Kadan sighed. "Let's just take one thing at a time. What do you have for dinner? I'm a fairly good cook."
Tansy's mouth went dry. She couldn't sit still with the rush of adrenaline. He was going to force her to go back with him. Tansy leapt from her chair and paced across the ground to where she kept her food supplies, needing the action to hide her thoughts. There had to be a way to escape. She knew the mountain like the back of her hand. If she got out of his sight, she could get away and hide. If he really had a tight timetable, he wouldn't have the time to look for her. But she had to keep it together and not panic.
She turned from the crisp cooler and found him inches from her body. He was so silent she hadn't heard him approach. Worse, she hadn't sensed him either. She was used to feeling the energy that radiated from people, but with him, there was nothing at all to warn her he was close. She realized she was holding her breath. She inhaled and took the scent of him into her lungs. Deep inside, her body sizzled and burned in an unfamiliar way. Fear shimmered through her, not at the prospect of this man attempting to force her compliance, but because as rough and scarred as he was, he filled her senses and mind with a sensual heat she couldn't ignore.
Tansy pushed the vegetables into his hands. His thumb brushed the sensitive skin of her forearm, a long stroke that had to be deliberate. Her gaze jumped to his. "I don't like to be touched."
"You shouldn't have such beautiful skin then," he answered, sounding completely unrepentant and not in the least perturbed by her reprimand, when, truthfully, he was shocked that he'd let his guard down so far with her that he was acting out of character.
Tansy shook her head. "Don't try to flirt with me, not when you've come up here determined to drag me back down into evil."
A slow smile changed his entire face, softened every hard line, lit up the blue of his eyes, and changed his mouth from that hint of cruelty to pure sensuality. "Honey, if I was going to flirt with you, you'd know it. That was the pure truth, whether you want to hear it or not." And touching her had shocked the hell out of him.
It wasn't a few butterflies reacting; an entire forest of them took flight in her stomach. "You were flirting," she said accusingly, frowning at him.
His smile widened as he turned away to the small table where he took the chopping board from her along with the knife. "Maybe. A little. But you do have beautiful skin."
"Thank you." Tansy fired up the gas stove and put on water for rice. "I have to work tonight. And you can't come. You'll scare my cougar away."
"She follows you. I found her tracking you through the trees down to the waterfall. She's dangerous, Tansy."
"The whole world is dangerous."
"Say my name."
She touched her teeth to her lower lip and shrugged. "Kadan, then. Why does it matter?"
His blue-black eyes flicked over her. "I matter, that's why."
The way he handled the knife with efficiency, chopping vegetables for stir-fry while she pulled her frying pan out of the locked chest where she kept her cooking pots, seemed to fascinate her. He noticed she couldn't stop watching the movements of his hands, so fast they nearly blurred, each stroke deliberate, and maybe he was showing off a little. Chagrined at behaving like a kid with his first crush, Kadan forced himself to focus on his mission.
"The first time you helped the police find a serial killer, you were only thirteen years old. What in the world made you do such a thing?" he asked. "Especially when the cost to you was so high." He turned to look at her. "You do more than simply pick up an object and know what a person was thinking and feeling; you're an empath. Why would a teenager ever put herself in a position such as tracking killers? That made no sense to me." And how could your family allow it? The thought spilled out before he could censor it.
Her head snapped up and she glared at him, proving she could pick up his thoughts. "My family understood my reasons, and unlike you, they believe in free will."
"So you are also telepathic. Apparently that talent didn't get knocked out of your head in that climbing accident."
She didn't even blink, but flicked him a look of censure from under her long lashes. "Apparently not."
She was cool under fire, he had to give her that. "Just how many talents do you have?"
She shrugged. "How many do you have?"
He flashed her another smile. "Good girl. Don't give away too much to the enemy." He heated a small amount of oil and tossed in the chopped vegetables. "I'm not, you know."
"My enemy? Maybe not, but I'm listening to everything you say, and I think you're prepared to use force to try to get me to track your killer."
"You really don't pull your punches, do you?"
"Why would I? You came up here with your own agenda. You don't really care what my reasons are for not cooperating. My reasons don't matter to you, and quite frankly, neither do I. As long as you get the job done, that's what is important to you."
Kadan sighed. "I have no more choice in this than you do. I have orders, Tansy, and people are going to die if we don't stop this."
"How does that make you any different from Whitney? For all you know he was following orders. He's a scientist and he works for the government. He could have been under orders to develop psychic warfare; in fact, in order to conduct his experiments on you, he had to have convinced somebody high up he could do it. They had to have known about his earliest experiments."
He let the first surge of anger wash over him and dissipate while he lifted the frying pan off the heat and tossed the vegetables. Setting them back on the stove and adding a little soy sauce gave him a little more time so he was able to keep his expression exactly the same. "I've been more than up-front with you. Insulting me is not going to help anything."
Her eyebrow shot up. "It wasn't meant as an insult. I think it's a legitimate question. As I understand it, your GhostWalker program is top security clearance. You're a government secret, so secret that if you can't find out who is killing people, they want to eliminate all of you. Who has that kind of power, to play with people's lives, to decide whether they live or die? I don't see that they're much different than your killer. And Whitney maybe just carried out his orders, like you're doing now."
Maybe she was hitting a little too close to home. Of course they'd all speculated that several of their bosses had a hand in creating them. Whitney couldn't have done it alone, and he was still working for the government, sanctioned by someone, because he was escaping every effort to capture or destroy him. He had friends in high places.
"I suppose you have a point. There's every possibility Whitney is following orders, but what he's doing is wrong in so many ways I couldn't even begin to tell you."
"And if the order comes down to eliminate your fellow GhostWalkers, will you carry it out because they told you to do it?"
He removed the vegetables from the heat and turned completely to face her, his face settling into hard lines. His eyes went flat and cold, the blue turning nearly black, focused and hungry like the cougar. "There would be a war like no one has ever seen before."
A shiver of fear crept down her spine, but she liked him a lot better for it. He wasn't joking, and so far, she was fairly certain he had told her the
truth about everything. She was very sure he meant what he implied--he would go to war for or with his friends. She gave him a concession, then, a piece of herself because he'd revealed a part of his character to her.
"My parents always told me I was special. That my talent was a tremendous gift, not a curse, and that I could do things no one else could do for a reason. I started tracking serial killers when I was thirteen years old because I believed that was what I was supposed to do with my gift. I heard about somebody dumping the bodies of young girls next to schools and I thought, I can stop him. So I did."
Her voice was calm, remote; no expression chased across her face. Kadan knew self-preservation when he saw it. Tansy had removed herself from her past and simply recited the details as if they'd happened to someone else--and maybe they had. Her experiences certainly had to have changed her from that young, innocent girl. And she was giving him something of herself, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
"It must have been difficult, especially with you being an empath and so young. Did Whitney help prepare you?"
Tansy frowned. "How would he have helped me?"
"There are exercises you can do to strengthen each of the gifts you have and ways to learn to combat the repercussions of using psychic energy. I would have thought Whitney would have taught them to you."
"No, he didn't teach me anything. He studied me. If there was a way to combat the rush of impressions from objects, I certainly was never told. I wore gloves, of course, but the feelings, particularly emotions that were violent, often leaked through anyway. Whitney liked to observe other people's pain. It helped with his own."
Everything in him stilled. She had revealed an important piece of information without even knowing what she was giving him. "What pain?"
"He uses other people's pain to drown out his own. I think his pain stems from perceived abandonment, real or not; he feels very disconnected from everyone around him. He has rage toward his parents and teachers, people who didn't recognize his genius. He's very patriotic and has anger toward certain individuals in the government who don't share his vision, because he believes he's smarter and they should listen to him. All of that causes pain, but he doesn't recognize that it does. He can't connect with anyone."