The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  “You mean my shop? I’ve been there all day. I closed up a few hours ago and stayed late to work on a special order—” She broke off, shook her head. “Why? Why do you want to know? Will you please just tell me what the hell is going on? I think I deserve that much.”

  He took a step closer to her, crowding her back up against the locked door. “What you deserved was to be left alone to conduct your business. That didn’t happen.”

  “I – uh – well, that’s very true,” she stammered, her eyes widening, but her gaze still holding tightly to his own. It was damn disconcerting, really. “I mean, you intrude right into the middle of my shop, then you smash up the hybrids that took me two weeks to track down in that particular color, and if you had any idea what kind of bridezilla I’m dealing with on all that, well, the very least you owe me is an explanation—”

  He covered her mouth with his hand, stopping her nervous babble. Her eyes went wider, but it was her brows furrowing in a very good show of temper that actually had his lips quirking, just a bit.

  “I’ll explain,” he said. “But . . . no screaming.”

  He slowly slid his hand away, and was surprised to discover that the slide of her soft lips across his palm was somewhat stirring.

  “Why would I scream?” she asked, her voice quieter, but no less intense.

  “Actually,” he said, “I suppose if you were a screamer, you’d have already done that.”

  “I couldn’t scream then, I was in shock. I thought I was having a stroke, or an exploding brain tumor.”

  He couldn’t help it, the smile threatened again. “And now?”

  “And now I don’t know what to think. Why don’t you tell me your version of reality? Mine involves lengthy neurological testing, and possible electric-shock therapy, so I’m hoping yours sounds like more fun.”

  He outright grinned at that. “I wish I could ease your mind, sweetheart, but, on that score . . . checking yourself in somewhere – anywhere – might be the better option.”

  She frowned again. “Why? Who are you? Really.”

  He felt her physically tense up, bracing for his response. Something about the way she shifted against him, however, had him thinking he wouldn’t mind checking in somewhere there, either. She felt soft and warm, and, he was pretty sure, possibly inviting – if he could remember how to be charming. It had been quite some time since he’d needed those particular skills. Which was probably why his body was thinking it was on holiday instead of on a mission gone horribly wrong.

  Well, he knew one way to snap them both out of that particular hormonal stupor. “When I arrived in your shop, I had traveled a bit farther than from Papua New Guinea.”

  She nodded calmly enough, but he saw her throat work. “Like, from another galaxy? Or something?”

  His lips curved. “Nothing so exotic as that. I’m as human as you are.”

  She sighed and relaxed somewhat, even as the most delightful flush warmed her cheeks. “So, did I just imagine you appearing in front of me like a hologram come to life?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then . . . ?”

  “I didn’t travel through space, sweetheart, just through time.”

  She let that sink in for a moment. “So, that’s why you wanted to know the year?”

  He nodded.

  “Which means . . . what time – year – exactly, did you travel from?” She glanced down between them, ostensibly, he assumed, at his clothing. “Not the past, surely.” She looked back up into his eyes.

  And he had the most peculiar urge to kiss her. He shook his head, both in response to her and his own urges. “2563.” While she goggled a little at that, he turned the conversation back to the more immediate concern. “You said you’ve been here all day. No breaks? Did you leave at any time?”

  “No, why? Listen,” she tugged at her wrists again, as if just remembering he still had them in his grip. “What’s going on? The whole story.”

  “I don’t know the whole story. Yet.”

  “So, tell me the parts you do know.” She tugged again, hard, this time, making him tighten his grip again. “Who is Stoecker?”

  Her pupils flared, and her throat worked, which he told himself was fear, but his body was busy telling him that that part of her reaction was based on something else entirely. Which made him a bit more blunt than might have been entirely necessary, because given the fact she had him rapidly growing hard as a rock, maybe they both needed a bit of shock therapy. “Kir Stoecker is a bodysnatcher. He gets paid a very princely sum to travel back through time and capture women to be put up at auction for those who enjoy the companionship of the helpless and truly enslaved.”

  “You mean s-sexually?”

  He couldn’t help it, he could feel her, soft, curvy, pressed up against him. His gaze drifted to her mouth, and then back to her eyes, pupils so wide and dark he could fall right into them and never come out. “Sexually, and every other way they might want to wield their newly purchased power.”

  He brought his hand up and stroked the side of her face, pushing back those wild, ridiculously luxurious curls. “And you, sweetheart, would be ripe picking for his sort.” He slid his hand across her hair, palm to cheek. “You’d earn him quite a bounty.”

  “Me?” The word came out breathy, almost hoarse.

  “Tall, defiant,” he said, crowding her further, tipping up her chin. Then, giving into the urge, he pushed his hand deeply into all that silky curl. “With the kind of hair a man can get a good grip on. Oh, you’d fetch a pretty price, indeed.”

  She swallowed hard, then her gaze drifted to his mouth, too. “And you?” she said, still looking at his mouth. Her breath was coming in shallow pants now. “What do you do?”

  “Keep him from succeeding.”

  Her gaze lifted to his. “And do you?”

  “Not always.”

  She gave a convulsive little jerk at that. “You don’t participate in the trade. Do you?”

  A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Sample the wares, you mean? There are some who have been grateful to escape their fate.” When her eyes widened, he lowered his mouth until his breath mingled with hers. “I always refuse.”

  He could feel her body tighten further, rather than relax. Her voice was hoarse now, barely a whisper. “So, you never . . .”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that.” He slid his hand to the curve above her nape, and tipped her mouth up to his. “I just prefer my partners wanting me out of something other than gratitude.”

  She wet her lips. “Like?”

  “Spontaneous, mutual desire?”

  He looked into her eyes as her chin quivered. “Yes,” she breathed, holding his gaze quite steadily, nonetheless. “I mean . . .”

  But it was too late for quantifications. He took her mouth, intending it to be a shock of sensation for her, bringing her to her senses. But it turned out the recipient of that shock was him. Her lips were warm, and tasted both sweet and earthy, beckoning him to explore, to find out what was beneath that surface. So . . . he did. She moaned a little as he parted her lips. Her newly freed hands gripped his biceps, not to push him away, rather to support herself as her body trembled against his.

  That should have been enough. Enough to jerk him out of this state he’d somehow succumbed to. Instead, like some kind of elusive jungle quicksand, it simply sucked him in more deeply. That sweet vulnerability in one so tall and strong made him want to both claim and protect. He ignored those thoughts, thoughts that never interfered when it was pleasure he sought. In fact, thoughts like those had never interfered in any instance. A man like him, a slave-trade bounty hunter, didn’t lead a life conducive to lasting friendships and deep, personal relationships, so he chose his partners accordingly.

  Dani here, she wasn’t that kind of partner. In fact, she wasn’t like anyone he’d ever encountered. Not so innocent, and yet so very, very naïve. At least about what was happening to her, or could.

  And yet, those thought
s didn’t stop him from sliding his hands from her hair, and down along her torso, letting his thumbs drift in so they brushed along the swell of her breasts. She jerked at the touch, moaned against his mouth. So he shifted her, just enough, to bring his thumbs back up again, only this time brushing them directly across nipples that were hard and plump to the touch.

  His body was the one jerking now. Sweet hell, it had been far too long since he’d indulged in this kind of simple, yet primal, pleasure. She moved against him, and he was the one groaning under his breath. She was sinuously tall, so well matched for him, and oh so ripe for the taking. He felt it in her quick breaths, rapid pulse, and the way she shook when he slid his hands down her hips, then hiked her up the wall, so he could press the aching, rock-hard length of himself right where it wanted most to be nestled. “I want to rip your clothes off and sink every last inch of this into you,” he growled against her neck. He didn’t know if he was still trying to scare her or convince her.

  Her thighs squeezed instinctively, reflexively, around his hips as she locked her ankles around his lower back. “I – yes,” she panted. “Yes.”

  Lost, so well and truly lost, he thought, reeling at a time when he should be at his sharpest. Wrong time, wrong woman, wrong everything. And yet he was undoing the buttons on the front of her filmy little sundress, sliding her higher up the wall, so he could put his mouth on those turgidly plump and oh-so-perfect nipples. Even through the sheer, pale-pink film of her bra, she tasted dark, and sweet. Her responding moan was a low keening, and she slid her hands to his head, into his hair, holding his mouth where she wanted it to stay. Her scent was sweeter still, and growing increasingly musky. His body all but howled for him to take what was being so generously and openly offered. No harm, no foul, just pulsing, thundering release.

  But, before they could make a decision they would surely come to regret, they both froze as the wall behind Dani’s back vibrated, followed by the sound of something crashing inside the shop.

  “Shit. Shit!” What in the hell had he been thinking? He scooped her against his chest and ran like hell across the narrow alley, dropping her feet down as soon as they hit the grass on the other side, where it slanted down steeply toward a ditch. “Down,” he commanded, brain back in focus, even if his body wasn’t. Not even close. “Belly flat, don’t look up.”

  “Jack—”

  There was no time to think now, to wonder, worry, decide. Operating purely on unquestioning instinct now, he crouched down and took her face in his hands. “Trust me, Dani. Do as I say, and live. Look up, show yourself in any way, and I can’t be responsible. You got me?”

  She locked gazes with him, in that unnerving, intense way she did, that was so much more than a simple meeting of the eyes, and nodded. Then he did the damnedest thing. He wasted another precious several seconds to lean down, and kiss her. Hard, fast, but . . . dammit. “I’ll be back for you.”

  “Right.” Her expression was sober, as if a shield had dropped into place.

  “Dani—”

  “Just, don’t die,” she said, as seriously as he’d seen her. “You got me?”

  He grinned. And something clicked, right into that empty place he’d never thought someone like him could fill. “Wouldn’t dream of it, sweetheart.”

  Three

  Dani lasted a full minute, which felt like several lifetimes, before she peeked. Not that she hadn’t taken Jack’s warning seriously. In fact, she quite understood that the right thing to do was to scuttle down to the bottom of the ditch, crawl her way to the end of the alley through the muck (eww), then run as far away from her shop as she could get. Because that was what any person in her right, tumor-free mind, would do.

  But, let’s face facts. She was presently lying belly down in gross, damp weeds, hiding, while a hot, time-traveling bounty hunter took on a psychopath who’d apparently also just come through time into her little florist shop, intent on abducting the nearest woman – her, for the sake of argument – for the twenty-sixth-century slave trade.

  Still, why was she lying here? In hopes that her Aussie Greek god of a hero would rush in, save the day, then come back and . . . what? Yeah, what, exactly, Dani? Make mad, passionate love to you in a drainage ditch? Then beg you to join him and go back to his time?

  And she’d been shaking her head, trying to decide just what kind of brain tumor would create such a completely involved, highly detailed psychotic break like the one she was obviously having. Something like that couldn’t possibly be operable, could it? Because, if that were true, then what harm was there in waiting for her space cowboy to kill the bad guy and come back for her, because at this point, psychotic-break sex sounded pretty damn good. What little foreplay she’d had so far had been quite excellent, in fact. Win-win really, if she was going to die either way.

  Which was why, when the sky over her shop exploded in a yellow-orange haze of smoke, she’d peeked.

  What she saw was pretty damn impressive. Jack was facing the back entrance to the shop with some kind of small gadget in his hand, aiming it at the door, which – more or less – dissolved in front of her eyes. Then he palmed some other sort of weapon from the side of one of his boots and, crouching low, went inside the building.

  Did she stay in the ditch and wait to see what happened? Or did she run to get help? Or did she go inside and make damn sure that the man who’d just kissed her like she was the last woman on Earth didn’t go and get himself killed before he could finish what he’d started?

  She was up and running low across the alley before allowing herself to really think the plan through. But then, she’d never been much of a sideline-sitter. Not since Tommy Decker had goaded her into diving into the lake at summer camp, despite the fact that she didn’t know how to swim. But the girls in her cabin had discovered Beemer and were incessantly taunting her, and drowning felt like a potentially acceptable alternative to a summer bunking with a hit squad of mean girls. Plus, Tommy was already showing asshole-guy tendencies. So, she’d dived in. And lived. Take that, Cabin Three bitches!

  Of course, she’d been right about Tommy. Turns out he’d just wanted to see her in a wet T-shirt. He’d been all of nine at the time. If only she’d been more focused on that lesson learned instead of shutting up her bunkmates, she might have saved herself from the world of grief she’d suffered one year, four months, two weeks, and a couple of days ago. Because idiot boys like Tommy grew up to be asshole jerks like Adam.

  But she wasn’t thinking about Adam, Tommy, or the mean girls of Cabin Three. She was thinking about the flower shop – her flower shop, dammit! Aunt Teddy and Uncle Deacon were both gone now, the family dairy farm long since sold off. Then, sixteen months ago, on that fateful, much recalled date, she’d discovered – as in, before-her-very-eyes – that Adam, her tax-accountant fiancé, was cheating on her with his much younger bookkeeping assistant. Whom he’d happily agreed to marry right away. This, after hemming and hawing over setting a date with Dani for four long years. That news had been capped recently when, while being maid of honor – again – for the last of her single friends, she’d overheard that the blissfully happy newlyweds were already expecting their first child.

  Yeah. She was so over all of it now. Except, apparently, the prolonged sex deprivation. Which left her with her little fledgling florist business and not much else. If she lost that, then what?

  She ducked behind her Jeep, straining to hear what sounds, if any, came from inside the shop. “Like what, Dani?” she muttered. “Gunshots?” Because, it was doubtful, given Jack had just vaporized the door to her shop without making so much as a whisper of sound, that whatever that little weapon thingie was, it would make any noise either. Of course, the person getting hit by whatever that weapon produced might at least scream. Right?

  “Oh, for the love of—” She edged around the front of the Jeep, trying to decide what her best bet was, and what she could arm herself with. When a crashing sound came again, like shelves – many shelves – being
toppled over, accompanied by much grunting, and what sounded like old-fashioned fists on flesh, she was on the move again. That they were killing each other was one thing, but she’d be damned if they’d just trash her shop while they did it. She didn’t think her new insurance policy covered destruction by alien invasion. Or . . . whatever.

  She peeked around the corner of the door, wincing suddenly as a bite of heat hit her on the shoulder. She looked down to see that the doorframe – what was left of it – had pretty much melted her shirtsleeve.

  She edged inside the building. With the door gone, the moonlight penetrated the back room of the shop and bathed it in a dim glow. She scanned the storage shelves for anything that might help her defend herself and her shop. She wondered, briefly, if this Stoecker guy would fall for the toxic-glue gun thing, but figured it wasn’t worth the risk. Instead she palmed the biggest, heaviest crystal vase she could wrap one hand around, then crept closer to the swinging door that led to the front of the shop. More grunting, more crashing. More of what sounded like fists on flesh. Apparently men didn’t change much over the centuries. Not particularly surprising.

  Without a set plan in place, other than to help Jack so the destruction of her shop would end before it was completely leveled, which had the dual win of thwarting the threat against her apparently black-marketable person – and, well, yes, she hadn’t exactly forgotten that a win against Stoecker would allow them to get back to what they’d started out back by her Jeep – she quietly edged through the swinging door. Was it wrong that it was that last part that had provided the most motivation?

  She didn’t have time to ponder that, as she was immediately confronted by two men, locked in mortal combat. Telling them apart was easy, even in the dim interior. Assuming it was Stoecker that Jack was currently wrestling with, the future world slave trader was as pale and blond as Jack was swarthy and dark. Plus, he had more clothes on. What he also had was a good fifty pounds and a few inches in height on Jack. He looked like a Nordic Incredible Hulk.