BlindHeat (7 page)

She reclaimed the glass and sat back, rolled it between her
palms while she studied him. Pose defiant. Gaze liquid, drawing him to see
deeper, past resistance and into longing.

It made him hungry for her, sent images of slippery breasts
and plump lips through his brain. He wanted to tell her she was his, show her.

He didn’t. He put his right hand over hers, gently, his voice
soft, reassuring. “We won’t do anything you don’t want to do.” He released her
hand and leaned back. “You want to do more than you admit.”

She tucked both her hands under the table in her lap. “Look,
I don’t know anything about you. Not even your name.”

“Marcus.”

“What do you do, Marcus?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Ex-con complicated?”

“No. I’m sort of a spiritual leader.”

She stared at him. He didn’t need to read her mind to know
what she was thinking.

“Look, about this morning…”

“It won’t happen again,” she said. “I’m not going to tell
anyone. So that’s settled.”

“That’s not… This morning got out of hand. I didn’t mean for
things to go that far. My fault entirely—”

“You were waiting for me? You planned it?”

“No.” His gaze dropped to the table when he said it. He was
not a convincing liar. “Yes.” He felt her tense, move her knee away from his.
He made an attempt at damage control. “I was there for another reason, but I
knew you might happen along.”

“So, what? You’re having some fun playing your little cat-and-mouse
game with me? Spiritual leader my ass.” The last word ended on a hiss as she
leaned close again, before adding, “You tell Eddie to go to hell.”

She was sexy when she hissed like that. It made him lose the
thread of conversation.

She stood then, pushed the chair back so hard it fell over.
That was not what he needed. The research lab Romeo was up on his feet and the
guy closest to Allie’s chair followed. Franny came hustling their direction
with a steaming pot of coffee in hand, no doubt destined for his lap.

He had nothing to lose at that point. “Who the fuck is
Eddie?”

She saw it then, that everyone in the diner was staring at
her, both of them. She picked up the chair. Waved off the guys ready to defend
her. “I’m fine.” She sent them another fluorescent smile, brushed the hair from
her eyes and said loudly, “I’m clumsy today. All thumbs.”

Franny didn’t look convinced, but the guys sat, eyes still
on him. Allie turned back to Marcus. “Walk me back?”

She saved him with that simple request. He wondered why.

Marcus stood, dropped a fifty on the table and followed
Allie, careful to give Franny and her coffee pot a wide berth. Allie kept a
brisk pace and when they reached the corner, just out of view of the diner
windows, she whirled. Her eyes drilled into his. “You don’t know Eddie?”

“No.”

She dissected him with her eyes for another few seconds,
then turned away. “If you’re going to pretend you’re a spiritual leader, you
should drop the word ‘fuck’ from your vocabulary. And learn to manage your
baser urges—translate that as temper and sex—better.”

Manage his urges? He was the high magus of the Pantherians.
Pretend? He was a millennial being…almost. She probably hadn’t walked the earth
a quarter of a century. She was human. And she was telling him to control
himself? And since when was sex anything less than the true merging and sharing
of two spirits? It was not a baser urge.

She was walking away and he hurried after her.

“Who is Eddie?”

“My father.”

“And a father would send someone after his daughter, someone
who’d have sex with her in the park as some sort of torment to her?”

“Why were you in the park?”

“Answer my question first.”

She whirled to face him again. “I don’t know what fathers
normally do. I only know about Eddie. If all he did was send you to the park to
torment me, then I got off light.”

He reached for her then, both hands cupping her face. She
slapped them down, her lips pulled back over her teeth in a snarl. “Don’t.”

He stepped back when everything in him screamed to grab her
up and kiss her.

“What would Eddie normally do?”

“I answered your question. It’s your turn.”

“I was at the park looking for something I lost there.

“What?”

She’d started walking again, the light was green and she
crossed, leaving him to trot after. She stopped on the other side and whirled
to face him.

“Great, I didn’t have enough to deal with already. God, what
is it with this day?”

“What?”

“Trouble headed this way.”

Marcus looked over her shoulder. “Those ladies with your
boss? The garden club is trouble?”

“I swear they share the same bottle of hair dye and why are
all of them dressed in shades of beige? It is spring after all.”

He tried hard to keep up with the sudden change in topics.
Hair dye? And Allie wanted them to be more colorful. He thought of her closet,
seven outfits in varying shades of black to gray. Her room, with its
furnishings so old that they’d all taken on a gray patina, her rug a grayed
green, her bedspread, grayed white.

She tossed another quick glance their way and grabbed his
hands in hers. “I don’t have my glasses with me. Which is my boss?”

Her hands were cool in his. Her pulse was hammering like a
cornered rabbit’s. Allie didn’t wear glasses or contacts. But Marcus knew when
to ask questions and when making himself useful would earn him points. He needed
points right now a whole lot more than he needed answers.

“The one in the middle, in the lightest of the brown suits.”

“Do you know any of the others?”

He thought he knew them, but was certain Allie must.
“Caroline to her right and Joyce to the left.”

Allie frowned. “How do you know the garden club?”

Was that a glint of jealousy in her eyes? Millennial being
or not, his ego needed the boost her possessiveness gave it. He shrugged. “They
don’t mind sharing a table with me when the diner is busy.”

“You have lunch with the garden club?”

“We chat about flowers, organics. Joyce suggested I join the
club.”

“Joyce invited—”

“Allie? There you are.”

Allie rolled her eyes, muttered something he didn’t catch
and turned to greet the ladies.

“Elaine, Caroline, Joyce.” Allie smiled at each in turn.
Marcus was relieved they each responded appropriately. He knew for sure he had
Elaine’s name right, the others were a little fuzzier, but all turned out well
enough. Elaine told the others Allie would be heading up a gardening magazine
project. Marcus smiled and promised to attend their next meeting when Joyce
reissued her invitation. Then the ladies were off to Franny’s, and he was alone
with Allie.

“You’re into flowers?” she asked.

She said it with a wrinkling of nose, as if antennae were
suddenly protruding from his skull.

“One of many interests.”

“Right. You’re a monk or something too. A monk who likes sex
with women he stalks in the park.” The rain chose to return at that moment. The
rise in his cock, when she looked up at him, was hard and swift. He couldn’t
read her mind, but he knew she was remembering the same rain-soaked kisses.

“Sex in the park in the rain,” he corrected. “And I said
spiritual leader, not monk. Absolutely not monk.”

She cleared her throat. He could swear she felt rising
sexual tension as keenly as he did.

“I have to get back,” she said and she turned, running down
the street. At the last intersection she crossed against the red and ducked
into the newspaper office. He’d accomplished almost nothing. She’d thrown him
crumbs about herself and nothing about Hella. He’d have to see if the crumbs
led anywhere interesting. He was going to start with why Allie could see a
leopard in the snow, in the murky light of predawn, and yet insisted she needed
glasses to recognize her boss a few feet away in the middle of the day.

* * * * *

Oliver sat back on his hind legs, pink nose twitching. The
lid of the laptop was closed. He was looking intently at Marcus.

Marcus pointed at the computer. “Do you know anything about
Googling?”

Oliver just stared, that steady, unwavering look.

Whenever Marcus needed research done, Jake said he’d Google
it. Only this time, Marcus didn’t want Jake to know what he was researching. He
couldn’t explain his need to protect Allie from people he trusted with his life
or them from her. There was just a sense, a premonition of sorts, that she was
his Pandora’s box. When he learned her secrets, there’d be no putting them
back. He didn’t want blame for whatever might go wrong to fall on anyone but
him.

Marcus lifted the laptop lid.

A round button just above the keyboard blinked red.

“What now?” Marcus wondered aloud.

Oliver looked from Marcus to the laptop. When Marcus did
nothing, Oliver tapped the “enter” key. With a whir and some beeps the screen
lit up. An empty box with password written above it appeared.

Oliver typed, hit enter, and the screen changed. A few more
key taps and another box, very much like the password box appeared, only this
box said Google.

Marcus nodded. “Now that is impressive.”

Oliver flicked his bunny ears and twitched his tail.

Marcus sat. He still didn’t know what to do, but he had his
pride. If a rabbit could figure this out… He typed “face perception” in the
box. If he knew more about how the recognition process worked, he might
understand why the skill seemed absent in Allie’s case. He waited patiently for
the computer to produce some kind of answer. Nothing happened. Oliver reached a
paw across the keyboard and hit the enter key.

A list appeared on the screen.

“Ah,” Marcus said.

Oliver nudged the mouse with his nose.

“I know, I know,” Marcus said. Oliver looked at him, head
tipped slightly sideways, contemplating. It was unacceptable that he had a
rabbit doubting whether it was safe to leave him alone with the computer.

“I’ve got it from here.” He lifted Oliver from desk to floor
and gave his furry backside a pat, which sent the little guy hopping off.
Marcus chose the first suggested page from the list and started reading. Two
hours later, he pushed back from the computer, eyes burning. He closed them and
pressed cool fingertips to the lids, tried to decide how best to use what he
had learned.

There was no doubt in his mind that Allie was prosopagnosic,
or face blind. Not a psychological disorder but one either inherited or caused
by head trauma. He’d seen her display the symptoms and employ several of the
coping strategies he’d just read about. The way he understood it, it was
something like colorblindness, only with faces. It wasn’t that she found him
forgettable, or that her eyesight was deficient, but that she lacked a
cognitive ability to process and commit to memory the unique patterns of
features that comprised individual faces.

Clearly, it left her vulnerable, and she was wise not to
reveal that chink in her armor to others. There was no solid treatment for the
condition. All of that added up to the perfect excuse to get closer to her, the
means to reach out. Medicine and science might not have the answer to Allie’s
problem, but Marcus thought he did. Humans relied too much on sight to make
sense of the world. Proper training could amplify the perception level of
Allie’s other senses, teach her to see with more than her eyes.

* * * * *

The timer on her desktop beeped the one o’clock warning.
Allie logged the project she was working on into her time-tracking software.
The sleepless night and the roller coaster day were catching up with her. She
wanted a nap in the worst way. Coffee would have to suffice.

In the break room Allie added sugar to her mug, watched the
crystalline mound linger on the surface and then melt, resisting before
dissolving. She stirred up a whirlpool with a red coffee straw, stared into
swirling dark liquid, remembering the licorice black of his hair, her fingers
feasting on the texture.

It was raining harder when Allie returned to her desk,
rivulets streaming down the plate-glass window. The world on the other side
wrapped in mist and glittering droplets. An ad layout waited on the computer
desktop, carefully worked in black and white plus two shades of gray. She
wanted to escape into the tidiness of the grayscale, the orderly march from
black to white. Results easily controlled. Reliable.

She sat down at her desk, but her thoughts ran off, out the
window and into the mists.

Marcus crept back into her thoughts with his dangerous
smile—singing a nursery song, painting a rainbow of sound in unruly colors.

Playmate, come out and play with me.

In her fantasy his call lured her into the rain, back into
the memory of him in the park, his voice going smoky when he pressed her
against the broad trunk of an oak, dropping almost to a whisper when he
unbuttoned her blouse.

Climb up my rainspout, I’ll slide down your cellar door.

He had the words all wrong, but how could she know that?
Nursery songs weren’t something she’d learned at Eddie’s knee. The song seemed
a part of another life, something from a time before she had words. Playmate?
The thought nagged like a pebble in a shoe.

She pushed the irritation aside, returning to the daydream.
A vision of his dark head bent low, his tongue catching a raindrop that
trembled at the tip of her nipple, his lips closing around her flesh and the
tug of gentle suction banished nursery songs from her mind.

Unlike that morning, in her fantasy neither of them was
afraid to finish what he started. With rain pelting their bodies, wind moaning
and rattling the branches, she had her legs wrapped around his hips and their
bodies pounded out a primal rhythm. They moved on to a grownup song, wordless
tones riding up and down a scale of pleasure.