Sight Unseen Read online

  Since he’d left the agency, Ethan had never allowed himself to care enough about anything or anybody to make him vulnerable to that kind of disillusionment. Tonight Raine had broken down all the barriers he had built between himself and anything that could threaten his control. And then she’d accused him of not being comfortable breaking rules.

  “I haven’t been. Not until tonight,” he said.

  “I told you there were advantages.”

  She meant advantages to her gift. Obviously, there were. He just hadn’t realized how many of those would accrue to him.

  She lowered the elbow she’d been propped on, lying down beside him again. He put his arm around her back, pulling her to him. She laid her cheek against his shoulder. The palm of her left hand rested flat on the center of his chest, just above his still-rapid heartbeat.

  “Is that what you were doing?” he asked. “Reading my mind?”

  Every man has fantasies. He was no different from anyone else in that respect. There were certain intimacies he had imagined some beautiful woman performing on his body, but he could never have imagined Raine in that role. Like him, she had seemed to value her control far too much to become a part of someone else’s fantasy.

  But she had. Every one he’d ever imagined as well as a dozen more he’d never dared to dream. And there could be only one way that this woman—cool, poised, sophisticated—could have known each of his wildest fantasies in such detail.

  “I didn’t think about it like that,” she said. “It was more a matter of wanting to give you pleasure. Trying to think of things that would please you. If they did, it was obvious by your reactions. There was nothing mystical about any of this.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said, tightening his hold around her slender body.

  He could feel the breath of her laughter against the dampness of his skin. Unbelievably, given his exhaustion, a shimmer of sexual heat flickered through his groin.

  She must have felt that stirring under the tanned thigh that lay across his lower body. She raised her head a little, looking down at him with a smile.

  “Don’t start,” he warned, provoking another breath of laughter. “Just lie very still.”

  “Poor baby.”

  The tone was falsely sympathetic, her amusement at his predicament clear. He ignored it, concentrating on stoking the small, determined blaze that was growing in his body by remembering each diabolically delicious torment she’d inflicted. Now it was payback time, and he didn’t intend to be humiliated by his own satiation.

  He closed his eyes, imagining a few intimacies of his own. She might be able to anticipate his plans, but she really couldn’t do anything about them. Even if she wanted to.

  Obediently she put her head back on his shoulder, her fingers idly caressing the hair on his chest. It was enough to fan the spark that had ignited the tinder of his desire. He closed his eyes, thinking about the first of the dozen ways he wanted to bring her to fulfillment.

  He had no doubt she would be as responsive to his touch as he had been to hers. The chemistry, as she’d called it, had been there from the moment she’d opened the door of her beach house to him. It had grown with each second they’d spent together, even those when danger had been the motivating force that had drawn them together. Maybe especially during those.

  Her eyes, filled with the certainty of what the man at the hospital was capable of. Her arms, clinging to his neck, holding on for dear life.

  He opened his eyes, the memory of that terrifying instant when he had felt her slipping away from him too real. Too much of a reminder of the danger she faced.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her hand still lay on his chest. The leap his heart had taken at that remembrance would have been telling.

  Instead of answering, instead of carrying out any of the sexual ploys he had been thinking of, he rolled over, carrying her with him, until she lay under him, pinned by his weight. As he looked down into her face, the arousal he’d been nursing was suddenly full-blown.

  The realization of how deeply he had come to care about her shocked him. He didn’t bother to deny the truth he’d just discovered, not even to himself.

  He didn’t want to blurt it out like the schoolboy she always made him feel. It was too sudden. The emotion too uncontrolled. All of the rash, impulsive things he was not.

  Before he’d met Raine McAllister.

  He looked down into her face, seeing it anew. With new eyes.

  There wasn’t enough light to find the faint scattering of freckles. There was a smudge of mascara beneath her lashes, and the generous mouth had long ago lost the coating of lip gloss she’d put on for the evening. Her eyes were almost black in the dimness, the pupils wide. Still looking up into his.

  And what he read there…

  He lowered his head, forgetting those thoughts of sexual payback. His lips found hers instead, gentle as he pressed a series of featherlight kisses along them.

  She tried to engage his tongue, but he ignored her demand, playing this his way. And his way right now was to show her the tenderness his newfound realization had created.

  Despite what Gardner might have done for her, Raine’s life had been difficult, her gift both a blessing and a curse. Even when she had tried to use her abilities for good, the effort had proven to be a two-edged sword.

  Her lips slowly opened under his, no longer demanding, but acquiescing. An unspoken agreement that he was in charge. She had had her turn at control; this was his.

  He deepened the kiss, trying to express something of what he felt. Her hand found the back of his head, opened fingers sliding through his hair.

  He tightened his hold, wanting to fill her, to own her, to overwhelm her with what he felt for her. Just as his emotions had overwhelmed him.

  Her lips clung, her tongue matching the slow, deliberate movements of his. A prelude to what would inevitably follow.

  His hand found her breast, cupping under its fullness. He caught the nipple between his fingers, rolling it. A small moan sounded low in her throat.

  Unable to resist, he lifted his head, breaking the kiss, and then lowered it again, taking the peak he had teased to tautness into his mouth. He suckled hard, feeling the answering arch and twist of her hips beneath his body.

  His teeth closed over flesh, and then his tongue rimmed the softness surrounding the hardened nub before he suckled it again. Her breath released, the exhalation almost a gasp.

  Before that sound had faded into the darkness, his mouth had covered hers. At the same time his fingers found the moisture his kiss had created in her lower body. Hot and wet and ready for his entrance.

  He used the fluid to touch her, forcing her down the same spiraling pathway where she had driven him. Taking her to the edge of the abyss and then bringing her back.

  Controlling her. Feeling her trembling beneath him with need and desire. Exalting in his ability to make her mindless with wanting him. As he had been mindless wanting her.

  “Please,” she whispered, the word shivering out into the moonlight.

  He had fought his own loss of control. Railed against it.

  In contrast, she sought its release. Wanted it. Begged him for it.

  And this was, after all, what he had wanted, too. To make love to her. To carry her along the path to the same ecstasy where she had led him.

  He eased his body over hers. Her eyes opened, looking up into his face. He smiled at her as he touched her, waiting for the exact moment when she would be on the verge of capitulation.

  He sensed it first in the trembling of her body. It started as a shiver and then grew until she was shaking as if she were in the throes of fever.

  Before the flood could break, he had positioned himself. With one smooth, downward thrust, he entered her. The trembling became a cataclysm, breaking around him.

  He drove into her again and again. Her nails marked his shoulders, but he was unaware of pain. Unaware of anything but her hips arching beneath his, matchi
ng each stroke until his explosion joined hers.

  Tangled together in a web of sensation, they clung to one another until it was over. When it was, unwilling or unable to move, they lay exhausted in its wake.

  Still joined. Still connected, both in mind and body. Content in a way he had never been before.

  Raine was the first to stir, her fingers again idly caressing the hair on his chest. He put his hand over hers, holding it.

  “Good?” For some stupid, schoolboy reason, he needed to hear her say it. To acknowledge that he had in some small way given her back some part of what she had given him.

  “You couldn’t tell?”

  “I don’t have your advantages.”

  She laughed. “So would you believe me if I said it wasn’t?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “You have your own gifts.”

  “Because I could read that from your reaction?”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of gift.”

  He didn’t even try for false modesty. He knew she had been as lost in what had occurred as he had been in the endless hours she had made love to him.

  Made love. Two people making love.

  He acknowledged to himself at least that that was what this had been. He had known her a matter of days. She was as much a mystery as she had been from the first. And he was in love with her.

  It wasn’t logical or rational or any of the things he needed his world to be. But it was real. And it had been, just as she’d told him, inevitable.

  “Ethan?”

  He realized that he hadn’t answered her last comment. He couldn’t even remember what it had been. Not given the realization he’d made, which still had the power to stun him with its force.

  “I know you didn’t want this to happen,” she said.

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Then…?”

  After this was over. After he’d finished the job he’d been given. There would be time enough to tell her then.

  For an instant a feeling of despair, like he hadn’t felt since he’d walked into Griff’s office at the CIA to tender his resignation, washed over him in a gut-clenching wave. That had been the threat of the loss of his professional life. This…

  He wasn’t sure what this represented, but as he had done before, he wrapped his arms around Raine and turned, carrying her with him until they were again lying face-to-face. There was a fine dew of perspiration on her upper lip and her temples. Her mouth was swollen. Well kissed. Well used.

  She was his. For the asking. For the taking. She had told him that in every conceivable way she could communicate it to him. All he had to do was accept the gift she’d offered him.

  You have your own gifts. And she was by far the most valuable of the ones he’d been given. She had been put into his hands by a man who trusted him to protect her, and, while he did, to also solve the crucial national security case he’d been given.

  Another act of trust. One that had been made long before he’d met Raine McAllister. Long before he had fallen in love with her.

  There would be time for vows and promises after he had fulfilled the first he had made—a vow of loyalty to a man who had offered him a second chance. Right now…

  “We have to make an early start tomorrow.”

  Her pupils widened slightly, one of those subtle physiological clues he had been trained to look for. He wasn’t certain what this one meant. Shock or disappointment or—and his heart ached with the thought—hurt.

  Whatever she was feeling, it took her only a second or two to hide her reaction. Her brow cleared, and her eyes again seemed open and transparent, without any trace of disappointment or rebuke.

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s been a very long day.”

  One that had been full of dangers, both physical and emotional, he’d never expected to encounter. The barriers he’d erected against allowing himself to feel too strongly about anything again had been breeched by the one woman he could never have imagined himself falling in love with. That he had was something he was going to have to come to terms with first before he confessed it to her.

  She moved, propping over him on her elbow again. “Shall we say good-night?”

  “Don’t,” he said, unable to bear the brittleness of her tone. “When this is over. There’ll be time for this, I promise. Until it is…”

  Her eyes changed again as they searched his face. And then she nodded, seeming to accept what he had asked of her. He prayed her gift was powerful enough for her to know that that had truly been a plea for time and not a denial of what she’d offered him.

  What she might not understand was that this was the biggest risk he had ever taken in his life. And he was willing to take it on the strength of something he would have said less than a week ago he didn’t even believe existed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “This is Dr. Charles Ellington,” Griff said as Ethan and Raine were conducted into his office the following morning. “I believe the two of you may be acquainted.”

  Ethan walked across the room to offer his hand, which was grasped limply and pumped once. “Dr. Ellington? I’m Ethan Snow. Sorry, but I don’t believe we have met.”

  “How do you do?”

  Elegantly dressed in a lightweight tropical suit, Ellington looked and sounded like a British colonial official from the last century. His hair, long enough to touch his collar in back, was heavily sprinkled with gray, as were the small, pencil-thin mustache and neat goatee. His dark eyes were a startling contrast to the paleness of his skin.

  “I meant that Dr. Ellington may be acquainted with Ms. McAllister,” Griff clarified.

  “McAllister?” Ellington held out his hand to Raine, who had followed Ethan across the room. “Not Raine? Surely not little Raine?”

  Despite the effusiveness of the man’s greeting, there was a decided lack of reaction. “I’m very sorry,” Raine said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you. Of course, if you knew me when I was ‘little Raine,’ perhaps that’s forgivable.”

  “Not at all surprising you don’t remember, my dear. You were a child. A very lovely child, who has now become a stunningly beautiful woman. You could hardly be expected to remember all of us.”

  “All of ‘us’?” Raine questioned.

  “Who were fortunate to work with you. When Mr. Cabot left his message on my machine last night, he said he was trying to gather information about the CIA’s long-ago foray into parapsychology. I called him back as soon as I got home, of course, delighted at the opportunity to reminisce about those days. When I saw you here, I rather naturally assumed you’d been invited for the same reason.”

  “Ms. McAllister remembers very little from that time, I’m afraid,” Griff said.

  Ellington glanced at Cabot before he turned back to Raine. “Of course. As I said, she was only a child. An extremely talented one, however.”

  He took the hand Raine finally offered. Despite Ellington’s age and his claim of a long-standing acquaintance, Ethan didn’t enjoy watching those long, pale fingers touch her. He controlled the impulse to pull her hand from his by looking at Griff, one brow raised inquiringly.

  “Dr. Ellington was one of the psychologists who did testing for the agency during the course of those experiments,” Cabot explained.

  “A job I achieved almost by default,” Ellington said, with a laugh. “They had a hard time finding researchers willing to participate. As a result, they kindly decided to let in a limey who’d done a bit of work for the SAS. Out of the norm compared to what I’d done there, but then I’d always been interested in the esoteric.”

  “You considered those projects to be esoteric?” Ethan asked.

  Raine had managed to reclaim her hand, but Ellington was still beaming at her paternally. Ethan wondered if she remembered the Englishman now that she’d had time to study his features and, more tellingly, listen to him talk. With its strong accent and high, almost feminine pitch, his voice was memorable, perhaps even unique in a child’s
limited experience.

  “Oh, for the CIA, certainly,” Ellington said. “And I can tell you that many of the old hands weren’t happy about the direction the agency was headed. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Gardner’s support…” Ellington shrugged.

  “Why don’t we sit down,” Griff suggested, “and try to reconstruct as much as you two can remember about those days. My secretary will bring in coffee and iced tea. Or something stronger if you prefer.”

  The last had clearly been addressed to Ellington. Maybe Griff thought a drink might loosen his tongue or refresh his memory, although neither seemed to be a problem.

  Raine had chosen the chair farthest away from the Englishman, leaving Ethan the one between them. Not a bad place to be, he decided, settling into it.

  “Whiskey, if you have it. It’s bound to be the cocktail hour somewhere within the Empire,” Ellington added with a smile.

  Griff used the intercom to relay that information to his secretary before he took his seat on the other side of the wide mahogany desk. It didn’t take him long to hone in on the opening Ellington had given him.

  “Why don’t you tell us exactly what you did for the CIA.”

  “Of course,” Ellington said readily. “I was responsible for testing perhaps twenty people. The original number of subjects I was given was somewhat higher, but preliminary screening eliminated most of those. The ones who were left, like little Raine here, for example, were obviously on the up-and-up.”

  “Meaning they had psychic ability?”

  “Some more than others. And some of the talents they exhibited, although impressive, weren’t perfectly suited for what the CIA had in mind.”

  “Which was?” Ethan asked.

  “Spying on the Soviets, primarily. You have to remember that satellites were nowhere near as sophisticated then as they are now. In the midst of the so-called Cold War, they were operating primarily from human intel and guesswork. And of course they were terrified the Russians were going to get the jump on us. Rumors abounded that they had psychics who could track troop movements and even the locations of our subs. We wanted someone who could give us the same kind of information about them.”