A torrent of dazzling power crashed through it, emerging in great waves of controlled psychic energy.
She knew this talent. She knew this man.
"It was you," Zinnia whispered. "You're the vampire."
Chapter 11
She switched off the focus. And then she turned on the lights.
For some reason the simple mundane action caught Nick off guard. Instinctively he suppressed the fiery storm of power that he had generated on the metaphysical plane. The prism Zinnia had created winked out of existence.
"Great. Just great." Zinnia threw up her hands. "The end of a perfect day. I missed breakfast because I had to spend the morning with a loony professor and a bunch of blood-sucking plants. I missed dinner because I had to spend the evening boring myself silly holding the focus for a statistician. I walk in the front door, asking no more out of life than a glass of wine and a sandwich, and what do I find? A psychic vampire in the living room. It's too much. I quit."
She gave Nick a withering look as she stalked across the open loft into the kitchen. She yanked open the icerator and jerked out a bottle of green wine.
Nick rapidly reassessed matters as he watched her reach into a drawer and rummage around for a corkscrew. Things were not going as he had planned. He hated it when that happened.
Ever since he had realized that the journal was a forgery, he had been obsessing on this confrontation with Zinnia. His rage at having been played for a fool was bad enough. The frustration he felt at having once again failed in his quest was even worse. But it was the knowledge that Zinnia had betrayed him that was gnawing at his guts.
She had set him up. There was no other logical explanation.
He did not understand the anguish that had welled up inside when he had forced himself to face the truth earlier that afternoon. He had not allowed anything or anyone to affect him this strongly for a long, long time.
It infuriated him to know that he was reacting so intensely to what he should have foreseen as a possibility right from the start. He should never have trusted Zinnia.
Nevertheless, in spite of the facts, more than anything else at that moment he wanted her to defend herself.
Earlier, as he had brooded in his hidden office, he had envisioned a dozen different scenarios for this meeting. All of them had involved Zinnia desperately struggling to convince him that she had been duped by Polly and Omar. He wanted her to plead, to declare her innocence even though logic told him that she must have been in on the scam up to her elegant ears.
"Where is the real journal?" he asked very softly. "Did you sell it to someone else? Or did you keep it for yourself? Did you buy into that old tabloid legend about my father's team discovering a fortune in fire crystal? Do you think the journal can lead you to it? If so, you're not nearly as intelligent as I had assumed."
"Gosh, I'd hate to sink any lower in your opinion than I already have."
"No one betrays me and gets away with it, Zinnia."
"Don't waste your time trying to intimidate me tonight, Chastain." She came around the end of the counter with a long-stemmed glass of wine in her hand, walked to the antique sofa near the window, and sank down on it with a heartfelt sigh. Propping herself in one comer, she stretched out her legs on the cushions. "I'm too tired to be scared."
"Better work up the energy for it because I'm not playing games."
She took a slow meditative sip of wine and regarded him over the rim of the glass. "If that journal you bought off Polly and Omar last night is a fake, then I'm as much in the dark as you are."
"You made all the arrangements for the transaction." The steady clarity of her gaze made him seethe. "You had to be in on it. The only thing I don't understand is why in five hells you thought you'd get away with it."
She folded one hand behind her head. "Do you really believe this nonsense or is it just matrix paranoia talking?"
"I am not paranoid," Nick said through his teeth. "But I am very good at detecting patterns, even without the aid of a prism. Not that it takes a matrix-talent to see the connections in this situation. A small child with a pencil could connect the dots."
"Then I suggest you go find a small child with a pencil because you're not doing a very good job on your own." She took another sip of wine, leaned her head back against her folded arm, and closed her eyes. "Lord, am I tired. I hate statistics."
Fury swept through Nick. He shoved himself up out of the chair and crossed the room to the sofa. "Look at me, damn it."
She opened her eyes. "I'm not in the mood for this, Mr. Chastain."
He reached down and snatched the wine glass out of her hand. "Did you really think I'd be blinded by a few kisses and the promise of good sex?"
"What promise? The only thing I agreed to was dinner." She raised her brows in mocking inquiry. "Speaking of which, I assume this performance means that the invitation for tomorrow night has been canceled?"
Nick heard a sharp crack. Liquid flowed over his hand. He glanced down and was stunned to see that he'd snapped the fragile stem of the wine glass. He stared, shocked by the evidence of his loss of control. Blood and green wine dripped from his fingers onto the wooden floor.
"Oh, for heaven's sake. Now look what you've done." Zinnia got to her feet and started back toward the kitchen. "Come over to the sink. I'll get you cleaned up and then you can go back to your cave."
Anger and despair washed through him. "Zinnia."
He reached for her with his mind the way a drowning man lunges for a lifeline. He felt the familiar floating sense of disorientation as he sent out a psychic probe. Relief rushed through him when he sensed her response. He wished he was sitting down. The overwhelming impact of intense intimacy nearly drove him to his knees.
Zinnia said nothing as she turned on the water faucet, but she offered him a prism on the metaphysical plane. It was crystal clear, very powerful. This time he took a few seconds to study it. He sensed that it could focus the full range of his talent. Never in his life had he ever been able to use his psychic gifts to the maximum.
He could not resist. He sent talent crashing eagerly through the prism. The metaphysical construct did not waver. It channeled the full thrust of raw psychic power and converted it into finely tuned waves of energy. It was energy that could be used the way he used his hands or his ears or his eyes. Energy that was as natural and controllable as any of his other senses.
He no longer had to grope for or deduce the patterns in the world around him. From the slightly irregular edges of the mosaic tiles on the kitchen walls to the myriad tiny sparkles on the surface of the water that poured from the faucet, the intricate designs of the surrounding matrix took on a whole new dimension on the metaphysical plane. Several dimensions, in fact. He could have studied them for hours, analyzing the connections, extrapolating the possibilities, assessing probabilities.
But he made no attempt to use the energy waves. He simply watched the great, glittering cascade of psychic power with his inner eye and marveled. He was drunk with the beauty and excitement of his own fully focused talent.
"You're dripping all over my hardwood floors," Zinnia said.
The normal nature of a good focus link was such that both prism and talent could indulge in a casual conversation or perform a routine task while they worked their combined psychic energy. It came under the heading of being able to chew gum and walk at the same time.
But tonight Nick had a hard time concentrating on Zinnia's words. In addition to the wonder of indulging his own psychic senses to the hilt, he was in the grip of sexual desire so strong that he literally ached with it. He doubted if he could have chewed gum at that moment, let alone walk.