The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  Really, Dani? A guy beams into your shop, like a character straight out of a Spielberg movie, assaults you, appears to be quite ready, willing, and able to finish what he’s already started . . . and the best you can do is whine about your smashed-up floral arrangement?

  Maybe it was just as well that E.T. had found cute little Drew Barrymore instead of her, after all.

  “No time,” he muttered, apparently changing his mind about . . . whatever he’d been talking about.

  Dani wasn’t following, mostly because she was still thinking about what it would take to get this guy off. As for getting her off, well, sadly, that didn’t require any thought at all. It had been long – far too long, clearly – since a man of any size and shape had pressed himself so intimately on top of her. One year, four months, two weeks, and a couple of days, to be exact. Not that she was counting. The date just happened to stick in her mind for other, more demoralizing, cheating-rat-bastard reasons.

  So, it seemed a shame, really, bordering on unfair, that when the opportunity for body-to-body contact finally happened for her again, the guy was some kind of raging psychopath, possibly recently beamed down from another planet, and more interested in the glue gunk on his hand than her womanly form, trapped beneath him.

  For God’s sake, get a grip! “Right, right,” she muttered to herself, trying to focus on the situation at hand without going into a full-blown panic. In her defense, though, who wouldn’t, really? Well, besides Drew Barrymore? Hence the thinking about hot, sticky sex, instead of . . . whatever the hell was actually happening to her, neurologically or otherwise. And, she had to admit, the guy presently molding his body to hers seemed like a pretty realistic “otherwise” to her.

  Take charge, Dani! This is your shop, your business, the livelihood you worked so hard for. The one thing you have left, dammit. He can’t just . . . just . . . beam down and have his way with you.

  Okay, well, clearly he could. But still. “Who are you?” she demanded, hoping he didn’t notice how shaky her voice was. “And . . . and how did you get here?” She wasn’t sure if she really wanted the answer to either of those questions, but she had to face facts at some point. Either he’d give her a perfectly plausible, scientific explanation about how he’d magically appeared in front of her, and she’d have to deal with the fact that this was really happening and E.T. had finally shown up, after all, only older, taller, and a hell of a lot hotter . . . or he’d tell her he was Han Solo, beamed down from the Millennium Falcon after escaping Darth and his buddies, and she’d have to deal with the fact that her mind had, in fact, cracked. Not in your right mind, you must be.

  She held her breath, trying to decide which response would be the better reality of the two, but he wasn’t listening to her at all. He scraped his hand hard along the sharp edge of a shelf, removing most of the rapidly solidifying glue chunk, then gripped her wrist in his wide palm and tugged her along with him as he headed toward the back of the shop. “You have transport?”

  “I – have a car,” she said, answering before she thought better of it. Sure, just tell him you have a car, so he can abduct you and car-jack you. Dear God, she was handling this exactly like an idiot actress in a bad D-list sci-fi flick. She’d never pictured herself as that girl. She’d always wanted to slap that girl.

  He pushed through the swinging door that led to the rear storage area, pulling her along behind him, and she finally snapped out of her shocked stupor and dug in her heels. “Wait!” she shouted. “Just—” She flung out her free hand and grabbed on to the handle of the wall-sized refrigerated unit she stored her flowers in, and held on tight. She almost got her shoulder wrenched from its socket for her troubles, but when he did snap around, she said, “Hold on a minute!”

  “No time!”

  “Then you’re going to have to make some, because I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the hell is going on.” Yeah, she cheered herself, that’s more like it!

  He turned on her and, with one simple maneuver, shifted himself in a way that forced her to release her hold on the handle and land in front of him, where he could now pretty much shovel her toward the door. “No time means no time,” he panted in a near snarl, next to her ear.

  She gulped, because he sounded a lot more lethal – which she, frankly, hadn’t thought possible – and, oddly, she realized . . . Australian. Had he had an accent before? Or was this just a sign that her brain synapses were in their final zenith and her hallucination was shifting accordingly?

  For a hallucination, his grip on her sure felt real enough. As did the rest of him, hot, hard, and supremely male, pressing up behind her as they stumbled forward toward the door that led to the rear lot behind the shop. “Wait, I need my—”

  “Stop talking.” He pushed them both through the door, then kicked it shut behind him. “Where is your transport?”

  It was after shop hours, and the sun had set some time ago. For late October, it was still pretty warm on the southeastern coast, but she shivered nonetheless. The small security light didn’t do much to illuminate the area, but the full moon bathed the narrow alley behind her shop in a bluish glow . . . making the whole situation feel that much more surreal. “Right there,” she said, inclining her head toward her green Jeep Cherokee, since he held her hands, crossed at the wrist, behind her back. “But, I was trying to tell you – my purse is in the shop.”

  “Purse?” He dismissed that as unimportant. “Uncloak this transport you speak of, and do it now.”

  She tried to swivel her head so she could look back at him. “It’s right there,” she said. “But we’re not going anywhere in it without the keys.”

  “Keys?” His scowl deepened.

  “Yes,” she said, with exaggerated patience – which was a marvel really, considering she had the pulse rate of your average jackrabbit at the moment. “The ones you just locked inside the shop with your Rambo door-slam move.”

  He followed her gaze toward her Jeep, then spun her around so she faced him. Literally almost nose to nose. Well, nose to chin. He took care of that by tipping her face up to his, his hold on her chin just the wrong side of civil. “I have no idea what game you think you’re playing, but this is no time to test me. Now, reveal your transport to me.” He pulled her clenched hands up between them with his free hand, which easily circled both of her wrists. The sudden move had the very special consequence of jerking her hips up flush to his. And . . . oh my. Why, he was no Greek god after all. Because every statue she’d ever seen of those guys? Yeah, not all that well-endowed. This guy? Exceedingly different in that department.

  He tipped her chin up further and leaned down until she swore she could see so deeply into his eyes, she—

  “Give me the sequence start-up code, sweetheart, and I’ll fly. I’ve no choice but to take it. But, look at it this way. Losing your transport isn’t worth losing your life for.”

  Definitely Australian. She’d heard that Aussies were a bit on the wild side, but this guy was taking that reputation to extremes. “The only transport I have,” she said, through gritted teeth, “is that Jeep behind you. It rolls on the ground. On four wheels. It doesn’t fly. I don’t own anything that flies. Or uses a start-up sequence for that matter. If you’re looking for a spaceship-type thingie, I think you landed in the wrong century, cowboy.”

  “Thingie?” He loosened his hold on her chin.

  “You know. Ah . . . hovercraft. Podracer. Whatever.” She worked her jaw. “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Maybe he was some kind of mental patient, on the loose. Or hopped up on drugs, though his eyes seemed pretty crystal clear to her. Besides, neither of those options would explain how he’d done that whole “beam me down” thing back inside her shop.

  Once again, he wasn’t listening to her. He was scanning the narrow gravel and sand alley that ran behind her shop. On the other side was a strip of overgrown weeds, then a drainage ditch. Yeah, don’t look at the drainage ditch. Good place to store dead bodies. Namely he
rs, since she’d just made herself dispensable to him. “Um, maybe – we could get a helicopter. Would that work?” She knew there was a tourist business that operated down near the waterfront, where a person could pay for a coastal air tour. Of course, they were probably closed now, but he didn’t have to know that. If she could get the two of them out of this alley, maybe she could figure out a way to get free of him. And check herself into the nearest mental facility.

  “At least tell me your name,” she said. “I’m Dani.” That’s right, she thought, make friends with your captor, get him to think of you as a real person and not a disposable nuisance. Besides, since her stroke was taking its sweet time in killing her off, she had no choice, really, but to go with her present reality as if it were, in fact, reality.

  She looked back up at him, and was surprised to see that instead of looking all ferocious and serial-killer-like, his expression had changed to one of deliberation. And, if she wasn’t mistaken . . . fear. Or, at the very least, serious concern. Something about that sudden hint of vulnerability, of . . . humanness, gave her back a bit of much-needed moxie.

  “If you’ll just tell me what’s going on, then I’ll do what I can do help you,” she told him, not necessarily meaning it, but she had to get him – them – out of the alley. “At least tell me your name.”

  “Jack,” he said, but he said it dismissively, probably just to shut her up. She wasn’t even sure if it was his real name, but at least it was better than “Yo, cowboy.” And, she had to admit, a part of her was relieved it was something normal, and . . . human, and didn’t sound all otherworldly, like it had double consonants and apostrophes in weird places.

  “Okay, Jack. If you tell me where you need to go, maybe I can help you.”

  He continued to scan the alley, then the sky, then the alley again. She didn’t think he’d even heard her, until she felt a slight lessening of the tension in his grip on her wrists. “You can’t get me where I need to go.” He squinted at the sky. “How did it put me here?” he muttered.

  Dani slowly slid her gaze skyward, almost afraid of what she’d find. A huge hovering spaceship? Three moons and a big blue sun? Something to indicate she was still having her hallucination? She almost wished something would.

  Because the dawning reality that he might be exactly what he appeared to be wasn’t nearly as exciting as she’d have found it twenty-three years ago. No matter how much she’d grown up. Or how hot her extraterrestrial space cowboy was.

  Two

  Jack looked at the woman. Dani. “This is, what, early twenty-first century?” When she frowned and nodded, he looked back to the sky. He couldn’t figure out how it had gotten messed up. He’d made the trip dozens of times. More, even. Time fissures worked how they worked, and all the readings indicated that the one he’d traveled through was still quite stable. Not only did it appear as if he’d missed his target by a couple hundred years, but given her accent and the position of the stars, it appeared he was also off by a continent. Or two.

  He’d never gone this far back. Not only that, he had no idea where the fissures were in this part of the world, much less where this one looped back out again, or how long it would take to loop in. More importantly, literally no one on Earth would know where the fissures were, either. It would be a good hundred years or more, from this point in time, before mankind figured out how the time-space continuum could be manipulated for travel, and many more years still before they made successful, practical use of the knowledge.

  “How did what put you here?” she asked. “Why don’t you just explain your situation, from the beginning?”

  He let out a humorless laugh and looked away. “Sweetheart, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  She took this opportunity to slide her wrists free. But, rather than run, like any smart-minded soul would do, she merely crossed her arms and gave him a good once-over. “Sweetheart,” she said, in a pretty good imitation of his accent, only tinged with that butter-melting-on-biscuits accent of her own, “I just watched you materialize out of thin air in front of me. I’m thinking there’s not much you could say that would surprise me.”

  Right. Another reason they never traveled back to any date prior to 2297, the year cellular particulant transport had finally been approved for safe use. No point in freaking out the natives. Especially when that wasn’t necessary. Bodysnatchers didn’t have to risk traveling this far back to do their dirty work.

  “Be careful what you ask for,” he told her, in lieu of a direct response. Particulant transport was the least that he could surprise her with.

  “Why are you in such a hurry? And you look kind of . . . beat up. Did something happen to you?”

  She sounded a lot calmer, which was, he supposed, a blessing. Hysterics weren’t going to help anyone. But her eyes still held that heightened wariness. Which was smart – very smart – on her part. “I didn’t have time to clean up from the last job before diving – literally – into this one.”

  “And your last job was . . . ?”

  He was still trying to figure out how an established fissure with solid stability readings had gone so far off, and answered her without thinking. “New Guinea. 2379. Native girls are a hot commodity. None left in my time.”

  “Your . . . time,” she repeated, and, in his peripheral vision, he noticed she took a step backward.

  He looked at her fully, then lunged to catch her wrist when it looked like she was going to take off running. Not that he needed the extra baggage at the moment, but he definitely didn’t need any loose ends running about, telling people about time travelers, et cetera. Not that anyone would likely believe it. “Hold on there,” he told her. “Listen, you asked, right?”

  She nodded, and held his gaze, but he felt the tremors running through her.

  “No running. It’s not safe.”

  “What’s not safe about it, exactly? Because you don’t look all that safe to me at the moment.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m the best bet you have going right now.”

  To his vast surprise, and grudging delight, she barked a laugh. “Well, then, let’s hope this actually is a brain tumor, because otherwise, I really am screwed.”

  “Brain tumor?”

  “What would you think if you saw someone materialize in front of you? Never mind. You apparently actually do see that.” Her smile faded and she tried to tug her wrist free.

  “Just . . . hold on, would you?” He relaxed his grip, but kept hold of her all the same. He tried to smooth some of the tension from his voice, but it was a challenge, given all the things that were horribly wrong with the situation he’d landed in. Not the least of which was whether or not the guy he’d been chasing had also ended up here. Stoecker was a nasty piece of work. And, against that particular threat, the woman in front of him wouldn’t stand a chance. She might not be the exotic tribal type Stoecker was usually after, but she had the height of an Amazonian warrior and just the right kind of attitude to make her irresistible to his sort.

  “That must be it,” he muttered, realizing why Stoecker might have broken protocol and gone back farther in time than was legally mandated – as if the law meant anything to a man who made a living snatching women and selling them into slavery. “That must be it!”

  “Must be what?”

  “Stoecker’s after a new, even rarer commodity. Someone must have paid a pretty penny for him to take this kind of risk, but – how did he do it?“

  “Pretty penny for what? Who’s Stoecker?” She tugged at his hand again, bringing his attention back to her. “Are you in danger? Is . . . someone following you?”

  He looked at her, really looked at her now. In addition to being significantly tall for her gender, her other striking feature was her hair. It was long, well past her shoulders, and fell in dark waves and curls. It was the kind of hair that encouraged a man to sink his fingers into it. And those dark curls framed an attractive face, now that he was paying attention, with well-defined cheekbones, and a
strong chin. Stubborn, he thought now, given her brief display inside the shop and out here in the alley. Her eyes were hazel, nothing exotic, except for the intently direct way they held his own. He wasn’t used to that.

  Given what he did for a living, the people he ran across usually worked hard to avoid making any kind of eye contact with him. He supposed a woman of her height wasn’t used to feeling threatened or intimidated in any way. Well, he thought darkly, if he didn’t do something, and fast, that was about to change.

  “No one is following me,” he said. “I’m doing the following.”

  “Who’s Stoecker?”

  Jack swore under his breath. If what he suspected was true, Dani here would be the perfect target for one of the best body-snatchers in the business. She was just different enough to get attention at the black-market auctions, and the key part was that she was from an era in history no one remembered anything about. She’d be well and truly out of her element, without even a rudimentary understanding of how she could escape back to her time. The perfect slave. Tall, dominant in appearance, with all that hair, that stubborn chin . . . and yet completely at the mercy of her new owner. “Let’s pray like hell you don’t have to find out.”

  He pulled her toward the door. “We need to get back inside.” He still didn’t know for sure if the fissure had simply flung him through to a more distant time and place, or if Stoecker had figured out a way to manipulate the fissures already documented and cleared for use. This didn’t happen often, if ever. He’d been hunting Stoecker too long, and he was the best there was. He’d know.

  “You locked us out,” she reminded him, as he tried the door handle.

  Of course, if the continuum had somehow been manipulated to send him so much farther back than it should have, who was to say it hadn’t warped over such a long distance? Maybe Stoecker was no longer in front of him. They hadn’t been that far apart. Jack turned back to Dani. “How long had you been inside the building?”