“Of course I do!” he exclaimed. “Are you blind?”
“Not anymore.” She surrounded him with her power and hugged him gently all over. When he sighed appreciatively, she increased the pressure of the massage and draped her arm around his shoulders, too.
He sniffled. “I feel ill.”
“You know what? I’ve had candy, but you haven’t had anything to eat for a whole day, have you?”
He shrugged.
“Eat the rest of the seafoam. And then— Can you drive? We’ll have dinner at that restaurant next to the hotel.” She squeezed him with her arm and her power.
He turned to look at her. Now his pupils dilated. His green eyes went black, and he bit his lip. She hadn’t imagined this at Glitterati. She wasn’t imagining it now.
But he didn’t kiss her this time. He growled, “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
“I won’t,” she whispered.
“And when you’re playing around with your power, seeing what you can lift, do not experiment with your body over a deadly chasm.”
She laughed. “Okay.”
To her relief, he smiled. “But you definitely need a magic act of your own. And somewhere in it, you need to levitate in that pose with your hair in a circle around you. That was totally f**king cool.”
A man sat down right behind Elijah at the next table in the crowded restaurant, thinking very loudly about the overheated radiator in his truck. Holly couldn’t read Elijah’s mind—Elijah had to keep reminding himself of this—but she recognized the expression on his face. She stood and walked around the wagon wheel table to switch places with him and give him some distance from the other restaurant customers, for the third time in the hour they’d been eating.
He stood, too. When they passed each other, he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of oleander in her hair.
Then he sat down in her chair and surveyed the crumbs on the plates. Some of the dishes originally had been hers, some his. They’d lost track.
“God, I feel better,” he said. “I’m glad you suggested this. If you hadn’t, I might have passed out eventually. It didn’t even register as hunger to me. I guess my head is full of other stuff.”
She sat down, too, and pushed away the plate with the crust of his second slice of pie. It moved only a millimeter with all the other plates in the way. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve had enough to eat.” She patted her flat bare stomach. “That would be the ultimate revenge on my mom, to show up in Vegas with a muffin top hanging over my bikini bottoms.”
He grinned. “You have a long way to go.”
She opened her mouth to say something about edamame. He never learned what she was going to tell him, because she looked sharply over her shoulder at a man their age sitting down at the table next to them. Whew—she’d thought for a second that it was Rob.
Her fear and then her relief shot through Elijah in quick succession. He leaned forward, gripping the edge of the wagon wheel. “What do you mean, Rob was stalking you?”
And then, as the scene flashed into her mind, he saw what Rob had done to her that night at Glitterati.
Elijah had wanted to hurt Rob several days before. He just hadn’t understood why, or trusted his own instincts. Now he knew he’d been right.
Her dark eyes widened. “Elijah. Don’t look like that.” She reached across the plates and put her hand on his hand. “Don’t do anything. Don’t go after him.”
“How could I leave that alone?” Elijah demanded.
“He’s a cop. You’ll just get yourself in trouble. Besides, Kaylee’s goons already beat him up.”
They sure had. They’d dumped him on Elijah’s doorstep. And Elijah had been zonked on Mentafixol and beer. He felt even more powerless with her soft hand on his hand, trying to comfort him for something that had happened to her. He sat back in his chair and slipped his hand out from under hers. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe I let that happen.”
“You didn’t let it happen,” she insisted. “We weren’t together that night. You were just borrowing a Mentafixol pill. And even now, you’re not—” Realizing what she’d been about to say, her mouth snapped shut.
“What do you mean, I’m not your boyfriend?” he exclaimed in disbelief.
Her straight ballet posture sagged, though the green sequins on her bikini top still glittered ethereally amid the rustic Western decor of the restaurant. She leaned over the plates and said quietly, “I didn’t say that.”
“You thought it. You stopped yourself from saying it at the last second. You might as well have said it.”
“Because you can read my mind,” she said through her teeth. “You can’t get mad at me for thinking something if I didn’t say it.”
He put his elbow on the wagon wheel and his chin in his hand, considering her. The big hair, exotic makeup, and revealing costume made her look older than she was. The pout on her lips and the little worry line between her brows made her look like his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend. Even now, she was confused about what he felt for her, and she searched his eyes for clues.
“That’s the whole problem,” he said, straightening in his cowhide chair. “Just like back at the cliff. I know how you feel about me. I forget you don’t know how I feel about you unless I tell you. And I haven’t been doing a good job of telling you.”
He stood and rounded the table again. The closer he got to the man sitting behind Holly, the louder he heard the man’s thoughts about his overheated truck. Elijah desperately wanted to tell the man to spring for a new one already. What did the man expect after twenty years and three hundred thousand miles?
But when Holly looked up at Elijah expectantly, false lashes fluttering slowly around her deep brown eyes, for the first time he could almost block out the thoughts of a man sitting three feet from him. Elijah knelt in front of Holly. He laced his fingers through her thick hair and kissed her.
The kiss started sweet. That’s how he felt about her, and that’s what he’d meant to show her. But when she made a small noise, he found himself kissing her harder on the mouth. This was nothing like their kiss at Glitterati. This was not sweet anymore. This was raw and real.
She wound a coil of gentle pressure around his chest, along his arms, and around his fingers in her hair. Her whole body tingled as she used her power. He felt her sensations and her racing pulse, and his too.