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  His brown-eyed gaze, turned golden from pleasure, held hers for the space of several heartbeats then he kissed her softly. Her body shivered as his hands touched her sensitive breasts, still swollen with desire, while his mouth captured hers. The kisses were long and slow and beautiful, heating them both up to another boiling point. She felt him grow hard again against her leg.

  “How do you feel?” he murmured into her nipple, making it pucker as his breath tickled across. His tongue reached out to rasp across it, causing her to gasp.

  She knew he was asking if she could go another round and wondered vaguely if she had been misinformed about men's sexual limits. “I'm better than fine,” she whispered to him, excitement building inside her. He reached for the last condom in the box without lifting his head from her breast. He handed it to her and she ripped the package open, flailing a bit, her hands not working quite right. She stared at it, wondering which was the right side, long enough for Jake to raise his head to look at her. “I think there's a trick to this,” she told him conspiratorially.

  He let loose a small laugh and took it from her with a grin. Showing her the right side, he deftly unrolled it down the length of his shaft as she looked on in fascination. “I'll be damned,” she mused, “that didn't look too hard.” She touched the length of him, then reached below to run her hands over his testicles with a light touch.

  Jake moaned, dropping his head to her shoulder. “Your hands have electricity in them. You're driving me insane.” He pulled her to the edge of the countertop and dropped on one knee to taste her. She leaned back on her elbows, her head lowering to hang off the other side of the island. His tongue caressed her clitoris, slowly moving back and forth as if he could lick her all day long. A finger played at the opening of her passage before slipping inside. When she was balanced on the edge of another climax, he stood up and pushed inside her, wrenching a moan from deep within her body.

  Susan sat up to grab his shoulders, clinging to him as they found a rhythm together. Her tongue licked his chest and she couldn't seem to stop herself from biting him hard enough to leave marks. Her gaze met Jake's and held it for a long moment. This time around, things had changed. It didn't feel like sex but more like lovemaking. She pushed the thought away and concentrated on the feel of his body. They were doing a set of slow, graceful movements, and she felt her climax build, until finally she went over the peak, her body shivering with her release. He followed seconds later, just as the last of her own tremors subsided.

  Suddenly, his legs seemed to give out and Jake held on to her for balance. Susan didn't realize what was happening, and they both hit the floor, with Jake's shoulder and her hip taking the brunt of the fall. She started laughing at the same time tears came to her eyes. The fall had hurt, but the whole scene was so ridiculous, she was overwhelmed with conflicting emotions.

  “Are you okay?” His concern obvious, his face serious.

  “Yes ... no ... my body is numb anyway.” She sobered and was surprised when he reached his free hand to wipe tears away from her cheeks. He kissed the end of her nose and snuggled her close, easing most of her body onto his and off the cold tile floor.

  With such a complete feeling of contentment and joy washing over her, Susan didn't even feel her shields drop. She had no warning at all that she was about to See, the vision washing over her without any notice. And then she was trapped, watching a piece of Jake's life unfold before her.

  The woman stood over the man on the floor, her body jerking convulsively. At first the boy thought that the man had fallen down, that everything was fine. Just an accident. But then the woman turned toward him, and he saw all the blood splattered across her face and he had to hold back a scream. Her face was so contorted with rage, he almost didn't recognize her. “Mother?” he said, reaching out a hand.

  "Get out of here Jake,” she screamed. “Get out of this room!” She moved to block his father's body, her housedress covered in blood and bits of something else, something thick and gray, the gun still in her right hand. “I told you to get the hell out of here!” Her voice wasn't even the same as his mother's. Who was this person? What was happening? The boy stood there, his whole world tumbling down around him.

  “Susan?” Jake's concerned voice brought her back to the present.

  Susan looked at him, blinking to change her focus, her body rigid. She knew the vision had only taken seconds. She tried to get herself back together, but still ended up whispering, “My God, how could you have survived it?” The comment slipped out before she could control herself.

  Damn it all to hell. She knew she shouldn't have slept with him. He was too amazing for her not to want to drop her shields and feel him completely. Living behind shields made everyone she came in contact with seem less than they were because of the barrier she put between them. The desire to drop her shields from the first moment she'd met him was why she had stayed away from him for so long.

  Susan twisted out of the warmth of his arms, trying to find her clothes on the floor. When she couldn't locate her underwear, she dragged on her jeans. Make an excuse, any excuse and get out of here. “I've got to go. I need to get my laundry done tonight and it's already late.” She had to get out, now, before she had another vision. Having one often led to a whole string of others.

  “What's wrong?” He sounded concerned, but she didn't stop gathering her clothes. He pushed himself to his feet, his expression one of disbelief.

  She didn't make eye contact, throwing on her bra, clipping it between her breasts even though she could feel the straps all twisted in the back. She grabbed her blouse and shrugged into it.

  He reached for her and she sprang back into the island, “Don't touch me, Jake. Please.” She heard the desperation in her voice. She reached down and caught up her shoes. Not bothering to stop and put them on, she was out the door within seconds, slamming it behind her, not seeing the naked man slide down the cabinets to sit in a confused heap on the floor.

  Chapter Two

  Susan called herself every kind of fool on the way home. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Had she done it on purpose? Is that why she had shown up at his doorstep on an impulse? So she could have him without thinking of the consequences? But now she had stolen a memory from him. One in which his mother had killed his father. “Things you See aren't always what they appear to be. Your brain makes assumptions to fill in the blanks,” she muttered.

  She heard her mother's voice in her head as clearly as if she were sitting beside her in the car right now. “You stole my secrets. Took them like the little thief you are. Don't ever touch me again! Never. Again.” This had happened after her mother found out she had talked to her grandmother about what she Saw. She had told Gran her mother's secrets not once, but twice. That had turned out to be one time too many. Her mother had been true to her word. Susan hadn't felt her mother's touch for 15 years. When they were together, her mother kept a careful length of space between them, constantly rearranging herself to be out of Susan's reach. Her mother knew touching was the catalyst. Without touching, a True Seeing was rare. Susan never told her mother she still had visions without physical contact. God, her mother would have dropped her off at an orphanage had she known.

  She pulled into her parking place at her apartment building and remembered she had left her underwear. “Oh no!” She banged her head on the steering wheel. “I left my panties!” She tried to remember which ones she had been wearing.

  “You practically force him to have sex, then you steal a memory, then you run out without an explanation and leave your underwear. You may have just won the Idiot of the Month Award.” She slipped on her shoes and got out of the car, slamming her door extra hard as an exclamation point to her mood.

  Susan walked up to her building, feeling the lack of panties with every step. Groaning, she climbed the stairs to the second floor, thinking about kicking her own ass.

  At the top of the stairs, a man appeared, jumping out at her, causing her to scream for a good five secon
ds before she figured out who it was and got herself back together.

  “Suzy-baby,” Robb Connors said with feigned concern, lust dripping from every syllable. He didn't seem surprised she was there, which meant he had been waiting for her again. “I've been looking all my life for a woman like you."

  For a complete jerk, he was surprisingly good-looking. Susan's eyes swept over the casual, but expensive clothes and the stylish black hair crunched up in the front with just the right amount of gel. He looked great, but his personality spoiled his looks.

  “Hello, Robb.” Susan put down her head and marched past Robb—with two B's baby—to her apartment door. She was not dealing with him without wearing underwear. Period. She walked into her apartment and turned around to face him, bracing her foot against the bottom of the door as a precaution. He'd once managed to get in and she'd had a hard time getting him back out. Since that incident, she had been careful not to let him past her doormat.

  “Suzy-baby, I've got tickets to see the Dave Matthews Band next week and I've been saving them so I can take you.” Robb reached out to touch her cheek and Susan drew back sharply, half shielding her face behind her door. How much worse could this night get?

  “Goodbye, Robb,” she said, shutting the door in his face, sending the bolt on her lock home with a feeling of satisfaction. Southern upbringing be damned—she was done being nice to him.

  “Suzy-baby, I'll call you later to tell you what time I'll pick you up!” he shouted.

  It still amazed Susan that he could take what amounted to more than a hundred no's from her and continue asking her out. He couldn't comprehend that she had no interest in him. Or else he thought he'd wear her down eventually. What a complete bummer he lived four apartments over. That meant he would probably ask her out another hundred times.

  Lately he'd gotten more aggressive, popping out as he had tonight and he had added the touching bit to his bag of tricks. The last thing she wanted was an accidental memory transfer from Robb. Casual touching in any form was out of the question for her as a general rule. She didn't want to think about what terrible things had happened to form Robb's personality.

  Turning the lights on in her apartment, Susan shook off all thoughts of Robb Connors with the ease of long practice. She walked to her bedroom, changing into a sweat suit and running shoes. She ran a brush through her tasseled strawberry blond hair, glad that short hair didn't look as bad as long after a man ran his fingers through it.

  Susan leaned against her dresser for a few moments. She couldn't believe she'd gone to Jake's tonight. It seemed like some strange fantasy she'd daydreamed. She forced herself to straighten and walked to her closet to grab her laundry.

  Don't think about any of it. Especially not the fact you left your underwear. Ignore it. It never happened. You did not leave your underwear at Jake Matherly's apartment. Oh God, what if he shows them to his friends, like that guy did in “Sixteen Candles"? Susan felt nauseous at the thought of the whole police station paying a dollar a peek.

  He won't do that, Susan. If you think he won't tell anyone about sleeping with you, why do you think he'd let his friends see your underwear? You're not using your head here. “If he does, I'll sue him!” She spent the next couple of seconds trying to think about any case law that would apply. She wasn't familiar with any offhand, but she would find it in the library at her law office if she had to. The thought comforted her.

  Picking up the laundry basket, she locked her door and prepared to go down to the spooky dungeon of a basement where the washers and dryers resided. She deserved to be doing laundry at ... she checked her watch, nine o'clock Sunday night. It was her penance for everything she'd done from the time she rang Jake Matherly's doorbell. She walked down the stairs to the ground level, then to the basement.

  Pausing on the top steps, she had a moment of triumph. “The yellow pair!” She hopped down the rest of the steps in jubilation. “Not a bad pair to leave, if I had to leave them in the first place!"

  She was so happy, so completely focused on the fact that she was saved from utter humiliation, so caught up in a review of all the worse pairs she could have left, that she didn't feel anything out of place when she entered the laundry room.

  “Ellie,” she said, seeing her next-door neighbor standing just inside the door. It took her a second to comprehend that her neighbor's laundry lay spilled on the floor. “Ellie?” Susan reached to touch her, but stopped before making contact. Her neighbor was acting weird. She waved her hand in front of her face instead. Ellie gasped for breath, looking at something on the other side of the folding table.

  “What is it?” Susan asked.

  “Susan ... oh my God, Susan,” Ellie panted and pointed to something Susan couldn't see. Moving forward into the room, Susan saw a man lying in a pool of blood. The vision swamped her.

  He finished loading the washer in the corner of the room. He was thinking that doing laundry was so boring—maybe he should go ahead and pay for a new washer so he could watch TV between loads. He turned to see another man come in, a man who was wearing a yellow raincoat with great big buttons. “Hello piggy,” the man in the raincoat said in a happy voice. Something about this person put the man doing his laundry on guard. He started to say something or maybe put the folding table in between them, but the guy in the raincoat moved so quickly there was no chance to do anything, and the knife sliced in a slow arc, cutting deep into his throat. The last thing he saw was blood soaking into the load of whites in the open washer.

  Susan felt herself surface and stood there in shock for a second, listening to Ellie whimper. She knew the first vision she'd had at Jake's apartment made this one all but unavoidable. There was no way she could have a vision as strong as that one, then walk through a charged energy field like this twenty minutes later without True Seeing.

  Instinct took over and she balanced her laundry basket on her hip, catching Ellie's arm with her other hand. She ran for the stairs, not even noticing the laundry jiggling out of her basket as she hauled her neighbor to the second floor. She let go of her only to juggle her keys.

  Turning her lock, she said to Ellie, “Call the police. We need to call the police.” Her neighbor looked back at her with glazed eyes. Grabbing the still non-functioning girl and towing her into the apartment, Susan flung her basket to the side and picked up the phone. “Don't panic, Ellie. We're calling the police,” she said. Susan knew she was reassuring herself more than her neighbor because Ellie hadn't spoken a word since they'd left the basement.

  As the phone rang, Susan had a moment to think about the irony of handling the discovery of a dead body better than she handled leaving her underwear at Jake's apartment.

  A voice said, “Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?"

  This had been one hell of a Sunday.

  She was naïve enough to think it couldn't get any worse.

  Chapter Three

  Jake leaned against the counter in his kitchen and wondered what had just happened. One minute, he was opening his mouth to invite Susan to dinner, having had the best sex of his life. The next, she was running out of his apartment like she was a football player on the way to the end zone.

  Women were strange creatures, but he had already figured out that this one was particularly tricky. For eleven months he had been pursuing her as casually as he could, when every bone in his body screamed at him to have her NOW. He'd been playing it cool, asking her out every so often after her relationship ended with that moron John Walters, only to be turned down each time. Then she shows up on my doorstep like the Avon Lady, propositioning me.

  He'd thought his heart was going to stop when he opened the door to find her standing there, looking sexy as hell in a simple green shirt and jeans. It had been all he could do to keep his expression blank. Jake usually dated women with a different body structure, but something about the way her short, slim body, green eyes, and pixie face combined made him change his mind about his ideal woman.

  He'd wanted her
from the first and now he'd had her, but it wasn't enough. She was better than she had been in his fantasy the night before, or any of the fantasies he'd had about her in the last two weeks. She might not know what it meant when a guy was able to come three times in under an hour, but he did. It meant he would make damn sure he had her again. It meant he had put his brand on her.

  Spying a bit of yellow silk under his shirt on the floor, he reached over to grasp a pair of panties with his fingertips, still too lazy to move from the floor. He held them up, spread between his two hands and imagined her in them. He hadn't even stopped to look at her as he took off her clothes earlier. Maybe that's what caused her to run. He'd been too fast. Maybe he'd hurt her? He didn't think so. He'd bet his left nut she'd climaxed each time, all three times, and that she'd enjoyed it as much as he had. So why did she leave?

  He fought the impulse for a second and then gave in, leaning to bury his face in her underwear. Breathing in the scent of laundry detergent and a musky woman smell that was all Susan, he felt himself get hard again. He pulled back as if he'd been burned.

  Trouble with a capital T, that's what she was and had been since the beginning. But come hell or high water, he would have an explanation for what had gotten into her tonight. He had long ago promised himself he would have her, and he was talking about more than a roll in the hay. Or maybe I should say a roll in the kitchen. His lips tipped up into half a smile.

  He was determined and focused and patient. Exactly what made him so good at his job. There was no way she would hold out for long, not with that amount of desire coursing through her—hell, through both of them. Playing it cool hadn't gotten him anywhere and she had made the first move this time. She had given him an opening he didn't mind exploiting.