Mind Magic by Eileen Wilks Read Free Book Online Page B

time they were half a mile apart, it was completely scrambled—though the scrambling wasn’t the same for Rule as it was for Lily. She simply got random locations for him. He usually sensed her in multiple locations at the same time.
    Lily had been forced to tell Ruben about being “unpredictably subject to sensory distortion.” So far she hadn’t had a problem separating hallucination from reality, but she couldn’t prove that. Hence the medical leave. The worst defense attorney on the planet could get his client off when the agent in charge of the investigation suffered random hallucinations. When Rule suggested this might be a good time for him to head to D.C. for a bit of lobbying, she’d agreed.
    Maybe she could talk Ruben into giving her some kind of desk work. It would be wrong to pester her host, of course, but she could mention the possibility. No more than once a day, she promised herself. Twice a day would be pestering.
    The nosy treadmill tilted as it started her up yet another pretend hill. Lily was not a marathoner. She seldom had time for a long run, and besides, what was the point? If she couldn’t catch a perp in the first ten or twenty minutes, another hour of chasing wouldn’t help. The treadmill had translated her desire for an intense thirty-minute run into lots of hills.
    She checked the time . . . almost twenty minutes down. Good. The hills were a bitch. Automatically she checked something else and frowned. Rule was still here. She could have sworn he intended to leave right after breakfast. Representative Brownsley must have called to postpone their meeting. She hoped that didn’t mean—
    “Pardon the intrusion, Deborah.” A red-haired man who looked about thirty stepped into the doorway. Lily had met him when she arrived last night. His name was Alan Jones—a lot of Wythe clan members were named Jones—and he was older than he looked. “It’s about Charles.”
    Deborah didn’t sigh. Lily wasn’t sure why she had the impression she wanted to. “Yes?”
    “I told him to go back to the barracks, but he won’t. Not on my word.” A tightness around Alan’s mouth announced his opinion of that. “The Rho has already left. I could have Charles carried over there, but—”
    “He’d probably just come back.”
    “He’s a stubborn cuss.”
    “I’ll speak with him when I go upstairs.”
    “Thanks.” He left as quietly as he’d appeared.
    “I . . . met Charles.” Lily had to work to find enough breath to talk. The bastard treadmill had saved the steepest fake hill for the end of her run. She could reduce the speed or the incline, but that would be letting the machine win. Seven minutes to go . . . “He’ll listen . . . to you?”
    Deborah had finished her crunches plus some lunges and moved on to weights. “Charles agreed to accept my authority when Ruben wasn’t present. That was one of the terms Ruben set for allowing him to return with us. I am so glad to see you out of breath.”
    Six minutes, forty seconds. Surely a couple of those minutes would be cool-down. “Why?”
    “Because I thought you never would be.”
    Lily snorted. She didn’t have enough breath to laugh. Six minutes, six seconds . . . “Hey,” she panted as Rule’s presence nudged into her awareness. He was close enough for the mate sense to work just fine, but he wasn’t supposed to be. A moment later he appeared in the doorway. “Thought you’d be gone.”
    “Something came up.” He looked easy, comfortable. He wasn’t. That certainty came from a type of knowledge older than the mate bond. Lily lived, slept, fought, and made love with this man. She didn’t always know his mind, but she knew his body, and right now his muscles were loose and easy because he wanted them that way, not because he felt relaxed. She couldn’t tell what emotion he was hiding, but he was hiding something.
    The smile he gave Deborah looked like any other smile . . . if you weren’t watching his