Retrieval (14 page)

“It was still raining, and as I stood watching my sisters run back toward me lightning flashed all around me. Great, long, bright, hot streaks of lightning lit up the sky, and my sisters were screaming at me. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but suddenly I knew. I knew that Mama Sarah and Daddy Robert were dead and that the man in front of me was responsible. I remember Piper reached me first. With all the blood on me, she must’ve thought I was about to die too. I touched her, and when we grasped hands, everything she’d seen was in my mind. I knew her every thought, every memory. Something in me clicked. I told my sisters to run back to the mission and wait for me there, and something in my eyes must have alerted them that I meant business. I am the firstborn, and authority is mine by birth order. They always did what I asked, mostly without questioning. I was glad that night they did so again.

“I turned back to the man once my sisters had left. I had to touch him in order to read what he knew. He was lying there in a pool of his own blood, gasping like a fish out of water. Even as close to death as he was, his eyes were bright with hate. I did not want to touch that man. I had no choice. So I touched him, and there are no words to express the horror of what his memories held. He worked for Dr. Dolan Smythe-Ward, he’d murdered my mother, he’d murdered Mama Sarah and Daddy Robert … he’d killed countless times, and he knew where the Haitians were being held. Oh my God did he know where the Haitians were being held.”

She covered her face to block out the visions of Goolsby’s memories. She hadn’t cried then, when the man’s memories had overwhelmed her and caused her to vomit next to his dying body. She hadn’t ever cried for those who’d been taken and tortured in that facility she viewed in his memories. She’d always wanted to, but in the end it was the anger that kept her on mission, not the sorrow.

If she were lucky, she’d have a chance to cry for them one day, but today wasn’t it. She looked up, her eyes dry, heart hurting. The balls of light were back, and she was juggling them with both hands.

“A GenTech facility outside of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, ironically only about an hour from where we were living, was where the Haitians had been taken. They were treated like cattle and were experimented on heavily, all for the sake of genetic research. I saw men and women strung up, some dismembered while still alive, some implanted with animal parts. Some of the children captured had been placed in a cold, dark room and had been forced to cannibalize the ones who’d died of starvation. Men, women, children all killed in the name of science. I hear people bitching about monkeys being used in research, and how horrible their fate is. I see people staging protests on behalf of primates, and somehow nobody blinks an eye when it’s
human beings
being experimented on by the Dolan Smythe-Wards of the world. It’s amazing, is it not, how we rise to the call of tortured animals, but turn away from the torture of our own kind?” Sky finished with a question that she expected no answer to.

“I think it’s safe to say that the world in general has no idea what’s happening, Skylar. I’m a soldier, trained by the greatest military in the world, and I still had no idea what you’re alluding to. I have seen things no one should ever see, but what you’re talking about is beyond my experience. I can’t understand what I don’t know. It doesn’t mean we don’t care once we find out, but what you’re saying is that our own government has sanctioned this type of experimentation. This is a bomb, Skylar, and if it gets out, it will blow sky high,” Sebastian said in a tight voice.

“Can you continue, or do you need some time?” he asked her in a gravelly voice.

“I’ll finish this. Then I’ll need a little while to get myself together,” she responded, still in the throes of her own tortured memories.

“Go ahead,
bebe
. We’re not rushing you,
petite souer
.” Rover encouraged her.

“Where was I? Oh yeah, Goolsby. Good old Warren Goolsby, the devil’s right hand. He thought of himself that way, and he enjoyed it. He lay there bleeding out, gasping for breath, holding onto my ankle as if he still had the strength to make me do something. I didn’t realize at the time that he must have known a little of what I was capable of. My biological father must have informed his minions of what he suspected were my secret talents.

“As he lay there looking up at me, a pleading smile on lips that were covered in blood and tinted saliva, he knew I had the ability to save him. I didn’t know though, so I was decidedly unprepared when lightning struck closer and closer, and the wind picked up to gale force. But Goolsby and I, we remained in a bubble of sorts. None of the garbage that had been riled up by the wind touched us. Hell, the wind did nothing more than ruffle my hair. But the lightning? The lightning ripped through me again and again, sending all of my nerves screaming in pain. Agony tore me apart, put me back together again. By the time I’d come to my senses, Goolsby’s wounds, that fucking murdering bastard’s wounds, were healing. The gaping hole in his throat had closed. The blood that had been spurting out with each beat of his heart wasn’t now. I was scared. So scared that I took off running, and somehow, even in my ignorance, I managed to shield myself from his eyes. He didn’t see where I went though he gave a good chase.

“I managed to catch up with my sisters, and they just naturally became enclosed in my shield. We ran for miles it seemed and finally caught a shrimp boat we managed to stow away on. It docked down off the coast of Florida, and from there we continued stowing away on trains, in cars, on foot until we finally got far enough away that we felt safe. From there it’s a whole other story, but I need a few minutes right now, so if you’ll excuse me?”

Skylar stood up, and King moved in beside her. She moved toward the room she’d woken up in earlier. Before she could make it out of the living room Sebastian moved in front of her, and when she wouldn’t meet his gaze, he tipped her chin up.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“I don’t have a choice, Bastian. I don’t have a choice,” she responded in a hopeless voice and then moved around him into her room, where she closed the door and leaned against it.

Chapter 10

“You believe that?” Bleak asked.

Sebastian moved to sit down on the seat Skylar had vacated.

“How can I not? We’ve all seen what she’s capable of. Sure I have my doubts. It’s damn hard to believe what you don’t understand. One thing I do know, she believes it; there’s no mistaking that. Right now that’s enough for me. Rover, I need you on the computer doing your thing, man. I need everything you can get me on GenTech and Senator Cobb. Knowledge is power for us right now. I’ll be damned if I’m going into this fighting blind. We’ll give her a few more minutes, and then I’ll make sure she can continue, but we might be better off giving her until the morning.” Sebastian’s tone brooked no argument, and he knew he wouldn’t get one.

All of the men realized just how tightly strung he was right now.

“Morrissey, have you found out anything else about this safe house she keeps referring to?”

“No, but if you can get it out of her, I’ll head wherever that may be and set up shop there for us,” Morrissey replied.

“This is just a hunch, but with Smythe-Ward heading southwest do you think that’s where the safe house is?” Rover asked from his perch on the ottoman.

King hadn’t followed Sky into her room. Instead, the dog had walked over to Rover and sat there looking intently at Sebastian’s tech guru.

“I don’t know. Look for any properties owned by any of the sisters in the Southwestern U.S. I don’t care what we need to pull to find them, but do it before that crazy-assed scientist does, or shit will hit the fan before we’re ready,” Sebastian ordered him, then turned to address them all. “I need to know if you’re on board for this or not?”

He didn’t need to ask, but he owed them the courtesy because he was more than just their employer. They were all friends, but ultimately Sebastian had taken this on himself. If they were in, it was a plus, but he wasn’t going to put them in the line of fire without them understanding the score.

“Don’t even need to ask me, man,” Rover said sounding put out.

The big black Cajun was hell on wheels, and Sebastian felt relief in having him at his side in this.

“Me either, man. You know I’ve got your back,” Bleak answered somberly.

The relief intensified. There were no better men to have on your side than Bleak, Rover, and Morrissey.

“All right then. We’ll meet up in the morning at first light, and I’ll give you what I know and vice versa.”

* * * *

Sebastian had cleaned up the kitchen and was moving into the living room when he heard King whining. The big dog stood at Skylar’s door pawing and sniffing at it trying to find a way in.

“You need hands, man,” Sebastian said softly as he walked over to where the dog stood.

He bent down and scratched the dog behind his ears. The big animal looked up at him earnestly. Sebastian wondered if the mutt was trying to communicate with him, but he didn’t speak doganese so it was a moot point.

“I’ll check on her; you go on in there with Rover, and I’ll check in with you later.”

The dog looked at him, cocked his head, and then trotted away to the room where Rover was holed up doing his thing. He shook his head.
Unbelievable—I think I just had a conversation with a dog.

Sebastian knocked on the door quietly and waited for permission to enter. When he didn’t get it, he became concerned, so he softly opened the door. He peered around it into the room.

Skylar sat on the floor Indian-style with her hands on her knees, and her back straight. Her eyes were closed as if she was in a meditative trance, and he decided to leave her alone for a little while longer. Maybe the meditation helped her calm her nerves. Before he could close the door he heard her whisper his name in a voice husky with unshed tears.

“I don’t want to interrupt. I just came to check on you,” he told her.

“It’s okay, come on in. I know I didn’t come even remotely close to answering any of your questions, but I needed a few minutes to get my thoughts back together. It’s funny how long we’ve all kept our situation to ourselves. Now within the span of a mere twenty-four hours you’ve brought out this need to share. Why do you think that is?”

She looked straight at him, her head cocked slightly to the right, and her whiskey eyes alight with questions of her own. He didn’t have any answers. He only knew they seemed to have a connection that was physical but also much more.

The intensity of her gaze caused his stomach to clench, and the softening of her face as she read the obvious brightening of his eyes made him harden. Her skin glowed like honey in the muted lighting of the room, but what little light there was caressed the planes and valleys of her body. His pulse went from a slow, steady thrum to a hot, hard pound.

The woman was cotton candy to his senses. He couldn’t come within fifty feet of her and not have the hard-on from hell. Touching her blew his mind, and the few meager kisses they’d shared had damn near destroyed him.

He didn’t want to contemplate what actually making love with her would do to him. The fact that he’d just thought about the act of sex as anything even remotely close to making love was an indication she knocked him for a loop.

His concentrated perusal lingered over her soft skin. It must’ve affected her because he noticed the pulse at the base of her neck begin to beat faster, and her nipples, bless their little hearts, perked up beneath her cotton tank. He wanted to taste them. Were they as sweet as her scent, or was the taste as powerful as the whiskey color of her eyes? He wanted to hear her moan as he drew their peaks into his mouth. He wanted to watch her eyes flare as he licked the underside of those golden mounds with his tongue and shaped them with his hands.

*

Skylar noticed his nostrils flare and prayed he couldn’t scent her arousal. The man was potent and dangerous as hell to her sense of well-being. Her body automatically prepared itself for whatever it was he wanted whenever he was around. She didn’t need any superhuman powers to allow her to see inside his mind. Nope, she responded viscerally to the heat, scent, and intent he threw off.

Over the past forty-eight hours, her body had been a stranger. It recognized what would take her mind a while to get used to: She belonged to Sebastian Graham. Thirty minutes ago she’d been awash in the despair of her past, and now she recognized Bastian as her light in the midst of that despair.

She’d thought the way she’d reacted in the cafeteria at work was scary. But for the last day she’d become that creature of pure instinct she’d always feared. Right now was no different, and bad things happened when Sky lost control. So while she innately trusted him and knew that her future somehow could, in a perfect world, lie within him, it was hard to let go because the repercussions could be deadly to both her and her sisters. Maybe even him.

She’d never been tempted to take the plunge with a man. But right here and right now, it was about her. It wasn’t about protecting her sisters or staying a step ahead of Smythe-Ward. It was about her. She wanted to learn his passion and give it back to him a thousandfold.

As he stood there, so tall and strong, everything she would’ve ever wished for if she’d ever had time to give in to those girlish dreams, she knew he’d only have to crook his finger at her, and she’d be on him.

He stared at her, his eyes bright and wild as a storm over a raging sea. Her body picked up on the message in his eyes, and heat traveled from her core. It spread languidly, and warmth infused her limbs, settled in her womb and caused her labia to moisten. Her nipples beaded, her stomach clenched, and her skin became ultra-sensitized. Wherever his gaze wandered she flushed. She had to physically restrain the moan that wanted to bubble out of her mouth.

The powerful grip of this need he aroused in her was insanity. Like a cat in heat, she wanted to rub herself up and down him, impress her scent on him until she couldn’t distinguish where he stopped, and she began. Two nights ago in her room she’d been unable to stop as she’d climbed up him and tried to imprint herself on him. Earlier today that need had been the same. And it beat at her now. Unable to stop her body, she stood and trembled as she waited for what he would do next.