Seeing Is Believing Read Online Free

inward in response to the pain he’d launched at her. Life was such a bitch. Utterly a bitch. He knew he wasn’t the kind of person many people wanted to have around. Hell, he had a lot of rough edges, and he wasn’t worth sticking around for any length of time. That’s why his army career had fitted him so perfectly. He was a loner in a loner’s job. But now he had to take a partner. And he didn’t like it. A woman, at that. A soft, compassionate woman who’d mysteriously tugged feelings from his hardened heart that he thought had died long ago.
    Lifting his hand, Wes rasped, “I know I’m a bastard. I’m hard on people. That’s about as close to an apology as you’re going to get from me.”
    Diana relaxed slightly, her fingers loosening from their position on the granite bench. She could feel Wes wrestling with so many feelings, even see them in his eyes, if only for a split second. As a psychic, her forte was picking up on subtleties, and she was glad this once that she could ferret out such things, because they painted a less violent and aggressive picture of him.
    “Fair enough,” she whispered, her voice softening in compromise. “Just tell me why you came here.”

Chapter Two
    W es put the papers aside. “Ruth Horner is a psychic,” he began, retrieving the information from his memory. “When she was ten years old, the Psi-Lab, a top-secret branch of the federal government, tested her.”
    “What do you mean, ‘tested’?”
    “They tested her for her psychic skills,” Wes said. “This lab’s whole reason for being was to develop a team of psychics to use in the Cold War and any other hot spot around the world. They used psychics to ferret out top-secret information. If they could get access without putting one of our spies in danger, they did it.”
    Diana grimaced. “What a terrible use of psychic gifts.”
    Wes shrugged. “If you believe in that sort of stuff.”
    She felt rebuffed. “Obviously, you don’t.”
    “Nope.” He pointed to his eyes. “I believe in my own five senses. Beyond that, nothing is real.”
    The flat statement came out hard, uncompromising. Diana curbed her reaction—one of anger. “Okay, so poor Ruth Horner was tested when she was only ten. And they used her? At that age? I think that’s terrible.”
    “It’s worse than you can imagine,” Wes said. “Ruth Horner’s skills were so high on their index that they brought her to Washington, D.C., and she worked in their lab facilities five days a week.”
    “How awful! What did her parents say?”
    “She didn’t have any. She was an orphan.”
    “Oh, dear…”
    Wes smarted beneath her softly spoken words and the glistening of tears in her sympathetic brown eyes. Tears! He felt rage. He felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. “Don’t get all teary eyed over her being an orphan. She survived.”
    Diana felt a huge surge of anger slam into her and she winced. She saw the fury in Wes’s eyes and stood openmouthed. Why had he taken such offense? Her mind whirled with questions about this unpredictable man.
    “Horner was cared for by foster parents who approved her work for our government. Her education was excellent. She was tutored through high school and went on to get a degree in biochemistry.” He deliberately looked at the papers instead of at Diana Wolf, whose compassionate expression only made him feel angrier. “She eventually became a supervisor at the lab and responsible for a lot of new psychic tools being employed in our country’s defense.” Wes glanced up. “I don’t know exactly what she did psychically. But I was told she was very powerful. One of the best.”
    Swallowing her tears, Diana came and sat down on the edge of the bench. The anger had left Wes’s face and voice, but she was still shaken by the suddenness with which he’d turned on her. Why couldn’t he feel sympathy for Ruth Horner? What was the matter with him? Maybe he was so hard-bitten he hated tears, or at the