"Yes." His blue eyes snapped open and speared mine with sudden intensity. "Where are your guards? I sense no one here other than you and I."

"Guards?"

He frowned. "Surely you are…" Carefully, slowly, he reached out one hand, stopping just short of touching me, and stroked above the bare skin of my forearm. His force, though invisible and without contact, was palpable just above skin. I felt his stroke as surely as if he had caressed me.

"You feel like a Queen," he murmured.

I stepped back, wondering if he was one of those madmen who frequently found their way to St. Vincent's dehydrated, famished, and highly delirious. And yet there was something very different about him.

"What are you talking about?" I demanded sharply.

A plump tech bustled up, a bright smile creasing her matronly face. It was Sally, the ward clerk who took the vital signs of all the new patients, helping lighten the nurses' loads. "My, my, aren't you the pretty boy," Sally murmured, glancing down at his data sheet. "David Michaels. Just what I needed to brighten my night."

He smiled, a lethal combination of teeth and dimples.

She smiled back. "I'll have his vitals for you in a sec, Lisa." In so saying, she reached out to take his pulse.

It registered then—what should have registered immediately had I not been so stunned by his beauty and my body's reaction to him. His heartbeat. His very, very slow heartbeat. Not more than thirty beats per minute. Far below the normal human rate of sixty and above. My own heart sped up from its usual sluggish fifty, hitting the sixty mark when Sally frowned and looked up.

He captured her gaze with his eyes and I then felt the gentle flow of his power. Shit. He really hadn't been using it before now. What then was this peculiar, strong attraction between us?

Sally's frown lines smoothed away like unrippled water. "A pulse of sixty and a blood pressure of one hundred and twenty over seventy." She jotted down the numbers on his sheet, not seeming to notice the blood pressure cuff that lay unused beside her. She hadn't touched it.