The Unwanted (A Novella of the FBI Psychics) (6 page)

His skin felt hot and smooth against her hands. Hot, smooth and the muscles of his abdomen were hard, rippling under her touch. She went to push the shirt higher and then Caleb caught her face in his hands.

The kiss lightened.

Eased.

“Damn it, Caleb,” she groaned as he went to pull away.

“The phone,” he muttered against her mouth, pressing another kiss to the corner of her lips.

“Fuck the phone.”

He laughed and the sound was strained, tight.

“The phone is ringing, sugar,” he said, stroking a hand down her back.

And then the voice sanity started to sing. If Destin didn’t know better, she’d almost think it was the chorus to “Glory, Hallelujah”
.

“Shit.”

What in the hell was I thinking
? She stared at him in a panic for one long second and then jerked away from him. By the time she reached her phone, it had already stopped, but it didn’t matter. The phone call had come at a crucial time. Right before she would have given in and done another stupid, thoughtless thing. Granted, this one only would have hurt her, but still. She didn’t do stupid thoughtless things any more.

She was careful.

She was patient.

She thought things through and she no longer responded simply to emotion. Or her body.

Staring at the phone, she said woodenly, “It was Oz. Probably wanted an update already. She’s impatient.”

“She always was.”

“Yes.” Closing her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose and then set her shoulders. She had to acknowledge what had happened, had to set things straight, make sure he knew it couldn’t happen again.

Slowly, she turned around and faced him.

And once more, that voice of need started to whisper,
please, please, please…

He looked so good. Flags of color rode high on his cheeks and his eyes glinted with a wicked, hungry light. Caleb rarely let his guard down but when he did…

Her heart raced as she thought about what she was about to turn her back on. But she had to do it.

“That was a mistake,” she said quietly. “It can’t happen again.”

“Is that a fact?” He held her gaze steadily.

“Yes.” She licked her lips. The taste of him still lingered and when he dropped his gaze to follow the path of her tongue, she was tempted to tell that annoying voice of reason to take a flying leap. But she couldn’t. She’d lived by need and emotion and want and it had ended badly. Very badly. Now she lived by logic and reason. It was easier. Safer.

Lonely…

But lonely didn’t end with her heart broken, and lonely didn’t end with her costing somebody their life.

Lonely was better.

“I did trust you, Caleb,” she said quietly. She had to get that out there. “I trusted you more than I ever trusted anybody. And I trust you now…as far as the job goes, I know there’s nobody I trust the way I trust you.”

Turning away from him, she moved to the window, staring out over the pretty little town of Charlottesville. Even now, it was bustling with activity, young adults moving all over the place. “And I almost begged you not to leave. If I’d known…” Then she stopped, shook her head. “I never hurt so much in my life. But it’s over now and we’re different people. I can’t go back to who I was. You’ve got a different life now. That part of us is over and done.”

She blew out a breath and then forced herself to continue. “But you’re wrong…in the end, whether you left or not, we
would
have fallen apart, but it had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. It’s myself I didn’t trust. I still don’t trust myself.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?”

“It’s what I tell myself.” Destin lifted a brow as she looked back at him. “It’s what is.”

“You never had issues with trusting yourself before,” he said softly. He glanced at the scar.

She didn’t flinch away, didn’t hide, even though she wanted to. “Yes, I did. I just didn’t realize it until too late.”

He closed the distance between them and she held still, unwilling to move away, and when he reached up to trace the scar yet again, she held still and steady. She wouldn’t flinch. Wouldn’t hide.

He traced a finger along her cheek and she tried not to shiver, resisted the desire to turn her face into his hand and rub against him like a cat looking for a stroke.

“So what do we do now?” he asked quietly.

“We do our job.” She shrugged and made herself back away before she gave in to those impulses. “For now, I’ll check in with Oz, then I’m going to bed.”

“You going to sleep okay?”

No. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the case
. It was him. Just him. She didn’t tell him that. She made herself smile, forced a casual shrug. “No reason I shouldn’t sleep.”

She even managed a faint smile as she nodded to the files. “There’s nothing in there that’s going to cause me nightmares, and you can bet on that.”

Chapter Five

No nightmares.

There were dreams, but she couldn’t call them nightmares.

Hot, sexy dreams where Caleb put his hands on her and she returned the favor. They were the kind of dreams that had her kicking off the blankets and when she woke up sometime near two a.m., hovering on the edge of orgasm, it took a great deal of willpower to keep from climbing out of her bed and finding him in his.

It took almost as much willpower not to push her hand between her thighs and bring herself to the climax she could feel hovering just out of reach.

She ached with the need for it.

For a long, long time, she’d existed without any of that. It wasn’t even that hard. After what had happened with Dawn, she’d turned herself into a tool. Focused on the job, on making herself better so that she never made such awful mistakes again. She’d always acted on impulse, lived by the emotions that guided her gift, actions that led to the awful mistakes she’d made.

In response, she’d cut off those emotions. She couldn’t stop
feeling
but she could damn well stop letting them control her and it became second nature. Sexual desires, pleasure, even simple happiness had all become obstacles that were in the way of the job, so she shut them off.

Odd and random dreams about Caleb would slip in, but they were forgotten almost as soon as she woke up, and when she didn’t forget them soon enough, she reminded herself about what he’d done. How he’d hurt her. How he’d left her. That made it even easier.

But it was almost impossible to brush this dream away, this need away, when he was sleeping just a few yards away.

She missed his heat.

She missed his quiet strength and the way she felt so much steadier when she was near him.

She just plain missed him.

And you didn’t say a thing to stop me. Every step of the way, I waited for you to say something, Destin. Every damn step.

His words echoed in her mind and she had to wonder, how much different would her life have been if she’d given in to that impulse? She’d always thought that he’d changed his mind.

He’d told her that he loved her, and she’d almost believed him. Almost. But Destin had had people tell her they loved her before. Like her mom and dad. And then her abilities had started to surface and their
love
hadn’t been all that real, after all. They’d hated her. Feared her.

Had even thought maybe she was as bad as some of the monsters out there.
Monstrous little thing—

It wasn’t so far a stretch for her to think that the man she’d thought she might have loved had changed his mind about them. If she had reached out to him,
then
, would things be different
now
?

“It’s too late to worry about that,” she whispered. “No do-overs allowed.”

He didn’t seem all that different. A few more lines around the lines and maybe a little more serious, but all in all, Caleb was just as he’d always been. Solid, strong, steady.

She was different, though. She was completely different and if she needed any reminder of that, it was in the mirror. Stroking a finger down the scar, she closed her eyes and curled up on the bed and waited for the miserable, achy need to subside. It took too long. By the time she was able to fall back to sleep, hours had passed.

Come dawn, she woke to hear him moving out in the sitting area; she didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. She opened the door and almost swallowed her tongue when she saw him. He was wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts and another old T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, leaving his biceps bare.

A fine sheen of sweat highlighted his muscles and she watched, mesmerized as he lowered himself to the floor and then pushed himself back up. Slow, steady.

Talk about a perfect push-up. The man could have done a TV infomercial, the way he looked.

Of course, he’d always looked good.

Get over it, Des
,
she told herself. Squaring her shoulders, she made herself walk past him into the small kitchenette. She desperately needed coffee. Coffee, and a psych eval. She went about making the coffee and tried to pretend she wasn’t watching him as he did a good fifty more push-ups beyond however many he’d already done and then shifted around to lie on the ground and do crunches.

The hotel had a perfectly good gym. Why couldn’t he do his workout
there
instead of in here?

Five more minutes passed while she stayed in the kitchenette and drank her coffee. She passed the time by studying an absurdly boring abstract painting and hoped by the time she had her coffee done, he’d have his workout done.

But she planned it a little too perfectly. He finished up his workout at exactly the same time as she finished her coffee, which meant they ended up running into each other at the refrigerator.

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

Destin shrugged. She almost told him the truth, but she figured that would have just given him more of an excuse to keep talking and she wanted to go hide in her room while she got her treacherous body under control.

He didn’t seem fooled. “I take that means yes,” he said, shifting so that she couldn’t go around him unless she brushed up against his body.

A body that was damp with sweat and way too hard on her self-control. “I was already awake.”

Caleb studied her face. “You don’t look like you slept well. Nightmares?”

Shit, no
. But she wasn’t about to tell him that she hadn’t slept well because she kept having lurid sexual fantasies with him as the one and only star. “Some dreams did keep waking me up, but it’s nothing I can’t handle,” she hedged.

A sympathetic look entered his eyes and he reached out, skimmed his fingers down her arm. “Need to talk about them?”

“No.” Talking used to help. Or rather, talking with
him
had helped. But no way, no how was that happening now, even if it had been nightmares keeping her awake. Nope.

He squeezed. “You sure?”

“If I wanted to talk about them, I’d talk about them,” she snapped. Lack of sleep, need and general moodiness were quickly eroding any politeness she might have started out with when she climbed out of bed. She jerked her shoulder away and shoved past him. “We’re not together any more, remember?”

“Just because we’re not together doesn’t mean I can’t listen.”

Destin stopped in her tracks and turned back to him. “Yes. It does. I laid my soul bare for you because I felt safe doing so.
Then
. But that’s changed now.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “So that means you don’t feel safe doing it now?”

“That’s exactly what it means,” she said. Destin rubbed her hands over her face and then drove her fingers through her hair. The words danced on the back of her tongue, fighting to be free, and for once, she decided,
to hell with pride.
“You left me, Caleb. You broke my heart and you left me. I don’t want to
hear
this shit that you kept waiting for me to ask you to stay. If you wanted to stay, then you should have stayed. I read emotions and you’ve always known how to block me out. I didn’t know what you were thinking, what you were feeling. All I knew was that you were
leaving
me…leaving me and breaking my heart. How could I feel safe with you after that?”

Turning her back to him, she slipped back into her room. Then she locked the door. Pressing her back to it, she sank down to the floor and stared off into nothingness.

All I knew was that you were leaving me…leaving me and breaking my heart
.

Caleb stared, a little dumbfounded, at the closed door in front of him.

He’d gone after her. After she handed him that little gem, he’d reached for her, but she’d moved away too quick and before he could catch up with her, she’d shut the door, practically in his face.

He swiped a hand over his damp brow and started to pace. She hadn’t said anything to him that day. He’d asked if things were ever going to change…or just stay the same. Her response had been easy and flippant…
What’s wrong with how they are now?

Well, other than all sorts of things, he guessed he understood where she was coming from. They were great in bed, they never fought and they had so much in common; it was like they’d been cut from the same cloth.