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terrified.”
    She had been. Through a child's viewpoint, the machines were alien creatures that gave her nightmares. The adults in white lab coats were witches and warlocks who trapped her in sterile-walled torture chambers from which she couldn't escape. Needles pricked her. Electrodes stung her. Questions hounded her.
    “One doctor finally thought to give me an IQ test. I was off the scale for a six-year-old. Then the testing really began. They wanted to find out just how smart I really was.” BJ slipped back to those terrifying months, reliving the fear and loneliness. “Once, they locked me in a room and gave me math problems to solve. They tied my hands together so I couldn't use them to count. They wanted to get an accurate measure of how complex a problem I could do in my head.”
    She shuddered as the memory became real to her. No longer a twenty-seven year old woman, she regressed into a confused child who felt imprisoned and abandoned and frightened for her life. “I got every answer right. But they said I cheated. They strapped me down every morning until I finally figured out that if I gave a couple of wrong answers, they'd let me go.”
    The brush of something soft and solid against her cheek pulled BJ back to the present. The smell of worn leather tickled her nose. Warmth surrounded her. She didn't know how much she had actually said out loud, but she shook with tears that burned her eyes and paralyzed her throat.
    She hadn't cried like this since she was a girl. Not since she buried Jake. She'd shared her sorrows with Jas and Emma, and confessed troubling problems to her mentor, Damon Morrisey. But she'd never wept like this. She'd never bared her soul. She never thought anyone could understand.
    No one had until Brodie cradled her in his lap, and wound his sheltering, titanic arms around her. His long fingers smoothed the fringe of curls at her nape while he murmured deep voiced nothings against her hair.
    BJ burrowed into his ample chest, finding solace and security in his immeasurable strength. Finding comfort and peace in his gruff, rumbling voice. She discovered a kinship in his strong arms. He was an ally who truly understood her darkest fears.
    She didn't want to leave the haven she found unexpectedly in Brodie's arms. He made her feel safe. His size and warmth and awkward gentleness formed a barrier against both the dangers of the present and the demons of the past.
    “I suppose they could have put me into a public school program for the gifted,” she finally continued. “But the doctors recommended to Jake that I stay with them. I started with tutors for a couple of years, but when they found out how quickly I assimilated information, they enrolled me in college courses.  Talk about a freak. My classmates thought I was some kind of joke, an eight-year-old in a freshman algebra class. They stopped laughing when they found out how high I raised the grading curve.”
    Brodie's arms tightened around her. “Didn't Jake know what you were going through?”
    “Yes. But what could he do? He was a single parent who had no understanding of little girls and no idea what to do with a genius child. When he visited, he took me to ball games and showed me how to build model airplanes.”
    Her story indirectly explained the mess in her house, the tomboyish clothes she wore. She'd never had a childhood. So she had created one for herself as an adult. She had been a lonely little girl surrounded by people who treated her as an object, a phenomenon, not as a person.
    She knew Brodie understood.
    Her fingers tightened their grip on his jacket. He'd push her away soon, but for now she clung to him, seeking the strength to finish. “Jake was the only person who treated me like a child. To everyone else, I was a case study. A scientific experiment.”
    “A lab rat,” Brodie concluded.
    “When I was older, I went through some counseling. You can imagine how I handled their probing into my life. Damon was a huge