“You’re beautiful, Anna,” he whispered against her lips, “and not for me.”
She said, “I love you.”
Shock widened his eyes, held his mouth unmoving on hers. Slowly, he lifted his head.
“No, you don’t. You know nothing about me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said simply. “I don’t like what you’ve done in your past, either, and even that doesn’t matter. You don’t have to love me back, you don’t even have to stay. I just wanted you to know. And to care…a little.”
His hands moved inwards on her face, both thumbs touching the corners of her mouth. He said, low, “I care,” and kissed her again. “I care too much to do this to you and yet I’m finding it damned hard just to let you walk out that door.”
She smiled tremulously. “I won’t go.”
“Yes, you will.”
“We’ve never made love on a bed.”
“You’re a forward hussy.” The unexpected laughter began to die in his eyes. Instead, she saw pain. “Anna, if I take you to bed, I won’t want to let you go. Get out now.”
By way of answer, she reached up and took back his mouth. Released, desire swept through her like a whirlwind, and she began to writhe against him, looking for the familiar ridge of his cock against her. She found it, growing bigger and harder as she pressed into it. He groaned, pushing her backward toward the bed. One hand on her buttock ground her harder on to his cock. The other swept up over the curve of her breast, making her moan with pleasure and need. It slid under her shirt, pulled down one bra cup and closed over the naked flesh, caressing with his palm, then rolling her nipple between his fingers until she moaned into his mouth,
Anna pushed her hands up under his t-shirt, seeking skin and finding bandages.
Pulling back, she stared at him wide-eyed. “Broken ribs,” he said breathlessly. “Apparently I was in a car crash. At least one.”
“Are they sore?”
“No,” he said urgently, lifting her up in his arms as if to prove it.
A knock came at the door.
Joe froze. Anna whispered, “It might be Helen. My friend. She told me where to find you.”
“Christ. I so need to move out of here.”
Reluctantly, he let her feet slide to the carpet, and then walked silently across to the door. Anna found herself watching his bottom, the movement of his hips. Just looking at him made her hot. She loved the way he moved, and God knew she was wet enough to jump him now and push him straight inside her…
Pulling herself together, she followed him, though from instinct not too closely.
He opened the door with the same suddenness she remembered, and beyond his shoulder she saw Helen, wide-eyed and scared. Beside her, grasping her by the wrist and holding a gun at her throat, stood Mason Grenville.
Grenville actually smiled, as if he had achieved victory.
He said, “I believe you owe me.”
“Fucking right,” said Joe, and punched him hard in the throat. At the same time, with the same devastating speed, he seized the gun with his other hand, and while Grenville was still choking, pulled him into the room by the front of his coat.
With a soundless cry of terror, Helen fell back against the opposite corridor wall. Anna followed, throwing her arms ’round her friend, and Helen hugged her convulsively. Joe’s foot kicked the door shut.
The two women looked at each other. Somehow, the violence was almost more shocking because it had looked so casual.
Helen gasped, “What are they doing in there?”
“I don’t know,” Anna said uneasily. She could hear odd thuds, a strangled moan. “But I don’t think Grenville will like it. I’d better go back. Are you all right?”
“No, I’m scared and outraged and fucking curious. Who the hell is that? He was sitting in the foyer earlier—I think he followed me up here and when I knocked on the door, he just grabbed me!”
“Mason Grenville of the Zeitek Corporation. He paid Joe to kill me so he can build his stupid, dangerous car, and now he’s pissed off because Joe didn’t.”
“Should we call the police?”
Joe’s door opened again and the figure of Grenville bolted out, fleeing unevenly down the hall with his hands over his face and throat. There might have been blood.
Joe stood in the doorway, breathing a little raggedly. He said, “Grenville’s resigned. To all intents and purposes.”
Anna rose and went to him, new anxiety replacing the relief he had just brought her. “Your ribs…”
“Do you want them fixed again?” Helen asked.
***
While she re-bandaged his ribs, she asked questions, and had the grace not to call them mad while she listened to their strange love story. Only as Anna helped him back on with his t-shirt did she observe mildly, “Weird.”
“So did you wake up during the last crash test?” Anna asked him curiously. “It looked to us as if the seat belt had been unfastened.”
“I saw Grenville in the glass room. I saw the malice on his face. I heard your voice from somewhere, and I knew—I thought I knew I had to—stop him.”
Helen looked at him. “You came back for her. You chose to live to save her.”
Joe glanced at her, then away. “I owed her.”
Helen picked up her jacket from the bed. “Well, my boy’s right, you’re a dangerous son of a bitch, but for some reason I like you. Don’t let her down or I’ll poison your painkillers.”
And with that, she left the room, closing the door behind her with a small snap.
Anna said quickly, “It’s not pressure, Joe. She says these things because for some reason she’s my friend.”
“I know what she is and I know the reason.” He looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Anna…”
Don’t send me away again, please don’t tell me to go, please don’t leave…
“Anna, do you want to come away with me? Just take off…”
From sheer, flooding relief, she closed her eyes. Happiness beckoned. It might not have been happily ever after, but it was enough. She said, “No more killing?”
“I’ve retired already.”
A new idea began to form. “And you won’t mind if I drift into a sort of travelling consultancy? In road safety and crash research?”
“I might even fund some of it.”
She glanced at him uncertainly. “With your dodgy earnings? I suppose it might as well do some good.”
“I love a pragmatist.”
I wish you did…
Epilogue
“To Doctor Anna Baird!”
The enthusiastic toast was echoed loudly in many accents. Anna, blushing to find herself the focus of so much attention, gave a little laugh and a mock bow as the new staff of the Italian crash research centre drank to her health. The facility had been set up under her consultancy in record time, and in celebration, they had all piled into her hotel bar.
Secretly proud of her achievement, in her moment of “glory” she sought, as always, the attention of the man she loved.
He sat on a bar stool, his big, lethal hand lightly curled around a beer bottle. But he wasn’t watching her. His face was lifted to the television above the bar.
It shouldn’t have hurt. He’d given his full support to her every venture over the last six months, from the moment she’d handed her work at the Edinburgh Institute over to Lesley and Bill, down to this major project in Rome. He’d even given mind-bogglingly large donations and discovered an unlikely talent in himself for organization and management. An outstanding all-purpose Mr. Fix-It… In fact, without him, the Rome centre would never have been completed half as quickly.
But more than that, he made every day a revelation for Anna. Working or playing, she delighted in his constant company, his quiet, understated humor and the intriguing, timeless depths of his knowledge. She liked to puzzle and wonder with him over the strange, impossible experience that had first brought them together, learning to understand the profound
yet simple morality that had lain dormant in him for so long. She treasured every tiny insight into his past life, into what made him tick, every spark of pleasure and pain.
Life with Joe was a constant surprise, and she would have gloried in it even without the intense sex. And that just got better and better. She’d never imagined being so close to a lover, opening herself to another so completely. She’d never known such physical or emotional joy and, although he never said so, she was sure he felt it, too.
And yet he was a loner, a man used to his own space, and he was subject to moods of distance and withdrawal. Anna respected that. She just wished he hadn’t slipped into one of those moods right now. Half-ashamed, she acknowledged it was no longer enough simply to do her own good work—she needed his participation, too.
As the chatter rose around her and people clinked glasses with her, she watched him speak to the barman, who pushed a remote control across the counter. Joe picked it up, and the volume rose.
The barman grinned across the room at her. “Is you, Dr. Anna!” he shouted, pointing up at the television.
At once, everyone moved to crowd around the television, and Anna, swept along in their midst, saw that it was a British news channel. Worse, there she was on the screen, stalking across the floor of the crash room at the Scottish Institute toward the carnage of some past test.
The reporter said, “The research led by Dr. Baird forced Zeitek to look again. And the result was unveiled today.”
The screen changed to a showroom full of suits with champagne glasses—and a shiny new car that bore only a passing resemblance to the Zinnia which had once so occupied Anna.
“Four months behind schedule, the new Zeitek Zinnia is being billed as the safest car on the planet…”
Beside her, an Italian researcher gave her an admiring nudge. “Hey, you did that, too!”
Anna shook her head. “No,” she said. “I tried, but he did it.”
Joe turned toward her at last, his ponytail curling around his shoulder, a faint, sardonic smile curving his lips, and her heart gave the funny lurch it always did around him. He lifted his bottle in a toast to her and drank.
Damn it, this was one party she wouldn’t let him sit on the edge of.
She slid onto the barstool beside him. As their bare arms touched, his moved instantly against hers, an instinctive caress. But almost immediately, something shifted in his eyes and he looked away again, pretending to watch the television. His arm twitched, moving so that he no longer touched her.
With a sudden chill of apprehension, Anna recognized this little sequence of gestures—a repeat of what had happened earlier in the day. She had caught him watching her at work, a strange, intense expression on his face, and yet when she’d smiled, he had looked away immediately. It had been like that all day, she realized, almost as if he was—afraid of her.
Afraid of hurting her. Pain swelled up, filled her, because there was only one way he could possibly hurt her.
Oh no, not now, please not now, I can’t bear it if you go…
She closed her eyes briefly, fighting it, refusing to turn into the clinging, whining thing she despised. She’d at least pretend to be strong. And wait for him to come back.
She said, low, “You want to leave.”
His gaze came back to her, almost startled. “Leave?”
Her lips twisted. “I can see you want to. In your mind, you’ve already gone.”
A moment longer he stared at her, his face unreadable. Then he took another swig from his bottle.
“Anna Baird, the world thinks you’re so clever, you’re beginning to believe it yourself. I am not a crash test dummy that you can push and pull and then read the results in black and white.”
Her heart beat louder, faster. “What do you mean?”
He laid down the bottle and gazed into it. It seemed to be easier than looking at her, and yet still he spoke with obvious difficulty, forcing the words in a rush. “I mean you scare the hell out of me. I’ve never spent so long in anyone’s company, and I know I should get out. I’ve always known that. But it’s too late.”
He lifted his head, and his eyes, his whole face, blazed, a sudden maelstrom of heat and wild emotions far too confused to read. “I can’t leave you, Anna, even for your own good. And you’d better know now, I won’t let you leave me.” He drew in his breath on a mutter that sounded suspiciously like Fuck it. “I love you.”
And almost as if he was afraid she’d laugh, he seized her and stopped her stunned mouth with his.
When she became aware of anything other than his battering kiss and his even more astounding words, she realized the Italians were cheering them. Pulling free, if only to breathe, she buried her face in his neck, wiped her tears on his warm skin. But there was no time to come to terms with the soaring joy, or even the relief that flooded her.
Joe pulled her from the stool. In front of everyone, he dragged her out of the bar and straight into the empty lift. Even before the doors had properly closed, he had his arms ’round her, pushing his hands inside her shirt as he devoured her mouth, grinding his hard cock into her abdomen, lifting her to press it into the hot tenderness between her legs.
She stumbled back against the wall of the lift, trapped between its coldness and Joe’s incredible heat. Half-laughing, breathless with lust, she gasped, “Oh dear! Can we make it to the bedroom?”
“We can make it right here,” he ground out. “And then in the bedroom.”
As he tugged up her skirt, she gave a gasp of laughter that held as much excitement as panic.
“Joe! What if someone stops the lift?”
“I don’t care. I’ve said the ‘L’-word—I’ve nothing left to fear.”
With fresh dawning wonder, she realized that it was true for them both. And then, since coherent thought became impossible, she gave herself up to the moment. It had never been so good.
About the Author
To learn more about Marie Treanor, please visit www.marietreanor.comSend an email to Marie at [email protected] join her Yahoo! group to join in the fun with other readers as well as Marie! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sexydelights. Subscribe to Marie’s Newsletter at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marietreanornewsletter.
Look for these titles By Marie Treanor
Coming Soon
Gothic Dragon
Ariadne’s Thread
A glass of wine sends them back in time. But only one of them remembers who they are.
The Enchanted Inn
© 2007 Pam Champagne
It's bad enough that a wrong turn in a snowstorm forces Gina to take shelter at an out-of-the-way inn. Her ex-fiancé Luke is stranded there, too. The man she left when she caught him in bed with another woman.
A glass of wine at dinner, and Gina wakes up in a bed with Luke by her side. It's the same inn, but it's the year 1778 and Luke insists his name is John. And he says she's an indentured servant, Rachel.
Gina has to quickly learn primitive tasks like dip candles and cook without a microwave. While John is delighted that his normally reserved lover has become a wildcat in bed, her outspoken opinions could put them all in danger.
For Gina, it's like a second chance with Luke. But when an innocent mistake turns their newly discovered love upside down, Gina realizes how big a mistake she made when she left Luke.
Gina never gives up hope of going back to her own time, and she's determined to take John with her—whether he wants to go or not.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Enchanted Inn:
She took the plunge. “My name is Gina Locke and you’re Luke Harding. Ruth McPherson sent us here on Christmas Eve, 2006. Don’t you remember? We were sitting in the living room, drinking her homemade elderberry wine.”
John studied her face for a long moment then threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Do continue. I did not know you were a weaver of tales.”
Gina choked back tears of frustration and rose to her knees to grasp his sho
ulders. “This is not a story. It’s the truth.” She fought the urge to shake him.
“Come here.” John tugged her close. “That knock on the head must have been a bad one.”
Gina sighed. “You don’t believe me?”
“Shall I tell you what I believe? You hit your head and had a dream. When you woke, you clung to the dream as reality.” He kissed her forehead. “We must be patient. Your memory will return.”
If only yours would. Gina huddled closer, lapping up his caresses and murmured phrases of concern. Still, his concern didn’t calm her fears of remaining in the past. If John remembered who he was—that he’d been her lover in another time—she’d be willing to accept her situation. One thing was certain. There was no way John was going to listen tonight. So she sighed and said, “Perhaps I’m dreaming right now. How old am I?”
“Four and twenty as of last month. Now be silent and kiss me.”
She turned her head away to escape his lips, now feathering her cheek.
“What is wrong?” Gina heard genuine puzzlement in his voice.
“I don’t feel like having sex with someone who doesn’t trust me…who thinks I’m…I’m daft.” God, it seemed so strange to use that word.
“Try to understand,” he coaxed. “I’ve been with you at this inn for three years. One morning I wake to find a different person inside the body of the woman I love. We must become reacquainted.”
Gina couldn’t argue that his reasoning wasn’t sound. For tonight, she’d put her problems in the closet. Looping her arms around his neck, she captured his lips. For an instant, he grew rigid at her aggression before his mouth opened to her questing tongue. Within seconds, their raspy breathing sounded loud in the otherwise silent room. Gina tugged and yanked on John’s clothes, never losing lip contact.
Killing Joe Page 9
