Page 20 of City of Love

“Gideon? Please don’t stop.”

He stood from the piano and walked to her, stopping a chilly foot away.

She tried to remember everything she’d meant to tell him. She knew there were some very good reasons why she, in fact, was the one who should be angry. But her thoughts muddled and mixed, her various desires all vying for prominence.

She wanted to stay, right here. She wanted to go home, right now. She wanted to stop being flung around in life like the damn hacky sack of the gods.

She wanted Gideon to look at her with the same soft expression she’d seen in her visions, not the measured examination he was giving her now.

Frustration rose, boiling up and finally exploding like an old glass mercury thermometer. She straightened her spine, slammed her fists onto her hips, and—

Did she just stomp her foot? She just stomped her foot.

He pursed his lips tighter, fighting to hold back a smile that wouldn’t be fair. Her upset was genuine and not to be dismissed, even if her posturing was unintentionally adorable.

But this wasn’t how he was supposed to be responding to her right now, with a desire to pull her into his arms and ease her distress.

When he’d finished up with the Princeton professor a half hour previous, his frustrations with the night having reached a peak, he’d sent all Taco Shots patrons back at once by playing the reverse tonal music, rather than letting them fade back on their own. Although the artifact had indeed proved interesting, he’d been anxious and testy the entire time. His worries about the portal and awareness of the upcoming fight he’d have on his hands when he announced that he’d be closing it, had haunted the edges of his mind from the first moment of his meeting.

Then the visions had started again, disruptive imagery flashing through his mind’s eye, and this time he clearly saw Alana and Vik seated across a table on this very evening. By then there’d been no more doubt that the images were coming from Lexi. Even as he ran his hands over the ancient papyrus, he finally determined that along with her precognition, she must be nothing more dangerous than an unaware, untrained telepath, broadcasting her brain hither and yon. Even across dimensions, if he was right that the images and emotions he’d experienced before she’d even arrived at his world had been coming from her. A pretty neat trick, he had to admit, for someone untrained. He’d hoped once she went home and got over the emotional high of her evening here, she’d be out of sight and, literally, out of mind.

But when he rounded the visitors up, Lexi Cross had not been among them. He hadn’t been completely worried, because he’d seen snippets through her eyes as she headed back, knowing she was concerned over her tardiness. And she’d been with Vik and Alana, so other than preparing an angry earful for her negligent chaperones, there’d been no need for any greater concern than mere annoyance. He’d waited for her in his office, agitated and restless, soothing himself with his music, planning to question her activities to his satisfaction, to reinforce in her the need for secrecy about his world, and to finally put to rest his interest in her.

Because much to his dismay, he was becoming interested. She intrigued him. She attracted him. And there was no place for that in this situation. No place at all.

Now she stood before him, pumped up with some kind of resolve, chin held high. Foot stomping. Bottom lip… quivering. Oh damn, that bottom lip. He pulled in a deep breath through his nose and remained a statue.

“I know I’m late, and I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “But Vik and Alana totally ditched me. Then I got lost, tripped on the cobblestones, and this old man helped me up, but I guess I kind of freaked, and—”

He took a step toward her. “Miss Cross—”

“—Margot told me that your Philly and my Philly weren’t exactly the same, but I forgot and went down an alley, but there was a monument there and—”

She was flipping between anger and panic, confusion and indignation. He knew this because he felt it down to his bones. Not from reading her face and body language, though her feelings were written there plain as day, but because somehow her emotions were inside him. In his heart, his mind. Osmosis.

It was unnerving. Beautiful. Painful. He felt… twice as much.

Twice as full.

“—I ran back another way, but that wasn’t right either, and I twisted my ankle and—”

She was losing her center, reaching a pitch.

Had he been planning to dismiss her? Send her out of his universe and spinning off on her own to negotiate her unique life without any tools? So selfish of him.

Her pain. His pain.

“—it’s totally my fault, okay I admit it, for not having kept an eye on the timer. I know that. I shouldn’t have been relying on Vik and—”

This woman, so accustomed to apologies, to such needless self-recrimination. She had no idea of her own strength.

“Miss Cross.” Gideon took her by the shoulders, pulling her closer to try and calm her. She broke off her sentence, looking up at him in question.

He thinks I’m crazy. He’ll never let me back into his world. Oh God, his music is so…

His head jerked back as if he’d been slapped. What the fuck? That wasn’t just a flash of imagery or wash of emotion. Those were her thoughts. Word for fucking word. Like a bloody conversation. Gideon was not a telepath; this was all Lexi.

It was true that closely bonded lovers could usually hear one another’s thoughts, often with conversational clarity, but he and Lexi had only known each other for…

---