by Cindy Dees
oking woman.”
“Then there must be something wrong with your eyesight.” She started to argue, but he cut her off. “I’m serious. Your eyes are so extraordinary, I can’t tear my gaze away. The intelligence and warmth that shines out of them is breathtaking.”
She huffed, and he laughed again. “Some women are flashy, some are pretty,” he told her. “Some are fashion model striking. But you—you’re different.”
“Oh, here we go. If you say I’m interesting or unique looking, I’ll slug you.”
He grinned. “You happen to be both of those things. You are…” he thought about it, and then said, “…timeless.”
“What’s that? A politically correct metaphor for looking middle-aged?”
“Jeez. You’re not this prickly when you’re awake,” he grumbled.
She laughed. “Yes, I am. I was just being polite this afternoon. I figured I’d break you in slowly to how miserable I am to work with.”
“Dance with me.”
He took her in his arms and commenced a slow spin, swooping and turning in an airy waltz in space, making her not quite dizzy but definitely light-headed. He held her weightlessly in his hands, one palm resting low on her back, strong and warm against her skin. He twirled her, lifting her up over his head in defiance of a gravity that did not exist, and she felt like a wisp of smoke to his fire. When she was breathless and flushed, he drew her slowly down his body, inch after glorious inch of marble hard muscle. And then he really kissed her.
She thought what they’d done before had been kissing, but that was a candle flame compared to this burning sun. He all but inhaled her, drawing her into him. A hand plunged into her hair, cupping the nape of her neck, his other arm crushing her against him. In turn, she clung to him as if he were the only air in her universe, and she was desperate to breathe him in as well. To be part of him. To be one.
The sky dissolved into a velvet canopy once more, and they were back in the magnificent bed, limbs entwined, their bodies, indeed, joined as one. Their lovemaking started as an easy thing, a gentle flexing of flesh and muscle. It grew by slow degrees, becoming more powerful. Intense. And finally, a driving wildness, a primal thing greater than the sum of them both. Higher and faster, harder and deeper they pushed one another, their panting breaths mingling and their bodies straining together.
Her climax was shattering. It felt as if he’d destroyed her soul and made it whole again all at once. He shouted his release and they collapsed in a sweaty, exhausted, sated heap.
Wow. Further words failed her.
She managed another description: incredible.
“You know, I can hear your thoughts,” he murmured, his lips moving lazily against her ear.
“No way did I dream you being able to do that,” she muttered.
She felt his lips curve in a smug smile. As if he’d come up with the thought-reading bit himself and found it humorous…
She frowned. How on earth was Pete inserting details into her dream? It wasn’t possible. Unless—
Athena bolted upright. And found herself sitting alone in the middle of her bed, the sheets soaked with sweat and hopelessly twisted around her. The piney smell of his aftershave lingered in her nostrils, and the feel of his body on hers was itely not here.
She glanced up at her window. It was closed and locked. She climbed out of bed, nearly breaking her neck as the sheet tangled around her right foot and tripped her. Cursing under her breath, she righted herself and stumbled to the living room. Her front door was locked. A quick pass through the kitchen confirmed that the back door was, too. He hadn’t sneaked into her house and taken advantage of her wine-assisted slumber.
It was almost as if he’d passed through the walls of her house and directly into her sleeping mind—
Horror erupted in her gut.
The son of a bitch!
Chapter 3
It took her under a minute to throw on a pair of sloppy sweats and running shoes, grab her keys and barge out the back door. Swearing a blue streak, she made record time getting to the university and downstairs to the basement lab that held her time travel equipment.
No surprise, a light shone under the door.
She was going to kill him. She slammed her palm against the new biometric panel, and punched in the numeric security code, which, in her state of mind, she was darn lucky to remember. A green light went on above the number pad and she yanked open the door.
“Of all the nerve!” she exclaimed.
Pete jerked upright in her recliner—her recliner—and grinned sheepishly. He looked ridiculous with the crown perched high on his head, too small for him, wires trailing down over his ears. “Hi, Doc.”
The sight of him, the sound of him, staggered her. The intimacy of their shared knowledge was almost too much to bear. The connection between them, forged in her sleeping mind, was more real than ropes tying them one to another. Their gazes met. And just for a second, she saw that he was as affected as she was. An impulse to throw herself into his arms, to continue where the dream had left off, almost overtook her.
But the look in his eyes stopped her. Shock was followed by naked desire, and then a careful masking of his reaction—outright denial, even. And that was what made her snap. Who was he, to hide from her? It was all his fault in the first place.
“How dare you invade my dreams like that!” Her fury continued to gather steam, and she relished the idea of letting him have it with both barrels. “That crown is not a toy! That’s a priceless piece of alien technology. What possessed you to use it for a practical joke? Don’t you have any idea how important my research is? The implications for mankind? Did you hear nothing of what I told you today? It’s vital that we figure it out—not make a game of it!”
He had the good grace to look vaguely chagrined.
An errant thought struck her. “How did you do that, anyway? That thing doesn’t have anything to do with dreams.”
He grinned up at her as he carefully set the crown aside. “It works with dreams if the user’s particular psychic talent happens to be projecting himself into other people’s dreams.”
She stared. Her jaw dropped. “You? You’re psychic?”
“Why do you think I was assigned to this project?”
The anger rushed out of her at once. She sat down heavily in the chair before the computer. “How’s your head?”
“ in this project until he’d come along and yanked the rug out from under her. It felt as if the crown had betrayed her. Worse, her own body had betrayed her, by desiring him. Even her dreaming brain had betrayed her, willingly allowing psychic sex with him.
Suddenly she was tired. Exhausted all the way to her soul. She’d been fighting so long for this project, and all at once it was no longer her fight. “Remember to put the crown back in the safe before you leave,” she said dully. “I’m going home.”
“Help me.”
He was all orders and demands. But he had the checkbook, and that gave him the right, she supposed. With a sigh, she moved behind the recliner and carefully disconnected the crown from the various leads and wires. She carried it to the new safe in the conference room and put it on the table while she opened the digital lock. The door swung open.
Her gaze landed on the contents of the safe and she jolted violently. “How’d this stuff get in here?” she demanded, appalled. The entire contents of the tiny wall safe in her office had been moved in here.
“One of your students shifted the things over after everyone else left the lab today. The security company said this new safe is a lot harder to break into than your old one.”
“You had no right—” she began. But then she stopped. What was the use? He did have the right. Apparently, Peter Grafton had hijacked her entire life in the past twenty-four hours. “Never mind.”
Seeming to sense her mood, he glided past her to put the crown and its storage box into the safe. “What’s that?” he asked quietly.
She glanced in the directio
n of his gaze. A heavy aluminum tube lay on the floor of the safe, nearly two feet long and stretching almost to the back wall of the enclosure. Was nothing sacred to this man? She sighed. He’d taken over everything else about the project. He might as well have this one last secret, as well. After all, Project Anasazi was Peter Grafton’s gig now.
She turned to face him and said quickly, before she could change her mind, “There’s one more thing I haven’t showed you.” Dammit, he smelled of pine woods and…and her shampoo. We did not have sex. It was just a dream!
He murmured, “I thought we covered everything earlier.”
Yeah, what with her briefing, and then their virtual sex, she supposed she had shown him just about everything she had. She tried to work up a renewed sense of fury at his invasion of her mind, but it refused to come. Instead, an insidious desire to do it again—awake this time—insinuated itself into her unwilling thoughts.
Yanking her focus back to business, she laid the tube on the conference table and tossed him a pair of cotton gloves. She donned a second pair and slipped a set of scrolls from the metal container. Together, they unrolled the ancient vellum, each holding down a corner of the fragile pages.
Pete leaned forward curiously to examine the top scroll more closely. A lock of chestnut hair fell forward over his forehead, and Athena suppressed an urge to reach out and smooth it off his brow.
“Looks like scientific notes,” he murmured. “What language is that? Latin?”
She forced her mind to stick to the business at hand. “Good guess. It dates to about 44 B.C. From Italy, near Pompeii. The author was a woman. A historian named Argenta. She wrote about pieces of a medallion that were hidden across the Earth throu ready to master interstellar travel.”
“Who hid these medallions? Does she say?”
Athena winced. “A group of…star travelers. From a galactic council.”
He gaped. “Aliens?”
“Yeah.”
Pete stared at her first in disbelief, and then in burgeoning amusement. “And you believe this Argenta person?”
Athena winced again. “It gets better. She also warned that certain elements within the galactic community do not want humans to acquire the ability to navigate the stars. She claimed that they already have and will continue to interfere with man’s development of time and space travel…which, according to her, are quite similar to one another.”
His gaze shut down, his expression becoming completely unreadable. Panic clawed at her gut. Oh, God. What was he thinking? At best, he must believe he’d been assigned to watch over a bunch of nut cases. At worst, he was mentally drafting the memo to revoke their funding and shut down Project Anasazi altogether.
Pete stared at the petite woman before him. She didn’t look crazy. She didn’t sound crazy. But without a shadow of a doubt, her assertions were true-blue loony tunes. She had to be messing with him. Jerking around the new guy. Except her desperate gaze never wavered. Not a hint of humor showed in her troubled green eyes. Either she was a hell of an actress or she was dead serious.
“You’re telling me the world will end if we don’t solve this problem?” he asked incredulously.
“Well, it’s not quite that bad. At least I hope not. So far no spaceships have swooped down and abducted any members of my staff to prevent us from doing our work. Although one does have to wonder what the Roswell spacecraft was up to, flying around in our atmosphere like that. Our scientists have positively identified radio and visual surveillance equipment on the Roswell craft.”
Pete had the rank and security clearances to have seen the real Roswell files, and didn’t have trouble wrapping his
mind around the idea of humans not being alone in the universe. At least in theory. But this woman was saying that aliens had actually been on Earth, planting medallions and interfering with humans for millennia.
She continued, “We know that someone very badly wants to stop me and my team from acquiring time travel.”
That gave him a nasty start. How did she know that?
But before he could ask her, she continued talking. Rapidly, as if she desperately wanted to get all this information off her chest. “Since only a tiny handful of people know anything about the true nature of our research here, and all of them are completely trustworthy, we have to assume the threat comes from hostile forces outside of that group, which means—”
“Whoa there, Athena. How do you know this threat exists?”
She huffed. “There’ve been two break-ins here at the lab, and one at my house. Both of my assistant programmers have also had recent robberies. And inexplicably, little of value has been stolen at any of the break-ins. It was as if whoever it was searched our homes, didn’t find what they wanted, then snatched something randomly to make it look like a simple robbery.” As Pete gaped at her, she went on. “You have to admit, so many thefts can’t be coincidence.”
Somebody was probing the team’s security perimeter. Testing to see how vulnerable the entire project was. His gut vibrated in warning. He’d spent too many years seeing exactly these kinds of tactics practiced by terrorists. Thank God the Anasazi Project hadn’t had a major breach yet. No doubt about it, his inste he’d get any backup. Five minutes to defend what was possibly the most important equipment and information in the United States. In the world.
Four dark-clad figures eased through the door. Damn. They entered with military precision, quartering the fields of fire and visually clearing the corners of the lab like trained commandos.
Pete sensed Athena’s indignation, her impatience. She obviously wanted him to do something, but he was severely outmanned and outgunned here. The best course was to stay put, unless it came down to defending the crown and the scrolls. But it was damn hard to remain still and watch strangers rifling through the files in the lab, scattering papers on the floor as they searched for something. One of the men sat down at the mainframe and plugged in a nifty electronic gadget to one of the USB ports. No doubt trying to break the password encryption. Thank goodness Pete had had the staff change the passwords that afternoon. One of them had been using his dog’s name, and another her birthday, for heaven’s sake. The new passwords, each containing symbols, numbers and letters, would max out the time necessary for that little machine to break the code.
One of the other men used a crowbar to wrench the doors off the storage cabinets on the far side of the room. All four metal panels went flying, and Athena flinched each time one clattered to the floor. A third man headed for her office.
“Do some military stuff,” she breathed in Pete’s ear.
“I am. I’m hiding from the superior force,” he breathed back. Taking advantage of the intruders’ distraction, he gestured for her to crawl toward the rear of the conference room, under the table. He followed, searching for anything he could use as a weapon—to no avail. Pete made a mental note to pack a sidearm from now on. But in the meantime, he prayed the police and campus security would hurry.
A loud bang made Athena jump violently beside him. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her tight against his side. The bastards had blown the safe—the old one in the wall behind her desk.
Violent cursing erupted from her office. The bad guys must have just discovered that the safe was empty. Pete allowed himed.
“He can just deal with it. He should have warned us that his little professor got a sudden whim to beef up her security.”
Another man replied, “If he wants us to continue with this job, he can damn well pay more, given the heightened security.”
And then the intruders were gone.
Athena sagged against Pete, shuddering.
“You okay?” he murmured,
“Uh, no.”
He laughed quietly. “Looks like I got here in the nick of time.”
“I’ll give you that. Your timing was impeccable.”
“Stay put. I’m going to go meet the police and make sure they don’t contaminate the scene. I want a friend of mine to come
have a look at our visitors’ work.”
“Who?”
“A guy I know who’s ex-Special Forces.”
She didn’t ask more, and he got the feeling she grasped perfectly well what he was implying. The intruders were military-trained. Not simple thugs for hire. Project Anasazi had apparently attracted some very dangerous attention.
It took a couple of hours for his buddy to drive up to Flagstaff from Phoenix. But when the guy walked into the lab, he announced in about thirty seconds that the job had all the hallmarks of an East German team. When that country had dissolved, most of its military forces had been dumped on the street, and many had gone mercenary, their services for sale to the highest bidder. Which meant whoever was targeting Athena’s project had considerable financial resources.
The police agreed to set up a perimeter for the remainder of the night, and Pete made the calls to get an army team out here first thing in the morning. He had to artfully dodge questions about why some podunk civilian lab needed such heavy protection, but he called in a few favors, and the team was on the way.
He pocketed his phone and caught sight of Athena, who had collapsed in her recliner and was showing definite signs of aftershock. Pete walked over to her and murmured, “Let me take you home.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Those guys were talking about checking out your house. You’re not going home alone.” His tone left no room for argument, and she nodded, abruptly edgy again.
They swung by his hotel room first—he hadn’t had time to find a place to live yet—and he picked up his Glock pistol, shoulder holster and several clips of ammo. Athena gave him directions to her place, and he pulled up in front of a small, trim cottage with a deep and inviting front porch.
“Stay here. I’ll clear the place and then you can come in.”
“Not a chance. It’s my home,” she retorted.
