VISIONS OF HEAT

She’d spent the past minutes trying to convince him to leave and now that he’d agreed, she found she didn’t want him to go. For the first time, she was with someone who’d come to see her. Just her. Not Faith NightStar the F-Psy, but Faith, the individual apart from her gift.

“I am sorry,” she said, hesitant. She knew nothing about changeling interaction, but she understood she’d caused him hurt. It had been part of her training to learn to recognize emotion in order to banish it. That was why she knew. It had nothing to do with the odd sensation in the vicinity of her heart. “If I offended you, I am sorry. I meant to . . . play.”

Vaughn was caught completely off guard by that last word. His muscles relaxed without his conscious control. “Changed your mind, Red?”

“I’m not sure.” She released her hold on his hair, but then began to stroke through it. “You’re nothing I’ve ever experienced. The rules don’t cover situations such as this.”

“Rules?”

“The rules of Silence.” Her fingers brushed the skin of his shoulders. She withdrew as if she’d been scalded, her hand dropping to lie against the pillow. “Why did my question offend you?”

Vaughn didn’t talk about his past with anyone, but he found himself answering Faith—it was almost a compulsion, one neither man nor beast could fight. “My sister died when I was ten years old.”

Skye had been so fragile, so weak at seven years of age that she hadn’t been able to survive even in jaguar form. He’d brought her food, given her everything he had, but Skye had given up fighting the instant she’d realized that their parents weren’t going to come back for them. It was as if her soul had flown away and nothing he’d done had tempted her to return. She’d stopped eating, stopped drinking, and soon, she’d stopped breathing.

Vaughn had almost died then, too, because Skye had lived in his heart like no one else. She’d followed him around since before she could walk, a constant buzz of activity and energy. He hated his parents with a vengeance, but it wasn’t because they’d abandoned him. No, it was because they’d broken Skye’s heart.

“I can’t understand what she meant to you,” Faith said, her voice holding a quiet gentleness he’d never have expected from one of the Psy, “but I can guess. You mourn for her.”

“Do you mourn for Marine?”

The quicksilver lights in her eyes dimmed until they were dull echoes against the darkness. “Psy don’t mourn. To mourn requires feeling.”

“And you don’t have any.”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” Dropping his head, he bit her earlobe with sharp teeth and caught her resulting cry with the palm of his hand.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, pushing away his hand.

“Your body feels, Faith. Your body hungers.” He spoke against her ear. “The body and the mind can’t be so far apart. Can they?”

She didn’t answer. He heard the rapid beat of her heart and knew he’d pushed her too far. But it wasn’t far enough. She had to go further, had to understand more. It was imperative. The jaguar knew why, but the man wasn’t ready to listen.

“And the answer to your question is that if I’d found a strange man naked in my sister’s bed, I’d have ripped him to shreds.” He ran his lips down her neck and tasted the fury of her pulse before lifting his head to look down into her face. “I’ll do the same to any other man I find in your bed.”

Faith blinked and by the time her lashes lifted up, Vaughn was a shadow sliding out of the skylight. But nothing could erase the scent of him on her sheets, on her skin. The feel of his lips on the suddenly sensitive skin of her neck had her clenching her hands in an effort to find control where there seemed to be none. How could he do this to her? How?

Her strength lay in Silence, in holding her emotions in a stranglehold. If she let go, what other sensations might her jaguar introduce her to? Her brain revolted, insisting on showing her images of her aunt’s lipless face and rabid eyes. It was the bluntest of reminders—she had to regain control of her malfunctioning psyche or the visions would take her over as they were even now threatening to do. The logical course would be to go to the M-Psy, admit her conditioning was breaking down, and ask for retraining.

But would they give her what she wanted, or would they use it as an excuse to put her someplace “safe,” a location from which she could make predictions without causing them any of the inconvenience she now did by asking for occasional moments of privacy?

It didn’t matter what the M-Psy would do, because she wasn’t going to go to them. She was going to make a choice where there was no choice; she was going to act in a way that might leave her wide open to the very madness she wanted to escape. That strange, unknown awakening part of her didn’t want to stop being fascinated by the jaguar who touched her as if she belonged to him, as if she’d already said yes to his every demand.