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  Extrasensory

  Desiree Holt

  Book 2 in the Phoenix Agency series.

  Mia is skeptical about her precognitive skills, but her visions about Carpenter Techtronics are so vivid, she resorts to sending anonymous emails to the company. She’s also having visions of a gorgeous man who arouses her so badly, she’s satisfying herself just to get some relief. She’s shocked when the man shows up in her office, sending her silent erotic messages.

  Dan is helping his friend track down the person threatening his company. When he meets Mia, he has a hard time thinking about anything but indulging in off-the-charts sex with the intriguing woman—until bodies begin falling. As Mia’s visions escalate, so does the explosive sex between her and Dan, as well as an unexpected emotional connection. When Mia is almost killed, Dan and his team must race to find the culprits before they can strike again—or put Mia down for good.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Extrasensory

  ISBN 9781419930980

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Extrasensory Copyright © 2011 Desiree Holt

  Edited by Helen Woodall

  Cover art by Syneca

  Electronic book publication July 2011

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  The publisher and author(s) acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks, service marks and word marks mentioned in this book.

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  Extrasensory

  Desiree Holt

  Dedication

  With great love and affection to Marilyn Campbell, without whom the Phoenix Agency would never have come to life, and who inspired me to reach for the stars.

  Extrasensory: adjective

  (1) clairvoyant

  (2) residing beyond the ordinary senses

  ~Merriam Webster Dictionary

  Chapter One

  Where was the damn helicopter? They couldn’t hold these bastards off much longer.

  Dante “Dan” Romeo wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his camo shirt and slammed another magazine into his rifle. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out, although they always had to prepare for it. A sign over his desk back in Baltimore read, “Nothing in life is ever simple.” In his business, Dan Romeo considered it a motto.

  He was so sure their mission had been successful. Five days ago Drummond Laboratories had placed an emergency call to Phoenix, the agency in which Dan was the senior partner. Drummond’s CEO, Hank Nolan, had been captured by guerillas in Mexico, the kidnap capital of the world. They’d snatched him right off the street in Acapulco where he’d been vacationing with his family.

  The people from Drummond made sure Phoenix understood the feds could not be involved. The guerilla group had threatened to cut off Nolan’s head if the feds were contacted. Cut their losses, so to speak. These kidnap-for-ransom groups were getting bolder every day, especially in Mexico.

  Drummond didn’t balk for an instant at the fee Dan quoted him.

  So Dan had put the team together and using bribes, snitches and other sources of information, they’d found the location of the guerilla camp. They’d suited up and Mike D’Antoni, pilot extraordinaire and another of the partners, dropped them into the humid, insect-infested Mexican jungle. Where they were going was definitely not a vacation spot.

  They hiked to the camp location in stealth mode, using the sounds of the jungle animals as cover for their movements as often as they could. Then they concealed themselves in the surrounding jungle. Watching. Waiting. Timing the guards. Identifying where Nolan was being held. Learning the rhythm of the camp. For Dan, a former Force Recon Marine, jobs like this were no different from the missions he’d led in Afghanistan and Iraq. The same methods applied.

  At last, when they’d gathered sufficient information, the men put their plan together. Waiting until full dark and with the covertness they’d learned from years in the military, they made their way to the rear of the camp. Silently, the team working like a well-oiled piece of machinery, all the parts moving as designed, they took out the two guards in front of the shack where Nolan was being held. Then, moving swiftly, they backed out of the camp, half-carrying Nolan, until they reached the safety of the surrounding flora and fauna.

  As soon as they were far enough away to use the satellite radio safely, Dan had called in for extraction and Mike radioed he was on his way to get them. The two men set their coordinates and the team took off to meet the chopper. But Nolan had been tied up for two weeks and half-starved. In his deteriorated condition he had trouble keeping up, so they finally had to carry him. That delayed them and gave the kidnappers, when they realized their prize was gone, time to take off after the rescue team with AK-47s and other assorted weapons.

  Now Dan and his group were pinned down at the extraction point and the guerillas were moving closer. Machine-gun bullets rained everywhere, punctuated by the screech of the howler monkeys and the squawking of tropical birds. Dan could only pray the kidnappers didn’t have rocket-propelled grenades with them. That could take down not just the team but the helicopter too. Disaster didn’t begin to describe what that outcome would be.

  Then, at last, he heard the distinctive slap! slap! slap! of the helicopter blades and his comm unit crackled in his ear.

  “I am above you and ready to extract,” Mike said. “Looks like you need a little covering fire.”

  “No shit,” Dan answered. “Get that ladder down and have the shotgun riders start peppering these bastards.”

  The chopper now hovered directly over them. Someone pitched the rope ladder from the open cabin door and it hung tantalizingly in the air. Two Phoenix men were balanced on the chopper skids, spraying the area around them with machine-gun fire. The occasional shrieks let everyone know that at least some of the bullets had found a target.

  Dan hoisted Nolan onto the ladder and motioned for one of the guys in the cabin above just to pull the damn thing up. In seconds the man was inside the chopper and the ladder dropped again. Firing into the surrounding area as they climbed, aided by the gunners above them, each man scrambled up to the helo’s cabin, then reached to help the one behind him.

  Dan was last, as usual, holding to the ladder with one hand and his machine-gun with the other. He was gratified to hear more screams of pain as hands pulled him through the opening to safety.

  “Go now,” he shouted to Mike, who needed no urging to pull away and up. As they lifted into the sky, the two Phoenix gunners continued to fire until the chopp
er reached a safe altitude.

  “Sorry to cut it so close, Danny boy,” Mike yelled at him. “We had to wait for some other air traffic to clear. They didn’t look like they wanted to invite us for afternoon cocktails.”

  “These damn thugs are getting better equipped all the time,” Dan cursed. “We’re having to run our asses off just to stay ahead of them.”

  He looked around him and studied the activity. The men were all checking their guns, making sure they had full clips just in case a surprise awaited them somewhere along the line. The medic on their team was attending to Hank Nolan, expertly starting an IV even under the extreme conditions and then cleaning his wounds.

  “Mostly malnutrition,” he told Dan over the roar of the chopper’s blades. “And shock. He’ll be a long time forgetting this little trip.”

  Dan leaned back against the cabin wall, regulating his breathing, checking again to make sure everyone else was okay.

  “You earned yourself a little downtime after this,” Mike yelled from the cockpit. “Don’t you think? A break from the office? Maybe a little R and R?”

  Dan gave his partner a lopsided grin. He knew what that meant. Get your ass out of town and get some rest before taking on another mission. Give your body some rest. He had to agree that Mike was right. At forty-three years old, he was getting a little past the age for this kind of activity.

  “Chase Carpenter invited me to come to San Antonio,” he replied. “His company has created a sophisticated new robot that supposedly is undetectable and can do everything but sing and dance. He’s having a big unveiling next Friday, with lots of military brass, top cops and international corporations. He thought it might be something the agency could use.”

  Mike grinned. “Knowing Chase it’s a high ticket item. Do we get a discount for being friends?”

  Dan laughed. “I’ll ask him.”

  “You ought to take him up on it,” Mike insisted. “And while you’re there, you could see Mark and Faith.” Mike chuckled. “And interrupt his vacation.”

  Mark Halloran was the newest partner in Phoenix. He and his wife, a best-selling author of political thrillers, were both telepaths, and that psychic ability had been the single reason for Mark’s own rescue from terrorists in Peru. At the time he’d been a Delta Force team leader. A highly-placed defense department official, taking payoffs from the arms dealer Mark’s team was sent to take out, had blown the whistle on the mission. Only Mark and one member of his team survived the ambush they walked into.

  Joey Latrobe, whose brother was a Phoenix partner, had managed to hide himself from the terrorists even though he was seriously wounded. The details of his rescue were yet another story.

  Mark had been held in the terrorist camp and his only communication with the outside world had been the telepathic messages he exchanged with Faith. Like a raging virago, she’d taken on Washington and the Pentagon and when no one else would help her, had turned to Phoenix, even going along on the rescue mission.

  Dan had to smile now when he thought of her courage. It would be nice to see her again.

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” he said. “But not before taking the world’s longest shower and eating the biggest steak I can find.”

  * * * * *

  No. I’m tired. That’s all that’s wrong.

  Mia Fleming put aside the art book lying open on her desk, closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She’d just been staring at the photo of the Da Vinci painting too long, that was all. As art historian and assistant curator at the DeWitt Museum, she was immersed in research for the private collection due to arrive at the museum next month. Part of her job was to gather information for the brochures that were printed and the press kits they distributed. And as usual, she’d been overdoing it.

  Shoving her long brown hair, the color of rich chocolates, back behind her ears, she pulled the book forward and began to study the page again. And there it was. Just as before. Shimmering in the center of the photo of the Da Vinci painting. An ugly rock that looked like a misshapen lump of clay, bumping along, wobbling back and forth, with a pair of hands reaching for it. Then nothing except the original picture, undisturbed.

  God, not again. Please, please, please. Choose someone else, okay?

  Why did she have to be the one these things happened to? Why did she have to have what her grandmother called a “special gift”? More like a curse than a blessing, she often said.

  But she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the book. The image on the page kept shifting, first the photo of the painting, now that stupid little rock with its jerky movements. Finally, the shadow hands reaching for it. Like a broken record, the vision continued to repeat itself over and over again, taunting her to find its hidden meaning.

  Mia slammed the book shut and shoved it away from herself. It was just like always. How on earth was she supposed to figure out what the vision meant? A rock was a rock, right? Still, she’d learned to be extra cautious over the years. The images that came to her without warning and at the strangest times were not always easy to interpret. She’d been wrong more times than she’d been right because she’d misinterpreted what she’d seen. Or because the visions had come to her after the fact. She had no training in deciphering these things and certainly no place to go to find any.

  When she was younger there was a desperation in her determination to find answers. Getting people to listen to her was a battle itself. Her parents had always considered her a strange child—aloof, shy but apparently making up weird stories to capture attention. They never believed her stories about “visions”.

  “Don’t keep telling people those crazy stories,” her mother said too often to count. “They’ll think you’re crazy. They’ll think we’re all crazy.”

  “The neighbors are all talking,” her father admonished her. “I don’t want them pointing fingers at our family.”

  They even sent her to a psychiatrist who was supposed to “deprogram” her. What a lot of fun that had been.

  But still the visions continued to plague her. Too often the images had been too vague or misleading and now she’d almost become a pariah. When she did get someone to listen and she had success, the media called it a fluke. The frustration of not being able to make people understand the things she saw and the rejection because of her “oddness” had finally caused her to isolate herself from everyone else.

  When she finally escaped to the University of Michigan, she convinced her father to pay the extra money for a single dorm room, then she eventually moved into a studio apartment. She chose art history as her major, because she could lose herself in the richness of the creations of the artists and sculptors, the potters and temple rubbers. The orderliness of delineating art history gave her a personal discipline that allowed her to exert some measure of control over her existence.

  The visions, for whatever reason, came less frequently while she was at school, all the way through her postgraduate studies. When they came, they were so fractured she made herself ignore them, even if the effort sometimes made her physically ill.

  But finally she was finished with her studies, sporting her brand new PhD and the visions came roaring back. Not knowing how or when they’d appear, she isolated herself more and more except at work. She lived alone in her house, surrounded by the books and music she loved. It wasn’t that she was antisocial or weak, just self-protective. It took strength to deal with the impact of her visions and the primarily negative responses she’d learned to live with.

  Her life, for the most part, focused on her career with the museum. Her job suited her perfectly, since it allowed her to work alone the majority of the time. She was always on edge that a vision would explode from nowhere and being isolated allowed her to deal with them without distraction or embarrassment. During those instances when she had to meet with the museum curator, she found herself praying that she would not be disrupted by one of her visions. They came without warning and she didn’t think Mr. Hunter would be too impressed by them. For
someone who appreciated art, he was definitively black and white in his outlook.

  Today, thank God, he was away on a trip and unlikely to wander into her office unannounced. Her newest vision had disrupted her work half a dozen times already this week. Just seconds each time. That was all. A brief flash. But it wouldn’t go away and she had no idea what message she was supposed to read into it.

  She’d almost begun to believe that whatever was causing this to happen to her had disappeared. She hadn’t had one of what she’d taken to calling her “episodes” in months now and had almost begun to relax, thinking they’d gone away for good. Not so. Her stomach was doing the jitterbug as it always did at the beginning of one of her incidents and an aspirin-proof headache was already beginning to build behind her eyes.

  And then, without warning, a sharp pain stabbed her head. She leaned back in her chair, eyes closed, willing whatever was after her to go away. Suddenly the headache eased and a sense of peaceful bliss stole over her. No, more than that. Erotic feelings were creeping through her body dampening her bikini panties and making her breasts ache inside the silken cups of her bra.

  The image of the man that shimmered before her shook her, both because of its startling clarity and because he was so completely, devastatingly masculine. Tall and lean, his muscles rippled enticingly beneath his olive skin, he had black hair that touched the nape of his neck and black obsidian eyes. His face had a grimness that bespoke too much exposure to life’s misery.

  And he was nearly naked!

  Clad only in tight knit boxers, she saw the strength of his thighs and the impressive bulge of an erection that made her mouth water.

  I want to fuck you.