Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (22 page)

The room fell silent for a minute.

“We all know why I left the Institute,” Eric said. “And why Justine came with me.” She slid her chair in closer to him. “What about you, Jamie? How did you get involved with my sister?”

Jamie explained about the Order. Noticeably, he left out any mention of his background and his arrest record. He also didn’t say anything about how we arrived here, or our experiences in Vegas. I didn’t either.

Eric said, “All right. You say you came to help me. How would that work?

Jamie nodded. It was a question he’d been expecting. “For all we are seen as a commune full of rich hippies, various police departments have sent us their problem Talents. Think of us as a diversion program.” Like Jamie himself. The program worked, on some level.

“How exactly does that work for murderers?” Eric’s voice was cold, clipped. His words sliced into my heart.

Jamie continued, calmly, “For other people with law enforcement issues, they have either not been charged, or been sentenced to house arrest at the Order’s headquarters in Maryland. It’s not unlike a home for the criminally insane.”

That hadn’t been how he’d pitched it to me. I wondered which of the old people playing cards were there under house arrest.

“I see.” Eric rocked back on his chair. “The thing is, I need to get this under control before I can go anywhere. I can’t risk burning anyone else to death. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” Jamie said, his tone matching Eric’s, cold and businesslike. “The training will continue.”

“For Eric, and for Cat as well, now, I think,” Miller offered.

I laughed, nervously. “What if it doesn’t work?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Jamie said.

The warmth that had been building inside me as Jamie massaged my leg was gone, and now I was cold, cold as a February night.

“See you in the morning then, both of you,” Miller said. “Catrina, Jamie, you can take another cabin. Try to take better care of this one.”

I didn’t appreciate the joke. We filed out of the Quonset hut into the darkness, and I randomly made for a dark cabin.

Inside, this one was a little nicer—or at least more to my taste—than the one I had destroyed. No cow skin rug adorned the floor, and crocheted pillows and needlepoint decorated the room.

Jamie closed the door behind me. I turned to him, saying nothing, watching. He moved toward me, graceful, his swinging stride eating up the floor between us, until he arrived in front of me and took my face in his hands.

“Catrina,” he said, “you look spooked.”

“I don’t know what to think or how to feel about myself after today. I don’t know what you must think of me. I don’t know where we go from here.”

He kissed me softly, and took me in his arms. “One day at a time, like the rest of life. We take it one day at a time.”

His hands gentled me as if I was a fractious animal, stroking me down. I trembled at his touch.

He swung me up into his arms and carried me through to the bedroom, where he undressed me down to my undershirt and panties, not urgent like he had been earlier, but tender and slow. Placing one hand behind my head, he laid me back on the pillow, and then stood and shucked his own clothes. Once naked, he crawled in beside me and turned off the light. He wrapped me in his warmth, cradling me with his body.

I turned my face to him and kissed him hungrily in the dark. His mouth was hot, and he tasted good. We lay there kissing, like teenagers, not the lovers we had been, for several minutes. Each touch of his lips against mine made me feel better, wanted, needed. At last I broke away and rested my head against his shoulder for a moment, and the next thing I knew, it was dawn.

I put my face against the skin of his shoulder, inhaling him, tasting him against my lips. He was a little salty, the remnants of yesterday’s sweat, or perhaps my tears. I realized I should have showered before bed, but it had been the last thing on my mind.

I rolled out of the bed quietly, headed for the bathroom. After taking off my T-shirt and panties, I washed them in the bathroom sink and hung them over the radiator in the main room. Hopefully they would dry before training began this morning. I didn’t relish the prospect of running through the woods in damp underpants.

Back in the bathroom, I climbed into the shower, which was over a sixties-style pink bathtub. Hotel sample sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner lined the soap dish. Grateful, I turned the water up as hot as I could stand it, and buried my hair in suds.

I had aches in all kinds of odd places, some from the training, and some from yesterday’s adventures with Jamie. My thighs were stiff. It had been a while since I’d been with a man, having sworn off them after the last bad boy and I went our separate ways when he turned out to have a girl on the side—and that girl was me.

As I rinsed my hair the door creaked and my eyes flicked open to see Jamie entering the bathroom. He slid back the screen and stepped into the shower with me. For the first time, I got a good look at him naked in the warm bathroom light.

I raised the soap to his chest and drew a sloppy circle of suds in the dusting of dark hairs across its center. “Good morning,” I said. “You look like you need a wash.”

He smiled at me, his eyes hungry. “Maybe you can help?”

“Maybe I can.” I began to soap him, pausing over his left nipple to look again at that tattoo. “What language is this in?”

“Gaelic,” he said, and then the words rolled off his tongue, like the lilt of a sunlit brook.

“What does it mean?”

“‘In heaven half an hour before the Devil knows I’m dead’.” He smiled down at me.

I laughed, and traced the words with my fingers. “Why Gaelic?”

“I don’t know much about my parents, but I do know they were Irish.” He shrugged. “When you have almost nothing, you cling to what you have.”

I continued soaping my way down his chest, and followed the lightning bolt down the center of his flat stomach, to where the dark hair between his legs began, then skidded back up. “Turn around,” I said, “I’m sure your back is dirty too.”

He complied, and I caught my breath at the grace in this big man, and then at the broad span of his shoulders. There was another tattoo, here, on his right shoulder blade, and again I outlined it in the soap. This one showed the outline of a primitive-style horse.

“It’s the Uffington White Horse,” he said preemptively. “It’s carved in a hilltop in England, hundreds of feet high. No one knows how it got there, who made it, or why. Like me.”

I traced this one too, wiping away suds. “I like it,” I said. “You know, when I first saw you, I thought you’d have a Celtic knot tattoo, like everybody else.”

“Like all the other bad boys you’ve ever known? I’m not like them,” he said.

“And how do you know that?” I said, teasing him with my voice, and my fingers sliding down his spine.

“Trust me,” he said, “I am nothing like them.”

My hands caressed the curve of his buttocks and down to his muscular thighs. He didn’t need the tattoos. His body was a work of art.

He turned back around, caught me by surprise as I found myself looking now at his erection, beaded with water from the shower.

“Your turn,” he said, taking the soap from me. He drew circles around each breast, then ran the flat of his hands across my stomach, dipping down below my belly button for a moment, then up again. My nipples hardened, tightening something between my legs. I wasn’t just wet from the shower now.

“Let me wash your back,” he said, and I nodded, submissively, turning my back to him. His hands began at the base of my neck, and I arched my spine, stretching myself under his fingers as he stroked his way down, down over my lower back, over my buttocks.

I put my hands on the wall to steady myself, and his came around in front of me, cradling my breasts as he pressed his body against me from behind.

The hard length of him nudged at me. He reached between my legs from the front, stroking, rubbing, making me gasp.

“Hey,” I managed to say, “last time we did this, the building burned down.”

“I’m willing to take the risk. You’re worth it,” he breathed in my ear, thrusting himself against me.

I arched again, as much as I could, lifting my butt and spreading my legs to allow him better access.

He rocked his pelvis back and forth against me, sliding himself between my thighs, against the hot spot between them. I let out a moan, involuntarily, and pushed back against him harder.

“One second,” he whispered in my ear. “Just one.”

My back was instantly cold while he stepped away, and then he was back against me, this time reaching around to the front with both hands, one to angle himself, and the other to stroke me.

I cried out as he pushed himself slowly, surely, into that slick heat, and we began to rock back and forth under the hot water, his hips thrusting at my buttocks, his fingers busy playing with me at the front.

He lifted his other hand to steady himself against the wall, and breathed hard in my ear, biting it, then letting go to cry, “Cat, Cat, Catrina, Catrina,” as he rocked himself deeper and deeper inside me.

I pushed back against him, imprisoned against the wall by his body, impaled upon him and loving every minute of it. He moved deep inside me. I felt wanton, open, taken.

My climax began to tremble through me, waves of warmth beating an overwhelming rhythm out from the place between my legs over my whole body. My legs shook and I cried out, “Oh God, Jamie, oh God,” as he thrust one last, deepest time, inside me.

He whispered in my ear again, “Catrina, Catrina, my Catrina,” as he shuddered his climax inside me, holding me against him, emptying himself into me.

We stood frozen together like that for a time, the hot water beating on us. I could not speak.

Finally, quietly, Jamie reached out and shut the water off. He stepped back from me, leaving me bereft but satisfied. I turned to look into his eyes. They held more naked emotion than I had ever seen on his face. I reached to touch his cheek and he pulled me against his skin, enveloping me in his arms, burying his face in my wet hair. Maybe I wasn’t the only one getting more emotionally involved than I should.

I put my arms around his neck and held him close. Minutes passed.

He pulled back and looked around the room and up at the ceiling.

“What?” I said.

“Just checking. The roof isn’t on fire this time.” He gave me a cheeky grin. “Should I take that as some kind of insult?”

I swatted him on the behind.

“Ouch!”

“It’s not funny!”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. I went to swat him again but he jumped away. I chased him into the bedroom and we fell, laughing, onto the bed.

Jamie pulled the covers up over us and me against him. “You know something, Cat? You’re good for me. Very, very good.”

“You were good for me too,” I said.

Now it was his turn to smack me on the butt. I squealed, and the ruckus began all over again.

In the morning, I was sorry not to have gotten much sleep last night. I hurt all over. It had been the good kind of hurt until we started running through the woods. The sky was black, again, and my clothes were wet through.

I didn’t understand why Miller thought we should be out in the rain, but I admit the weather probably reduced the risk of starting a forest fire.

When we arrived at the training area, the group had one extra person present. Justine had joined us today. I hadn’t seen that much of her at the camp. She mostly stayed in her cabin while Eric trained, and clung to him like a silent, brooding leech at meals.

I was surprised when Miller beckoned me forward.

“You’re up first, Cat. Let’s start with something basic.”

My first job was to start a fire in a bundle of kindling. I closed my eyes, and gathered myself, centering as we had practiced in yesterday’s meditation. Feeling full of power and Talent, I released it into the pile of kindling.

Nothing happened.

“Whenever you’re ready, Catrina,” Miller said mildly.

I tried again, breathing slowly, and in a controlled fashion, working hard to systematically relax every muscle in my body, from my toes all the way up to my scalp. Then I released my inner power into the kindling. Nothing.

Thinking back to yesterday, I tried to remember the sequence of events that led to the cabin catching on fire. My mind filled with images of Jamie naked, the sensation of his skin against mine, his body moving in me, the smells and tastes of him. My face flushed. The more I remembered the hotter I got. Finally, I tried to open my mind as I had while I lay relaxing in bed afterward.

A rush of hot power built inside me. I had Talent, it was here in my hands, mine to use. I tried to release it, to channel the fire outward, but the power filled my head, unable to escape. Bursting with energy, I screamed in frustration, and felt the power drain away.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I opened my eyes. The kindling was still intact. I looked around. Everyone was staring at me. I had failed.