Grace gazed up at me, so determined and so devoted I felt humbled. She hadn’t known me very long, and a lot of what she did know would have sent most people running for the hills. But here she was, wanting more. Wanting to stand with me.

I took a step back into my living room. Just to get a little distance from those big brown eyes and the scent of her perfume, softly sweet but intoxicating. My heart was thumping, my stomach balled tight.

I didn’t do this. I didn’t show who I was, what I could do, to anyone. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even put on a show that wasn’t completely necessary for anyone in my family.

But Grace already all but knew. She was ready to throw herself all in. I owed it to her to let her see exactly what she was getting into.

“Jeremy,” she started, as if to keep trying to convince me.

I held up my hand to stop her. “I’ve had this... ability since I was a kid,” I said. “I was born with it. I want you to know I’ve never hurt anyone with it. I can’t always control it well when I get emotional, and there was a learning curve when I was younger”—my fingers twitched toward the shard of glass in my pocket—“but since then I’ve always kept it under control. The people who are after me, they’re after anyone like me, because they want to use us. Not because I’ve committed some crime or anything like that.”

I wasn’t going to bring my family into this, not yet. As much as I trusted Grace, I didn’t want her having more information the Alpha Project people might want to get out of her.

Grace nodded. “I know,” she said. “Of course you’d never hurt anyone.”

She had so much faith in me it killed me. She had no idea how many times I could have, how many close calls there’d been. Not because I wanted to—just because of what I was.

I dragged in a breath and reached down into the thrum of psychic energy that ran through the core of me. A bright jittering sensation spread through my chest and into the muscles of my arms. I looked around the room, picking my spots of focus. The couch. The coffee table. The lamp in the corner. The breakfast dishes I’d left on the counter by the sink.

I felt each of them as if my fingers were literally grazing them. The sensation in my chest thrummed harder. I raised my hands, willing all those objects to follow me.

The furniture, the dishes, they rose from where they’d been resting in time with my hands.

Grace’s jaw went slack, her eyes going round. I tried not to pay attention to her reaction. It took all my concentration holding all those objects in the air. I motioned, and they lifted a little higher, hovering a few feet off the floor. Damn, I really wished I’d swept under the couch more often. I’d just revealed a huge patch of dust bunnies.

I set the couch back down. It required the most effort anyway, because of its weight. I tightened my focus on the lamp and the coffee table, and they whirled around each other before I sent them back to their places. The dishes floated in a circle like a merry-go-round. Then I banished them to the sink. Finally, I let myself look at Grace again.

Her expression was still shocked: eyes wide, lips parted. Her gaze slid from the dishes I’d just put away to my face, and I realized it wasn’t just shock. An awed light glowed in her face. She beamed at me, in every sense of the word.

“You’re magic,” she said, sounding breathless. “To be able to do that—you can’t call that anything but magical.”

My heart started to thump again, but in a much headier way. I found myself smiling too. Magic. I’d never really thought about my talent that way. Maybe because for as long as I could remember, my strange ability had been something to hide, to pretend away. Something that would scare people or make them want to use me.

And it was those things, some of the time. But it was also a talent in every sense of that word. A talent that had made Grace light up like Christmas.

For the first time in my life, I had someone I didn’t have to hide from.

The feeling overwhelmed me. I walked back over to her, and she grinned up at me, her eyes sparkling. “Grace,” I said, not knowing how to put my own awe into words. She reached for me, tracing her fingertips up over my chest. So I simply leaned in and kissed her.

It didn’t feel quite as desperate as the kiss we’d shared in this same spot yesterday, when I’d been trying to convey all my desire for her in one embrace. It didn’t need to be. She knew me, all of me, and she was kissing me back with equal enthusiasm. Her fingers trailed up my neck and into my hair, sending sparks over my skin in their wake. The hot slide of her soft lips against mine was everything I could ever have wanted.

Except I wanted more of her, all of her. Fuck, it had been too long. I left her mouth to press kisses along the length of her jaw. She whimpered, clinging to me. Her body swayed against mine. I was already hard, my erection straining against my jeans.

She tasted as delicious as she smelled, like smoky vanilla. I grazed my teeth down the side of her neck and earned myself another whimper. She wrenched my shirt up, slipping her hands under it to caress me skin to skin. I groaned and captured her mouth again.

She explored every plane of my chest until I was dizzy with need. I teased my tongue over hers and brushed my palms over her chest at the same time. With an encouraging sound, she pressed into my touch.

Oh, God, her breasts were perfect, softly firm and just the right size to fill my hand. I flicked my thumbs over her nipples. She moaned into my mouth as they stiffened beneath her thin bra. Suddenly I couldn’t think of anything except getting rid of every layer of fabric between me and them.

“Jeremy,” Grace murmured, so needy I almost caught fire. I slipped my hands up under her shirt. Dipped them into the cups of her bra. She shuddered against me as I stroked her, gripping my back. Her hips arched against mine. I burrowed my face in the crook of her neck, nibbling her smooth skin, high on the smell and the taste of her.

She reached to pull her blouse right off—and my phone buzzed in my pocket with an incoming call. I gritted my teeth in protest, but at the same time my heart lurched.

I couldn’t ignore this, no matter how much I wanted to. Not when the Alpha Project people were already so close.

I pulled away from Grace with an apologetic sound. My heart was hammering, my cock protesting. I sucked in a ragged breath. “I have to take this. Just in case.”

Grace looked back at me with cheeks flushed and lips tender. The desire in her eyes was almost enough to change my mind. But she nodded to show she understood.

The call was on my regular phone. I didn’t give out the number very often, mostly to clients. The number on the screen showed as unlisted. Hmm. Pacing to the couch and back to try to cool off, I raised the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Oh, hello,” a measured male voice said. “Glad I could get in touch. Are you in San Jose at the moment?”

I frowned. “Who is this?”

“Just a friend of someone you work with. I have a job I thought you might be interested in. But you’d need to start right away.”

You couldn’t get much more vague than that. A chill ran down the back of my neck. “I’m actually pretty busy with projects right now,” I said. “If you want to give me your name and your number—”

“Oh, I think you’ll want to squeeze this in. It’s really quite an extraordinary opportunity. If you’ll just give me a moment—”

He kept talking, but I caught another sound. The chime of a phone alert from somewhere nearby. The default iPhone alert.

My thoughts darted back to the woman Grace had described to me. A hell of a lot of people in the world owned iPhones. But this conversation was already strange enough. I hit the End Call button without a second thought.

As I lowered the phone, I looked around the room, my chest tightening. If they’d tracked down my phone number, they’d gotten that fake name. The same fake name I’d used to rent this apartment. I shut down the phone completely in case they could track that.

“We have to go,” I said, grabbing Grace’s arm. “Now. Maybe it’s nothing, but I don’t want to take the chance.”

Especially not when she was here with me.

“Okay,” she said immediately. “Do you need to take anything with you?”

“It’s all already packed up.”

I stopped for just long enough to lock the apartment door and then we hurried to the back stairwell. We were just starting down when the ding of the arriving elevator sounded from behind us. I flattened myself against the wall and glanced back through the window that looked into the hall.

A lean man with silver mixed into his pale auburn hair strode out of the elevator. He was heading toward my apartment. Grace sucked in a breath.

“That’s Malcolm Fitch,” she whispered.

I swallowed hard. “Let’s get out of here.”

We rushed the rest of the way down to the underground parking lot. I tossed my phone into the garbage bin. I still had my burner on me, but they’d never trace that.

The rental car was exactly where I’d left it. But there were probably other Alpha Project lackeys watching the building.

I’d just have to make the best of the situation. I’d rented the car under a different name, so at least they wouldn’t be looking for that. I grabbed my hoodie out of the back seat and pulled the hood up over my head so it’d be harder to see my face.

“Get down,” I said to Grace. “Until we’re well away. I don’t want them seeing you here.”

She leaned over without complaint, her head coming to rest beside my thigh. “Just keep an eye out for dark sedans.”

“Right.” I let out a rough chuckle and turned the Ford toward the exit.

If the Alpha Project people had brought their sedans, they hadn’t parked them nearby. I cruised down the street as if I were just a regular guy on my way out for the evening, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror. No one pulled onto the road to follow us.

As soon as we’d turned a corner, I sped up. First I needed distance. But not too much distance. Grace still had her life here. I couldn’t just run off with her.

I took a rambling route around downtown and out to the suburbs at the other end of the city. A stolid business-style hotel caught my eye. That was plenty unassuming.

I stashed the car, grabbed the smallest of my three bags, and headed with Grace into the lobby. The hotel had a room free on the second floor near the back—perfect. I accepted the key cards for me and my “wife,” and Grace and I hustled to the elevator and down the hall.

In the room, Grace sank into the chair by the desk. I tossed my bag beside the bed.

“You could go home now,” I said. “The people after me don’t know you were at my apartment. Now that they’ve got a clearer lead on me, they’ll probably leave you alone unless they find out you’ve been spending time with me.”

Grace shook her head. “They’ve already been hanging out around my house. I don’t feel safe there anymore.” She paused. “And I want to be here with you. Until I know you’re safe.”

“Grace...” I should leave town now. My family’s enemies were too close for comfort. But I didn’t want to leave her any more than she wanted to leave me.

I didn’t want to let her down.

Was there any chance I could still stay? When they saw the abandoned apartment, they’d assume I’d run. They wouldn’t expect me to stick around in the city. It might actually be smarter to stay here, laying low for a couple weeks until I was sure they’d have moved on, and then restart my life under a different name. It wouldn’t make any difference to my clients. And it obviously wouldn’t make any difference to Grace.

She was watching me. “I’m going to stick it out,” I said. “For now. You’re right, I’ve spent an awful lot of time in the past twenty-nine years running.” For myself, or to get one of my brothers out of a jam.

“That must have been hard,” Grace said softly.

“I’m used to it. But it’s not how I enjoy living. And... I’ve got the best reason I’ve ever had to stay put right here in front of me.”

I held her eyes, my body warming as she gazed back at me. She stood up and reached for my hand. The gentle twining of her fingers through mine somehow hit me with an even stronger wave of emotion than I’d felt having her whole body up against mine less than an hour ago.

“You don’t think there’s any way they could track us here?” she said.

“Not unless they’ve got their own superpowers. And if they did, I don’t think we’d have made it anywhere near this far.”

“Good,” she said, her voice taking on a sultry note that took me from warm to hot in an instant. “Because we were interrupted in the middle of something I’d really like to finish.”

She rose on her feet and pressed her lips to mine.