Page 3 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Life was simpler before I knew her name. Not easier—my life had never mapped on the whistle-while-you-work spectrum—but objectively simpler before Dr. Eve Roth came into the picture.

I scrolled through the texts we’d been exchanging all night, rereading every word and trying to pretend I wasn’t memorizing everything she said.

Her last message was twenty minutes ago.

I’d sent a picture of a nearby gas station sign advertising Buy One Get One Red Bulls , which she secretly loved and drank like an alcoholic trying to low-key slam tequila shots at the office.

But she never responded to the picture. No emoji, nothing.

And now I was obsessively refreshing the app, waiting for the nonexistent dots of her response to appear.

I put the phone down and looked around. The problem was I didn’t have much else to do.

I was on a job, doing fieldwork in Max’s boring Toyota.

An infidelity assignment. The cheating husband had left work and checked in at a hotel by himself, leaving me to sit at the edge of the parking lot taking pictures of every person who went in or out of the building, like a perv.

The guy had to go home to his wife for dinner, which meant he and his sidepiece would be coming out again soon.

If I was a different kind of investigator, I could’ve gone into the hotel and made friends with the front desk clerk, found out their room number, and maybe gotten a picture in a hallway where there was a better chance of catching them together.

But hotels had people, and people were lousy with thoughts and feelings infinitely louder than any of them could imagine.

Out here, on the far side of the parking lot, I sensed almost nothing from the rotation of guests moving in and out of the hotel.

A whiff of frustration from a dad packing his screaming kids into a minivan, but it was manageable.

I could draw the boundaries of myself against the background static of humans living their lives.

The farther away people were, the easier it was to tune them out, to remember where they stopped and I started.

Unless that person was Dr. Eve Roth.

I picked the phone up and refreshed the text feed. Nothing.

She’d been gone for over a month, in Australia studying tropical cyclones with a group of grad students.

Flying into storms and probably learning Indigenous customs and wrestling giant snakes, although she only sent pictures of the storms. We texted daily.

I gave her updates on her father-in-law, Earl, who was staying with a friend while she was gone.

She gave me updates on the grad student drama—who was dating who and whose research looked promising—-like I knew any of them.

Her new PhD student, Chris, came up a lot and it was humiliating how much I viscerally hated seeing his name, the instant heat that boiled up at the idea of someone else being closer to Eve than I was.

They’d arrived back in Iowa today and I could see Chris sitting next to her on the endless flights, discussing research methodologies and papers and all the data they’d probably collected together. Data was Eve’s love language.

We weren’t together.

I put the phone down and tried a few yoga breaths. Eve could date any brilliant twenty-something PhD student she wanted to. Not that she wanted to or seemed to think about—

I hit my head against the seat of Max’s cheap car, hard enough to interrupt my creepy consent-less obsession.

God, I hated myself. I needed this client’s husband to appear so I could take a picture and leave.

The freeway was in spitting distance and I wanted to bury the needle on this pile of beige scrap metal until bolts started shaking off.

Not healthy , Eve had said. She’d been trying to get me to take up running lately, claiming it would be better than illegal street racing for my sero-adrenal whatever.

She’d probably bookmarked studies and made charts about it.

Most people’s minds were a chaotic scattershot of random thoughts and whiplash emotions, but Eve’s mind hummed.

It was like being around a supercomputer, if supercomputers were bright and warm and—

The passenger door opened and I jerked, dropping the phone onto the camera.

“Hi.” Eve slid into the passenger seat and smiled.

I looked behind the car, trying to figure out where she came from, which made her laugh. “Did I just surprise a psychic?”

“Omniscience isn’t part of the deal.”

“No, but you’ve claimed a radius of awareness. If someone were to test that hypothesis, sneaking up on you might be a valid method.”

I hadn’t felt her approach because I was already thinking about her. Listening to the whirr of her mind from what I thought was miles away. I couldn’t tell her that, though. Just like I tried not to focus on the sudden singing in my chest.

“I’m sure I’d fail all your tests.”

“There’s no failure in science, only the elimination of possibilities.

” The grin hung on her face, but I felt an undercurrent of exhaustion.

She had dark circles beneath her eyes. Her short, dark red hair was messy and her jacket was rumpled.

She should’ve been in bed, sleeping off the jet lag.

The fact that she was here, that she’d found me instead . . .

“Wait, how did you sneak up on me? Are you the omniscient one?”

Leaning forward, she peered up at the sky. “Altocumulus are moving in. Based on the progression of the system and the timestamp on your picture, it was easy to find the longitude of the gas station location.”

Of course it was. For her. I’d seen her chase down a drug trafficking ring and hijack a plane. The list of things Eve would find challenging could fit on a Post-it note.

She sighed, watching the clouds. “I missed the sky here.” Contentment hummed out of her as her eyes darted from cloud to cloud. I forced myself to turn back to the hotel entrance and focused on separating her emotions from mine, redrawing the boundaries.

“Isn’t the sky the same everywhere?”

“No.”

I waited for the explanations, the ionic molecular something that impacted something else to support her conclusion, but she was silent. Waiting. I looked over to find her watching me, studying me as intently as she had the sky.

“I missed you, too.”

It was hard to breathe. The quiet words coupled with a cocktail of emotion emanating from her—happiness, fatigue, and a hint of longing—didn’t leave room for oxygen.

She slid her hand into mine and for an endless moment we just looked at each other.

I feasted on the details, the sight, smell, and feel of her.

I wanted to bring her hand to my mouth, to taste her skin and listen to what it did to her heart.

Instead, I squeezed her palm and absorbed the flow of heat and energy.

“I was thinking while I was in Australia.”

“You’d be thinking if you were in a coma.”

I felt it coming. I heard it before she spoke it, and still it caught me like a punch in the gut.

“Would you like to have dinner with me? I want to go out. With you. Or stay in. I don’t know how you date, but I’m flexible. I want to be with you, Kendrick.” Her voice caught and went quiet. “I didn’t like not being with you.”

“Eve.” I pulled my hand away and tried looking anywhere else, as if that would help, as if I couldn’t feel the bright pulse of her intent shimmering behind my own ribcage.

I wanted to say yes. My body was screaming at me to say yes.

To ask her where and when and tell her how much I wanted it, too, that I’d been miserable while she was gone.

That she was the best part of my day, the calm at the center of my entire stormy, complicated existence.

And I didn’t know how to do any of it.

“What?” I could feel the debate brewing, her list of counterpoints at the ready.

“I don’t date. It’s not really . . . possible.”

“We don’t have to go to a restaurant—”

“It’s not about being in public.” I turned back, drawn like a moth to the light of those blue, questioning eyes and choking on the truth I had to finally—after months of fantasizing and denial—admit out loud for both of us to hear. “It won’t work.”

“How do you know? We’ve already established you’re a pretty half-assed psychic.” Her mouth tipped up at one corner. “And you don’t have precognition. You can’t see the future.”

I didn’t have to see the future to know how this would play out.

My haunted visions, dreams that woke me screaming in the middle of the night, a constantly medicated, barely-hanging-on existence at the fringes of every situation, wasn’t the kind of life I could invite someone into.

Eve was brilliant, at the top of her field, rightfully in the center of every room, and beyond all that she was still recovering from her last relationship to an asshole who’d gotten himself—and her, almost—killed.

It had been two years since her husband’s murder, but you don’t bounce back from a marriage like that and never with someone like me.

“I can’t be what you deserve.”

Her eyes narrowed as she processed that.

The longing I’d sensed in her solidified into something more familiar, a silky and immutable determination.

Holding my gaze, she leaned over the console until we were a foot apart and every fleck of her irises came into focus.

Her heart thudded and mine picked up, matching her beat.

Every good intention flew out of my head until all that was left was her—the smell of her, the pulse at her throat, the heat of her skin, and that shining whirr of her mind, ten paces ahead.

“Merit is an arbitrary, problematic concept. Completely untestable. I’m disregarding it because this isn’t a question of what I do or don’t deserve. It’s a question of what I want. And I want you, Kendrick.” She swallowed and her gaze dropped to my mouth. “Do you want me back?”

All the reasons we shouldn’t be together dissolved into white noise. I forgot everything. I forgot my own name. I leaned in, pulled toward her like gravity, as voices murmured from outside the car. Then, out of nowhere, I felt a jolt of satisfied lust.

“What the—” I swung around to see my mark—our client’s cheating husband—locked in an aggressive kiss with his sidepiece directly in front of the car, two rows ahead.

I grabbed the camera and snapped a dozen shots as the guy tried to keep his fling from leaving. “Sorry. Max will lose his mind if I miss this.”

“It’s hard to miss.” Eve retreated to her side of the car and waited for me to complete the surveillance. The pictures were paid-on-delivery perfect. Clear shots of both faces, the whole scene in complete, prenup-negating detail before they both drove out of the parking lot.

I transferred the photos to my phone and backed them up on the company cloud, aware that I was stalling now. That Eve wasn’t going to forget the question hovering in the air between us.

Do you want me back?

It was inevitable, probably. It had been inevitable since the day we’d skated across a frozen, abandoned world and she told me she believed in me, since I’d held her hand in a dark bathroom while she sobbed, since we’d brought down a building and survived, together.

Entanglement , she’d called it, and there was never any hope of untangling, not for me.

“I do. Yes.” Equal parts elation and terror ballooned in my chest.

Eve and I were officially dating.

Holy shit.