The door flew open and Karma spun toward it guiltily. Not that she had any reason to be guilty. He was the one who was late. It wasn’t like he could read her thoughts—thank God. That she knew of. Unless he’d been lying when he said he couldn’t read minds… No. She would not make herself crazy.
His presence consumed the room again, but this time instead of strolling around marking every inch as his, he walked straight for her. “You ready?”
Karma centered herself, drawing up her chin to face him. “You’re late.”
A dark brow lifted. “Didn’t you know when I’d be here? Isn’t that one of your little tricks?”
She hadn’t. Was he exempt? No, she’d sensed him before. Had she short-circuited her early warning system? “How do you know about that?”
“Your secretary is a chatty little thing. I think I only understand about a third of what she says, but what I do understand is very enlightening. She adores you, by the way. And she thinks I’m fascinating. Smart girl.”
“Now, aren’t you glad the demon you summoned didn’t succeed in killing her?”
He groaned. “Are we ever going to get beyond that? I’ve sworn in the presence of your lie detector that I never intended to hurt any of your people. What more do you want me to say? Don’t I get any bonus points for saving that girl yesterday?”
He was right. She was holding his past crimes against him like a shield, to keep him at a distance. Which, considering how he’d been doing everything she asked—albeit amid smartass remarks and unsanctioned cursing of frat boys—was unfair of her. Time to be the better woman and let bygones be gone. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You have my word that I won’t mention it again. I’m grateful for your assistance. Shall we get started?”
“You going soft on me, Karma?”
Of course he had to pick a fight, even over the fact that they weren’t going to fight anymore. “We’ve already lost,” she glanced at her watch, “fifteen minutes. Why waste any more time?”
“Always skipping the foreplay, eh, angel? You’ve got it.” He rolled up his sleeves. “For starters, why don’t you show me what you’ve been doing?”
Karma nodded crisply and marched over to the screen that hid her meditation area, focusing on keeping things businesslike and professional so she didn’t have to acknowledge how much of herself she was exposing to him. There was a reason this area was screened off. She didn’t let people see her like this, see inside her, see her coping mechanisms.
She slipped out of her heels and knelt, carefully smoothing her skirt. She closed her eyes, but could still feel him looming behind her. It wasn’t his towering height that made his presence so overwhelming, it was something about him, something about the way he seemed to own every space he entered. His power rippled out around him; whether he was still or in motion, it was always flexing, brushing against her spine, curving a teasing finger up the nape of her neck until goose bumps rose on her arms.
Karma took a breath and started her exercises again, clearing, concentrating, taking command of her wayward senses, finding that central point where everything was calm and controlled.
“Wrong.”
She jerked at the sound of his voice, her eyes snapping open. “Excuse me?”
“You’re doing it all wrong. You can’t go building barricades in your mind. It’s like trying to hold back the ocean with a wall of sand. You need to learn how to ride it, how to channel it, and to do that you need to relax and let the universe in.”
She twisted to get a better angle to glare up at him. “I tried that. The universe, as you put it, overwhelmed me until I couldn’t think anymore. I was totally lost. I need the control. The focus. It’s the only thing that gets me through the day.”
“There’s such a thing as being too controlled. You can’t control everything. Sometimes nature gets to have her say. You could be a force of nature, Karma. If you let yourself.”
“I’m trying.”
“Then stop trying so hard. Get up from there.”
She put her hand in his to let him lift her to her feet, a tiny static charge shooting from his fingertips into hers.
“C’mere.” He tugged her out from behind the screen and over to the couch tucked along the far wall. She waited for him to release her, refusing to show weakness by pulling away, even though she was excruciatingly aware of every second her hand lingered in his. When he did drop her hand, she refused to show a reaction, holding herself perfectly still. “Sit.” He pointed to the couch.
Since he clearly hoped to get a reaction out of her by treating her like a German Shepherd, she pointedly didn’t give him one, sinking onto the designated cushion without comment. He folded his long body onto the cushion next to hers, not touching but close enough to touch.
“Think of that psychic well you can tap into like a riptide. An ocean. If you fight it, it will drown you. If you block it, it will keep coming at you. But if you can learn to move with it, rather than against it, it can take you some pretty freaking incredible places.” His grin was an advertisement for all the wicked ways magic could be used. “Your problem is that instead of learning to swim, you’re trying to dictate to the ocean how it’s supposed to flow. It doesn’t work like that.”
“So how do I learn to ‘swim’, as you put it?”
He held out his hand again. “Shall I show you?”
Her instinct was to say no, so Karma forced herself to nod and place her hand in his. The static charge was stronger this time and kept tingling, a low current sizzle.
“Close your eyes,” he instructed. “And if you can, take down some of those walls you love so much.”
She obeyed the first request. The second was harder. Undoing a lifetime habit wasn’t as easy as closing her eyes. She didn’t even know how to begin. She didn’t see oceans or walls of sand. All she saw was her safe place. Her inviolate core. That quiet, hard-fought calm.
The first awareness she had of her own walls was when she felt Prometheus pressing on them from the outside. Once she was aware of them, releasing them was as simple as taking a breath—but as soon as she did, she couldn’t breathe. A thousand chaotic images crashed in on her, flashes of this future and that tripping over one another and slamming into her brain: deaths, lives, moments. She was Jo laughing, Lucy shouting, her parents hugging—each flicker faster than the last, overlapping and running her over, through her, jerking her farther and farther away from a sense of self, jumbling up inside her until she couldn’t tell what was real and what was chance. She felt Prometheus trying to guide her, urging her to what? Float? Swim? But no sooner had he tripped across her awareness than she was pulled into a cyclone of possible futures—she was Prometheus holding a gilded box like it contained a viper, and punching a dark-haired man, and waking up in a bed, Karma’s bed, but she wasn’t herself, she was him, her sheets tangling around his hips.
Karma recoiled, slamming walls, doors, fences, barricades, anything she could grasp between herself and the wild, plunging tide of futures. For a long, stretching moment, they continued to rush around her, a barrage of unfettered possibilities, then finally a quiet place emerged, that lovely center, that sense of self amid the chaos and the door of her internal safe slammed closed.
Her eyes flew open and she came up gasping for air. She heard a thud, but it took a moment for her eyes to focus enough to see Prometheus sprawled on the floor at her feet, the long fingers of one hand cradling his head.
“What happened?”
He groaned. “You cold cocked me.”
She looked down at her hands, surprised.
“Not like that.” He flashed his teeth, levering himself up off the floor. “My own fault. I didn’t expect you to blast me out hard enough to actually throw me. Serves me right for underestimating you.”