Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(6)

“I don’t want to be your friend, April. I want more than that. I want to be your everything.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t give you that.”

Fire flared in Tony’s eyes. “Then I don’t want anything from you.”

I flinched, startled by his hatred. Yeah, I was breaking his heart—I’d basically been breaking it for six months now—but I was still hurt by his anger. He was being selfish. He was hurting, but so was I. I had feelings too, and it was as if he didn’t care about them. He just wanted what he wanted and thought it was all my fault that he couldn’t have it.

I folded my arms and had to work to keep my emotions in check so I wouldn’t send out a burst of electricity and short-circuit the house. “I’m not doing this on purpose. I’m not trying to hurt you.”

Tony glared at me one more time, then turned his back on me. “Just go.”

“Fine.” Big baby. “If that’s what you want.”

I used my superspeed to pack up a couple suitcases and, in under a minute, was back standing in front of him, ready to separate my life from his. Tony looked at my bags and scoffed in disgust. “You’re going to regret this.” He sneered. “You’ll never survive on your own. You have nothing in this world except for me.”

I reared back. His words, laced with real hatred, hurt so much because they were true. I had nothing. I depended on Tony completely. I let him dictate my life because I knew nothing else. My tears started flowing freely again, and I finally managed to match the angry look on his face with one of my own. “You can be such a jerk sometimes, Tony. I don’t understand how I ever loved you.”

I slammed the door on my way out with a little too much force and heard the frame splinter. I didn’t care. I had to get out of there.





I was now officially no one from nowhere who had nobody. Talk about depressing. To keep my mind off of my dismal situation and the hurt Tony had caused me, I focused all my thoughts on the one thing I had left—my necklace. Plan B was everything now. I needed to see what jewelers could tell me about my necklace, and see if I could figure out who made it.

I decided to go to Las Vegas because it was the city where the Visticorp labs had been. I knew I probably wasn’t from there. Tony was from Italy and managed to end up in the same lab as me, so I knew I could have come from anywhere in the world, but I didn’t have a better place to go, and it was closest.

I was excited because I’d never been to Las Vegas. I’d never been anywhere public, thanks to Tony. My body buzzed with energy as I reached the infamous Strip, but as amazing and fun as it looked, I only lasted a couple minutes before I had to leave. It was sensory overload.

Aside from being able to manipulate electricity, I have a whole laundry list of other superhuman abilities. All of my physical senses are amped up—sight, sound, smell, taste, strength, speed, and agility. Basically, I’m somewhere in between Captain America and Superman with a whole lot of Elektra.

Having powers is awesome, but sometimes they can overwhelm me. I can’t ever completely shut them off, even though I spent the last six months with Tony learning to control them. It didn’t help that I’d been so secluded out in the desert all this time. I wasn’t used to the world coming at me in epic proportions.

I was a good four miles away from the main strip before I was far enough from the noise to make the pounding in my head stop. It wasn’t the best part of town, but I found a motel that smelled decent enough to stay in. I appreciated the dinginess of the motel when I noticed the guy behind the counter. My unusual looks would fit right in with his tattoos and facial piercings.

At the sound of my entrance, he droned out a welcome in a bored voice without taking his eyes off the small television he was watching behind his desk. “The rate’s thirty-nine dollars a night, we don’t rent by the hour, it’s a hundred-dollar deposit if you’re paying cash, and no pets, no exceptions.”

“What about the lice and roaches already living in the rooms? You going to charge me for those?”

The quip earned me a smirk from the guy. “Those are on the house.” Finally glancing in my direction, his head jerked back and his eyes widened as he took a moment to look me up and down. After admiring my body long enough for me to have to clear my throat, his gaze finally made it back to my face. He zeroed in on my eyes and then leaned over the counter to get a better look. “Whoa. Killer contacts.”

I wasn’t about to explain that they were natural as I slid my ID and credit card toward him. “Need to take a picture, Sparky?”

I got another smirk. With a shake of his head, he took my ID and started typing into his computer. “Just the one night?”

“For starters.”

He nodded to this, then squinted at my driver’s license. My hair in the picture on my ID was jet black and my eyes were green. I guess that’s what I’d looked like before the explosion. “Wicked. I can see why you go for the Chelsea’s Angel look. When your hair was black, you could have been her clone.” His eyes flicked up to my face again. “I like the green, though. It makes a statement.”

I laughed. I’m sure this guy was all about making statements with his looks. “Who’s Chelsea’s Angel?”

The guy froze in the process of handing me back my ID and credit card. “For real? You don’t know who Chelsea’s Angel is?” When I shook my head, he sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Have you been living under a rock in the middle of nowhere?”