by Linda Howard
Deep, whiskey-rough, burred. Not the smooth voice of a practiced seducer, but that of a man used to command: completely self-assured, determined. And yet he’d asked, very quietly, “So where are ye now, lass?” as if he truly needed her—
Grace’s eyes opened again, widening. She had been dreaming, after all; she remembered a snippet now, of Black Niall sitting quietly before a fire. But something was different, as if it wasn’t her dream at all, something outside herself that had drawn her in.
More and more of the dream unfolded itself. She saw him alone, half naked, with only his plaid draped loosely about his hips. He had evidently been injured, for a rough bandage was wrapped about his left shoulder, the linen pale against his olive-toned skin. Fear licked at her and she wanted to go to him, assure herself he was all right.
A metal cup was in his hand. He was drinking, staring at nothing, his expression somber. His loneliness, his absolute aloneness, made her ache inside. Then he closed his eyes and abruptly she was there, in his arms, lying naked on his lap while he fondled and sucked gently at her breasts.
Grace trembled at the memory that wasn’t quite a memory, was more than a memory. Somehow she was lying on the bench and he was crouched over her, his face tense as he thrust again and again. The pleasure rose beating inside her, and she reached up to twine her arms around his strong neck, almost weeping with joy.
And then, nothing. He was gone, the dream ended, with only his murmured, “So where are ye now, lass?” echoing in her mind, as if she should have been there, tending his wound, offering him the comfort women have always offered warriors.
She felt a wrench of regret that she hadn’t been there.
The image of him was sharp and clear in her mind. He sat with his back to the fire and the golden light had glistened on his bare shoulders, broad and powerful with muscle, and a halo limned his long black hair. Equally black hair spread across his chest, and a thin, silky line of it ran down his washboard stomach to the small, taut circle of his navel. His long legs were thick with muscle, the most powerful legs she had ever seen on a human, the delineation of his musculature built on the rock-solid strength produced by a lifetime of swordplay and battle, of controlling a huge stallion with the strength in his thighs, wearing more than a hundred pounds of armor and actually fighting in it. His was the body of a warrior, honed into a weapon, a tool.
But he was still just a man, she thought with aching tenderness. He bled, he ached, he sat alone and got drunk and grumpily wondered why some woman wasn’t dancing attendance on him. It was her imagination that made her dream he’d been speaking only to her.
If he had been… if she were actually with him… She would get him to lie down in bed, make him more comfortable. He was probably a bit feverish; a cold cloth on his brow would make him feel better. She didn’t doubt, however, that he would be a terrible patient. Instead of resting he would insist she lie down with him, and soon his hands would be roaming under her shirt—
“Damn it!” Grace moaned, pressing her hands to her eyes. Her breath was coming soft and fast, and she felt warm, liquid. Her nipples were tight and erect, pushing against the thin fabric of her T-shirt. It was bad enough that she sometimes had erotic dreams about him, but it was a far worse betrayal of Ford that she daydreamed about Black Niall, too.
The pistol was still in her hand, cold against her temple. Carefully she replaced it and thought about getting back into bed, but she was wide awake. She glanced at the clock. Why, it wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet; she’d been asleep less than an hour. Long enough, however, for Niall to take over her subconscious.
For eight months she had been dead inside, and she wanted to remain that way. There hadn’t been any laughter, any sunshine, any appreciation of a deep blue sky or the drama of a storm. It was safer that way, easier; if she hadn’t been numb, she couldn’t have survived. She didn’t want any sign of returning life because it would only weaken her. In eight months she hadn’t yet been able to weep, even tears held at bay by the bleak ice surrounding her. Niall was a crack in that wall of ice; one day it would collapse, and so would she.
She couldn’t afford the weakness he represented. She had to hurry with those damn Gaelic papers, get them finished and out of her mind so Black Niall would cease to plague her. If she could get some measure of revenge against Parrish, perhaps her mind would ease and she could begin to heal, and her subconscious would then no longer need to cling to the dream image.
Well, sleep was definitely out of the question. Groaning, knowing she needed to rest because tomorrow she and Kris planned to break into the Foundation’s computer system; instead she turned on a light. Her mind was racing; until she calmed, she might as well use the time to work.
She didn’t bother getting out the laptop, just took her notepad and the remaining Gaelic papers and curled up in the room’s one armchair, a cracked vinyl job she had made more comfortable by throwing a sheet over it. She could still hear the creaking and crackling of the vinyl, but at least now the chair didn’t stick to her.
She picked up a page and groaned. More mathematical formulas, though, thank God, they were in Latin. Her brows rose in surprise. This was the first time two languages had been mixed in one section. The handwriting was different, too, heavier, plainer. She scribbled the formulas on her notepad, translating them into English. “For twenty years, the proportion of water to weight shall be…” On and on it went, giving the precise fractions for, supposedly, targeting the year to which one wanted to travel. Also included was the voltage of energy required, or at least she thought that was what it was; they hadn’t had any knowledge of electricity other than watching lightning bolts, so what exactly had they been measuring? Energy, yes, but what kind?
Still, she copied it all down, yawning as she did so. It was like copying down a complicated recipe, though not half as interesting. If anything was going to put her to sleep, this would do it.
She began reading aloud to herself, droning the words. “‘For DCLXXV years’—let’s see, D is five hundred years, the C is after it so that adds another hundred, L is fifty, the two X’s after it add ten years each, and then a V, which is five. Six hundred and seventy-five years. Getting pretty precise there, aren’t you?” she muttered to the long-ago writer.
Absently, she subtracted six hundred seventy-five from 1997, just to see what year a current time traveler would end up in, using this exact formula: 1322. “A wonderful year,” she said, yawning. “I remember it well.” What a coincidence; 1322 would have been in Black Niall’s time.
She turned the page, ready for more math. She blinked at the words, wondering if she was sleepier than she had thought, or perhaps had somehow gotten a sheet that didn’t belong mixed up with the Gaelic papers.
She read the words again, and chills ran over her entire body. “No,” she said softly. “It’s impossible.”
But there it was, in Gaelic, and in the same heavy hand that had written the mathematical formulas:
“Require ye proof? In the Year of Our Lord 1945, the Guardian slew the German beast, and so came Grace to Creag Dhu.—Niall MacRobert, y. 1322.”
She became aware she was panting, and a shudder wracked her. The page swam before her eyes, the words blurring. The term German hadn’t existed in the thirteen hundreds.
How could someone who lived in the fourteenth century have knowledge of something that happened in the twentieth? It was impossible—unless the formula truly worked.
Unless they had known how to travel through time.
Chapter 15
KRIS DIDN’T RECOGNIZE HER. THEY HAD ARRANGED TO MEET outside a supermarket late the next afternoon, and Grace had arrived more than an hour early so she could watch for anything suspicious. She hated not feeling able to trust Kris completely, but there was too much at stake for her to take anything for granted.
She watched Kris arrive in his beloved ’66 Chevelle, the engine rumbling with a muscular cough that had a couple of middle-aged men throwing envious gla
nces his way. Poor Kris. He wanted female attention, but instead his car was attracting the male variety. At least he’d done some additional work on the Chevelle since she had last seen it; it was actually painted now, a bright fire-engine red.
He parked at the end of a lane and waited. There hadn’t been any suspicious, repetitious traffic during the hour Grace had been watching, but still she waited. After fifteen more minutes had passed she slid out of the truck and crunched across the thin layer of snow that had fallen on the parking lot since she arrived. It was still snowing lightly, lacy flakes swirling and dancing in the wind. She went up to the Chevelle and tapped on the window.
Kris rolled the window down a couple of inches. “Yeah, what is it?” he asked, a little impatiently.
“Hi, Kris,” she said, and his eyes widened with shock.
He scrambled out of the car, slipping a little and grabbing the door to right himself. “My God,” he mumbled. “My God.”
“It’s a wig,” she said. She wore a blond one, plus a baseball cap and sunglasses. Add losing more than thirty pounds, and no one who had known her before would have recognized her.
Kris’s stupefied gaze started at her booted feet, went up her tight jeans, took in the denim jacket, and ended once again on her face. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. The tip of his nose turned red. “My God,” he said again. Abruptly he lunged at her and wrapped both arms around her, holding her tight and rocking her back and forth. Grace’s nerves had been on edge for too long; her first instinct, barely restrained, was to kick his feet out from under him. But then he made a strangled sound, his shoulders shook, and she realized he was crying.
“Shh,” she said gently, putting her own arms around him. “It’s all right.” It felt odd to let someone touch her, and to touch someone in return. She had gone so long without physical contact that she felt both awkward and starved.
“I’ve been so scared,” he said into her baseball cap, his voice shaking. “Not knowing if you were okay, if you had a place to stay—”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” she said, patting his back. “The first week was the worst. Do you think we can get in the car? I don’t want to attract attention.”
“What? Oh! Sure.” He trudged around the car to open the passenger door for her, a courtesy that touched her. He was still thin and gangly, his glasses still slid toward the end of his nose, but in several small ways she could see the advance of maturity. His shoulders looked a tad heavier, his voice had lost some of its boyishness, even his stubble was a little thicker. Manhood would suit him a lot better than boyhood; when other men his age were fighting middle-age spread, Kris would still be lean.
He slid under the wheel and slammed the door, then turned to survey her. His eyes were still wet, but now he shook his head in wonderment. “I wouldn’t have known you,” he admitted in awe. “You—you’re tiny.”
“Thin,” she corrected. “I’m as tall as I always was. Taller,” she said, pointing at the inch-and-a-half heels of her boots.
“Cool,” he said, eyeing them and blinking hard. He glanced at his own feet, and she thought he might soon become a boot man. There was nothing like boots to give a man attitude. Or a woman, come to that; she definitely walked with more authority when she wore the boots.
Then he looked back at her face, and she saw his lower lip wobble again. “You look tired,” he blurted.
“I couldn’t sleep last night.” That was the unvarnished truth. She hadn’t been able to close her eyes after reading that little note from Black Niall. Every time she thought of it she felt her spine prickle, and chills would roughen her skin. But after the initial shock, it wasn’t the bit about 1945 that was so eerie, it was the phrase “and so came Grace to Creag Dhu.” Surely he meant a state of grace, but it felt so—personal, somehow, something written specifically to her. She felt as if he were inviting her to use the formula, to step through the layers of time energy. His calculations had been very specific, for exactly six hundred seventy-five years; back to the year 1322, the year the message had been written.
Kris reached out and took her gloved hand, squeezed it. “Where have you been?”
“On the move. I haven’t stayed in one place for long.”
“The police—”
“It isn’t the police I worry about so much as Parrish’s men. At least the police aren’t actively hunting me, not after this length of time. Sure, they’ll follow a lead, but that’s about it. Parrish’s men nearly caught me once.”
“It’s so weird,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you still think it’s because of those papers you had?”
“I know it was.” She stared out the window, which was fogging up from their breathing. “I translated them. I know exactly why he wants them.”
Kris clenched his hands into fists, staring at her delicate profile. He wanted to take her somewhere and feed her, he wanted to tuck a blanket around her, he wanted—he wanted to punch something. She looked so frail. Yeah, that was it. Frail.
Grace had always been a special person to him; he’d known her most of his life, had a crush on her since he was seventeen. She had always been so nice to him, treating him as an equal when most adults didn’t. Grace was a genuinely good person, smart and kind, and her mouth, oh her mouth made him feel all hot and dizzy-headed. He’d dreamed of kissing her but never worked up the nerve. It was lousy of him, but when she had called the day before, he had thought again of kissing her, and even thought that it would be okay now because Ford was dead. But looking at her he knew it wasn’t okay, might never be okay. She was quiet and sad and distant, and that mouth didn’t look as if it ever smiled.
He pulled himself away from his thoughts and reached into the backseat to grab a computer printout. “Here,” he said, placing it on her lap. He might not ever kiss her, but he would do what he could to help her. “It’s a blueprint of the building where the Foundation is headquartered.”
Grace pulled off her sunglasses and put them on the dash. “Where did you get this?” she asked in surprise, flipping through the pages.
“Well, it’s a fairly new building,” he explained. “A copy of the plans are on file with the city planners, I guess in case of emergencies and stuff.”
She gave him a sideways glance. “So you went to city hall and got a copy?”
“Not exactly. I got it out of their computers,” he said blithely.
“Without setting off any alarms, I hope.”
“Oh, please,” he scoffed. “It was a joke.”
There was no point in scolding him about it; after all, she was asking him to commit a much more serious crime than computer hacking. “Getting into the Foundation’s computers won’t be as easy,” she warned.
“No, but I’ve already got it figured out. Your idea about the maintenance crew was great. We steal a couple of the uniforms, waltz right in. But all we need is to get into the building, we don’t need to actually get into the Foundation’s offices. Look,” he said, pointing to the blueprint. “Here is the service elevator. We take it to the floor below, then use this access panel in the ceiling to get to the electronic panel. I tap into a line, pull up a file list, and we go from there.”
“What about alarms?”
“Well, it’s a self-contained system, so they don’t have to worry about anyone hacking in; certain files may be security-coded, but not the system itself. My job is to get the coded files.”
He made it sound so easy, but she didn’t expect the Foundation’s files to be as vulnerable as the city’s. Parrish was too smart, too wily, and he had too much to hide. “There has to be a list of the passwords for any coded files, but it could be anywhere. Parrish may keep it in his house, or there could be a safe in the offices where it would be kept. Either way, we won’t be able to get it.”
He shook his head, grinning. “You’d be surprised how many people keep a list of passwords in their desk. It’s worth a look, anyway, once we’re certain everyone has gone home.”
“I have s
ome ideas about the passwords,” she said. “We’ll try those first.” She shuddered at the idea of going into the empty offices and finding they weren’t empty after all, but that Parrish had worked late. Hearing his voice on the telephone had been bad enough; she didn’t think she could bear actually seeing him. Still, if it became necessary to break into his private office, she would do it. Kris would be willing, but she wasn’t willing to let him; she had already involved him enough.
“Okay,” he said, practically twitching in his enthusiasm. “Let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
Why not, indeed. There was no reason to wait, not if they could manage to liberate a couple of uniforms from the maintenance service. “Do you have your laptop?” she asked.
“In the backseat.”
She shrugged. “Then we might as well give it a try. We’ll go in my truck.”
“Why?” He looked a bit affronted at her reluctance to travel in the Chevelle.
“This car is a little noticeable,” she pointed out, her tone dry.
A grin broke across his face. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” he said, giving the dash a fond pat. “Okay.” He got the laptop out of the backseat and took the keys from the ignition. Grace grabbed her sunglasses. They got out and locked the doors, and they trudged across the slippery parking lot to her pickup.
They were silent as Grace drove. She tried to come up with some feasible plan for getting the maintenance uniforms, but none occurred to her. And there was still security at the building after office hours; perhaps the maintenance service had a key to the rear service door, perhaps not. After cleaning houses for six months, she knew some people without thought turned over a spare key to the cleaning service so they wouldn’t be inconvenienced by having to be at home when their houses were cleaned. Grace was always amazed at their lack of caution. Still, it happened. Unless Parrish owned the entire building, the chances were fifty-fifty the maintenance crew could enter without ringing for a guard. If Parrish owned the building, no way; he wouldn’t care if the crew had to wait, or that a guard had to trudge from wherever he was in the building to let them in. He wouldn’t even consider their inconvenience in the security scheme.