Hide and Seek - Lara Adrian Page 0,37

pump-action rifles and Russian semiautomatics that made his hands itch to hold them. “Which ones can we use?”

Alec shrugged. “Any of them. All of them. Whatever we need.”

John nodded and continued with his mental cataloguing of the tools at his disposal should he need them. He was aware of Lisa moving alongside him as he strolled past one collection then another. This wasn’t her world—dealing in violence and death. He didn’t want it ever to be her world. But to her credit, she didn’t shrink away or flinch at the sight of so many lethal instruments.

She was virtually unshakable, except when it came to her beloved brother.

And for what wasn’t the first time, Duarte found himself wishing things were different. Wishing he was different. Just a man, not a warrior. Not a precognitive freak whose life had been defined, then forfeited, by the power of his gift. Not the former Phoenix operative whose duty and commitment to the program now stood in the way of what he felt for Lisa Becker.

She drifted past him, taking a sweeping look at a case filled with sniper sights and night-vision equipment. “What’s in this cabinet?” she asked Alec, already heading toward it.

“Ah, those are Mr. Zapata’s favorite rifles.”

A knot of panic lodged in Duarte’s chest as he glanced up and watched Lisa reach for the door handles on the tall gun cabinet. The familiarity of it froze his blood.

All at once, his nightmare vision seized him in a cold fist. The opened gun cabinet. Three rifles inside. Then the explosion that obliterated everything in its path. He lunged for her. “Lisa, no. Don’t—”

She pulled the doors wide, throwing a questioning glance over her shoulder at the same time. “What’s wrong?”

Nothing.

He stood behind her, panting as if he’d run a marathon, his entire body coiled in horror. Terrified for what might have happened to her. To all of them.

But the gun cabinet wasn’t the one from his premonition. Half a dozen rifles stood inside it, not a single one of them anything less than pristine. There was no derelict weapon. No earth-shattering roar of obliteration. No hellish fire and heat that he could never prevent.

Lisa’s hands were tender on him when she turned to face him. She held his shoulders, touched his face, smoothed her fingers into the sweat-dampened hair at his temples.

“John, are you all right?” Genuine care and concern shone in her sweet hazel eyes. “What just happened?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing.” The words were a raw croak on his dry throat.

Alec eyed him gravely. “Not the vision again? While you’re awake this time?”

“No,” he said. “I thought... Forget it, it’s cool now. Wasn’t the same as in my vision.”

“What vision?” Lisa searched his gaze. “What are you two talking about? Another vision about Kyle? About me?”

“Nothing like that.” Duarte caught her anxious hands and brought them to his lips. He kissed her fingers gently, then stepped out of her embrace because holding her felt too damn good.

He wanted her arms around him, and he wasn’t going to be satisfied with having just her sympathy if she kept on touching him so tenderly and looking at him so... affectionately. Lovingly.

“John, tell me what you’ve seen.” Her voice and gaze were soft, but he could tell from the angle of her chin that she wasn’t going to let him off until he leveled with her. Not after today. Not about anything anymore.

He cleared his throat. “I’ve had a recurring nightmare since Phoenix went down. Alec’s been having the same one, too.”

She glanced briefly at Alec before looking back to Duarte for confirmation. “You mean a premonition? Something awful.”

He gave a sober nod. “A massive explosion. Catastrophic. When it happens, it obliterates everything. In the vision, I know I have to stop it... I know what’s coming every time the damn thing starts, but I’m too late. Every fucking time, I’m too late.”

She absorbed the information in silence for a long moment. “And when I opened the gun cabinet? Is that part of the vision, too?”

“The cabinet, yes. The detonation happens right after I see it. In the vision, it’s me who opens the cabinet, but when you reached for it...” He trailed off, unwilling to speak the words.

The dread he’d felt when she had started to pull open those doors still gripped him. Seeing her in harm’s way—imagined or not—was a terror that still raked him with icy claws. And the danger for her was real in other ways, from the men who had her