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It gave her hope that the nuns and the administrators looked after the kids with similar attention to detail.

As she and John came up to a pair of doors, she could feel the dreams of the boys on the far side, the tremors of emotion that bubbled up through their REM sleep tickling her symphath receptors.

John ducked his head in, and as he stared in at those who were where he had been, she found herself frowning again.

His emotional grid had . . . a shadow to it. A parallel but separate construct that she had picked up on before, but now found screamingly obvious.

She’d never sensed anything like it in anybody else and she couldn’t explain it . . . and didn’t think John was consciously aware of what he was doing. For some reason, though, this trip into his past was exposing the fault line in his psyche.

As well as other stuff. He’d been just like her, lost and apart, cared for by others out of obligation, not blooded love.

On some level, she thought that she should tell him to stop this whole thing, because she could sense how much it was taking out of him—and how much farther they had yet to go. But she was captivated by what he was showing her.

And not just because as a symphath she fed off the emotions of others.

No, she wanted to know more about this male.

While he studied the sleeping boys and got pulled into his past, she focused on his strong profile as it was lit by the security light over the door.

When she lifted her palm up and laid it on his shoulder, he jumped a little.

She wanted to say something smart and kind, put togther some combination of words to reach him where he’d reached her with this. But the thing was, there was more courage in these revelations of his than she had ever shown anyone, and in a world that was full of taking and cruelty, he was fucking breaking her heart with what he was giving her.

He’d been so lonely here and the echoes of the grieving were killing him. And yet he was going to soldier on because he’d told her he would do so.

John’s beautiful blue eyes met her stare, and as he tilted his head in inquiry, she realized words were bullshit in moments like this.

Stepping into his hard body, she wrapped one of her arms around the small of his back. With her free hand, she stretched up and captured his nape, pulling him down to her.

John hesitated and then came willingly, linking his arms around her waist and burying his face in her neck.

Xhex held him, lending him her strength, offering him shelter that she was more than capable of providing. As they stood one against another, she looked over his shoulders into the room beyond, at the small dark heads on their pillows.

In the silence, she felt the past and the present shift and mix, but that was a mirage. There was no way to comfort the lost boy he’d been back then.

But she had the grown male.

She had him right in her arms, and for a brief moment of whimsy, she imagined that she was never, ever going to let him go.

THIRTY-SEVEN

As he sat in his guest room at the Rathboone mansion, Gregg Winn should have felt better than he did. Thanks to some evocative camera shots of that soulful portrait down in the living room, coupled with some stills of the grounds taken in the gloaming, the brass back in L.A. was thrilled with the presell footage and was set to start running it. The butler had also come along nicely, signing the legal documents that gave permission for all kinds of access.

Stan the cameraman could perform a proctology exam on the damn house for all the places he could stick his lens.

But Gregg didn’t have the taste of victory in his mouth. Nope, he had a case of the this-isn’t-rights riding his gut and a tension headache that ran from the base of his skull all the way into his frontal lobe.

The problem was the hidden camera they’d put out in the hall the night before.

There was no rational explanation for what it had captured.

Ironic that a “ghost hunter,” when confronted with a figure who disappeared into thin air, needed Advil and Tums. You’d think he’d be overjoyed that for once he didn’t have to