Talent to Burn (Hidden Talent #1) (7 page)

He laughed. “I hadn’t noticed. But don’t let me stop you.”

I grabbed the bags he handed me and headed into the bathroom. The shower was huge, the shower head the size of a dinner plate. Sighing in pleasure, I shucked my clothes, turned the water on and slipped into a steamy paradise.

Half an hour later, there was a knock and the bathroom door cracked open. I froze, and then tried to cover myself with a washcloth.

“I’m not coming in,” Jamie’s voice said plaintively, “but do you think you might be out soon? I’m starving.”

My stomach rumbled in answer. “I’ll just be a minute.” After I got out of the shower and dried off with a luxurious white towel, I looked through the shopping bags. There were jeans, a couple of T-shirts, underwear, and a nice Asian-style embroidered red silk shirt with a mandarin collar.

The red shirt slid over my skin like a lover. I didn’t usually wear a lot of red—it drew too much attention—but it actually looked pretty good with my hair, made me look blonder even with my Pacific Northwest non-tan. I could have done with a haircut to get my hair as boy-short as I liked it.

The bags also held a toothbrush and deodorant, no makeup, but I was lucky to have what I had already. No bra, either. Probably too hard for him to figure out. I considered putting mine back on, but a sniff convinced me otherwise. I had little enough up top that I could get away without one anyway.

I needed to thank Jamie properly for his kindness. When was the last time someone else had bought me anything at all, or the last time I’d dressed for dinner? Or gone on a date? Was this a date? I widened my eyes, smiled at myself in the mirror.

Opening the door, I kept my eyes down and walked over to the bed, sat and put my black ankle boots back on. They may not have been the newest shoes, but they went fine with the outfit.

“You look nice.” His voice was gentle.

“Thank you,” I mumbled. “And thank you for shopping for me.” My cheeks heated. I knew from previous experience my face, my neck, even my chest would be bright pink.

“I thought you’d be more comfortable.”

“Thanks.” I looked up and discovered he’d changed as well, into a crisp white linen shirt and black jeans, with the motorbike boots as before. This was the first time I’d seen him clean shaven, and I found my gaze following the line of his square jaw, to his dark eyes, and up farther to his still messy, although now more artistically, dark hair. I wondered if he ever combed it with anything other than his fingers. Mine twitched. I put my hands in my pockets.

“Shall we eat in the hotel? These casino hotels have plenty of restaurants. Sushi, teppanyaki, I think there’s even an Italian place here for some reason…”

My stomach grumbled loudly and Jamie laughed. This blush seemed unlikely to retreat anytime soon. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll eat whatever’s closest.”

We ended up at a darkly hip fusion place with little booths. It was minimalist and private, and I found myself with nothing to look at but Jamie. I inspected my fingernails instead. I cut them almost painfully short, and even the half hour shower hadn’t miraculously transformed them into a French manicure. We were playing dress-ups. I didn’t belong here, or with him, so it was safer to keep my eyes and my thoughts off him as much as possible.

The menu though, oh, the menu. I couldn’t narrow it down to one thing to choose, but I didn’t want to appear greedy. I also didn’t recognize half of the things on it. My budget didn’t run to seafood, and my culinary vocabulary didn’t run to most of the rest of it.

“Small plates,” Jamie remarked, flicking through the menu. “We should order a whole bunch of things. Like tapas.”

“Why don’t you order for us both?” I suggested, relieved.

Jamie nodded, and took the liberty of ordering me a glass of white wine. I knew beer—well, anything domestic—and I knew my basic cocktails, but the stuff we sold in the bars I had worked in had convinced me I didn’t like wine. I sipped at the glass, trying not to screw up my face, and was shocked at the taste. The liquid was like silk in my mouth, filling my senses.

“Is there something wrong with your drink?”

“No, um, no. The contrary.” I put my glass down, not wanting him to watch me, or to realize how gauche I was. Little plates began to appear and I stuffed morsel after tasty morsel of seafood into my mouth, interspersed with sips of the incredible wine. I closed my eyes between bites, feeling the textures on my tongue, drawing in the scents of the food.

“This is fantastic,” I said, warming up. “Thank you so much for bringing me to dinner. I thought you were like me. I didn’t think you would know about fancy foods and things like this.”

Jamie laughed. I flushed. Again. The taste in my mouth turned sour, and my eyes burned. I would not cry at the table. I didn’t cry when I broke my wrist, or when I couldn’t pay the bills, and I sure as hell wouldn’t cry now.

His face softened as he looked at me. “I’m not laughing at you, sweetheart,” he said. “There was a time, and it wasn’t too long ago, when I didn’t know about, as you put it, fancy food. I suspect our upbringings have more in common than you think.”

“You didn’t spend yours on the run, I’ll bet.”

“That chip doesn’t become you.” He sat forward. “I spent some of it in an orphanage, and most of the rest of it in foster care. You had your father, at least.”

My hand went to my mouth. I was an idiot. “I didn’t mean to offend you. Or be ungrateful. I am incredibly grateful for this.” I waved my hand. “All of this. This isn’t my life. It feels like a dream. I know soon enough I’ll be back to my beer and burger budget.”

“You don’t have to be.”

What was he suggesting? I deliberately kept my face blank, but my fingers traced the base of the wineglass. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “You can come back with me, if you’d like. There’s always room for one more at the Order.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. He must be joking. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“What do the un-Talented do? Maid service?”

Jamie leaned across the table and took hold of my wrist. My fingers stopped their circuits of the glass. “Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, I am convinced you have Talent.”

I almost spat the words. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you I don’t have a Talent. What you don’t seem to understand is that Talent is the last thing I want.”

Chapter Eight

Jamie’s attention focused on me now, intent. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why not?”

I leaned across the table, wanting to get my point across this time so he wouldn’t ask me again. “Look where it got Eric. I’m better off normal. I’d rather not kill anyone.”

“And if it turned out you did have a Talent?”

“I don’t. The chance of that is so low that if it happened, I’d also ride my unicorn to the end of the rainbow to collect my pot of gold.”

His fingers opened slowly and I lifted my glass, tipped it to him and had another sip of the wine, putting on a bravado I did not feel. I hated talking, or even thinking, about any of this. I swirled my glass, and changed the topic. “Tell me, how did you end up at the Order?”

Jamie sat way back in his chair, stretching out his long legs, and folded his hands over his flat stomach just above the hunk of metal he called a belt buckle. “It’s not as exciting a story as you might think.”

“Go on.” Sounded like a topic he didn’t want to talk about, therefore worth pursuing.

“When I was old enough to get out of fostering, I had managed to avoid acquiring any sort of reasonable education or reputable skills. I had, however, learned some disreputable things along the way.” He chuckled. “I was lucky enough to be caught pickpocketing a man who turned out to be even more disreputable than myself, and he taught me a lot.”

“About Talent?”

“Grifting. We worked various cons together, up and down the east coast, New York and Atlantic City, down to Florida in the winters. He got sent up for writing bad checks, and then I was on my own. I found a new con then, a better way to make money.”

This was a thousand miles away from my own dirt poor but honest upbringing. I was fascinated. I couldn’t even imagine how you would go about choosing crime as a career. “What was that?”

Jamie waved his long-fingered hands through the air, and adopted an air of mystery, deepening his voice to an oracular boom. “Summoning the spirits. Speaking with the dead. I became a medium, running séances for rich women and their bored friends.”

“I didn’t know you had that Talent.”

He laughed, deep and rolling. It was impossible not to laugh with him. “I didn’t and I don’t. But con teaches you to cold read people, and I’ve always had a way with a story. My Talent helped me find two things: first, easy marks, and second, their valuables.”

“You didn’t see any, um, ethical problems with this?”

“Nope. I was Robin Hood. I took from the rich, and gave to the poor—the poor being me.”

I shook my head. “How on earth did you end up at the Order?”

His gaze flicked away from me to his glass. “They’re always looking for Talents. One evening I ended up with a Talent scout at my séance, who didn’t believe a word I said, but knew something was up. They called me to come in to the Order to run another séance. That was my usual approach, you see, word of mouth. Helps avoid trouble.”

“And then?”

“When I turned up there was no séance. They were on to me, but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

This was a world I had never experienced. Hard to imagine it even existed. “What was that?”

“A job offer. I would find things for them, for constructive purposes, and in return they would pay me well, and give me a generous expense account. The only condition was that I had to give up my various less legal income streams.”

“Was that hard?”

“At first.” He picked up his glass, took a sip, and then cradled it in his fingers. “Habit of a lifetime. I got comfortable pretty quickly. And Finding things—that’s an addiction once you sharpen up the Talent.”

There’d been no one with a Talent for Finding at the Institute when I was there, but I remembered Eric saying much the same thing, that the use of power was addictive. Interesting. “What kind of things do you find for them?”

“These days it’s mostly missing people. On the sad side, children, teenagers, natural disasters. On the light side, absconded husbands, embezzlers and so on. The occasional stolen family treasure, but mostly people. That’s my specialty. Others are better at divining for water, gold, oil and things like that.”

Such a job had never occurred to me. I rolled the wine glass stem between my fingers, thinking. “How did you find me? I don’t understand how looking for Eric brought you to my door.”

“That’s an interesting question,” Jamie said, pausing to take a sip of his drink. “You asked what people without Talent do at the Order. One of the answers to that question is research. When someone of interest disappears, naturally you check their friends and family first. Research had a list of relatives and known associates, and you were on it.”

“You were working your way through a list?”

“Not exactly.” He paused, staring off into the distance. “Finding is a strange and sometimes unreliable Talent. This was different. Your name stuck out like it was written in gold leaf. It said,
come find me
.”

“And how did you, exactly?” I needed to know that, if I was ever going to live a normal life. There had to be a way to hide my trail from Talents who wanted to find me.

“We knew from Research what state you were in—from the GED you got last year.” He paused. “I’m surprised you managed to acquire that much of a paper trail.”

I put down my drink. The glass banged into the table, nearly spilling. “I thought I was safe.”

“I went to Tacoma, where it was issued, and then followed my heart.”

“But how?” I said, frustrated.

“Honestly? I had that piece of paper with your name on it, and it pulled me to that town and to your bar like you were a magnet. I’ve never had someone to find that drew me like you did. You called me like a lighthouse.”

I didn’t know whether to be flattered or dismayed. “I thought lighthouses steered you away from rocks.”

“Cat,” he said, leaning across the table and taking my hand in his. “The question of rocks has yet to be answered. But to me, you are lit up from inside like no beacon I’ve ever seen.”

His hand was warm and dry, and mine clammy within it. I didn’t know where to look. He had turned on the full force of his charm, and his eyes focused intensely on me. Overcome with embarrassment at his words, I couldn’t meet his gaze and instead found myself looking at his mouth. Although that mouth frequently quirked up at one corner, now his lips were pressed together, serious, and somehow more compelling for it.

I picked up my wine in my free hand and took a sip that turned into a swig.

Jamie let my hand slide free. “What do you want to do after dinner?”

I dropped my shoulders, deliberately ratcheting the tension down a notch. “If you’d asked me that earlier I would have said sleep. For days. But I think I spoiled it with that nap.”

“Do you want to go dancing?”