He broke the kiss and threw back his head with a ragged breath, half laughter. A moment later he looked down at her.
“Does that mean good or bad?” she said.
“Good. And too bad we’re in a park.”
She laughed, and for some reason the silvery sound of it alerted him. He looked beyond her and saw a gardener watching them. Then he noticed through the bowers that the side windows of the museum had eyes. “I think we’re under surveillance.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “The wonder is they’re being fairly discreet about it.” She glanced through the trailing ivy, half-laughing, half-sighing as the silhouettes disappeared. “I think you have an image problem, Mr. Gage.”
“You have magnificent powers of observation.”
She looked a little smug. “I know how to solve it. You just need to let people see you in a normal role.”
“And you have a normal role in mind?”
She ignored his faint sarcasm. “Why don’t you come by my class tomorrow and give my fifth graders some tips on their science project. They’d love it, and it would give them a chance to get to know you.”
“A science project?” One of his golden brows arched ironically. “The sacrifices a man has to make for his image.”
Long wisps of blond hair had escaped from the coil at the nape of Lise’s neck, making her look wistful and lovely. He smoothed them back, and she laid her cheek against his hand as he drew it away.
It was a seemingly guileless gesture, but breathtakingly seductive. It also seemed totally out of character, and he found himself wondering if it was a spontaneous caress. Or if she’d done it before, with some other man. And then he realized he knew almost nothing about her. There didn’t seem to be any way to approach the topic of her romantic past, so he brought up a more immediate problem. “This town’s pretty protective of you, aren’t they?”
“Very protective,” she agreed. “Look what they did when they thought you’d abducted me.”
He smiled. “I wonder what they’d do if I actually did it. Abduct you.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “That’s assuming I’d let you.”
“That’s assuming you’d have a choice.”
She drew up, an arch in her posture. Her long, graceful neck was a swan’s curve, and her eyes sparkled like melting diamonds. Stephen realized he’d challenged her, and as much as that possibility intrigued him, a second awareness intrigued him more. He’d also aroused her. Her gaze was darkening, and her breathing had quickened.
Shame on you, Miss Anderson, he thought. You’ve just told me exactly what you’d like me to do.
Six
STEPHEN STOOD IN THE darkness of the cabin’s living room, staring out at the full moon. Floating just beyond the zenith in the western sky, it was as potbellied and luminous as an oriental rice paper lantern. He massaged his temples and pulled out a chair from the wobbly dinette table that was pushed up against the windowsill. It was three in the morning and he hadn’t slept.
A leather-bound logbook lay open at the far end of the table. He dragged it to him and switched on a light as he sat down. The blank page stared up at him like a stone tablet waiting for divine inscription. He released the pen that was clipped to the book’s spine.
Omega Mission. Day Five, he scrawled. Failure to establish contact again. Nine days left to achieve successful transmission of data, otherwise mission will be aborted. Source of failure unknown at this time. Dosimeter levels indicate “solar proton event” is intensifying. Time is critical, and yet I must wait another twenty-four hours before I can try again—
He set the pen down and pushed the journal away. Light seeped from the storage room door behind him, and a sudden high-pitched signal caught his attention. The shrill beeping drove him out of his chair.
The darkened room was alive with activity as he pushed open the door. Red light pulsed in the gloom, a vibrant heartbeat against the steady drone of electronic circuitry. He strode past digital readout displays beaming intermittent status signals and a bank of monitors that projected extraterrestrial images of earth. The distress signal came from an oscillograph that was spewing out ribbons of data. He hit the reset button and silenced the machine.
Just moments before he had set every device in the room on Self Test. Time was his enemy now. He had to find the glitch, especially if it was in his own equipment. There was always the possibility that the problems were in the ship orbiting out in space. If that was the case, there was nothing he could do. Years of effort would be lost, and the damage to Omega Mission incalculable. But he didn’t believe the problems originated with the spacecraft. They were right here. The problems were his.
He scoped the pulsating room with his eyes. Where was the failure? The geomagnetic storm building in the earth’s upper atmosphere was far more intense than he’d predicted, but the system was specifically designed to withstand such electrical interference. And yet something was jamming the transmission. He might have been able to rule out sabotage, except for what he’d discovered that morning. She had been in this room. He’d inadvertently left the door unlocked the night she showed up, and the next day he’d found it locked.
Lise’s clear eyes and serious smile shone in his mind like sunlight breaking through clouds. He could see her as sharply as though she were standing before him. She was that kind of woman, expressly self-defined and free of ambiguity. Somehow he knew he would always see her in his mind that way, with such clarity of detail that it would seem as though she were there. It was ridiculous to think that she would do anything to hurt him, he realized. There wasn’t a devious bone in her body. She was scrupulously honest, a principled woman. What was more, she couldn’t possibly know why he was actually here—or what he was trying to do.
He could feel a tightness at the base of his skull as he scanned the array of sensors one last time. The room’s harsh reddish glow, its pulsing lights seemed to be flashing inside his head. A dull pain throbbed behind his eyes, warning him that it was lying in wait—the white noise, the oblivion that routed his senses. He had no heart for solving the puzzles his equipment presented that night. The ship wouldn’t be within range again for another twenty-four hours, a frustrating detail that gave him great gaps of time between transmissions. Time! He had too damn much of it now—and too little overall. At the moment he needed to breathe, to clear his head.
The night sky was devoid of stars as he walked out onto the porch. An owl hooted softly in the distance, a forlorn sound that knifed through him. This place was lonely. The vast wasteland he’d come from hadn’t felt as desolate as these hills did. There’d been nothing there he wanted. Nothing to remind him he was a man.
The stricture in his throat might have been laughter, only it was too acid. Too harsh. She’d changed all that. She’d reminded him that he was something lower than a man, something closer to an animal in rut. Lord, the pain of that night he’d had to undress her.
The sycamores stirred, whispering her name ... Lise.
He descended the porch steps into the darkness, breathing in cool air, trying to calm the sudden hard rhythm of his heart. What was it about her? He was drawn to her, inexorably drawn. It was more than physical. And it was testing his control.
His stomach muscles tightened on their own hollowness, reminding him how empty he was. It was a sensation he’d come to associate with her, only now the pulling inside him was vibrant, almost painful. It felt as though all of the electrical impulses in his body were being drawn toward his groin, draining the energy from his limbs, from his brain. The eye of the storm, he thought, the vortex. It was wild and lonely, that empty feeling. As lonely as an animal calling out its need.
He needed the woman.
The claws of sexual longing ripped through him. Gut-deep and beautiful. Beautiful. His jaw muscles knotted as he fought the sensation, willing away the hardening in his loins. But he couldn’t stop it. It was her that he needed, the coupling of two pounding, aching bodies. Deep, aching sex.
<
br /> His body throbbed with the need for physical release, but it was so much more than that. He needed her for life. She was his way out of the darkness. She could give him back everything he’d lost—and everything he’d thrown away.
Laughter again. Harsh. Acid. All of this yearning was insane, he told himself. He knew nothing about her. She might have someone else, a lover. His intuition answered that doubt immediately. She didn’t. The flashes of yearning in her eyes said she felt it too. She’d felt the claws.
The price then. Every dream had its price. What was the cost of wanting her? Even if she meant him no harm, there were others who did—on her behalf. Buck Thompson wanted to kill him—or at least do some serious damage. The man had violence in his eyes. Stephen understood the allure of violence. It was as cleansing as it was destructive. It was cathartic. He might even have welcomed a confrontation under other circumstances, but his mission was already at risk.
Some dreams were too costly, he told himself. Even if he begged, borrowed, and stole to have her, what then? Would making love to her be enough? He could never take her where he was going. And he could never leave her behind.
“Which of these screws is an RH two dash fifty-six by five sixteenths?” Julie called out. She was bent over the parts to the model train kit they were hoping to “customize” into something resembling a metrorail system.
“You’re asking me?” Lise was laboring over the railroad pike, trying to align a series of tiny telephone poles along a highway.
“I think we’re in over our heads,” Julie grumbled. “Couldn’t the kids just grow something in a petri dish instead?”
“Not if we want to win that fifty-thousand-dollar scholarship money. If we don’t show up at the science fair with something that looks like a metrorail, we haven’t got a snowball’s chance.”
Lise glanced out the front windows as the cries and whistles of playing children drew her attention. Summer school had let out for the day, but as always, several of her students lingered on the playground.
She rolled a telephone pole absently between her fingers. She truly enjoyed the sounds of children playing. Their familiar shouts were a form of security somehow, almost a comfort. But it wasn’t the antics of her students that kept her gazing out the windows so intently.
She’d been preoccupied for the last two days over the possibility that Stephen might show up. Preoccupied, she thought, that hardly covered it. Forty-eight hours of thinking about little else but the moment when he would walk into her classroom. She was hung up, stuck in the groove like a cheap record needle. What was worse, when she wasn’t contemplating his arrival, she was wondering why he hadn’t arrived.
All morning she’d felt drawn to the windows. Once or twice she’d even found herself gazing out toward the hills, in the direction of his cabin. She glanced down at the object she was rolling in her fingers and clicked her tongue softly. Freud would have a field day with this, she thought, setting the telephone pole down. It wasn’t in her makeup to be so quixotic. She wasn’t the type to tilt at windmills or go off on romantic tangents. And even though she probably harbored a fantasy or two, she’d never been led by them.
“Earth to Lise—”
Lise picked up the telephone pole and redoubled her efforts. “What is it, Julie?”
“You okay?”
“Sure—I just can’t get this thing to take root.”
“Maybe you need some glue.” Julie pushed the instructions aside a bit too eagerly. “I’ll get it.”
“You read,” Lise countered. “I’ll get the glue.”
What greeted Lise inside the storage cabinet—in addition to the regular supplies—was a bowl of petrified papier-mache, several piles of wadded construction paper, and two opened tubes of glue, both of them nearly squeezed dry. Someday her students would learn the difference between a storage cabinet and a wastebasket.
“Off to the supply room,” she called to Julie, who was still mumbling to herself over the instructions.
Lise slipped the supply room door key off its hook and shut the cabinet. She’d barely left the classroom and entered the corridor when she saw a figure step out of the gloom at the end of the hall. Her intuition told her who it was as she strained to make out the shadowy features of the man who was walking toward her.
“Stephen?” His name slipped out under her breath. He couldn’t possibly have heard her. There was a flashing energy about him that was almost visible as he walked up to her. It put her instantly on guard.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
She wasn’t sure what made her more apprehensive—his silence, or the blazing concentration of blue in his eyes as he stopped and stood before her. His gaze swept over her body with the intensity of a spotlight, leaving her feeling as though she’d been searched without ever having been touched.
She repeated the question softly, reaching for a breath. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d been invited,” he said.
“Oh, yes ... well, school’s out for the day. The kids are already gone.”
“I didn’t come for the kids, Lise ... I came for you.”
“For me?” Her throat went dry, and her heart went wild. “What does that mean?”
His eyes touched hers, and their searchlight intensity narrowed, probing, penetrating her thoughts. “You know what it means.”
“No ... I don’t.”
His eyes darkened then, reproaching her. “This isn’t like you, Lise. It’s not in you to lie, even to yourself.”
But I lied for you, she thought. I told the museum crowd you were harmless—a tourist—when a part of me sensed they were right. You are different, and frightening. Lise looked away, her heart pounding. Why hadn’t she listened to her own doubts and fears about him? Had she been too busy defending him? Or had she suppressed them? Either way she was acting like a woman who didn’t know her own mind.
“I came for you, Lise ... to be with you.”
His voice was taut and sure and rivetingly male. There was such certainty in it, such latent power that she felt a strange weakening of her will, almost a giddiness. He knew what he wanted and for some reason that thrilled her. He’d come for her. He’d come to make love to her. She couldn’t let that happen, of course. It was too crazy even to consider, but that didn’t stop her from going weak-kneed at the thought.
He touched the collar of her white linen blouse, almost as though to straighten it, but his hand lingered and drifted down the lapel, grazing her breast. His thumb lifted the edge of the top button. “You know why I’m here, don’t you?”
She held in a sigh, and its energy trembled down her body. Even though she shook her head imperceptibly, she loved the heat of his hand against her. It was dark and concentrated, like his eyes. The vibrancy of his fingers, the thought of what else they might do, sent strokes of anticipation radiating through her.
“Lise ... answer me.”
She looked up raggedly, her control ebbing away. “Yes, I know why you’re here.”
He released her then, leaving her swaying in his wake as he scanned the corridor and spotted the supply room door to his right. Darkness spilled into the hallway as he opened the door and turned back to her.
“We can’t go in there—”
But she let herself be drawn into the room with him, her heart rocketing as he closed the door behind them. She relinquished the key without protest, watching it glow in the dim light as he locked them in. The only illumination came from a narrow fanlight window above the door. Why in the name of heaven didn’t she stop him? She didn’t understand the frightening control he had over her. Or why she was breathless and trembling when she ought to be resisting.
Something was driving him, too, she realized as he turned back to her. There was just enough light for her to make out the tension in his features as he reached out and touched her face. His fingers were rigid as they traced her jawline, leaving her skin tingly and numb.
“You have somethin
g I need,” he said.
“What—”
His eyes flared, incandescently blue. His jaw gripped painfully. Breathing a four-letter word, he took one slow step toward her, caught her under the arms, and lifted her to him, his palms pressing into the sides of her breasts. “This. I need to touch you again, Lise. Like this. I need your breasts under my hands, your lips under my mouth. I need you flat on your back, your beautiful legs spread—”
“Stephen!” She was so shocked, she couldn’t say anything else. He had jolted her back to reality. He had jolted her with rioting, slamming excitement. She wanted to stop him. She wanted to slap him, but her hand didn’t seem to be getting the message!
Light from the window streamed above them, arcing halos through his golden hair. He was strong and sure, his hands hot on her body. Despite the thundering noise of her pulse, Lise was aware of so many things at once. The inherent fear of relinquishing power, the seductive thrill of losing control. She could feel strength racing through him, flowing into her. His palms were pressed into a softness that had ripped painfully alive in just the last ten seconds. It was as though he’d pulled a lever and turned on a paralyzing current. The shock was running through her body, grounding her to the floor.
“Let go of me—” The words spilled out helplessly.
“I can’t do that, Lise.” His dark eyes were shadowed by a hunger that made her stomach knot. “I can’t let you go. Don’t you know that?”
There was something odd and vulnerable in his voice, a ragged quality underlying the raw desire. It was almost sad, and it drained her of every ounce of resistance.
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