Hidden Currents by Christine Feehan

even for just a few moments, but what mattered most, was getting her home safe and unharmed.
    “You spoke to her? Are you certain?” Hannah asked.
    The room went silent and all faces turned toward him. Kate the writer, serious and gentle, Abigail the marine biologist, Libby the doctor and healer, Sarah, Hannah and Joley, and the men who loved them, waiting, holding their collective breath.
    “She’s alive. Hurt.” Jackson frowned. “A head injury, I’d guess. She was confused and the pain was excruciating. Someone was questioning her and they used the name Sheena MacKenzie, so hopefully her cover is still intact, although they wanted to know who had sent her and asked what she was doing there. They spoke English with a heavy accent.”
    “Greek?” Ilya asked.
    Jackson shrugged. “I couldn’t say one way or the other. I wasn’t there, just heard it through her and I got the feeling of a great distance.” He rubbed his shadowed jaw, needing to find a way to still his hands, to keep from betraying the terror building in his gut. Elle. Damn him for not taking charge. For not keeping her safe. Baby, I’m coming for you. If you don’t believe anything else, believe I’ll come for you.
    He sent the message to her in the way he’d been whispering to her for the last couple of years. Soft. Intimate. Intense. He could tell her things across a distance he couldn’t seem to say to her face. He could feel the emotions, so deep they shook him, across that same distance, but up close, he was always so carefully controlled.
    “Come into the house,” Sarah said, her voice gentle, almost as if she knew what he was feeling. “Standing in the entryway isn’t going to help. You have to commit to us, Jackson. We can’t help if you don’t give us your full commitment, and it seems to me, as close as we are to Elle, you’re her soul mate and you’re the one that’s going to find her.”
    There was that waiting again. The silence. He lived in silence. Understood it. These people in this room had opened their lives to him, shared their world, yet he had always stood apart by choice, refusing to go all the way with the very commitment Sarah was asking of him. He didn’t understand people. He wasn’t comfortable being around them. The desert, the mountains, the sandy dunes above the ocean were places he sought and understood.
    Emotions were kept at a distance, yet this family, these people who always welcomed him, kept emotions close and intense, and every moment he spent with them made him feel both cared for and yet isolated and apart. For Elle he went deeper into the room, into the circle of her family.
    The candles made a pattern on the floor, the flames flickering with life. He looked around the house. It would be his home. His life would be here when he married Elle. He walked across the room and laid his hand on the wall. It was an old house, yet always appeared new. He had seen the house come to life, protecting those who dwelled inside. When he laid his palm on the wall, he felt energy, strong and pulsing. Little sparks danced around his fingers and across the back of his hand.
    If you’re alive, the way the Drakes believe, help us find her. Help me find her.
    Beneath his palm, the walls undulated, and for a moment he thought he heard the sound of feminine voices rising in the distance.
    He turned to look at the Drake sisters, but they were looking at one another, their eyes wide, their faces slightly shocked. He dropped his hand and moved back to the center of the room. “The storm is nearly overhead. Let’s get this done.”
    “The house spoke to you,” Sarah said. “Jackson, do you know what that means?”
    His dark eyes slid over her face, noting her astonishment. “Did you really think Elle didn’t belong to me?” His voice was quiet. Low. Soft even. The menace there reverberated through the room, enough that Damon stirred from his place against the wall and limped over to Sarah, his cane supporting his