“It’s just as well,” she replied. “I seem to spend a lot more time with mud on me than with makeup.” She turned her head toward the middle of the river. “Get us out of here, Nicolas. I need to be away from everyone and everything.”

In profile, even in the night, he could see the sadness on her face. He reached out and touched her, ran his finger down her cheek. “It will be all right, Dahlia.”

She didn’t answer but settled into the boat and kept her face averted from him. He indicated his pack. “If you’re cold, there’s a jacket in there.”

That earned him a faint smile. “The magic pack.” She opened it and drew out the amethyst spheres. “I think you saved Jesse. Thank you.”

He nodded solemnly. “I think we may have managed it. I never felt that kind of power before. I’ve felt it gathering inside of me, but I was never able to focus it or use it. You did that for me.”

“Did I?” Dahlia spun the set of balls beneath her fingertips, concentrating, her tone vague as if she weren’t paying him much attention.

“You know you did.”

“I know I should be very sick from everything that happened, but I’m not. We used up the energy together. It wasn’t just me. Violent energy is the worst kind. It’s like handling unstable nitroglycerin.” She kept the spheres spinning beneath her palm, staring at them intently rather than at Nicolas. “I’m shaky, but I’m not overloaded. Whatever we did together helped.”

“Energy naturally wants to disperse,” Nicolas said.

“Yes, it’s a law of nature, yet I disrupt it. I draw energy to me like a magnet. I haven’t really figured out precisely how. And I can’t change it or lessen the drawing.”

Her voice was matter-of-fact, thoughtful even, but some small note alarmed him. She was in a pensive mood, and he felt his hold on her was fragile, tentative at best. He could almost feel her slipping through his fingers. He waited to answer her, choosing his response carefully, wanting to coax her to stay with him of her own free will.

He could sense that she wanted to leave. He touched her thoughts, an invasion of privacy, but the thought of her disappearing made him feel desperate. She was close to tears, somber, feeling both melancholy and edgy at the same time.

“It’s a good thing, what we did together tonight, Dahlia.” He appealed to the scientist in her. “I wonder if we could find a way to utilize and disperse all the energy flowing toward you if we practice together more. I feel it more and more, not the way you do, but I can tell it’s there now. If we work together we might find a use for it. I doubt Calhoun would have made it until the ambulance arrived if we hadn’t harnessed the energy, not to mention it was a great feeling to use something so ugly for something good.”

That caught her attention. She nodded in agreement. “I didn’t think of it like that. I suppose we could try again to mix different types of energy. I can focus fairly well if I’m not too overloaded, and for some reason, you lessen the impact when I’m physically touching you.” She looked out across the river at the city lights. “It’s so strange to be so close to people, yet so far away from them at the same time.”

“Have you ever worried that this superconductor business you do to help relieve the buildup of energy might be harmful to you?”

She glanced at him, then away, her shrug small. “Of course I have. What are the long-term health risks with energy overload versus spinning molecules in my body? There haven’t been a whole lot of studies done on that yet.”

“Consulting Lily might be good idea.” The more he brought Lily into the conversations with Dahlia, the more Dahlia seemed to accept the idea of her position with the GhostWalkers.

“I’ll discuss it with her if it comes up. I don’t want her to think I’m just meeting her so I can use her. We’ve all been used just a little too much.”

Nicolas was silent, trying to think of something to say to comfort her. Words eluded him so instead he drew out the map Gator had given him. “My friend grew up here and owns several pieces of property, most out of the way. You have a choice of a small cabin with running water out in the bayou or a fairly large house sitting on a prime lot at the end of a road just off the river in Algiers. Both have generators so we’ll have hot water.”

“Take me to the bayou. I want to go home.”

The sorrow in her voice was almost more than he could take. He wanted to gather her into his arms and shelter her against his heart—and it was the dumbest thing he’d ever thought, but it didn’t matter. The need persisted. He shook his head to clear it. She twisted him up inside, something he’d never experienced, but he decided being with Dahlia was well worth every unfamiliar emotion.

“The most unexpected thing is the intensity.” He murmured it out loud.

Dahlia looked startled, but she didn’t lose control of the spinning balls. They moved beneath her palm in a pattern directed by her fingers, yet she never touched the spheres. “What are you talking about? Did I miss something?”

“You bring out very intense emotions in me,” he admitted with studied casualness. He wanted to wipe the grief from her face and replace it with anything else. If that took talking about his feelings, so be it.

She stared at the balls for so long he was afraid she might not respond. “I don’t think we should talk about it.”

Unexpectedly, he threw back his head and laughed. “Do you have any idea how pathetic I sound, Dahlia? This is classic role reversal. Women beg men to talk about relationships. Men never want to talk relationships. You’re supposed to want this conversation.”

She raised an eyebrow but didn’t look up. “No.”

Nicolas groaned. “If the guys ever hear of this I’ll never live it down.”

She turned her palm over and gathered the spinning balls into her hand, her fingers closing over them as if holding a great treasure. “Guys? The other GhostWalkers?”

He nodded, thankful he’d found a way to capture her attention. “Yes, they give each other a bad time, but they’re all very close.”

She settled into the bottom of the boat opposite him, stretching out her legs as if she were sore. “I can hear the distance in your voice, Nicolas. What’s wrong with them?”

Inwardly he winced. Trust Dahlia to catch the slightest discordant note in the inadvertent way he’d worded his comment. It didn’t matter though, he’d caught her interest and had turned her thoughts away from bailing on him. “You’re getting to know me too well. There’s nothing wrong with any of them. I think of them as family. I just can’t be too close to anyone.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just never learned. I think it’s an art. I spent a lot of my childhood away from people, and I guess I’m just more comfortable on my own. I feel a great deal of affection for all of the GhostWalkers. Even Lily.”

“Why would you say it like that? Even Lily? The Lily I remember was always sweet and careful of other people’s feelings. She always gave up what she wanted for everyone else.” There was a hint of belligerence in her voice.

Of course she would pounce on that. He nearly groaned aloud. Lily. The one person Dahlia remembered fondly from her childhood. “I love Lily. I do. It’s just that she’s a woman.”

“She’s a woman?” Dahlia kicked at his boot. “What does that mean? I happen to be a woman. What’s wrong with women?”

He grinned at her, a flash of his white teeth in the darkness. “Now I’m the one who’d like to change the subject. Lily’s a courageous woman, Dahlia, and she’s married to a man I consider my best friend. Without her, I might not be alive. She saved all of us with her courage. Believe me, I not only feel a great deal of respect for her, but also affection. She’s just so damned hard to talk to.”

“And that’s because?” she prompted.

His grin widened into a smile. “Because she’s a woman, obviously.”

That earned him a small laugh. Dahlia wiped at more of the mud. “I’m almost afraid to meet her,” she admitted. “She was the one person I built up as larger than life. I needed her to be real, and because I was a child, so young, the memories wanted to fade, so I made up things about her.”

“If you’re worried the real woman won’t live up to the one you created, she will. Lily’s a very special woman. She opened her home up to all of us, provided medical help for Jeff, who’d suffered a seizure and a stroke. She’s worked tirelessly to help us build enough barriers to go into the world without an anchor for short periods of time. The hope is eventually we’ll all get strong enough to have families and live in the world like normal people.”

“I’ve thought about that term so much over the years. Normal. It’s such a little word, yet it means everything.”

“It means nothing at all,” he contradicted. “There is no normal. Define normal for me, Dahlia. We’re all normal and yet abnormal.”

Now that the action was over and the night had closed in, Nicolas was becoming all too aware of her. He directed the boat off the river and up a canal heading toward the very heart of the bayou. All the while, his gaze kept straying back to her. She was tired and needed rest desperately. She was soaking wet and streaked with mud. It didn’t matter. His discipline was beginning to fray around the edges. His self-control was losing the battle with the demands of his body.

She glanced at him, a quick, under the lashes look that said volumes. The harder he tried to keep his thoughts from turning sexual, the more he fantasized. He knew he wasn’t containing his sexual energy very well, but there was something about the way the boat rode over the water and the night enclosed them.

Dahlia sighed loudly and tapped her fingers on the bottom of the boat. “You have three distinct thought patterns. Violence, food, and sex. Not necessarily in that order. And why your sexual energy would be a million times greater than violent energy, only a therapist could tell you.”

There was more than a little humor in her voice, allowing some of the tension to ease out of him. “Don’t you think that’s a good thing?”

“I think you’re seriously disturbed. Don’t you ever just want to curl up in bed and go to sleep?”

“I thought you were action oriented,” he teased.

“I thought you were sane.”

But she was looking at him. He could feel her gaze moving over his body, a silken sweep that left him as hard as a rock. The boat chugged lazily through the canals, carrying them through a grove of trees. The branches swept the surface, long dangling arms of green to brush across his shoulders. Moonlight spilled onto the water, a silver ball shimmering in the depths.

“I love it out here. Does that make me sane?”

“Yes.” There was pleasure in her voice. Warmth. She yawned. “I wish I had more clothes. I’m tired of being wet and muddy.”

“I was trying to get you to the point you didn’t think clothes were strictly necessary.”

She laughed softly and drew her knees up to her chin. “Really? And how long have you been planning on getting me naked?”

“Since I caught a glimpse of your bare bottom. The image is there, Dahlia, forever in my mind, and weak man that I am, it isn’t going away. You didn’t help matters when you unbuttoned your blouse either.”

“How very reassuring. Are you about to start fixating on my br**sts again?”

He closed his eyes and savored the memory of the sun shining through her wet shirt. “You’re incredibly beautiful, Dahlia.”

She was silent, watching him closely. Feeling for his emotions. Checking to see if he was sincere. “Thank you. That’s a nice thing for you to say.” She rubbed her chin on top of her knees. “Mostly I’ve been told I look like a witch. Too-big eyes, too much hair. Too small, too everything. No one ever used the word beautiful before.”