How had her lips opened? They did it without her will. He took ruthless advantage, his own tongue slipping in to caress hers. How dare he be so tender with her? He was a Viking, for goodness’ sake. But there was nothing of goodness about it and she found herself loving the moist sensuality of his mouth, the faint taste of bacon still lingering from this morning. Slowly he plunged deeper and then, somehow, their tongues entwined and she was kissing him back, even though she never meant to make it a true kiss on her side. Her hands slid around his ribbed torso, under Jake’s flapping flannel shirt. The contrast between Galen’s muscled hardness and her breasts and belly pressed against him made her feel vulnerable. That wasn’t bad, exactly.
She’d begun to feel light-headed by the time he broke the kiss. All her blood was pooled between her legs, and she was throbbing. He didn’t let her go. His arm still held her pressed to his hip. His eyes weren’t icy now. Definitely not.
“What means ‘for show’?”
So . . . so that was the problem. She felt a little shaky. Her chest was heaving as she sucked in air. Her lips felt the imprint of his lips still. “Pre-pretend—not real,” she stuttered. She resorted to Latin and repeated.
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “I understand. I will know this better when I kiss you again.”
Oh no. “There will be no ‘again.’ ”
“I did not break my vow, Lucy,” he warned. “You wanted kiss.”
True. No, false. She wanted a kiss, not that kiss.
She extricated herself from his arms. He let her go. She looked around hoping her knees would hold her up and resolutely refusing to think about soft lips and hot eyes and hard body. The very tanned guy was checking the condition of his boat after the storm and pointedly ignoring them. The man and his son were giving each other disgusted looks. They had tied the dog’s leash off to a cleat. People kept cats on a boat maybe, but not a big black wolf of a dog. These reclusive, gun-toting types were really too much.
Galen leaped over the line railing and the gap to the dock, sure-footed, and turned to stretch out his good hand. His eyes heated her more than her jacket in the cold bay wind. She couldn’t refuse his hand in case the others were looking, and with the rocking of the boat she wasn’t sure she could just jump the line railing and the little gap as he had. She looked up and saw him laughing at her with his eyes. So, with no other alternative, she pressed her lips together and took his hand. The calluses against her soft palm should have been repellant. They weren’t. A shock shot through her, making her knees even shakier as she stepped across.
He gathered her into his side as they moved down the dock. Somehow she let him, but she looked up, questioning, whether herself or him she didn’t know.
“For show,” he said seriously. But she didn’t think his eyes were quite serious. Smug bastard. He knew exactly what he was doing to her. But she couldn’t break away, just in case their neighbors were watching. She took a deep breath and let it out. Okay. So she might as well enjoy it.
No, you don’t. This is one slippery slope.
Okay. She wouldn’t feel his hip moving against hers, or the bare ribs pressed up against her side, or the bulky muscles in the arm around her shoulders. She wouldn’t feel . . . safe. Right.
Rightness coursed through her. A part of the universe thunked into place inside her, as surely as when she had realized that Brad’s secret project was Leonardo’s time machine. The very rightness of it all made her afraid. She shook off both the fear and the feeling of rightness. The guy was a Viking. He was going back to 912 as soon as she could figure out how to do it. With no access to the machine, the fact that it was broken, and . . .
She squinched her eyes shut. Their heels thudded against the boards of the dock. The water lapped in from the bay in unaccustomed enthusiasm after the storm. She might have been trembling against his side.
“Quest, Lucy,” he whispered. “You think of quest only.” And then the bastard kissed the top of her head and her trembling stopped. What right had he to quell her fear?
Casey’s mouth turned down as he surveyed the human refuse milling around the interview room through the one-way glass. The anonymous brightly lighted room was painted institutional green and served by its own elevator, just so “guests” such as these didn’t mingle with the government workers who occupied the rest of the high-rise. One woman just rocked obsessively and moaned. They were a colorful lot, from one guy’s red and white high-tops to the multicolored knit cap on that woman in the corner, ballooned out by her Afro. The only thing they had in common was a veneer of greasy dirt and dead eyes.
Damn that poncey little scientist, Steadman. He was nearly useless. But he had realized that a homeless person might have witnessed the Viking and the girl leaving the apartment building. Casey hated to admit he’d missed that angle. But you moved on.
Casey was checking the landlord’s background. He wanted to get some leverage on the guy before they tried to interview him again. Casey’s people were scouring marinas around the city with a picture of the girl and the artist’s rendering of the Viking. But the homeless riffraff on the other side of the glass still constituted at least a tenuous shot at finding the fugitives.
Casey grabbed a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and tapped one out as Evans led one of the interviewees out of a room. He flipped open his lighter and inhaled until the tip glowed, then snicked the lighter shut. He’d been exiled to supervise a stupid joint research project between a lab and the fuckup Italian government about a machine that still had gears, for Christ’s sake. God knew how the Italians convinced the NIATF to put money into the project in the first place. Even his superiors thought it was a bust. He was exiled to the fucking North Pole, and why? Because his assignments tended to be a little messy. He got what they wanted, didn’t he? That’s why they hired people like him, who could do things to people nobody else wanted to do. They wouldn’t have had that lawsuit if they’d let him clean up loose ends after the guys broke. And that last village was a totally expendable rat hole filled with bad narco-targets and a few basket weavers. But some jerk-off general got squeamish.
So they gave him a crappy assignment. But lightning strikes. He’d lucked onto a fucking time machine. They didn’t believe him yet. And that was fine. Now he’d have choices. He could go back and shove it in their faces and get whatever assignment he wanted.
Or he could use it for himself. Khrushchev. Now there’s a mo-fo who could have used killing. Castro? Toast. Economy in the tank? Go back and fix it. Nothing you can’t do with that machine. Save the goddamn, pathetic world. Or create a better one. In your own image. Visit the future, find the new Microsoft, and come back to invest in it today. Find your enemies and cut their fathers’ dicks off. He’d had months to think about the possibilities.
That machine can make you a god.
And it was broken. What a bitch. He needed the fucking diamond and the book. And then the world would be his oyster.
Pollington stuck his head out of the nearer room and beckoned to the glass.
Shit. Can he have something? Casey pushed himself off the desk and stubbed out his cancer stick in an almost empty Styrofoam cup. The end hissed in the sludge of old coffee at the bottom. He strode out to Pollington.
“Mr. uh, Smith here was in the right location, just across from the apartment building all night on Tuesday.” Pollington spoke in an undervoice.
Casey just pushed past the younger man and into the interview room. Mr. “Smith” was black, looked sixty, was probably forty-five. He wore layers and layers of shirts under one of those big sweaters from Tijuana. Gray fuzz covered his head and face, and his hand shook as he clutched a cup of that sludgy coffee. Great witness.
“Mr. Smith, I’m Colonel Casey. I’m in charge here.” He sat down opposite the man. The reek of unwashed bodies clung to the walls. They’d have to fumigate the place.
“Pleased, Colonel.” Smith probably once had a honeyed bass drawl, but now he was hoarse, his voice cracking
. He cackled. “Only colonel I knowed before you made chicken.”
Casey smiled grimly. “You were on Filbert just off Van Ness Tuesday night?”
“That’s my regular place, yes sir. They’s a overhang on one a them buildings there, and a hedge blocks the wind. Pretty good place. Yes. Pretty good.”
Well, at least the guy was more coherent than the rocker. “You know the building just across from your digs?” The guy nodded. “Did you see anything there that night?”
Smith shrugged and shook his head. “Like what?”
Casey snapped his fingers and Pollington handed him the pictures. “Like maybe these two people coming out? It would have been—maybe four in the morning.”
Smith’s eyes opened wide. He began to nod. “Yeah. Yeah, I saw red hair. Just kind of a gleam in the streetlight. She was driving the car. Somebody big in the passenger seat.”
Casey tried not to get excited. “What kind of car was it?”
“Kinda old. Maybe a Chevy. GM anyway. Blue.”
Not bad. The guy was observant. “Was it parked at the curb? Did somebody bring it?”
“Naaah. It came outta the parking garage.”
Casey sat back, mind humming. That meant someone in the apartment building had failed to report a stolen car. Maybe someone had loaned it to them. Casey rose in one motion. Time for a little visit to the residents of 1632 Filbert.
Evans tapped on the door with a clipboard.
“So what’s the deal on the landlord?” Evans’s expression gave Casey a thrill.
“Jake Lowell,” Evans intoned. “Bought the apartment building for cash in ’77. Tenants say he got the limp in ’Nam. But there’s no service record for a Jake Lowell, or Jacob, or Jackson, or any of those as a middle name. No records at all, military or otherwise, before the purchase.” Evans cracked a smile. “Jake Lowell is not what he seems.”
“Excellent,” Casey muttered. “Just excellent. Let’s have a talk with Mr. Lowell, while you find out just where he got such a big payout, and for what services.”
“Could be mob money, drug money.”
“Maybe.” Casey doubted it. He was beginning to smell something much closer to home.
Chapter Thirteen
“So, you ready for the car?”
Galen took a breath and let it out, remembering how fast the thing had gone when they rode in it before. He pulled the lever that opened the door and got in. “Ja. I will learn how to drive this cart as you do.” He set his jaw. “You will teach me, Lucy.”
“That’s a disaster waiting to happen,” she muttered as she slid behind the wheel. He didn’t understand those words. But he got her tone.
“You think I cannot do this?”
“Can we go on our quest first?” She was giving him that look of exasperation. He knew why. It was the kiss. It had unnerved her. He swallowed. It had unnerved him, too.
“Ja,” he answered. For a single instant, she had been so soft, so yielding. He had wanted nothing more than to protect her from her world. For an instant on the deck, she had revealed most clearly that she wanted him and that, even more important, she might let him protect her. When had that become important to him?
He cleared his throat and sat up, grasping the handle on the door to this car with the hand of his injured right shoulder. “We will now go fast.” He braced himself for that unnerving speed.
She reached around him and pulled a thick strap with an iron tongue on it across him and snapped it into a kind of a buckle on his left side as she had before. “Seat belts, everyone.”
The car backed up, slowly, turned as she turned the wheel, then started up the dirt track. As they approached a crossroads, other cars tore by, very fast, in both directions. Lucy took her foot from a lever on the floor and pressed another pad. The car stopped. She pulled a lever by the wheel with her left hand and a rhythmic sound began. He craned to see what she was doing. A little green light blinked, pointing left. She looked both ways, waited for some other cars to whiz by, and then pressed the lever on the floor. The car went onto the slicker, black road. She pressed down harder and the car sped up. He was ready. He braced himself with his good hand on the seat and pushed his feet against the floor. Marshes and reed beds flew past.
He steadied his breathing. Not so bad. How many leagues could you go in one day with a cart such as this? No horses to feed. No need to worry about their stamina. Was there?
“Does the cart grow weary?”
“Weary?” She glanced from the road to him. Her mouth tried not to smile.
He nodded. “Weary.” He liked it when she tried not to smile. Someday, maybe she would not try. She would just smile many times in a day.
“No. But you must give it gasoline. Like food. It goes until it has no more gas.”
They came to a very large village, though its halls were not as high as the ones the first night. She pulled the cart in among many others standing in rows in front of a huge building that looked like a squat castle stretching away into the distance. At several points huge stacked towers stretched even farther into the air. Carts roamed the aisles, pulling in and out. It was a maze of confusion. Did everyone in this time have such wonderful carts?
“Since I don’t want to become familiar, let’s try Macy’s this time.” She unbuckled her own thick strap and got out of the car. He pressed the metal buckle as she did, and the strap snapped back into a little, hard house at his shoulder. He unfolded himself from the car. People were walking in and out of doors made entirely of glass into total darkness within a huge tower of the castle. The young women wore breeches and tight, revealing tops like Lucy or tiny skirts that left their legs bare, the older women were clad in baggy breeches and voluminous smocks. The men shoes that laced and tight breeches and shirts in bright colors. Many were blue. This must be a rich time to have enough woad to dye so much cloth blue.
As he and Lucy approached, the doors opened by magic. He followed Lucy, who was striding toward the open maw of darkness. He straightened his shoulders and tried to breathe. This was an everyday thing for her. She was not frightened of this magic or the darkness. Quests demanded courage of a man. Was he not the first of his king’s warriors?
Galen tried not to limp as he followed her into the darkness. It wasn’t dark. He froze. The interior of this castle was lighted without lamps, like the place in which he had first wakened, but not so brightly. Small round moons in the ceiling glowed. The floor was hard and smooth, with earth-colored tiles much finer even than the tiles the people made in the lands around the southern sea. People were everywhere, walking briskly, or strolling to look at more goods than he had ever seen. Shelves and tables stretched away into the distance. A stairway moved upward of its own accord, taking riders with it. He swallowed.
“Move it, buddy. You’re blocking traffic,” an old man said, pushing by him.
He swallowed again. He could do this. He took Lucy’s arm. That felt better.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Okay” was the word she used to indicate that all was well. He’d heard her use the word to reassure herself. “Let’s find you some clothes and shoes.”
He took a breath and let her guide him. She seemed to know her way.
Lucy headed down to the men’s department. Galen was holding her arm, and she didn’t shake him off in spite of the nagging trill that sent down her spine. The look on his face was half wonder, half fear, and she couldn’t help but admire the way he faced such a foreign situation. He was a brave man. She wouldn’t deny him the solace of contact with a friend.
A friend. That’s what she’d be to him, for as long as it took to get him back to a time he understood. Now if she could just get rid of the nagging trill. Well, the first thing was not to kiss him again. They’d more than convinced the other marina dwellers they were besotted with each other. Mission accomplished. So no more kissing.
She stopped at a rack of jeans. “Here we go.”
“These are like the cloth of your brec, Lucy.”
&n
bsp; “Yes. Jeans. Men wear them, too.” She flipped through the rack.
“I look like other men. Good for hiding.”
“Not if you talk about hiding so loudly,” she whispered, frowning.
He examined the jeans. “The cloth is for ceorls, yet it is dyed with woad.”
“Ceorls?”
He repeated in Latin.
“Peasants? Oh. Because it’s rough. But it wears many years.” Woad was what they used to get blue color back then—some kind of a rock they ground up or something. She held a pair up to his backside and blew out a breath. She knew nothing about men’s jean sizes.
“Can I help you?” A young man with slicked-back black hair, a red satin acetate shirt, and pointy-toed black boots approached. Lucy sighed in relief. Here was someone who could help. Good ole San Francisco.
“My friend doesn’t speak English very well. He needs a new wardrobe. Can you help us figure out sizes?”
The kid’s eyes slid over to Galen. Up. Down. Lingering on the important aspects. “Gladly, mademoiselle,” he said. No one said that anymore. His nose wrinkled at Galen’s smelly boots, sweats, and plaid flannel shirt that wouldn’t button. “Obviously time for a makeover.”
The kid’s name tag said: Brendon. “I leave him totally in your hands.” Oops.
Brendon’s eyes slid over to her for one shocked moment. Then he sighed. He must know Galen was never going to be in his hands. On the other hand, he got a chance to dress Galen. “Mais oui, mademoiselle.” His head swiveled as he scanned his stock. “He has a rugged look, which we will accentuate with traditional five-oh-ones. Buttons or zipper?”
“Zipper.” Better keep the buttons to a minimum. Though Jake’s shirt was a little small, Galen hadn’t tried buttoning a single one.
Brendon scanned Galen once again. “I think . . .” He tapped his chin with one finger. “Thirty-four/thirty-fours.” He picked a pair of jeans from the rack. “I’ll pick out some shirts.”
A Twist in Time Page 17
