Mind Game (GhostWalkers, #2)(51)

“If you ever decide to get out of the business, you might want to write a manual.” She couldn’t take her gaze from his face, not even to look at the man they needed to follow. She felt mesmerized by Nicolas. The pad of his thumb was caressing her chin, stroking back and forth in a small rhythmic movement that both fascinated her and sent a shiver down her spine. “Have you ever been anyone’s obsession?”

The faintest trace of a grin softened his mouth. “Only those who want to kill me.”

“Are there many?”

“Not alive.” He shifted and scooped up his pack. “I don’t like people trying to kill me, obsessed or not. I have a rule about that. Come on.” He took her arm. “He’s on the move. Just walk with me, flirt a bit and hold my hand. We’ll catch an early cup of coffee.”

“You want me to blend.” She sighed and tossed back her abundance of hair. “I’ve never been much of a blender. I prefer the dark corners myself.”

“I don’t want him to get a look at you.”

“They don’t know me. I was trained under another name. Even if they manage to find that information, it won’t do them any good.”

He glanced down at her. “The name you trained under was Novelty White. Which of course translates to Dahlia Le Blanc. Not very clever.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea. How would you like to be called Novelty?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I was a teenager, for heaven’s sake.”

“You have a point. I would have thought you would strenuously object.”

“At the time, I gave very little input. I was going through my silent stage.” She glanced at him with a small smile. “You know the ‘I’m the superior teen and you’re just lint’ stage. Mostly I wanted to defy and irritate Whitney. I took great pleasure in making him angry. Did he really get rid of everyone but Lily? Because if Lily is real, so are the others.”

“Do you remember them? The other girls?”

“Some of them. Most are vague, but there are a couple of the others like Lily I remember. Flame. She had another name, but I’m not certain I remember it.”

“Iris,” he supplied. “Whitney really hated anyone calling her Flame.”

“Whitney hated us all, period. We didn’t do what he wanted, when he wanted. He needed robots, not children.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, Dahlia, he didn’t do much better when he recruited us. We were a failure to him as well. All military trained. Good backgrounds. Strong and disciplined, yet we didn’t fare much better than all of the little girls he gave away.”

“Poor Lily. It must have been such a blow to her finding out the truth about him. I remember her as being gentle and kind. She was smart, really smart. I remember sitting up with her at night talking about planets and the Earth’s rotation, but it may just have been a dream, after all, we couldn’t have been more than four or five. If I ever snuck out of my room and Whitney caught me, I was punished.”

“How?” Nicolas was intrigued with the conversation, but his attention remained on the man they were shadowing along the street. “How did he punish you?”

Dahlia looked up at his face. She had told him more about herself in the small space of time they’d known one another than she’d ever told anyone. She wondered if he really had cast a spell. How else could she explain the way she felt and acted around him?

He tilted his head and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

There was no point in fighting it. She was going to tell him. “I had this old ratty blanket. I used to pretend my mother made it for me and that she sent it with me when she gave me up. More than likely he bought it along with purchasing me, but still, it was a fantasy that helped me keep calm on the days I thought I’d go mad and my head would explode.”

“You kept it, didn’t you?”

Her gaze shifted from his. “Sure. It was one of the few things I had of my past. It’s not like I had grandparents and uncles and aunts. I treasured the small things.” She pushed her free hand through her hair. “I try not to think about them too much—Milly or Bernadette or my home, or my things. If I do, this terrible sorrow and rage wells up and mixes together until I know I’m dangerous.” She glanced at him. “It’s probably a good thing I met you. I’d be accidentally starting fires all over the place.”

“I saved the blanket for you.” He wanted to gather her into his arms when she talked about her past. Hold her against him where he knew he could keep her safe and shelter her from the pain of not having the most simple of necessities . . . a family. What had Whitney been thinking, sending the little girls into the world with no one to protect them? He’d given them money and thought that would be enough.

She looked up at him from under long lashes. “You’re angry.”

“I’m sorry. Are you feeling it?” She was pressing her hand to her stomach. It was the third time she’d done it, almost without thought.

“No, your energy level is very low. I’m getting to know you better. You do this thing with your eyebrows.”

“I do not. I worked at learning how to keep my face perfectly without expression.”

“It is,” she assured, “all except the eyebrow.”