Raintree. Linda Winstead Jones

on a mattress that felt like a dream, and thought.

      As big and comfortable as the house was, it wasn’t what she would call a mansion. It wasn’t ostentatious. He liked his creature comforts, but the house still looked like a place to be lived in, rather than a showcase.

      She knew he had money, and a lot of it—enough to afford a house ten times the size of this one. Throw in the fact that he lived here alone, with no daily staff to take care of him and his home, and she had to draw the obvious conclusion that his privacy was more important to him than being pampered. So why was he forcing her to stay here?

      He’d said he felt responsible for her, but he could feel that way wherever she stayed, and because of that damned newly discovered talent of his for making people do whatever he wanted, she couldn’t have left if he’d commanded her to stay. Maybe he was interested in her untrained “power” and wanted to see what he could make of it just to satisfy his curiosity. Again, she didn’t have to stay here for him to give her lessons or conduct a few experiments on her.

      He wanted to have sex with her, so maybe that was what motivated him. He could compel her to come to him, to have sex, but he wasn’t a rapist. He was possibly a lunatic, definitely a bully, but he wasn’t a rapist. He wanted her to be willing, truly willing. So was he keeping her here in order to seduce her? He couldn’t do that if he went off somewhere and left her here, not to mention doing so made her mad at him.

      Somehow the sex angle didn’t feel right, either. If he wanted to get her in bed, making her a prisoner wasn’t the right way to win her over. Not only that, she wasn’t a femme fatale; she simply couldn’t see anyone going to such extraordinary lengths to have sex with her.

      He had to have another reason, but damned if she could figure out what it was. And until she knew…well, there wasn’t anything she could do, regardless. Unless she could somehow knock him out and escape, she was stuck here until he was ready to let her leave.

      Last night, from the moment the gorilla had “escorted” her away from the blackjack table and manhandled her up to Raintree’s office, had been a pure nightmare. One shock had followed so closely on the heels of another—each somehow worse than the one before—that she felt as if she’d lost touch with reality somewhere along the way.

      Yesterday at this time she had been anonymous, and she liked it that way. Oh, people would come up and talk to her, the way they did to winners, and she was okay with that, but being alone was okay, too. In fact, being alone was better than okay; it was safe.

      Raintree didn’t know what he was asking of her, staying here, learning how to be “gifted.” Not that he was asking—he wasn’t giving her a choice.

      He’d tricked her into admitting that she had a certain talent with numbers, but he didn’t know how nauseated she got at the thought of coming out of the paranormal closet. She would rather remain a metaphysical garment bag, hanging in the very back.

      He had grown up in an underground culture where paranormal talents were the norm, where they were encouraged, celebrated, trained. He had grown up a prince, for God’s sake. A prince of weird, but a prince nonetheless. He had no idea what it had been like growing up in slums, skinny and unwanted and different. There hadn’t been a father in her picture, just an endless parade of her mother’s “boyfriends.” He’d never been slapped away from the table, literally slapped out of her chair, for saying anything her mother could construe as weird.

      As a child, she hadn’t understood why what she said was weird. What was so wrong with saying the bus her mother took across town to her job in a bar would be six minutes and twenty-three seconds late? She had thought her mother would want to know. Instead she’d been backhanded out of her seat.

      Numbers were her thing. If anything had a number in it, she knew what that number was. She remembered starting first grade—no kindergarten for her, her mother had said kindergarten was a stupid-ass waste of time—and the relief she’d felt when someone finally explained numbers to her, as if a huge part of herself had finally clicked into place. Now she had names for the shapes, meanings for the names. All her life she’d been fascinated with numbers, whether they were on a house, a billboard, a taxicab or anywhere else, but it was as if they were a foreign language she couldn’t grasp. Odd, to have such an affinity for them but no understanding. She had thought she was as stupid as her mother had told her she was, until she’d gone to school and found the key.

      By the time she was ten, her mother had been deep into booze and drugs, and the slaps had progressed to almost daily beatings. If her mother staggered in at night and decided she didn’t like something Lorna had done that day or the day before—or the week before, it didn’t matter—she would grab whatever was handy and lay into Lorna wherever she was. A lot of times Lorna’s transition from sleep to wakefulness had been a blow—to her face, her head, wherever her mother could hit her. She had learned to sleep in a state of quiet terror.

      Whenever she thought of her childhood, what she remembered most was cold and darkness and fear. She had been afraid her mother would kill her, and even more afraid her mother might not bother to come home some night. If there was one thing Lorna knew beyond doubt, it was that her mother hadn’t wanted her before she was born and sure as hell didn’t want her after. She knew because that had been the background music of her life.

      She had learned to hide what numbers meant to her. The only time she’d ever told anyone—ever—had been in the ninth grade, when she had developed a crush on a boy in her class. He’d been sweet, a little shy, not one of the popular kids. His parents were very religious, and he was never allowed to attend any school parties, or learn how to dance, anything like that, which was okay with Lorna, because she never did any of that stuff, either.

      They had talked a lot, held hands some, kissed a little. Then Lorna, summoning up the nerve, had shared her deepest secret with him: sometimes she knew things before they happened.

      She still remembered the look of absolute disgust that had come over his face. “Satan!” he’d spat at her, and then he’d never spoken to her again. At least he hadn’t told anyone, but that was probably because he didn’t seem to have any buddies he could tell.

      She’d been sixteen when her mother really did walk out and not bothered to come back. Lorna had come home from school—“home” changed locations fairly often, usually when rent was overdue—to find her mother’s stuff cleared out, the locks changed and her own meager collection of clothes dumped in the trash.

      Without a place to live, she had done the only thing she could do: she had contacted the city officials herself and entered the foster system.

      Living in foster homes for two years hadn’t been great, but it hadn’t been as bad as her life had been before. At least she got to finish high school. None of her foster parents had beaten or abused her. None of them ever seemed to like her very much, either, but then, her mother had told her she wasn’t likeable.

      She coped. After she was eighteen, she was out of the system and on her own. In the thirteen years since then—for her entire life, actually—she had done what she could to stay below the radar, to avoid being noticed, to never, ever be a victim. No one could reject her if she didn’t offer herself.

      She had stumbled into gambling in a small way, in a little casino on the Seminole reservation in Florida. She had won, not a whole lot, but a couple hundred dollars meant a lot to her. Later on she’d gone in some of the casinos on the Mississippi River and won some more. Small casinos were everywhere. She’d gone to Atlantic City but hadn’t liked it. Las Vegas was okay, but too too: too much neon, too many people, too hot, too gaudy. Reno suited her better. Smaller, but not too small. Better climate. Eight years after that first small win in Florida, she regularly won five to ten thousand dollars a week.

      That kind of money was a burden, because she couldn’t bring herself to spend much more than she had always spent. She didn’t go hungry now, or cold. She had a car if she wanted to pack up and leave, but never a new one. She had bank accounts all over the place, plus she usually carried a lot of cash—dangerous, she knew, but she felt more secure if she had