Ghostwalker 02 - Mind Game

want that.”

    Dahlia leaned back again, her expression impossible to read. “So what do you want, Nicolas? Everyone wants something.”

    “Of course I want something. Don’t you? Don’t you want something for yourself?
    Doesn’t a relationship matter to you? Isn’t that wanting something? Hell, yes, I want something from you, and it isn’t just your body.”

    “Is that what you think I was offering you?”

    “Wasn’t it?”

    Dahlia was always as honest as she could be with herself and she didn’t like the answer.
    “Okay, maybe I was. Maybe I wanted that to be what you wanted from me.”

    “I love you, Dahlia.” He sank down into the churning water and pulled her into his arms.
    “I love all of you.”

    She turned her face into his throat and wished she could cry like a normal person. She felt she was screaming inside, clawing at her own heart, yet she couldn’t tell him.

    Couldn’t share it with him. This one person who had shown her kindness. Who proclaimed to love her for who she was, monster or not. She kissed his throat and pushed away from him.

    “Did you bring the aspirin?”

    “I left the tablets on the sink.” Nicolas leaned back as she climbed out of the Jacuzzi.

    “This is one of those moments when the relationship manual would come in handy, don’t you think?”

    A fleeting smile curved her mouth and was gone. “I don’t think the manual covers this, Nicolas. I don’t think anything does.”

    She took the tablets and dried off, leaving him to the hot water as she paced through the house in her silken pajamas. Dahlia wandered through each of the rooms on bare feet wondering what it would be like to be a normal woman with a family, to have a house like this one and fill it with laughter and happiness. Her hair was damp from the Jacuzzi and made a wide wet column down her back. Even the water bubbling around her, as hot as she could stand it, could not take away the ferocious headache jabbing through her skull. She paused by the window and stared out into the night, feeling restless and moody. She wanted to walk away into the night and disappear. Had she been in the bayou, she might have done so.

    Nicolas came up behind her and leaned over her, putting a hand on either side of the windowsill caging her in. “Come to bed, Dahlia. You need to sleep.”

    She didn’t turn around but pressed back against his body. “It’s strange knowing someone wants me dead,” she mused aloud. “All of my life, I’ve known I was different and maybe in some way a monster, dangerous to others. I even knew I wasn’t lovable, but I never once thought they would want me dead.”

    He rubbed his face against the nape of her neck. “No one is going to kill you, Dahlia, not if I have anything to say about. And you’re very lovable. I don’t love anyone else. I haven’t since I was a boy.”

    She ignored his confession because she had to. She couldn’t think about Nicolas and what it would mean if he were like the others. “I thought they were my friends, Nicolas.
    Max and Jesse. I thought they cared about me the way friends care about one another.”
    How could she say she wanted to doubt him? That she was afraid if he was deceiving her in some way she would never recover? How could she admit she was a coward, wanting to run from him even more than the others.

    “Calhoun was tortured, Dahlia,” Nicolas reminded. “He refused to give them any information about you.” He straightened up, turned her around to face him, catching her chin so she was forced to meet his black gaze.

    “That’s so,” she conceded, “but then if his orders were to never say a word about me, wouldn’t he follow them, the same way Max followed them?”

    It was the first time he heard a trace of bitterness in her voice.

    “Don’t do that, Dahlia, don’t let them change you. Don’t let anything change who you are. You made your own world with your own code, and you did it yourself. It defines who you are.”

    Dahlia looked up at his sculpted face and the dark intensity of his eyes. “You believe that, don’t you? You think I’m worth so very much.”

    “To me, everything,” Nicolas admitted.

    “Why? Why am I important to you, yet someone else would want me dead? Why would my mother give me up to an orphanage rather than keep me? She just threw me away, and the orphanage people followed her example. I don’t even know the first thing about my culture, about my people. I don’t even