Raintree by Linda Howard & Beverly Barton & Linda Winstead Jones

Author:Linda Howard & Beverly Barton & Linda Winstead Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780373773428
Publisher: HQN Books
Published: 2008-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Dante began making calls, starting with Al Rayburn. Lorna was right: something hinky was going on, and he was pissed that she’d had to point it out to him. He should have thought of that detail himself. Instead of answering the detectives’ questions, he should have been asking them his own, such as: What were they doing there? A fire scene wasn’t a crime scene unless and until the cause was determined to be arson or at the very least suspicious. Uniformed officers should have been there for crowd control, traffic control, security—a lot of reasons—but not detectives.

He didn’t come up with any answers to his questions, but he hadn’t expected to. What he was doing now was reversing the flow of information, and that would take time. Now that questions were being asked—by Al, by a friend Dante had at city hall, by one of his own Raintree clan members who liked life a little on the rough side and thus had some interesting contacts—a lot of things would be viewed in a different light.

Whatever was going on, however those two detectives were involved, Dante intended to find out, even if he had to bring in Mercy, whose gift of telepathy was so strong that she had once, when she was ten and he was sixteen, jumped into his head at a very inopportune moment—he’d been with his current girlfriend—and said, “Eww! Gross!” which had so startled him he’d lost his concentration, his erection and his girlfriend. Sixteen-year-old girls, he’d learned, didn’t deal well with anything they saw as an insult to their general desirability. That was the day when he’d started blocking Mercy from his head, which had infuriated her at the time. She’d even told their parents what he’d been doing, which had resulted in a very long, very serious talk with his father about the importance of being smart, using birth control and taking responsibility for his actions.

Faced with his father’s stern assurance that Dante would marry any girl he got pregnant and stay married to her for the rest of his life, he had then become immensely more careful. The Raintree Dranir most definitely did not have a casual attitude about his heirs. A Raintree, any Raintree, was a genetic dominant; any children would inherit the Raintree gifts. The same was true of the Ansara, which was why the Ansara had immediately killed any child born of a Raintree and Ansara breeding. When two dominant strands blended, anything could be the result—and the result could be dangerous.

Mercy’s gift had only gotten stronger as she got older. Dante didn’t think her presence would be required, though; the Raintree had other telepaths he could call on. They might not be as strong as Mercy, but then, they wouldn’t need to be. Mercy was most comfortable at Sanctuary, the homeplace of the Raintree clan, where she didn’t have to almost shut down her gift because of the relentless emotional and mental assault by humans who had no idea how to shield.

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