by Mallory Kane
"BeeDee. Didn't you smell something up there? Just before the explosion?"
Kristen tried to calm her panicked thoughts as her gasps quieted to normal breathing. Had she smelled something? "Sickeningly sweet? Like rotten bananas?"
"Got it in one, Doc."
Kristen looked up at the building, where her window had been. "Sam," she whispered.
Rider hadn't relinquished his hold on her, but now he pushed her gently away and pointed to an alley.
"Sam!" It was Sam. No other house cat in the city was that big and could move that fast. She started after him, but Rider jerked on her arm.
He pulled her up against his unyielding body until she could feel his breath on her cheek. She wanted to duck away from the unrelenting fury in his gaze.
"Leave the goddamned cat!" he spat and grabbed her jaw. "Don't give me any trouble or I'll break your jaw." He let go of her jaw but not her arm, and she had no choice but to follow him, stumbling as she tried to keep up with his longer, faster strides.
By the time they stopped, blocks away from her apartment, her muscles ached and she heard the sirens wailing. Naturally, he wouldn't want to be around when the police came. They'd ask questions about the explosions.
The explosions. Kristen twisted around until she could see his face. "How'd you know?" she asked.
"Know what?"
"About the explosions? That's the second one you've pulled me out of." She shivered, not just from the cold. "And, Mister Rider from the future, if you're so intent on killing me, why do you keep flubbing it? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to leave me in the building when it exploded?" This was getting ridiculous. A man from the future, who claimed to be intent upon killing her, had saved her life twice.
"Don't give me any ideas." His eyes were blue as glacial ice, and his voice was like a deep freeze.
"Give you any ideas? Look, if it's not you who keeps blowing up these places, then who is it?"
Rider slumped and his hold on her shoulders slacked. She felt a stab of compassion when she saw his face turn bleak with despair.
"I don't know," he said. "BeeDee wasn't perfected when they sent me back here. So it's got to be somebody else from the future." He looked toward her apartment building, then down at her. "Somebody else who's trying to kill you."
Kristen stared at him, openmouthed. "Somebody else? You were serious? You think somebody from your time is trying to kill me?" She laughed shakily and shook her head. The things he was saying were too bizarre, too confusing to be believed.
"That's just it. Not my time. BeeDee was too dangerous when I left. They would have sent it with me if they'd been even remotely confident it wouldn't blow up on the trip." He pushed his hands through his hair and narrowed his eyes at her. "These guys are from further in the future than me."
Kristen shook her head angrily, helpless against his logic that was no logic at all, but must be a very deep-seated psychosis. Or the truth.
"No. You can't ask me to believe all this." She twisted her hands together. "First you, then the explosions! Now you're telling me they're coming from further in the future than you? No. No." She felt like she was being spun in a circle, dizzy with it all. "No. I can't believe that."
She closed her eyes and reached for the professional calm she kept inside her. Drowsy from the promethazine she'd taken, and almost sick with fear, she still managed to dredge up enough calm and assurance to keep her from falling apart. Sighing, she peered at Rider.
He was obviously exhausted. The few hours' sleep they'd managed to catch hadn't been nearly enough to take the edge off his weariness. His face was gaunt, his eyes red-rimmed and bright with pain. Kristen could probably deck him and get away, he looked that tired. But, right now, it was all she could do to stay upright. She couldn’t even lift her arms.
"Doc! Look out!"
Rider's grip tightened desperately as Kristen looked up. Blinding headlights rushed at her just as Rider threw her sideways. She landed hard, rolled, and found herself lying up against a set of concrete steps. Her head pounded where it had hit the bottom step and her chest convulsed as she tried to breathe.
She started to move, and felt something that wasn't a concrete step. When she opened her eyes she found herself staring up into eyes as black as midnight, peering brightly out of a hooded garment of some indefinite color. An odor of unwashed flesh sifted through the haze that enveloped Kristen.
She pulled herself up into a crouch and shook her head.
"Oughta watch where you're going," the derelict croaked, waving a hand hardly covered by the remnants of a tattered wool mitten.
Kristen squinted at the owner of the voice, trying to focus enough to tell if it was a man or a woman. Something tickled at the edge of her memory.
"Yep. Cars can be dangerous. 'Specially when they speed up. But then, so can houses. Houses don't speed up though." The voice cracked on a discordant laugh. "You know, the electric company don't never knock. They just read the meter and leave."
The figure sank back into the shadows as Kristen's head swam and her arms and legs gave way. She wanted to sink down onto the damp sidewalk and go to sleep, and to hell with people from the future who wanted to blow her up.
Then Rider bent over her and his hand touched her cheek with amazing gentleness. When she looked up, his gaze searched her face while his fingers carefully traced a spot on her cheek that was beginning to burn. Kristen felt a tenderness emanating from him that was so counter to anything she had gleaned from him before, she hardly recognized it. Tenderness and concern. Was all that for her?
"Are you all right?" he asked breathlessly.
She nodded, still finding it hard to breathe. "Wh-what happened?" she stammered.
Rider shook his head and glanced in the direction the car had taken. His brow was furrowed, his mouth downturned in a frown.
Kristen took his hand as she looked in the car had been going, then turned to examine the other end of the street. The streetlights were haloed with haze, their brightness barely able to penetrate the thick fog.
Turning back to Rider, she saw that his shoulders and arms were smeared with dirt, his face smudged and drawn. What had the old derelict said? She wiped her face and pushed her hands through her hair, trying to force her brain to think. It was important, she was sure. Something about cars and houses.
"It sped up," she whispered, staring at him. His face didn't change. The furrowed brow, the bewildered frown stayed as his gaze searched hers for understanding.
"Cars speed up. Houses don't. It came around the corner, then sped up." He stared at her stupidly. She wanted to shake him. "Rider. Come on. That's what the woman said." She pointed at the steps. "She was right! It sped up when it saw us."
The lines between his brows got deeper. He looked toward the building. "What woman?"
"That—" Kristen stared into the shadows, but she couldn't see anything. She shrugged. "There was somebody there. I don't even know if it was a woman. I think she was pretty crazy, but she was right about the car. It tried to kill us."
When Kristen said the words, their impact hit her with all the force of a blow. She dropped onto the curb, her legs no longer able to hold her up.
"Someone tried to kill us," she whispered, listening in awe to her own voice. If she said it three times, or thirty, or three hundred, would it make more sense?
"That's what I've been trying to tell you, Doc. Now, come on," Rider said, pulling her upright. "They'll be back. We've got to get out of here."
Kristen leaned against him, waiting for her arms and legs to stop quivering like gelatin. "Why?" she whispered, wanting to cry. "Why are they trying to kill me?"
Rider wasn't listening to her, though. He was concentrated on something else. She looked up at him, then in the direction of his gaze. The car that had almost hit her was bearing down on them. Rider jerked her back into a narrow alley. The car slowed down for a brief instant, then sped past the alley.
"Run, Doc. They're turning around!"
She ran.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kristen and Rider ran for hours, ducking from one dark alley to another, avoiding the busy streets, zigzagging in and out of alleyways too fast for a car to follow. Kristen couldn't think. All she could do was force one leg forward, then the other, jerked along by Rider's hand clamped on her wrist. Miraculously, she kept her feet under her. Air burned in her lungs like hot gas, and her side hurt.
Suddenly, she was jerked sideways between fetid garbage bins, into a cramped space. She fell against a hard, warm body, which rumbled with a groan as her weight hit him.
"Damn, Doc. Take it easy," Rider gasped. "These ribs are still sore."
Kristen was wedged between his legs, her buttocks up against the juncture of his thighs and her shoulders resting against his broad chest. His chest heaved with his labored breath, frosted puffs wafted in front of her face. Her own breath whistled in her throat.
"Sorry," she started, when he hissed.
"Shhh!"
They crouched there, ludicrously positioned against each other like dogs in heat, her backside so close to him she felt the throb of his tightly constrained passion. The sensation was so powerful that she gasped.
His breath warmed her cheek as he whispered to her in a muffled, strained voice. "Close your eyes. They reflect. And try to stay still, please."
The amused desperation in his voice made her face burn with embarrassment.
She squeezed her eyelids together and turned her head toward his collarbone, breathing in the warm redolence of his skin. He wrapped his arm around her, cradling her forehead gently as they waited.
The time stretched to eternity while they sat, joined more intimately than Kristen had ever been to anyone. Once, footsteps crunched menacingly near as someone passed. She didn't move, didn't even breathe and whoever it was finally passed by.
"Good girl," Rider whispered in her ear, so faint she hardly heard him over the beat of her heart. His hand on her head was as comforting as a mother's, his hardness against her bottom more disturbing than anything she’d experienced since she’d found him. She sat there, surrounded by him, her insides churning with emotions she had no name for, her head spinning with more confusion than she'd ever known. She was being held hostage in an alley by a murderous psychopath, and yet she felt safer than she'd felt since Skipper’s death.
It was unthinkable that this man who threatened to kill her was the first man to stir unquenchable desire in her. She, who had thought her empathy would never allow her to get close enough to a man to experience love and lovemaking, was having erotic fantasies about a deranged killer.
The night eased toward dawn while Kristen alternated between an exhausted doze and a throbbing need she was sure no tranquilizer could fix. Rider was similarly affected because his hand would relax against her, the hard pressure on her buttocks would ease, then he would jerk and the throbbing tension would increase.
She was awash with his feelings and her own. Each time he stirred to wakefulness, she felt his body tense with unwanted need and saw him grimace as his gut cramped with nausea. Kristen knew his desire was unwelcome because of his reaction to it. She understood. She was a physician, it was her job to understand these things.
His reaction was just the physical response of a male body in close proximity with a female, she reasoned. Of course. That was all. The reaction was innate, programmed by aeons of DNA selectivity. The DNA would survive. Constant, unrelenting sexual desire had been programmed into the species to assure survival.
Thank goodness for her scientific background. Kristen blessed her professional objectivity, while at the same time she wondered why it kept failing her.
Because it was failing her. Miserably. Even if his feelings were unwanted, accompanied by disgust and even nausea—how flattering—hers were not.
As much as she'd like to pretend she was unaffected, even disgusted by the betrayal of her body, the truth was she was savoring each distressing moment, just like a schoolgirl in the throes of her first crush.
Rider’s slightest movement, the tiniest shift of his body, brought a new height of awareness to her. She sat there, surrounded by his heat and his hardness while her mind and body went through each nuance of awakening like a pubescent adolescent. Physically, she'd been through it all years ago, but reliving it now, she was suffused with a sweet agony she'd never known back then.
Then she'd been too frightened by the changes in her mind to pay much attention to the changes in her body. It was during puberty that her empathic abilities had blossomed, and those sensations had overridden the simpler, less bothersome sexual maturing of her body.
Now, in the space of a few hours, sheltered and safe in the arms of a deranged bum, Kristen experienced all the sweet kindling of sexual response that she'd never quite achieved during adolescence. In that short time, she flourished emotionally as she had physically a decade before.
So she sat imprisoned, sheathed between his hard thighs, her skin alternately burning with embarrassment and heated with desire. She wondered if he could feel her heat, if he knew how her body was reacting to him.
Finally, ready to scream from the unreleased tension inside her, Kristen whispered, "Why'd we stop here?"
He sighed, his diaphragm rising and falling against her back. "I didn't know where to go, and I couldn't go any further."
Her heart contracted at the defeated tone of his voice. "You saved my life." Suddenly, giggles erupted from her belly. "You came from the future to kill me, and you've saved my life—what—three times now? Why? If you're who you say you are, and if my great-great-great-grandchildren did what you say they did, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
His body wrapped around hers became rigid, pain and nausea warring with exhaustion inside him. "Could you shut up?" he growled, even as he responded to her again. He moved involuntarily and she pressed backward into him, savoring his heat, his hardness.
She had no idea where her instinctive reaction to him came from. She had never, ever reacted like that before. No one had ever gotten close enough.
The few men she'd dated had telegraphed their insincerity and selfishness to her through their touch, and those sensations had always effectively tamped any desire she might have felt.
But Rider's touch was very, very different. Kristen shook her head. None of this made any sense. And yet she'd never felt anything as incredibly erotic as his body wrapped around her, his sex pressed hard against her.
Kristen moved again and heard the deep groan that rumbled up from his chest. The vibrations against her back stoked her yearning. She leaned her head back against his shoulder. His breath quickened. Her heart pounded. His hand caressed her throat and his thighs tightened around her. Then, as her heart sped out of control and her insides melted, his hands moved lower to gently trace and cup her breasts, and his mouth sought hers.
Some primal instinct made her arch her back and press her breasts into his hands, seeking his warm, searching fingers on her nipples. Something sweet and alien happened deep within her and she gasped.
The sound seemed to bring Rider back to his senses, because his body went rigid and he withdrew.
Breathless, bereft, and embarrassed by her abandoned response to him, Kristen said caustically, "Could we move now?"
A ripple of laughter rumbled through her companion. "Sure, Doc," he drawled, deliberately tightening his thigh muscles around her again. "What's your pleasure?"
Hot desire lost the battle with embarrassment as she flushed, burning her skin against his hand. She tossed her head, trying to rid herself of his suffocating, wonderful clench. "Let me up, you—you —" she hissed, squirming against him.
"Whoa," he gasped. "Stop elbowing me in the ribs. Shit!" He grabbed her arms and thrust her from him. "Doc! Stop it!" He shook her until she stopped squirming.
No matter how angry she was at him for causing this disturbing yearning to rock her, no matter how painful his injuries were, she had enough sense to know that h
e could hurt her if he wanted to.
"Doc, you listening to me?"
She nodded, trying to see his face in the darkness. Any playfulness was gone. He was totally serious. Suddenly, after hours of sitting behind garbage bins, the odor of rotting food gagged her. She wondered how he had stood it, since the smell of even fresh meat made him sick.
"I can't figure out how they keep finding us." The weary confusion in his voice worried her. "We need to find someplace safe. Where can we go?"
She lifted her chin and stared at him. Red streaks of dawn were beginning to sneak into the shadows, outlining the harsh planes of his face like a pen and ink drawing.
Kristen wrenched her thoughts from his sculpted beauty and reminded herself that he wanted to kill her. Or at least that's what he kept saying. "We? Wouldn't I be pretty stupid to tell you if I did know some place safe?"
He shrugged. "What are you going to do?"
"What I'd like to do is overpower you and knock you out, then go to the police."
Rider wiped a hand over his face and gave her an exasperated look between his splayed fingers, amusement dancing in his eyes. "The police. Right. What would you tell them?"
"I'd tell them—I'd say that you —" She stopped. What would she tell them? That she had rescued a bum from the street who was sent from the future to kill her? That she almost believed him because she could feel that he believed it himself? And now apparently someone else was trying to kill them both? "Oh."
"Yeah, 'oh.' Where, Doc? Is there anyplace we can go?"
She put her hand on his arm, not so much for support, but to test him. To see if she could glean anything from him that might reassure her. He watched her suspiciously, but he didn't move away.
He was tired and hungry, and his ribs hurt. Other than that, the overwhelming sensation was of worry, with a vague bewilderment lingering.
Something whizzed past her temple with a strange reverberating whir. Before she could react, a second whir seared the skin on the top of her hand. She cried out in pain. As Rider grabbed her and shoved her back into the alley, she caught a brief glimpse of a dark figure holding some kind of gun.