Losing Time (Lost Time, Book 1): A Time Travel Romantic Suspense Series

by Nicola Claire

  In the past, I’d have valued both his discretion and his innate ability to get you to see things from a different point of view. Perhaps I needed that clarity now.

  “No. There’s been more than one,” I admitted, refusing to show how that affected me.

  “How many?”

  “I’m not sure. Some seem a continuation of the original. Some not. It’s only been a few days.”

  “Exactly, Jack. This is happening too quickly.”

  He was right, of course. But part of me refused to believe Mimi wasn’t already mine.

  “What do we know about the girl? Bring me up-to-date,” he ordered. From anyone else, I’d baulk. But this was Bryan Fawkes. An experienced and dedicated RATS Surgeon.

  I forced myself to talk.

  “Carolyn Wylde is her identical twin. The sister disappeared first, picked up by Lunik. We picked up Mimi chasing Sergei. Sergei threatened Carolyn’s life, then in the next confrontation had Carolyn deliver the ultimatum. Mimi just wants to rescue her. That’s all she can think about. The less likely that becomes, the more determined she gets.

  “She’s courageous, more so than you’d think. And extremely intelligent. She’s taken to time travel as though made for it. She has a base understanding that most people take years to find. A natural.” I shook my head. “She continues to mystify.”

  “A natural,” Bryan murmured. “Don’t you find it unusual that both sisters were picked up on flybys?”

  “Absolutely. It’s the one thing I can’t reconcile inside my mind. The chances of one being picked up on a flyby are astronomical. But both? I wouldn’t have thought that possible. I’ve a theory, though,” I added. He nodded his head for me to continue. “It’s in the DNA.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. What has Clive said?”

  “Clive,” I replied on a heated breath of air. Bryan’s focus sharpened. “Clive has always believed our genetic makeup is involved when it comes to the dreams.”

  “Well,” Bryan said, looking out over the cafeteria as if seeing nothing. He wasn’t though. This was Bryan Fawkes. The American always saw everything. “If that ain’t an endorsement for the twin DNA angle, then I don’t know what is.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  Bryan scratched the back of his head, his gaze steadying on Sally Groves as she talked to Mimi.

  “It means, my friend, that she’s the key. The rip’s been mended, but not everything has been put back the way it should be. Both she and Carolyn Wylde are out of time. We return one; maybe the waves won’t rebound or break apart. We keep them both out of their original time, then sooner or later, the dimensions are going to buckle. Nothing this significant, this monumental like an OE, can be left untended, Jack. She has to go back, even if we can’t locate the sister. Sergei won’t do it. That leaves us.”

  He turned to look at me.

  “The dreams,” I argued. I didn’t like where he was going with this.

  “You have to make them happen. The sooner, the better. Once the dreams are realised, Time will settle. Then returning her should put a lid on all of this.”

  An awful feeling expanded inside my gut. A sickening sensation of doubt and guilt and desire and shame. This was not how I had envisaged things going with Mimi. I am not a manipulator. It’s not in me to play such games with people.

  Especially someone like Mimi.

  Someone full of such brightness and hope. Such sparks of intelligence and beauty. Such a courageous being forced to face disastrous odds. I was in awe of Mimi Wylde. But taking this path would ruin everything.

  “What about Carolyn?” I asked, scrambling to grasp another argument. Anything that would prevent me from doing what Bryan had suggested.

  “Carolyn is already lost,” he said decisively, immediately followed by a small, shocked gasp from over our shoulders.

  We both turned in our seats to see who had made the sound. For my part, I was stunned she’d approached so stealthily, that both Bryan and I had failed to see that Miss Groves and Mimi had moved at all.

  Sally looked equally as shocked at what Bryan had just said, but underlying her shock was outrage.

  Mimi just looked broken.

  “Miss Wylde,” I said, standing from my seat. Bollocks!

  She shook her head. Let out a small sound of misery. And then she was running.

  From the room. From the confrontation. From me.

  It took a mere second for my feet to follow. My heart thudding painfully in my chest. My mind running on automatic; images of our dreams cascading across my eyes, followed swiftly by Bryan’s unwanted warning.

  You have to make them happen. The sooner, the better.

  Time demanded we fix this outage.

  My heart said, bugger that!

  I had no idea which would win. But history has a habit of repeating itself. And I’d always, always, done the right thing.

  Until It Isn’t

  Mimi

  I should have known. RATS was only concerned with one thing. Time. Fixing it. Mending it. Stitching. Catching. Making. It didn’t matter how, as long as Time survived.

  It would have been a noble cause, in an utterly unbelievable way, if not for Carrie. I was fighting a losing battle, and I had no one on my side to aid me. RATS was too stuck in its ways to see things from any other point of view. Carrie and I were out of time. Therefore we needed to be put back accordingly.

  But what if we were meant to be out of time? What if putting us back negated all the good that we’d done?

  That made me laugh. A snort of derision escaping as I gasped for air. In what way had Carrie made things better? Clearly, RATS and this time were doing just fine, thank you very much. But Carrie being here, delivering ultimatums for RATS to close or else, couldn’t be construed as a good thing any which way you sold it.

  And me? What was I? A scientist who obsessed over space travel. A nobody from a different century.

  I rounded the corner of a beautifully manicured box hedge and found sanctuary under an old chestnut tree. The heavy boughs inviting me into the shadows beneath. I pressed a hand to my stomach, trying to still my wretched breathing, trying to dislodge the sensations of defeat and despair.

  Reaching out, I rested my hand against the rough bark of the tree’s twisted and gnarled trunk, and then simply collapsed, in a highly undignified heap, on the stone bench beside it. What was I going to do? How did I convince these people that rescuing Carrie was all that mattered?

  It was all that mattered to me.

  But all that mattered to RATS was mending Time.

  Stitching. Catching. Making.

  “You shouldn’t have run,” a voice said from out of the shadows.

  I lifted my eyes and met steadying whisky-amber out of a concerned looking face. He was breathing freely, not struggling for every lungful as I was. But he would have been just as swift as I had been to get here so soon after I’d left the cafeteria. Jack Evans was super fit.

  “I didn’t run,” I argued, and watched the side of Jack’s lips tip up in a smile.

  “What do you call it then?”

  “A strategic exit.”

  “At full speed?”

  “I can run faster.”

  He stepped out of the shadows and moved to sit beside me on the bench seat. I stiffened. I wasn’t ready to face reality - or the dreams - just yet.

  “You can’t run from this, Mimi.”

  I stared down at the leaves strewn across the ground at my feet; colours turning for autumn. I didn’t even know what day it was here. What year. I’d only guessed the century.

  Damn, I was so far out of my time.

  “Dr Fawkes was only stating his opinion,” Jack said softly.

  “His opinion seems a fair representation of RATS’ own.”

  “You don’t know that.” There’s a lot I didn’t know. “I don’t believe it.”

  I turned to look at him. He was watching me from behind carefully shrouded eyes. Truth or lie? I didn’t know
him well enough to be sure which, even if my mind, my dreams, knew his body intimately.

  I shifted on the bench and sucked in a breath of air to steady myself.

  “What do you believe, Jack?”

  He leant forward and rested his elbows on his knees, staring off across the garden. I’m not sure he saw its beauty, I certainly wasn’t paying it much attention. But he took his time staring at nothing before he spoke. Choosing his words carefully.

  “I think this has all happened for a reason,” he finally said.

  “What reason can there be for Carrie being with that man?”

  His head shook from side to side slowly, as if clearing his mind of an unwanted thought.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I dreamt of you before I met you, and I’m not the only one here at RATS to have dreamt of a Wylde twin.”

  I stood up from the bench seat abruptly, rounding on him, hands fisted on hips, mouth open; words failing me for a second.

  Had someone dreamed of Carrie? Who? Fawkes?

  Jack lifted up his hand, palm open, to calm me.

  “Easy,” he murmured.

  “Don’t you ‘easy’ me, Jack Evans!”

  “I’m just saying; there’s no need to get upset.”

  “Isn’t there? What’s with you Surgeons and dreaming? What’s with these effing dreams anyway?”

  “I’ve already explained the dreams, Miss Wylde.”

  “Oh, and I’m Miss Wylde again!” My hands flew up in the air, and I turned away, pacing a good distance; putting space between us lest I strike out and hit the man.

  Or knee him.

  “Mimi,” he said softly, that gentle tone from just over my shoulder. I hunched my back, sinking in on myself. But that wouldn’t make him go away.

  “I feel like I’m the only one who wants to find her, Jack,” I whispered. “Like I’m the only one who cares about Carrie.”

  “That’s not true. I care.”

  “And the person who dreamed of her?” I turned to look up at him. He was only a few feet away. Hands in his trouser pockets, a worried expression on his face. “Who dreamed of her, Jack?”

  “It’s not for me to say.”

  “Then why mention it?” I demanded.

  He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. Scratched at his scar. I stared at the small mark; wondering where he’d gotten it; how he’d gotten it. Why he reached for it when things got too heated.

  “The dreams mean something,” he said. “To dream of you both before we met you for the first time…it’s not a coincidence. Our dreams are prophetic, but rarely are they unrelated to our travels through Time. I’ve had countless dreams, Mimi. Over the years perhaps hundreds. And every single one of them involved a person I already knew. Had travelled with.

  “Why are you and Carolyn so different? Why did I dream of you before we met?”

  I shook my head. He took a step closer.

  “And the type of dreams,” he said in a quieter voice. “The intimacy.” I blushed, praying the shadows kept the telltale sign from my cheeks. “Not just what we were doing, but the fact that we’d done it before. Enough times for us to feel comfortable. To feel safe. Content.”

  He took another step closer, this time bringing himself to within a foot from me. I didn’t move, but I did look down at his shoes, noting the distance, or lack thereof, between us.

  “You felt it too, didn’t you?” he asked. “Mimi? You felt it too, that intimacy,” he stressed.

  I wished he would stop using that word. But I had to admit the word did feel right.

  Intimacy. Intimacy which as strangers we shouldn’t be feeling.

  “How do you do this?” I asked out of desperation. “How do live with these dreams making you feel something that isn’t right?”

  “In what way is it not right?”

  I looked up at him and shook my head.

  “We barely know each other, Jack. And yet I know exactly how you like to be touched. How you like to touch me. That’s not right.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re a man.”

  He arched a brow at me and smiled.

  “So glad you noticed, Miss Wylde.”

  I huffed out a breath and waved a hand at him, taking a step away.

  In moves too quick to catch, he reached out and stopped me; hot palm to the side of my neck. Another intimacy he should not have had. I rounded on him, moving with the pull of heat from his fingers, stepping into an embrace I had no intention of completing. His fingers wrapped up in my hair in a move I recognised immediately.

  Was the recognition from the dreams or the few times we’d actually kissed in reality? It was all getting so confusing.

  “Mimi,” he murmured. I pressed my fists to his chest, trying to halt the progression of the caress. “In a year’s time, the dreams will make sense,” he whispered into my hair, his arms so much stronger than mine.

  I hesitated, waiting for his explanation. Giving him an opportunity I shouldn’t have.

  “We’re merely jumping ahead of ourselves in this one regard,” he murmured, his free hand soothing down the centre of my back.

  Heat unfurled from in front of me, sparks of electricity fired up and down my spine. I was sandwiched between an inferno. My body reluctantly relaxed. He took advantage; pulling me closer; drawing me further in; cinching the embrace.

  “As Surgeons of Time,” he murmured, “that doesn’t seem such an unbelievable thing, does it? When you think about it, it actually makes sense. We surf dimensional waves from one time to another. Sometimes we visit things before they have even transpired. Why not feel them sooner too?”

  “It’s not natural,” I argued, but my words were muffled by the front of his shirt. My cheek pressed against his chest, my breath making the material beneath my lips moist already.

  “Why can’t it be?” he pressed. “If time travel exists, then why not this?”

  “Time travel is not right either,” I argued, for the sake of arguing I think.

  His chest rumbled as laughter bubbled up from deep within.

  “I love your contrariness,” he said between chuckles. “I love that you question everything.”

  Not many people did. Carrie, for one, often grew frustrated with me. Having to wait until I’d argued every side of a thing before I’d proceed. My sister was spontaneous by nature. I was the cautious one.

  And yet here I was, wrapped up in the arms of a stranger I knew with every beat of my heart.

  “It can’t be right,” I whispered. It was almost a plea. His shoulders relaxed, even as his arms tightened. He ran a hand through my hair and then bent down to kiss my forehead.

  “You’ve seen such amazing things in the past few days,” he said softly. “You’ve had your whole outlook on Time altered. You’ve handled it with a level of decorum most wouldn’t have possessed. And yet you doubt this?”

  “Did you always believe in the dreams?” I challenged, knowing the answer already.

  “Not always, no.”

  “How long before you began to see them as being real?”

  “A few years,” he admitted reluctantly.

  I snorted and pulled back to look up at him. “And you expect me to accept all of this within a few short days?”

  He smiled. “You’ve set a high standard, Miss Wylde. You’ve made it all look so effortless.” I doubted that completely. “One can’t help but be surprised that finally, something has thrown you off kilter.”

  I couldn’t stop it; I smiled. He stilled. And then in the next breath, his lips were pressed to mine. My body responded immediately. The familiarity of the act making it impossible to deny. But I couldn’t tell if that familiarity was due to the dreams or the fact that I’d kissed Jack Evans several times now. Each time more exquisite than the last.

  The dreams had me knowing things. Things I shouldn’t have known yet. But the reality of a kiss from Jack Evans made the dreams pale in comparison.

  I
’d feared there was nothing of discovery left. I knew his body. I knew the sounds he made when he lost himself in the act of making love. I even knew how he tasted. But actually kissing Jack made me realise how small those sensations were. How tiny they were compared to reality. How insignificant they were to what Jack actually made me feel when he kissed me in truth.

  I couldn’t imagine what differences there would be when we finally made love. Familiarity mixed with intimacy coated in the reality of Jack.

  He’d always seem so much bigger than a dream to me, I was sure of it. Even as I battled what the dreams made me feel when apart.

  I moaned as his tongue delved deeper, my lower back arched over his arm, exposing myself better to his attentions. One of his hands was wrapped up in the strands of my hair, tugging, directing, controlling; a move I was very familiar with in my dreams as well. He pressed the length of his body down the curve of mine; fitting himself against me as if a missing puzzle piece. He devoured my mouth, cupped my hip against his frame, rocked his body into mine.

  Jack did nothing by halves.

  I wanted to climb up him. I wanted to climb inside him. I wanted him to climb inside of me.

  He moved us, somehow maintaining our connection. Our lips locked, our tongues entwined, our bodies begging each other for more contact. I felt the coolness of the bench beneath my butt cheek, and then I was up on his lap, my legs spread either side of his thighs, his erection pressed into my centre. Rocking. Moaning. Pleading. Tasting. It was almost too much.

  And then not nearly enough. I knew what else he could offer.

  “Jack,” I gasped when he pulled away to suckle on the side of my neck.

  “Fuck,” he murmured against my heated skin. “I want you so badly.” His voice was beyond a rasp; desperate. “I know exactly how good it will feel and yet I don’t know if anything can better this. Can better you. Here. Now.” His lips moved across my skin, tracing a heated trail over my jaw, my chin, finding my lips again in a blistering kiss.

  He groaned into my mouth as if pouring himself inside there. He gripped me tightly around the waist and pulled me hard down on top of him, rubbing me in exactly the right spot, reminding me what lay pressed against my stomach. What was there for the taking. His hand tightened in my hair, tilting my head exactly where he wanted it. He consumed me. He owned me. He laid all past experiences to waste.