Afterglow by Cherry Adair Read Free Book Online

wouldn’t ever be my future husband,” she snapped, rewarded when a muscle ticked in his jaw. “It didn’t have anything to do with who we were as a couple. And frankly, mentioning it has only ever caused me problems.”
    Her parents were vaguely loving, if they weren’t distracted, but even they preferred she never talked about her gift. For two pragmatic academics, a daughter with an inexplicable sixth sense was awkward. It couldn’t be explained or measured. They didn’t understand it, and she was pretty damn sure Rand wouldn’t have been any more accepting and open than they were.
    The sun was hot on her arm as it shone into the car, but she felt none of its warmth.
    “Suppose I suspend my disbelief,” he began, tone cool, his white-knuckled grip no longer evident. He’d always had the ability to turn off his emotions like a calibrated drip line. “How does this ‘sixth sense’ work?”
    “When I hold an item belonging to a missing person, I can track the person and/or the item.” It might be an unusual sense but it wasn’t that complicated. She saw numbers in a concise, endless stream. Data she’d learned how to process. She watched Rand’s face to gauge his reaction.
    He shot her an incredulous glance before looking back to the palm-lined road flanking the beach. “Have a crystal ball in that purse as backup?”
    “Of course.” She kicked off her high heels and wiggled her bare toes in the plush carpet as she got comfortable. He wasn’t going to get to her. She couldn’t allow him to get to her. “It’s magical. All-seeing, all-knowing. How did you guess?” She’d had twenty-seven years of the same skepticism. Make that twenty-five, since no one had asked how she did what she did when she was a baby.
    Rand tapped an impatient tattoo on the upper curve of the steering wheel with one finger as he maneuvered through the traffic. Eyes narrowed, he glanced her way again. “You’re kidding. Right?”
    “Unfortunately, yes. I don’t have anything so mystical and cool as a crystal ball that tells the future.” The beaches were crowded, the road bumper-to-bumper cars, and throngs of scantily clad pedestrians clogged the sidewalks in front of the hotels, high-end boutiques, and casinos. Normally she’d enjoy the smooth, powerful ride of the luxury car, but Rand’s agitation, no matter how well masked, was boosting her own stress level.
    She rested the back of her head against the passenger-door window, willing her clenched muscles to relax one by one. “Call it a … tracking sense, for want of a better description. Holding something the person I’m trying to locate has touched shows me where they are. I see their coordinates, latitude and longitude, like a continuous stream of numbers in my head.”
    He shot her an incredulous glance. “Seriously? A human GPS?”
    “Pretty much.”
    “Does it work every time?”
    She got her sunglasses out of her bag and perched them on her nose. “One hundred percent.”
    “And this has been proven?”
    “Many times. You must know that Zak built Lodestone after he acquired his extra sense, following a near-death experience last year in Venezuela.” It was oddly appropriate that the owner and developer of the incredibly successful online search engine ZAG Search would become a kind of search engine in the physical world. “When we realized we had the same weird ability, it made perfect sense for us to work together.” It had been such a relief to find someone who completely understood and accepted her.
    “I was skeptical when he told me about it.” Rand tapped an uneven beat as he waited to dart between two luxury vehicles with black-tinted windows. There was maybe an inch to spare as he took the gap. Dakota helped out by holding her breath until their vehicle was safely squeezed between them.
    “Hell,” he muttered, “I’d welcome voodoo if I thought it would solve this quickly and quietly.”
    “Sorry. No dolls with pins in them. But like