Mind Game (GhostWalkers, #2)(99)

She didn’t turn around but pressed back against his body. “It’s strange knowing someone wants me dead,” she mused aloud. “All of my life, I’ve known I was different and maybe in some way a monster, dangerous to others. I even knew I wasn’t lovable, but I never once thought they would want me dead.”

He rubbed his face against the nape of her neck. “No one is going to kill you, Dahlia, not if I have anything to say about. And you’re very lovable. I don’t love anyone else. I haven’t since I was a boy.”

She ignored his confession because she had to. She couldn’t think about Nicolas and what it would mean if he were like the others. “I thought they were my friends, Nicolas. Max and Jesse. I thought they cared about me the way friends care about one another.” How could she say she wanted to doubt him? That she was afraid if he was deceiving her in some way she would never recover? How could she admit she was a coward, wanting to run from him even more than the others.

“Calhoun was tortured, Dahlia,” Nicolas reminded. “He refused to give them any information about you.” He straightened up, turned her around to face him, catching her chin so she was forced to meet his black gaze.

“That’s so,” she conceded, “but then if his orders were to never say a word about me, wouldn’t he follow them, the same way Max followed them?”

It was the first time he heard a trace of bitterness in her voice.

“Don’t do that, Dahlia, don’t let them change you. Don’t let anything change who you are. You made your own world with your own code, and you did it yourself. It defines who you are.”

Dahlia looked up at his sculpted face and the dark intensity of his eyes. “You believe that, don’t you? You think I’m worth so very much.”

“To me, everything,” Nicolas admitted.

“Why? Why am I important to you, yet someone else would want me dead? Why would my mother give me up to an orphanage rather than keep me? She just threw me away, and the orphanage people followed her example. I don’t even know the first thing about my culture, about my people. I don’t even know who my people are.”

“The GhostWalkers are your people. Does it matter so much where we came from? It’s who we are now that counts.” Nicolas led her toward the bed. There was too much pain and sorrow in her eyes. “You need to sleep, Dahlia, nothing is so important that you should put off sleeping. It will help your headache.”

She just stood there looking helpless, very unlike his Dahlia. Nicolas lifted her easily into his arms, holding her tightly to his chest. He feathered kisses from her temple to the corner of her mouth. “You just need to sleep, honey. Let it all go away.”

Dahlia allowed him to put her on the bed, and when he lay down beside her, she turned to him, familiar now with the heat and comfort of his body. She didn’t want to need him, but she found she did. She didn’t have any fight left in her and she needed his strength.

Nicolas glanced at his watch. His team was moving at three, to see what they could find in a soft probe of the NCIS agents’ homes. He had plenty of time, it was barely dark. He gathered Dahlia close and rocked her gently. “All the gifts you have, Dahlia, are incredible. Yes, there are drawbacks to using them, but we saved Calhoun’s life together. He wouldn’t have made it without us working at healing him.”

“Healing is your gift, Nicolas, not mine.” Her voice was drowsy, her long lashes feathering down toward her cheeks.

He kissed the top of her head. “I think you’re wrong. I may have the power inside of me, but it’s locked away. Without you, I have no key. That’s what you are, you can focus the power and aim it exactly where it needs to go. I simply release it. We work well together.”

“I’m tired, Nicolas. Really, really tired.”

The sheer weariness in her voice was heartbreaking to him. Nicolas held her closer to him, wanting to find a way to comfort her. He kept rocking her, as gently as he could, brushing kisses in her hair until she fell asleep in his arms.

Nicolas lay awake just watching over her. He’d found himself in many tight corners in his life, but none had ever felt like this one. He looked down at her face and wondered how she had become so important to him, so necessary to him. She looked like a porcelain doll with her petal-soft skin and her exotic eyes. He smoothed back the tumble of hair when she curled up tighter into the fetal position.

She made a soft sound of distress, then a low keening noise. Nicolas felt his heart shatter when she sobbed in her sleep. Her fists clenched and her body trembled, and the sounds were wrenched from her as if she couldn’t contain the overwhelming grief one more moment.

“Baby, don’t do this.” He whispered the words. Why had he thought if she cried she’d feel better? It was too much, too much sorrow for her. He pulled her beneath him, lying over her, somehow trying with his body to protect her from the grief.

She came awake, her eyes wide, black. Swimming with tears. “Nicolas? What is it?” She touched his face, the lines of worry there.

“You’re crying, honey. I thought it would be good for you to cry, but not like this, not in your sleep where I can’t share it with you.”

“I can’t be crying.” Dahlia wiped at the tears on her face with a kind of horror. “I never cry.”

“You are crying.”