Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) by Janet Edwards

bigger than the Research Unit where my parents
worked. I revised my estimate of its size up even further.
    Lucas was still talking. “Lottery
will have considered thousands of candidates for those forty places. It will have
imprinted a couple of hundred of them, to allow for rejections, sudden
vacancies in other units, and because there are a few other Hive roles that
overlap with Strike team imprinting. Rather than choose the final two hundred candidates
randomly, Lottery chose them to be men that you’d find attractive.”
    “That’s … humiliating.”
    “Would you prefer to be
carried round by men you find repugnant?” asked Lucas. “Think that through,
Amber. It’s not just being carried. In some situations your Strike team will be
physically protecting you with their bodies. That can get very intimate. Keith
is heavily built, so it’s impossible to make his Strike team all female, but he
reacts badly to close physical contact with men. That causes huge problems for
his staff.”
    I waved a dismissive hand.
“This is all irrelevant. However good looking my Strike team are, I don’t
believe that meeting them will change my feelings for you, Lucas.”
    He didn’t say a word, but his
answer was laid out for me in his head. He’d no self-confidence in this area. Girls
had never been interested in someone so bewilderingly unconventional and incomprehensibly
bright. Lucas had never really tried to overcome that problem. He couldn’t see
the point when he knew his initial physical attraction to a girl would soon
change to boredom anyway.
    I was different. The only
person Lucas had ever met who could keep up with his high speed conversations.
The only girl he’d ever met who fascinated rather than bored him.
    “You’re afraid that we’ll move
on from being friends,” I said, “and then I’ll meet my Strike team and dump
you.”
    “It would be difficult to continue
a working relationship after that.” His head was busy lining up the stakes
involved. The pain he’d feel at investing in a relationship just to have me
turn away from him within weeks. The risk of losing not just my friendship but
possibly his position as Tactical Commander as well. He couldn’t stay in my
Telepath Unit if I was uncomfortable with him being there.
    I sighed. “We’ll do this
your way then. Wait and see what happens when I meet my Strike team.”

Chapter Nine
     
     
    My mind was focused on my
relationship with Lucas, so it took me until the next morning to think of the
obvious point. Lottery had chosen my Strike team members to match my
preferences in a partner, and Lucas had said something about muscled men with
black hair. There was something ominously familiar about that description.
    I had breakfast, left the
dirty dishes strewn across the table, and headed towards Lucas’s apartment.
Halfway down the corridor, I abruptly stopped. It would be much simpler for me
to get the information I needed from Adika.
    His apartment was in the
opposite direction, so I turned round, and was just in time to see a girl opening
my apartment door. That was Hannah, one of the general staff who worked for
Megan. She’d been brought here a few days ago, when the untidiness of my apartment
reached crisis point.
    It was somehow symbolic of
how my life had changed, that Megan hadn’t made the slightest complaint about
how a pristine luxury apartment had turned into a disaster area. You don’t
argue with the telepath, tell her to tidy up, or even suggest she stops
throwing her clothes on the floor. You don’t leave her to live in a garbage
heap in the hope she’ll eventually clear it up herself. You make no comment
about it at all, just bring someone in to clean up after her and deal with her laundry.
    My reluctance to have a
cleaner invading my private apartment was hugely outweighed by my reluctance to
do the cleaning myself, so I’d welcomed Hannah’s arrival. As an extra bonus,
the girl was fresh from Lottery like me. I’d naively