?”
Kadan shook his head slowly. “No, he’s alive.”
“That’s impossible. My parents knew him quite well. If he was alive, they’d know.”
“How well is quite well? They were friends?”
Tansy shrugged. “No one was really friends with Dr. Whitney. They were colleagues and they respected each other. My father and Dr. Whitney went to school together and they had a lot of common interests.”
“Were you one of them?” Kadan asked.
Tansy’s mouth tightened. She pushed around him to start up the trail again. “I think this conversation has gone on long enough. It’s getting personal and I don’t even know what you want yet. I have work to do tonight and I need food, so if you’re coming, then let’s get moving.”
Kadan fell into step behind her, alert for any more threats from the large cat, his gaze shifting around the area, but more than that, his every sense reaching out for information. “Dr. Whitney conducted experiments on children about twenty-five years ago. He collected infant girls from various orphanages around the world. He was looking for specific talents, female babies with psychic abilities.”
Tansy kept climbing while the roaring in her head sent her pulse pounding in her temples. Counting. Ten steps.
“He named each of the girls after flowers. Tansy is a flowering herb that grows in Europe and Asia.”
Fifteen steps.
“He enhanced those girls psychically and genetically altered many of them as well. When he removed the filters in their brains, he opened them up for psychic sludge. Many have a difficult time in everyday society. Most can’t be around people at all. They have frequent headaches and nosebleeds. Seizures are common when there is too much psychic overload. Some can do amazing physical things, such as leap over a man from a crouching position.”
He wasn’t lying to her. All of her life she’d been different. All of her life she’d fought to stay sane when each time she touched an object, or sat in a chair, or reached for a door handle, the door in her mind opened and the voices poured in. She kept counting, whispering the numbers under her breath, while she tried to quiet the voice inside that was wailing with fear.
“He did other things too. He has a breeding program, matching the girls, who are now women, with men he experimented on in the military. He created several GhostWalker teams. I’m a member of one of those teams. I agreed to be psychically enhanced. At the time, we didn’t know he took those experiments even further without our consent. He enhanced us genetically as well as paired us with the women from his earlier experiments. Our best guess is that he hopes to create unique soldiers from the unions.”
Thirty steps. Things were clicking into place, and the door in her mind creaked ominously, threatening her sanity. She’d been so close to peace. So close.
“You were adopted, Tansy, and Dr. Whitney allowed some of the children he experimented on to be adopted out. He usually kept tight tabs on the girls, so I’m asking you, did you see him while you grew up?”
Had she seen him? She shivered, suddenly cold, thrown back into childhood memories she didn’t want to have. Seeing Whitney was one of the few things she and her parents ever fought over. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. She would never forget that man, the way he looked at her as if she wasn’t human. He was cold and dispassionate, studying her the way a scientist might an insect. She’d begged her father not to leave her alone with him, but he would grab her mother’s hand, looking upset, and walk out of the room, pulling her mother with him. It was the only time she felt vulnerable and without their support.
“Yes.” Her voice was so low, she doubted he could hear. She made an effort to push back the images crowding into her mind. “He was—oily.” Whitney had only to touch her skin and she would drown in a black vat of oil, suffocating under the thick stain of a twisted mind. She hadn’t recognized the feeling, or identified it yet with sickness in her earlier years, but the ooze had poured into her until she couldn’t breathe, until she choked, smothered by his megalomaniacal personality.
Kadan breathed in and out, hating himself. He was hurting her. He was even skating close to her edge of sanity. He could feel the pain in her like a knife through his body and mind. He’d studied every report on her. She was very sensitive, especially to violence, and he was a violent man. She didn’t need to feel anything when she touched him or any of his belongings. In spite of the fact that she claimed her talent was gone, there was no way that it had disappeared. He was both an anchor and a shielder, which meant he could hold all psychic energy at bay and direct it away from her.
“You know your parents had to have known.”
She spun around so fast, her aggression blasting him hard enough to kick in his reflexes. His hand closed around the hilt of his knife before he could stop himself. She was thinking about kicking him in the chest, but she controlled her temper, her blue eyes shimmering with that strange violet light that intrigued him. It had to be an enhancement, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was used for.
Kadan lifted his hand, palm out, before she could speak. “Don’t be angry with me. I’m giving you the facts. You want to hear them, don’t you?” He kept his voice calm, soft, that little bit hypnotic. She was susceptible to sound; he could tell by the way she relaxed in spite of herself. “You seem like the kind of woman who prefers knowledge.”
“Don’t make assumptions about my parents.”
He didn’t want to hurt her, but he damn well wanted to do a number on her parents. They were both considered geniuses, and they must have guessed exactly what Whitney was up to. Sharon Meadows wanted a child at any cost, and she was more than willing to keep her mouth shut about Whitney in order to have one. With their money and connections, they could have had any child, why this one? Why one so damaged?
And why had Don Meadows agreed to stay quiet as well? Why not simply get another child for Sharon and blow the whistle on Whitney’s experiments? He needed to look a little closer into Don and Sharon’s government contracts as well as their personal lives, because their silence didn’t go with the kind of picture his reports had drawn of them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, allowing his voice to grow warm like spreading honey. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
She knew his accusation was true, but she refused to allow the thought into her mind. She needed time and he didn’t blame her. If he could have, he would have spared her that, but they were going to have to work fast to figure out what was going on.