Levitating Las Vegas(44)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He was embarrassed at her unintentional double entendre, and he could feel she was embarrassed, but how could he really feel this? It was enough to know that they both looked down and avoided meeting each other’s eyes in the flickering light of the TV as he sank onto the bed beside her. Facing her would seem like he assumed too much after his comment about her mouth, so he flipped onto his other side.

She wasn’t touching him, but he felt her warmth.

And thought her thoughts.

That she wanted him.

That she was not thinking straight.

And then he felt her hands in his hair. At first she only ran her fingers along the ends of the outermost strands, testing. He probably couldn’t have felt this physically. He knew she was doing it only because in his mind he could see her seeing it in the sunlight filtering weakly around the edges of the curtains. He felt more pressure as she plunged her fingers deeper into his hair, letting the waves slide between her carefully polished long nails, marveling at the way some strands blended into the dark while others glinted in the dimmest light.

When he didn’t shy from her touch, soon she was massaging his scalp, running the nails of both hands through it and gently scratching. He let his head fall back into her hands in tacit approval of her touch.

Her thoughts of kissing him were gone. Now she thought of his hair, the way it glinted in the light, like tiny grains of sand in every color on the shores of Lake Mead, which she’d visited often with her parents when she was a child on languid Mondays, her parents’ one day off from the casino. She thought of water, and sunshine, and a comfortable sleep.

“What the hell!” Holly cried.

Elijah shook the nightmares out of his head and sat up on his elbows in bed, casting about in his mind for what had prompted Holly to sit bolt upright and curse. He didn’t need to read her mind to figure this out. Some horrible creature howled in the street outside the hotel, joined by another howl and another. After a minute they fell into roughly the same two-part chord. Bagpipes.

“The parade!” Holly scrambled from the sheets and made a long-legged leap off the bed, landing at the window and tearing back the curtains. She leaned over, forearms on the windowsill, and watched the commotion in the street. “You’re missing it,” she called.

He was not. He saw it all through her eyes. A line of bagpipers in kilts stretched across the street and led the parade. Next came a line of people in gorilla suits. Holly had never seen that many people in gorilla suits in one place, not even in Vegas. Then came big pickup trucks hauling flatbed trailers. People in shorts and T-shirts sat on the trailers and waved. Holly assumed the people would wear costumes and would get around to decorating the trailers before St. Patrick’s Day, and then the trailers would be called floats. The horses brought up the rear: rodeo horses dashing about, Tennessee walking horses stomping a strange gait, Native American horses decked out in beaded harnesses, all producing copious amounts of poo. Elijah didn’t need to look out the window to see this. Mind reading could make a guy lazy.

She looked over her shoulder at him, curls cascading down her bare arm. Her attention shifted from the parade to him. Because she’d been so tired before, she hadn’t even attempted to take advantage of the fact they were sharing a king bed. Only now was she realizing she’d just spent the last few hours in bed with Elijah Brown. He’d been a gentleman. She wished he’d been less of one. Tangled up in the covers, his hair a riot, dark circles under his eyes, he’d never looked sexier.

She asked, voice husky, “Are you coming?”

He rolled out of bed and crossed the room to her. She turned back to the window, but she held her breath, anticipating his touch.

Past her glossy brown hair, the parade marched on, a colorful blur. Elijah focused on her smooth bare back. He touched her sleep-warmed skin with his fingers.

An unseen hand grasped his hand. He flinched, but the pressure was unrelenting. The invisible force moved his hand up her back, toward her shoulders. Her mind told him she wanted to be kneaded there.

He did what she asked. Under the gentle but steady pressure, he had no choice. He reached forward, placed both hands just below her neck, and circled his thumbs.

She rolled her shoulders, welcoming his touch. And he was bathed in warm and tingling pleasure: the delicious sensation he always got when he used his power, and the additional heady feeling she got using hers. It was all he could do to keep massaging her shoulders and pretending he touched gorgeous girls this way in hotel rooms every day of the week.

“Of all the powers to imagine we have, why these?” she chirped, trying to act as casual as he was acting. “Dr. Gray said I was jealous of my dad—”

“You went to Dr. Gray?” Elijah asked, hands stopping on her back. Of course she did, if they had the same . . . disorder. He was beginning to wonder.

“—and that makes sense, I suppose,” she went on. “But if you have MAD, couldn’t you imagine a better superpower than that? Why can’t I imagine I have the power to eat all the cookies I want without getting fat?”

“You’re really into the sugar high,” Elijah commented. Kneading her back, losing himself in the tingling sensation she was giving him, he inhaled the oleander scent of her hair.

“Oh, no, it’s over,” she exclaimed.

His heart sank, thinking she wanted him to stop touching her. Then he leaned even farther forward to look around her shoulders, and he realized she meant the parade was over. It had reached the end of the street that ran up against the side of the orange mountain, near the candy store. Faintly he heard the participants cheering for themselves as they pumped their fists in the air. The lines of people and trucks and horses curled back on themselves and melted into a disorganized crowd.

She looked over her shoulder at him, sunlight glinting in her dark hair, her eyes dark, her lips curled into the smallest secret smile. “What superpower do you wish you imagined you had?”

“Reading minds,” he said.

“How lucky. You’re satisfied with your delusion.”

“Very.”

Deliberately she kept her eyes focused on his, but she thought about kissing him.

Automatically he raised one hand to his tingling lips.

Her chest was so tight, she could hardly breathe. “We need to talk.” She led him by the hand to the bed. They sat facing each other. The curtains were still open a foot, and the afternoon sunlight slanted across the room, drawing a broad line between them.

“If you can read minds . . .” she reasoned slowly.