He put both hands over her lips, then on her cheeks, then on either side of her jaw, framing her face. “You have to believe me.” He felt guilty for lying about lying, or at least for leaving out a pertinent piece of information—that his mom had said it wasn’t safe for Holly to leave, but that Elijah himself should book it. He wasn’t a manipulative ass of a mind reader if it was for Holly’s own good. Was he?
“I believe you.” She didn’t believe him, not completely. Everything else Kaylee had told her made too much sense for her description of mind readers to be inaccurate. But Holly desperately wanted to believe him. “We both have a lot of anger. That anger has to go somewhere. We can’t use it against each other. We’re too powerful for that, and we can do a lot of damage.”
“We already have.” He tilted her head forward, kissed her forehead, and looked into her eyes again. “I shouldn’t have done that to you, Holly. When you’re close to me like this, I know everything you think. I wish I could turn it off. I can’t. But I promise you I won’t make you feel that way again.”
She gave a small nod, her wide eyes never leaving his. She still wasn’t sure she should trust him, and she wasn’t sure she cared. He could betray her and use her, as long as he would touch her.
He pulled her by the hand through the open door, into the house.
A buzzer split the silence. Elijah dropped Holly’s hand and jogged through the living room. When she rounded the corner, she saw him pulling something out of the oven, and she smelled food. She skipped forward and ooohed her approval at the two places set at the kitchen table, the plates heaped with chicken casserole and roasted vegetables. As she watched, Elijah plucked rolls from the baking sheet he held with a towel and tossed a couple onto each plate.
“Dude.” She slid into a chair in front of one of the plates. Five minutes and one serving later, she came up for breath long enough to ask, “Do you have powers I don’t know about? Instant gourmet food? Oh, God.”
He rose, reached to the counter for the casserole dish, and spooned second helpings of chicken and vegetables onto her plate. “It’s been cooking for an hour. I couldn’t find you at the casino, and I hoped you might stop by here.”
Five minutes and the second serving later, she wiped the corners of her mouth daintily with her napkin, as if the whole meal had been a polite enterprise. Not. “I was hungry.”
He offered her a basket with the few remaining rolls. “Sitting at the casino talking to my mom, it came over me all of a sudden, this terrible hunger. I thought I was going to pass out.”
“Really!” Holly said through a mouthful of bread.
“On the way here, I stopped at that café, the one where I kidnapped you?” he said casually.
“Uh-huh?” she said in the same tone.
“I ate two of those muffins you were lusting after.”
“Mmmmmmuffin,” she said. “I’ve never had one. Were they good?”
He looked apologetic, as if they had been very good and he was afraid to tell her.
She stuck out her bottom lip.
He reached behind him to the cabinet, brought out a bakery box, and solemnly slid it across the table to her.
She peeked inside. Two chocolate muffins. She grinned her gratitude at him. He smiled back. She peeled back the glittering paper and took a big bite of muffin. Mmmmm.
“We can’t know what the future holds for us,” he said. “But I hope yours is full of muffins.”
Holly held up one finger until she’d chewed and swallowed. “Kaylee warned me about mind readers. You know exactly what to say to make a girl fall in love with you.”
Almost as soon as it was out of her mouth, she realized what she’d said. She glanced up at him guiltily. He frowned at her.
They’d had a huge fight just that morning. Now their relationship was too good and too tentative to mess up with a clumsy statement like that. It was true—if he did tell her he loved her, how would she ever know whether he was sincere?—but she hadn’t meant to bring this up.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know,” he responded with no expression in his voice.
Nervously she pulled at the muffin paper. Most girls probably would be put off their food by an awkward silence like this, or would pretend to be. Holly was not most girls. She was still hungry. She finished the first muffin and half-heartedly offered the second to Elijah. He shook his head no. She ate it in silence, then put the papers back in the bakery box and nipped up the crumbs with her fingers.
“Full?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I can ever be full,” she admitted. “Satisfied, for now.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s too bad.”
Was this innuendo? She didn’t have enough experience to know for certain, but she hoped for the best. She scraped back her chair, rounded the table to him, and slipped onto his lap. She ran her fingers back through his hair and—
“Oh God, how did you get this huge knot on the back of your head?” She touched it gingerly.
He winced. “That? My best friend pistol-whipped me.”
Holly nodded. “Your talk with Shane didn’t go well? And when you accused him of having magical powers, he thought you were crazy?”
“Basically,” Elijah said.
“Poor baby,” she cooed.
“It’s stopped bleeding,” he said. “The show must go on. Where were we?”
She gently kissed his hair. “Are we going to make out at the kitchen table, or is there a bedroom?”
The serious look he gave her sent chills along her arms.
He moved under her. She slipped off his lap and let him stand, then looked way up at him. It wasn’t often that he stood so close to her and she realized how tall he was.
He chuckled. “You make me feel like a million bucks, you know that?”
She let loose an embarrassed giggle. “Why? You knew you were tall.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know it was glorious.”
She snorted.
Shaking his head, he pulled her by the hand across the living room, into the hall, past the fateful bathroom. In his bedroom he closed the blinds against the midafternoon desert sun, plunging the room into shadow. The sunlight squeezing through at the edges of the windows backlit his wavy brown hair. He sat on the bed and kicked off his shoes. Then he patted the covers beside him.
She sat down and bent to take off her shoes.
“Could you leave those on?”
She paused. This request was kinky, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream.
“I plead the fifth.” But his voice was so kind that the kinky request began to seem almost sweet.
She let him ease her back onto the bed. Her eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the darkness and she couldn’t make out his expression at all as he leaned over and kissed her.
She cleared her mind. Because she didn’t want him to see the turmoil in it. And because she needed to enjoy this moment with him, which was all she knew she had.
He rubbed the tip of his nose against hers and rested his forehead on hers. “Don’t be scared, Holly,” he whispered. “The world is more open now, not more closed.”
She choked on her words as she whispered back, “I can’t believe what they put us through for so long.”
The stubble on his chin whispered across her skin as he said hoarsely, “Seven years asleep has been worth it for these three days with you.”
He watched her for a second longer. No matter what happened, she would always remember him just like this: a mess of sandy brown hair, kind green eyes, straight nose in a shadowy face, his lips twisted into a quizzical bow.
They kissed for a long time in the darkness. Slowly his body melted and settled into hers, his tongue exploring deep inside her mouth, his knee tucked between her thighs, his chest rising and falling against hers as they breathed together.
She thought of undressing him. Surprised, he looked down and watched her long and perfect pink nails sliding down his faded T-shirt. She was so beautiful. He would never get used to her.
She rolled him onto his back and straddled him. Then she grabbed the hem of his T-shirt on either side, lifted it up, and smoothed her small hands up his bare chest. Just as in Shane’s car that morning, her admiration for his body would have embarrassed him except that it gave her pleasure and heated her blood. His blood heated with hers.
“Your turn,” he said, running his fingers underneath the cups of her bikini top. She shuddered at his touch. Slowly, seductively, she unhooked the top and pulled it off, exposing her perfect breasts. Then, without turning around, she tossed the top over her shoulder. It rang a small basketball goal in the corner of his room.
“Score!” he exclaimed.
“Only if you have a condom,” she deadpanned. She winked at him. The extra drama provided by her false eyelashes set his skin on fire.
“I do.” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked into her eyes, searching for a bead on whether she really wanted to do this. She gazed steadily back at him. She was sure. She was scared, but she was sure.
To prove it, she unbuttoned his jeans and pulled his waistband until he helped her take his jeans and boxers off. He tugged her bikini bottoms down her thighs. All their clothes discarded, she eased on top of him again and massaged his hard length first with her hand, then with her power.
“Oh my Lord,” he breathed. Every second he thought his euphoria was too good to withstand, and every second he felt even better.
She felt the same way. As he watched her in the dim light, her pupils dilated, her brown eyes turning black.
He twisted underneath her and leaned over to peer into the top drawer of his nightstand. Reaching in carefully—Shane’s Glock was in there too, loaded now—he pulled out a condom packet. As he tore it open, he explained, “I bought them when we stopped for gas in St. George. I had high hopes for this day, and things are finally looking up, despite the argument, and the head trauma, and the escape from the fortieth floor.”
She laughed nervously, watching him put the condom on. He tried to put her at ease and felt a little like a dentist making small talk over the sound of the drill. “Seriously, did you ring that goal on purpose?”
“If I said no, I wouldn’t be a very good magician,” she joked, but he hadn’t taken her mind off what was about to happen. She watched his hands. Her breath came light and fast.
Slowly he rolled on top of her. Even more slowly he slid into her. She wrapped him in her power. His body was ablaze with his power and hers, her arousal and his own.
He grabbed both her hands and set his forehead against hers as he stroked inside her. “They were right to keep us apart,” he whispered.
She giggled between gasps of pleasure. “If we’d figured this out, they wouldn’t have been able to keep me away from you.”
“No. And I would not have done my homework.”
His joke didn’t get the laugh from her that he’d wanted. Instead, she thought of the night seven years ago when he first asked her out, and her parents said no and took away her power. Her homework had been reading Romeo and Juliet. She was afraid her story with Elijah would end the same way.
“Baby, don’t go there,” he coaxed her, brushing her curls away from her face. “We’ll be okay. We have each other’s backs now. They won’t be able to tear us apart again.”
He braced himself above her and stroked her harder, trying to get her mind off everything but their bodies and their power. It didn’t work. She felt as euphoric as before, but she was thinking hard about their future together. If they did survive, she wondered what the sex would be like when they were older and their power began to fade. She bet it would still be excellent. Power was delicious, but she had wanted him before, when he was only smart and funny and kind, with his hair in his eyes.
“I love you, too.” He kissed her mouth and thrust into her until they both were high.
Afterward he knitted his fingers into her thick hair and kissed her again, a long and thorough kiss of appreciation. He trailed more kisses high across her cheekbone and toward her hairline, following the smear of glittering makeup.
“I’m so sorry about this morning,” she said huskily.
“Me too,” he said between kisses.
“Powers make everything so complicated. We always have to remember why we liked each other in the first place in high school.”
“Yeah.” He wound one of her long curls around his finger.
“I wish this hadn’t happened,” she said, “and we could just lie here, and do it, and talk about rock bands, and the casino, and our lame parents, and the awful food in the high school cafeteria.”
He laughed. The high school cafeteria food had been truly awful. But he didn’t understand the rest of what she was saying. “Really? You wish this hadn’t happened? You wish you didn’t have power?”
She frowned. “I wouldn’t want to go back to thinking I was crazy. Having power is definitely better than that. But the Res or the casino or both are about to pin us like insects on a board. I wish I could go back to fourteen and start over. You could ask me to the prom, and I could go, and I would never float up to my parents’ living room chandelier.” She shuddered as he moved one finger along her collarbone. “How about you? Wouldn’t you rather start over?”
He shook his head against the pillow. “I always felt like half a person. Now I feel whole. You deserve a whole man.”
Her brows went down. She believed he loved his power, but she didn’t believe the reason had anything to do with her.
Then she remembered he could read her mind. Her dark eyes widened. She had screwed up everything again.