Neptune's Tears Read Free Page A

thought we might talk for a few minutes.’
    ‘Great. I’ll just get my stuff and we can go.’ He grinned. ‘Your place or mine?’
    Okay. He wasn’t so weird after all, just flirty. She’d had lots of practice handling flirts.
    ‘Dr Morgan wanted me to make sure you’re all right. According to your chart, you were unconscious when they brought you in, with quite a lump on your forehead.’
    He looked confused. ‘Who are you again?’
    Did he not see the glowing blue of her badge? ‘Zee McAdams, empath. I can help you with the bump on your head.’
    Suddenly there was a wrenching in the energy field. He jerked his whole torso backward, as if taking himself out of reach. The light she’d felt between them, or thought she’d felt,
was gone.
    ‘A mind reader?’ He looked shaken, almost angry. ‘No thanks. If I want my fortune told, there’s a carnival on the other side of town.’
    ‘I don’t read minds,’ she explained. She’d had this conversation too many times to count, but usually it was with older patients who thought psychic healing was a scheme
to pump up their hospital bills.
    ‘No?’ he challenged.
    ‘No. I read
bodies
.’ She hadn’t meant to emphasise
bodies.
Her voice had tricked her and now she felt the warmth of slight embarrassment creeping into her cheeks.
Often when she worked with a patient she laid her hands on them, palms open to facilitate the energy flow. She wondered what it would be like to feel the smooth warmth of David’s body through
his clothes.
Stop it!
she told herself.
Stop it, or you’ll slide right out of the zone and have to go back to divesting.
    ‘But aren’t the mind and body one?’ he was asking. To her surprise, he seemed genuinely interested, no longer flirting or dismissive.
    ‘In a way,’ she answered. The mind and the body
were
one, in ways that even science didn’t fully understand. But she shouldn’t have said she read bodies. It
wasn’t technically true. What she did, both consciously and subconsciously, was make an infinite number of tiny observations and allow a pattern to emerge, a pattern that guided the healing
energy she sent to the patient.
    ‘I’m only here to help you,’ she said, stepping towards him and extending her hand. ‘According to your chart, we really should make sure about that bump
—’
    ‘Stay
away
from me,’ he said, raising both hands, as if ready to push her back.
    Zee stopped. She shouldn’t have taken that last step, or extended her hand. Now she’d lost the patient. ‘Sorry. It’s just that you
were
brought in unconscious, and
Dr Morgan wants to —’
    ‘Have a look around inside my head. I get that. No thanks. I’m leaving now.’
    Zee bit her lip. If he left and collapsed in the street, it would be her fault.
    ‘Look,’ he said, softening slightly at seeing her concern. ‘I’m fine. No, really –
look.
’ He gestured to his head. ‘Do you see a bump on my
forehead?’
    ‘Well, not exactly, but . . .’
    But there had been one there before. Hadn’t there? She realised he was still staring at her. In fact, his eyes hadn’t really left her since she’d entered the room. She felt the
tug of attraction again. This time, in spite of the disastrous way things were going, it wasn’t so easy to dismiss. When she tried, exactly the opposite happened. She felt a longing
she’d never felt before and knew that, for the first time ever, she’d have to return to the unit and re-divest before she could see another patient.
    And of course she’d have to write up a full report of everything that had happened, which would be tricky because she wasn’t at all sure what
had
happened. Was it David
Sutton’s steady gaze causing her distraction? The way his arms looked strong but gentle at the same time, and made her wonder what his hand would feel like touching her? And the energy pulse
she thought she’d felt between them . . . She couldn’t imagine putting all those things into words for