Free The Protected (Fbi Psychics) by Shiloh Walker Page A

once Vaughnne was tucked safely back inside her house.
    “I’m sorry.” Alex stood there, his head hanging so low, his chin touching his chest. “I just . . .” He sniffled and then looked up, a defiant look in his eyes. “I just wanted a cookie. Why did I have to do that just to get a damned cookie?”
    “Watch your mouth, Alex,” Gus warned. “And you know why. So because you’re angry about the situation, you took it out on her. Was that fair? Was that kind? You saw what happened, didn’t you?”
    “Her head felt funny!” Alex snapped. He turned away and jammed his hands into his pockets. “It’s not as easy to get inside her head. It’s almost like looking in yours and I had to push harder.”
    Staring at the boy’s slumped shoulders, Gus rubbed his neck and tried to figure out what to say, what to do.
    He understood, basically, what Alex was saying. Some minds were just more open, easier to read. The more closed the mind, the harder it was for Alex to look inside, but if he really wanted in, Alex would get in. So far, it didn’t seem like anybody had been able to keep the boy out. But Alex usually didn’t cause pain when he looked, and over the past two years or so, his control had gotten better. For the most part, nobody seemed to even notice anything was going on. Before they’d started working on it, Alex had pushed too hard and people had . . . sensed something. Or just sensed that something wasn’t quite right, Gus supposed. He didn’t know how to describe it because he was always aware of it when Alex was probing his mind and he knew the look the boy had on his face when he was looking into somebody else’s.
    But as the boy’s control had improved, Gus had stopped seeing those signs of strain, those signs of pain. It happened less and less often, and for more than a year, those occurrences were the anomaly, not the norm.
    Until today.
    Not only had he caused Vaughnne pain, but he’d sent that woman crashing to the floor. All because she’d brought them a plate of cookies.
    Leaning against the wall near the door, Gus stared outside, watching her house, still painfully aware of how she’d felt when he’d picked her up. Solid. Warm. And real. It was a miserable thing, he mused. She’d been unconscious, dealing with a nosebleed, and instead of being wracked with guilt over that, he was too busy remembering how good she’d felt in his arms.
    So focused on that, he hadn’t taken the chance he probably should have taken. He could have searched her, looked for an ID, some sign of who she was. Although he’d already run a background check on her, using the piss-poor excuse of a laptop he had. According to the information he’d gathered, she was who she said she was . . . had lived in Atlanta, moved after she’d lost the lease on her house. Did data entry for a living and the company she worked for had been around for a long, long time.
    He knew there were ways around that sort of thing, but nothing about her set off his danger alert, and more, Alex wasn’t scared around her. That was the most important thing.
    Still, he should have done . . . something. Instead, he’d thought about how soft she felt. How warm. How much he missed feeling a woman in his arms.
    Too long
,
he brooded. It had been too long since he’d had a woman under him. And something told him it had been even longer since he’d been with one like Vaughnne. Maybe even never. She’d never let him run the show and she’d meet him hunger for hunger . . . he closed his eyes as that hunger tore into him.
    If he didn’t get this under control soon, they’d have to leave.
    He couldn’t let anything distract him. Not even something as simple as sex.
    Feeling a familiar brush on the edge of his thoughts, he turned his head and stared down Alex. “You know better,” he said quietly. “You use it only when you have to, and there’s no reason to use it on me.”
    Gus had no abilities, something he was