Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(60)



Her voice trailed off, as the look on his face sank in. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, no. Don’t . . . don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“They got her, too?”

“A few days ago. Home intruder, they say. Threw her down the stairs.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to see it in her head, but she had a very powerfully developed capacity to visualize, and it did its thing without her permission or consent. Oh, God. Matilda.

“You should have left me in there,” she said. “This is terrible. Everyone who tried to help me has died badly.”

“Not me.” He leaned his forehead against hers.

Her eyes opened, in spite of herself, and she stared into his intense dark eyes. She cleared her throat. “It’s just a matter of time.”

“I’m hard to kill,” he said.

The contact of his forehead against hers was as intimate as a kiss, but she didn’t dare give into the sweetness of it, or she’d melt into a weepy puddle again. She leaned back, biting her shaking lip. “You said Nina had a theory,” she said. “As to how I get through your wall.”

“Yeah. Nina was the one who introduced me to the concept of mind shields, on that very special night at Spruce Ridge. Her shield’s like a smoke and mirrors setup, and Aaro’s is like a bank vault. She said, pick an analog that works for you. So, hopeless tech nerd that I am, I picked an encrypted, password-protected computer.”

That was a lot to take in, so her mind latched onto the trivial bits first. “Nerd?” She looked him up and down, the deep, weathered tan, the battered hands, the sinewy, ripped muscles. “You?”

“Me,” he said. “Total geekitude. To the core of my being.”

“That is such bullshit.” She put her hand on his chest, catching her breath at the solid heat, the throb of his heart. “Tech geeks don’t tend to be heartthrob gorgeous.”

His grin flashed. “Right. With this nose.”

“Yes,” she said, forcefully. “With that nose.”

“Whatever. As I was saying, I picked a password. And I put your name in it.”

She was startled and moved. “Me? You put me in your password? Why me?”

“You were on my mind,” he said simply. “I used all the usual tricks, of mixing up numbers and symbols. But essentially, yeah. You.”

“But . . . but how did you ever know about me at all?”

“Nina already knew you’d been abducted. Aaro contacted me to do some research about your mom. I found pictures of you at your father’s house.” He hesitated, and added gently, “I was the one who found him.”

“Oh,” she whispered.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

She shook her head, lifting her hands. Silently begging him to leave it alone. Which he was smart and sensitive enough to do.

He waited a few minutes, and went on. “Anyhow, to get back to what I was saying. I couldn’t stop thinking about you after that.”

“So that’s why I can get through the wall?” she said. “Because I’m in your computer password?”

His big shoulders lifted and dropped. “You got a better explanation?”

She shook her head. All out of brilliant ideas.

“You’ve been my only social contact for weeks now,” he said.

“That’s what you call social contact?”

That earned her a flashing grin. “I was hiding up in the mountains until yesterday because I couldn’t bear to be with people. I got pretty messed up in Spruce Ridge. Rudd, the guy who locked your mother up, he was heavy into psi-max. It gave him coercive power, and he used it like a billy club. He bludgeoned me with it, basically. I spent time in a coma. Brain swelling, the whole deal.”

“Oh, God, Miles. I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t trolling for sympathy. Just filling you in. Anyhow, afterward, it was bad. Lot of pain, and the sensory input was disproportionate. Like, the filters in my brain got messed up. Everything bugged me. Smells, light, sound, radiation from computers and cell phones, smog. There were drugs I could have taken, but they sucked. So I ran off. I was out in the woods camping when you started visiting.”

“Social contact,” she murmured.

“Yeah, very social.” He pulled her back down on top of him, and kissed her. A gentle, questioning kiss.

But she wasn’t done questioning him yet. “Do you still have the sensory overload problem?”

His eyes went thoughtful, narrow. “Not exactly,” he said, slowly. “I did until a few hours ago. My senses are as intense as they ever were, but when you started visiting my head, I started keeping my shit together without the meltdowns or the stress flashbacks. And now, after today . . .” His voice trailed off for a long moment. “It’s weird.”

“What’s weird?” she burst out. “Besides absolutely everything?”

“That it doesn’t bug me anymore,” he said. “Once I hooked up with you, I got extra bandwidth. I grew into it. It fits me now. You know how when you hit puberty, suddenly your legs are too long or your arms, or . . .” He stopped, looked her over. “No, never mind. Not you. I bet you’ve always been perfectly proportioned. Since babyhood.”

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