Future Tense Read Free Page A

car.
    “Better?”
    She leaned her head against the backrest again and looked at him. Not normal .
    Telos Khūnbish was not normal. His hand stayed on her thigh, but he wasn’t feeling her Jewel/Future Tense — Chapter 2
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    up. He flexed his other fingers on the steering wheel then relaxed them again. “Yeah,”
    she said softly. “Better.”
    “Tell me what happened before your car accident.”
    “I left Michael, and he didn’t like it.”
    “Did he hit you?”
    She gave him a thorough once over. He was a physically solid man. Tall.
    Muscular. Fit. Even Michael would think twice about messing with him. The silence in her head filled up with the sound of metal breaking, no brakes. The guy who rear-ended her never even slowed down.
    “You’re with me.” His calm worked into her, soothing her when contact with anyone else would have sent her screaming from the impact of everything she saw.
    Khūnbish was a blank to her. Not blank, but blocked from his side. He definitely wasn’t normal.
    “Thank you.”
    Sometime later they were on her street. He pulled into a parking space a few doors down from her house and turned off the motor. He left the keys in the ignition.
    She didn’t move. Khūnbish turned his torso toward her, one arm draped over the steering wheel. And he looked at her straight on. Wasn’t he just tall, dark and dangerous? That ancient part of her brain quivered in fear, telling her to hunker down or run like hell.
    “Let’s get what you need from the house,” he said.
    She nodded. She was going to owe him big time.
    He took the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car. She watched him walk around the front. She already had her door open when he came around to the sidewalk.
    Good thing he was there, because she got dizzy when she stood. He caught her forearm and steadied her. “Easy there.”
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    She stared at his torso while she waited for her head to clear. “What on earth does your shirt say?” She squinted at his chest. “While you were reading my shirt, I hacked your bank account?”
    Khūnbish smiled. The thing was, it was only partly a joke, that saying on his shirt. He probably could hack her bank account. According to his CV he had top secret security clearance and right coast clients with three letter acronyms. And those were the ones he could disclose. The left coast clients were scattered up and down the coastline from the Silicon Valley to Redmond, Washington.
    “Don’t worry, your money is still there.” He smiled as he put a faint emphasis on your . He didn’t let go of her arm, not right away, and they stood there staring at each other. His eyes were completely black. She could drop into them and never come out.
    Just five minutes of peace, that’s all she wanted. Five minutes of not having anyone’s fate force its way into her head. That was her idea of paradise. For some reason, she could get that from him. He touched her and there was blessed nothing.
    They walked to the house, which was on a slope and had two sets of concrete steps with a landing in between. She did feel safer, having Khūnbish at her side. She fumbled around for her keys and eventually found them in a corner of her bag.
    She headed up the stairs, keys in her hand. The house belonged to Michael. Not her. She’d never liked it very much. In the last few weeks, she’d come to hate it. At the landing, Khūnbish put a hand on her arm.
    “What?” She glanced at him, and he pointed. The upstairs lights were off, but there was a light on downstairs. In the front room. “Oh.” She squeezed her house keys.
    The last thing he’d said to her the night before she walked out was that he wasn’t going to let her leave him and that if she did, he’d kill her. Michael never said anything he didn’t mean.
    Khūnbish spoke softly. “You should have told me he’s a mage.”
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    His casual admission that he knew anything about mages