Killing Time

by Linda Howard

  She was checking him out, too, with quick little glances at his chest and shoulders, but then she would devote her entire attention to the coffee. Maybe she wouldn’t touch him, but she was thinking about it.

  He fingered a loose fold of her gown, which happened to be on her stomach, where the fabric was a little bunched. “What kind of fabric is this? It looks like water.”

  She looked down at herself, frowning. “It looks wet?”

  “No, I mean the way it sort of flows, as if it’s liquid.”

  “That’s the point. It’s a synthetic fabric, of course, and the comfort of it is the whole idea. It keeps you warm if you’re cold, and cool if you’re too warm. All the really good sanssaums are made from it—”

  “ ‘Sanssaums’?”

  “What I’m wearing. That’s what it’s called. It means, literally, ‘without seams.’ The market name of the fabric is ‘Elegon,’ but who knows how it’s made? Some chemists came up with it.”

  “I like how it feels.” He rubbed the fold between two fingers, letting his knuckles rub against her stomach. He could feel the sudden breath she took.

  Deciding that he’d pushed matters far enough, he got up. “I’m going to hit the shower,” he said as he turned away. “I’ll be finished in ten minutes; then it’s all yours.”

  Leaving the room was almost more than he could do. She looked so damned sexy in that gown that showed every detail of her body without exposing her, her newly blond hair all mussed, her eyes heavy-lidded with sleep. She was getting to him, in a big way. Last night, when he’d seen the stricken look in her eyes, he could have kicked himself for even bringing up the possibility that she might not be human. His damn curiosity had made him open his big mouth and hurt her feelings. Robots couldn’t have hurt feelings; simulated feelings, maybe, but not real ones.

  So how did he know hers weren’t simulated?

  He shut that thought off as he stripped out of his jeans and got into the shower. She’d said she was human. He would take her at her word. She felt human, and that was good enough for him. If she was anything else, he didn’t want to know.

  He was going to have to work for her. He’d never worked for a woman before, not because he was such a hotshot lover, but because any attraction he’d felt had usually been mutual. The few times it hadn’t, well, there were reasons why it just wasn’t there, and he hadn’t pursued the matter.

  With Rebecca, the almost giddy sense of falling in love had been strong, immediate, and definitely mutual. It was as if they looked at each other and simply knew; the sex had been good because they were so in tune.

  The way he felt about Nikita was unfolding differently, growing a little slower, but he was definitely feeling testosterone-driven urges that made him want to grab her up. He was a reasonable man, so he was taken by surprise at how unreasonable he felt about her. He couldn’t just keep his distance the way she’d said; he couldn’t.

  Nikita sat in bed, sipping that awful coffee, and settled her jangling nerves. First he had startled her awake, though, oddly enough, she had seemed to instantly recognize him, because she hadn’t reached for a weapon. Then her senses had been thrown into mild shock because he hadn’t had on a shirt, and all that warm, bare skin made her want to cuddle close and feel the warmth wrap around her, to bury her face against him and inhale the scent of his skin.

  Pheromones, she knew. It was basic biology: a woman’s pheromones were airborne, capable of attracting men from a distance. A man’s pheromones were mostly exchanged by touch. As close as he’d been, she had definitely felt the pull, urging her to reach out and stroke his chest.

  Aesthetically speaking, it was a good chest, muscled and hairy—more muscled than she’d expected, given his relatively lean build. Either he worked to keep himself in shape, or he’d been blessed with excellent genes. Morning stubble had darkened his jaw—which was slightly darker on the left side, where she had hit him—and his hair needed brushing. She had wanted to pull him down on the bed with her, but her emotions still felt shredded. After a while she would get over her hurt, but right now all she could do was cling to her rather tenuous composure. When she was home—she had to believe she would somehow be able to go home—she would deal with the emotional issues he had exposed. In the meantime, she still had to work with him, regardless of how much she would prefer to just go away and hide.

  The sound of the shower stopped. She waited five more minutes; then she heard the bathroom door open and Knox called, “It’s all yours.”

  She didn’t get out of bed until he’d gone into the kitchen. She gathered her clothing for the day and took it into the bathroom with her; it was still damp and steamy from his shower. The smell of him lingered in the air, mingled with that of soap and some minty odor.

  The novelty of a wet bath charmed her once again, and soothed her nerves, though they were somewhat jangled again when she first looked in the mirror and saw her blond self; she’d forgotten about changing her hair color. Overall, though, when she was dressed in her new clothes, she felt almost ready to tackle whatever the day brought, and she followed the smell of cooking food into the kitchen.

  He was standing in front of the stove, his back to her, and he still didn’t have on a shirt. Helplessly her gaze traced the deep groove of his spine, followed the way the muscles in his back played whenever he reached for something. She felt as if she had been plunged into a heated pool. “I forgot my coffee cup,” she said in a muffled tone, and fled to her bedroom.

  The brief interruption to retrieve the cup gave her the time she needed to brace herself. He evidently didn’t intend to put on a shirt until it was time for them to leave, so she would just have to ignore the provocation. When she went back into the kitchen, she asked, “What are you cooking? It smells wonderful.”

  “I didn’t have much on hand; bacon, eggs, and toast is my limit, and I’m lucky I have that. I usually eat breakfast out.” He glanced at her. “You still eat meat and eggs in your time, don’t you?”

  “Some people do, and some people don’t. Real animal protein can be very expensive. I usually eat a nutrition bar for breakfast.”

  He made a face, then pointed toward a section of cabinet. “Get a couple of plates down for me, please. If you don’t mind.”

  She turned and opened the cabinet door, then took down two plates that were a sunny yellow color she wouldn’t have expected in a bachelor’s house. “These are pretty,” she said.

  “Lynnette gave them to me for Christmas last year. She said it was pitiful for a grown man to have nothing but paper plates in his house.”

  Nikita tilted her head and thought the matter over. “She was right,” she finally said, passing the plates to him.

  “Gee, thanks,” he said wryly. He put the plates in the microwave and punched the one-minute button.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Warming the plates. I don’t like for my food to get cold, and this keeps it warm longer.”

  The explanation made sense to her. She looked around. “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “Set the table. The silverware is in that drawer there.” He pointed with a spatula.

  Place settings were another thing that hadn’t changed much in two centuries: plates, napkins, and eating utensils. She looked around and didn’t see any napkins, so she asked him where they were.

  Again he pointed with the spatula. “Use the paper towels.”

  Marveling again at how plentiful and cheap paper was, she pulled two sections off the roll of towels, folded them, and put one each at the places they had used before. The microwave dinged as she was putting out the silverware, and Knox retrieved the plates, then began dishing up the food directly onto them.

  He had an excellent sense of timing, because two slices of bread now popped up out of the toaster. He grabbed them, put one on each plate, quickly slathered butter on them, then handed the plates to her while he put two more slices of bread in the machine.

  Nikita looked at the plat
es of food; they seemed identical to her, so she supposed it didn’t matter which plate went where. “I’ve always wondered what cooked eggs looked like,” she said as she put the plates on the table.

  He looked around, his expression incredulous. “I know you said they were expensive, but . . . Surely you’ve eaten eggs before?”

  She shook her head. “When I was young, my parents didn’t have much money because”—because they’d beggared themselves buying her—“they had some unforeseen expenses. Their financials are much better now, of course, now that all their children are grown and gone, to use your phrase.”

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “One of each, both younger.” She never told anyone about the older one, the one who wasn’t really a sibling. She had never known her, and tried not to think about her.

  “Are you close?” He refilled their coffee cups with the fresh coffee, set them at their plates, then indicated her chair and waited until she had sat down before he did.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “My brother, Connor, has a baby boy whom we all adore. Fair, my sister, will be getting married next spring.”

  “So they’re both younger, but they’ve both settled down. Why are you still unmarried?”

  Because things like her didn’t reproduce. “I’m married to my career,” she replied as lightly as possible. “The training is unbelievably intense; then I did my specialized studies, too.”

  “Specialized in . . . what?”

  “History. The last half of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first, to be specific.”

  “Hard to think of now being history.”

  “It’s probably even more difficult to think that in my time, you’ve been dead for about a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Ouch!” He gave her an appalled look. “Do you know exactly when I died?”

  “No, of course not.” Despite everything, she found herself smiling at his expression. “For one thing, I didn’t know your name to search in the archives for it. For another, there are huge gaps in our records. For all the great gains your time made in technology, you were really dumb about archiving.”

  “Yeah, you’ve said so before. So my music CDs aren’t going to last?”

  “No, they’ll be beyond use in about twenty years. I will say that, when the problem was noticed, it was swiftly rectified, but unless there was a hard copy of the music, book, newspaper—whatever—then there wasn’t any way to regain those lost records. For instance, we know all of the music by the Beatles, but very little from about 1995 to 2020.”

  “What about books?”

  “Printed material held up fairly well. Not all, of course. Some of it was printed on poor-quality paper that disintegrated. Others things held up well, though. Look how many of your banknotes still exist.”

  “Yeah, that’s really good paper.”

  “Oh, it isn’t paper; it’s a special cloth.”

  He looked startled. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It was analyzed.”

  “Well, how about that. Come to think of it, if you look close you can see the threads in the bills.” He finally picked up his fork and began eating, and Nikita did the same—warily, at first, then with greater enthusiasm. She didn’t care for the texture of the eggs, but liked the taste, especially when it was combined with that of the bacon. The bread was unremarkable, but edible.

  “I wish I’d had your DNA scanner with me last night,” he said after they’d finished eating, and she was observing how he placed the dishes in the dishwasher. “I don’t know how I could have used it without attracting attention, but maybe I’d have had a chance.”

  “Could you use it today?”

  “There were a lot of people in the house, scattering DNA everywhere. Would the scanner do any good now?”

  She shrugged. “Possibly. It would be tedious work, trying to find a sample that’s in our data banks, but if you had enough uninterrupted time, you might find something.”

  “The uninterrupted time would be the biggest problem. How about if we went back out to the Allen house, to where the shooter was standing yesterday? There was a heavy dew last night; would that destroy the evidence?”

  “The conditions aren’t optimal, and in any case, we wouldn’t be likely to find anything in our database because the shooter is almost certainly from this time.”

  “Yeah, I forgot. Shit.” He sighed. “Okay, let’s go to the library and look up those back newspaper copies. We’ll find out what was supposed to be buried in the capsule, get some names, talk to some people. Someone is bound to remember something.”

  “Don’t you have to go to your office to work?”

  “I am working. And I’m never out of touch.” He indicated the radio sitting on the table.

  She watched as he put a small plastic pack in a slot in the dishwasher door, closed the slot, then closed the door. The settings would be easy enough to decipher, so she didn’t bother scrutinizing that; all she needed was to learn the process. He slowly turned the dial until there was a click and a red light came on, and that was it. “Ah,” she said. “I have it now.”

  “Have what?”

  “How to operate the dishwasher. If you will show me how to operate the laundry machines, as well, I’ll be able to take care of my own clothing.”

  “I’ll do that when we get home tonight, unless you’re running out of clothes and need to wash something now?”

  She shook her head. “No, tonight will be fine.”

  “Do I need to wear the baseball cap today?” she asked when they were ready to leave. “If so, I’d really like to tie my hair back with something other than a trash-bag tie.”

  He gave a quick grin. “We’ll stop somewhere and get something. I like the look, with the sunglasses and all, like a movie star trying to go incognito. You’re kind of glamorous, you know.”

  “Glamorous?” she echoed, startled. That was certainly not a term she would ever have applied to herself. Glamour implied great beauty and style; she didn’t possess the one, and couldn’t afford the other.

  “It’s the way you walk, shoulders back, head high, like you’re either in the military or have had ballet training.”

  “Neither. I would have liked to take ballet classes when I was young, but there wasn’t enough money.”

  “I bet you’d have been cute as all get-out in a tutu,” he said; then his eyelids got that heavy look as he studied her. “I’d sure as hell like to see you in one now.”

  Nikita froze, afraid he would try to kiss her again. She thought she had been doing a good job of acting normal, chatting, but that was all on the surface. Not only did she not want him to touch her again, she was afraid that if he did, she might start crying and not be able to stop. With one question he had torn the scab off a deep wound in her life, leaving her emotionally bloody and in pain.

  He sighed at the stricken look on her face. “It’s okay; I’m not about to grab you,” he said gently. “I know I’m in the doghouse. Just—give me a chance, okay?”

  She managed to nod her head, a very small nod but a definite one. He touched her arm, a brief, warm caress that was gone before she could pull away; then he tugged on the bill of her cap and turned to open the back door.

  As early as it was, none of the stores he thought might have something for her ponytail were open, so they ended up driving to the Wal-Mart store. Nikita forced her thoughts away from her personal problems and looked around with delight. Knox led the way to what he called the “hair section,” but she got sidetracked by the rack after rack of cotton clothing. By the time he noticed she was no longer following him and backtracked to find her, she had worked her way past the T-shirts and tops and was fingering some lightweight pants.

  “Do you need more clothes?” he asked, which she was certain was a rhetorical question. She had four changes of clothes; she had intended to buy more clothing once she was here, anyway, unless by some great stroke of luck she had managed to catch t
he UT and return home within four days. Since the UT had obviously recruited local help, she didn’t think that was going to happen.

  “I do, yes, but I don’t have to buy it right now.”

  He checked his watch. “You have a little time. The library doesn’t open until nine.”

  In her time, the libraries were always open and accessible by computer; if you were away from home and needed some information, there were public computers everywhere. The closest thing in her time to a physical library was the Archives, but access to it was strictly controlled because of the fragile nature of the items.

  She took him at his word, and while he went to get a cart, she began pulling hangers of clothing off the racks and looking at them. She knew there was a sizing system, but had no idea what size she herself was. All clothing in her time was custom-made by computer: you stood in a private room, your body was mapped, you chose the garments you wanted from a touch screen, and five minutes later the neatly wrapped items slid down a chute into the room. You had to use your Goods and Services card to open the door, the amount of the purchase was deducted from your card, and that was it.

  When he returned with the cart, she was holding a pair of cotton pants against her, trying to see if the size matched. “How did you know what size to buy for me?” she muttered.

  “I did an intensive study of your ass,” he replied. A woman standing behind him snorted with laughter, and beat a hasty retreat. Frowning, Nikita watched her go.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  “Very well, then: what size is my ass?”