Hot Zone

by Cindy Dees

  He started. This woman was not of Persian descent. In fact, she didn’t look as if she came from anywhere in this part of the world. What in heaven’s name was she doing here? His people would have sent a man after him to bring him home, not some woman. So who was she? What other heretofore unknown society possessed the same psychic power that his did?

  He must find out.

  He gathered himself, bunching his muscles, and sprang forward, straddling the woman’s hips with his knees, clamping one hand on her neck and the other over her mouth. She lurched in surprise, but, interestingly enough, did not attempt to scream.

  Her body was slender, but strong, beneath him. She fought just long enough to test her restraints, and then subsided. Her eyes didn’t reflect the sort of panic they should have.

  Oh, she looked scared enough, but she also looked determined. No, she was by no means done resisting him. She was merely biding her time.

  She reached up fast and gave his thumb a good yank. With a man of average strength, she’d have ripped it nearly off his hand.

  As it was, he merely tightened his grip and grunted in annoyance. But then her knee jerked up sharply, connecting solidly between his legs. Agony exploded in him, and his grip loosened. The woman wrenched free of his grasp, scrambling clear of his thighs to the far side of the bed, against the wall.

  She dared attack him? Rage, white-hot and pure, consumed him. Were he not exceedingly curious as to who this woman was, she would be dead where she cowered this very instant. He gritted his teeth, rode the waves of pain and managed—barely—to hang on to his temper.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” she demanded.

  Lying on his side, curled in a ball, he ground out, “I might ask the same of you.”

  As the worst of the agony receded, reluctant admiration for her fierce self-defense tickled at the edges of his awareness. She would make a worthy mate. And the sons they could breed—

  “You’re the one who barged into my room and accosted me,” she retorted tersely. “Identify yourself.”

  No woman of this place would dare be so blunt with a man like him, particularly not one in her bedroom, alone with her. She ought to be screaming for her life. Definitely a traveler from a distant land. But where?

  He looked up, wincing. The woman actually looked ready to fly at him! Self-defense he could forgive. But a female attacking a male outright? Fury, still lurking just below the surface of his mind, bubbled up. She had no right to challenge him!

  He gathered power to blast her, but restrained himself at the last moment. He wanted answers before he turned her brain to mush.

  Surging up onto his knees, he towered over her, clearly a great deal stronger and more physically dominant than she. He felt better. The woman’s aggressive posture wilted. She crossed her arms defensively now. Apparently, she knew not to tangle with a sorcerer in his prime. But she still had the temerity to glare at him.

  She said nothing, so he waited her out for several seconds. He’d never met a female who could keep her mouth shut to save her life—except for this one, apparently. The silence stretched out. How odd. He would need to proceed carefully with her.

  Jaw clenched, he said, “I am called Rustam. How shall I call you?”

  “Tessa.”

  “What sort of name is that?”

  “My name. And that’s enough.”

  He snorted. “Don’t announce that around here. It sounds like a shortened form of Tessalonia, a common Greek name. People have been killed for less.”

  “Actually, it’s French.”

  He was not familiar with the term. He probed her mind to see if she was thinking of a location, but hit a blank—and entirely disconcerting—wall.

  Startled, he demanded, “How did you come to be here, Tessa?”

  “I thought you said I shouldn’t use that name.”

  “We’re alone.” He would have to be more subtle to get past her barriers. He sent her a faint mental thread of trust. Relaxation. Eagerness to talk. “You didn’t answer my question. How did you come here?”

  She shrugged. And said nothing. That, too, was strange. His mental suggestion hadn’t worked. He amped up the sending of desire to talk to him.

  If anything, she frowned and seemed to draw further into herself. Which reminded him…

  He blurted, “What did you see when I shape-shifted into the elephant?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” he exclaimed.

  Was she immune to his mind powers? It couldn’t be! Were her powers actually more powerful than his? His mind raced with the possibilities of that prospect—none of them good for his kind. He had to get back home and warn his leaders! And while he was at it, he would love to take this woman along as his hostage to prove his point. But first he had to find a way to subdue her.

  “I saw nothing,” she repeated. “You just stood there with your hands up while everyone acted like you’d grown a second head.”

  “Not a second head,” he replied dryly. “I merely turned the one I have into an elephant’s.”

  “I never saw a thing.”

  Fascinating. Experimentally, he sent her a forceful command to tell him what she was doing here. And got back a slight frown. He asked, “Would you mind if I held your hand?”

  “Yes, I’d mind!”

  He sighed. “I vow not to hurt you. ’Tis but a small experiment.”

  “What sort of experiment?”

  “Trust me. I only want to hold your hand.”

  “I think not.”

  He moved forward, close enough to see her individual eyelashes in the moonlight. Still she didn’t cringe. A brave soul, indeed. Even Artemesia would be shrinking away from him by now.

  He looked down at this woman in the dark. And unleashed the full power of his mind until their auras mingled, the crackling arcs of his blue and her violet twining about them in a sensuous dance.

  Her energy field bit into his skin everywhere it touched, like the tentacles of a jellyfish, leaving a sharp sting in its wake. Gods, the power of this woman! Did his energy field do the same to her, or was she entirely immune to it?

  She shifted restlessly before him. Apparently, she felt it at least a little, at any rate.

  Very slowly, he lifted a hand toward her. Treating her like a newborn foal shy of its first touch by man, he moved his fingertips until they were a bare whisper away from her cheek.

  Her power danced across his palm, sending his nerves into a riot of nearly forgotten sensation. Carefully, slowly, he aligned his vibrational frequency to hers until the pain of her nearness subsided.

  Synced up with his, her aura slammed into him in an entirely new wave of sensation, as alluring as the former had been uncomfortable. She was all light and heat and warm breath across his skin, sending a bolt of intense desire through him.

  By comparison, the local women might as well have been made of mud. He’d forgotten. It had been so long since he’d been with one of his own kind, he’d forgotten what a psychic link did to the sex act.

  He couldn’t resist. His fingertips grazed her cheek. Ahh. Soft. Alive. She inhaled sharply, and he withdrew his touch immediately.

  But the damage was done. She’d loosed a terrible craving in him. For more. More of her velvet softness. More of that sizzling electricity between them.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  He intoned in a deep voice from someplace subconscious within him, “I am your destiny.”

  Tessa stared up at the intruder for a moment in complete disbelief. These Persian alpha males were awfully darned sure of themselves.

  She couldn’t help it. She laughed. “That’s the dumbest line I’ve ever heard,” she chuckled.

  Thunder gathered on the big man’s brow.

  Whoops. She wasn’t a modern woman anymore. This was the ancient world, where women were treated little better than cattle, and valued less.

  She reined in her mirth and did her best to assume a contrite tone. “My apologies
. But I do not know you at all. It’s hard to credit such a declaration from a complete stranger.”

  His brow smoothed out, but lightning continued to flash in his black gaze.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “How is it you did not see my trick?”

  Ahh. The shape-shifting thing. “I have no idea. I just…didn’t see it. Maybe I’m too skeptical for such things to work on me.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Honestly, I have no explanation. I actually would have liked to see what the others saw. They seemed tremendously impressed.”

  He appeared slightly mollified by that confession. They stared at each other in silence for several seconds.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, this is my bedchamber,” she said gently, “and you’re in it. I was trying to sleep when you barged in.”

  “Are you throwing me out?”

  Was that amusement or disbelief in his voice?

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question. What brings you here?”

  She shrugged. “I have been shipwrecked. I am far from home.”

  “Far indeed,” he echoed significantly.

  Tessa lurched. It almost sounded as if he knew….

  Impossible! Even the idea of time travel would be too far-fetched for the ancient mind to conceive of, let alone believe in.

  “We enter into the game, then,” he murmured.

  Alarm exploded within her. She asked quickly, “What game?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “The dance between a man and woman as they circle closer to one another….” His voice was husky and low, sandpaper on her skin, sending shivers through her. “Letting the suspense build until they give in to mutual attraction and indulge in their forbidden desires and fantasies with one another.”

  Forbidden desires and—

  Whoa.

  Military mission. Seek lost medallion piece. Bring it back to Arizona. Save the world….

  Nope, nowhere in her mission briefing was there any mention of falling into the sack with the hunky Persian guy. Damn.

  He moved even closer, managing to make walking on his knees on a lumpy mattress graceful. He invaded her personal space until she backed away from him and felt cool stone at her back.

  “That’s far enough, Tonto,” she warned.

  “Who is Tonto? Is he a lover I must kill to have you?”

  She stared. This guy sounded serious! Lord, he was big. Overwhelmingly so. Sleek. And very, very male. The way these ancient guys embraced being macho was surprisingly attractive.

  “Not to worry. Tonto is merely a character from a well-known story in my land.”

  He planted a hand on the wall beside her head, his voice dropping to a half whisper that made her belly go liquid. “Tell me this story.”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll tell you tomorrow. But in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s the middle of the night.”

  “’Tis early still. The feasting will go on for hours yet.”

  Feasting. Right. Was that what he called that mad orgy? He planted his free hand on the other side of her head, effectively trapping her. No way could she take this guy out by brute force. He’d completely ignored a thumb lock that would have put most men on the ground in agony.

  He leaned in close enough so his warm breath caressed her temple. “We have all night, you and I.”

  All night? Abruptly, images of the two of them naked in a tangle of sheets, making love until she was too sated to move, roared through her brain. Her breath hitched in a way no man had ever made it hitch before.

  “Ahh,” he whispered. “You do see it, after all.”

  Befuddled by the haze of lust in her brain, she looked up into his eyes. “See what?” she mumbled, as more images of crawling all over that big, muscular body of his danced before her mind’s eye.

  He lurched, pulling back far enough to stare down at her. “You sent to me? How did you do that?” he demanded.

  “Do what?”

  “You sent that image to my mind!”

  “I…what?” Color her confused, here.

  He closed in on her so fast she barely saw him coming, let alone had time to mount any sort of defense. His hands grasped her upper arms, pulling her like a rag doll against his chest, which was as solid as the stone wall behind her—only burning with heat and pounding with lust.

  “I saw that,” he said through gritted teeth. “Don’t toy with me, daughter of French—I’ll chew you up and spit you out. Tell me how you sent that to my mind.”

  She didn’t know why she did it. Maybe the driving desire pressing in on her from all sides just became too much for her. Maybe it was frustration at finding this Neanderthal so damned attractive. Or maybe she was just stupid enough to rise to the guy’s bait. But she tipped her chin up fast, too fast to stop and think it over. And kissed him.

  Three

  They stood in the wreckage of the lab, soot-blackened and dripping wet. Alex looked around in disgust. Project Anasazi had just taken a kick in the butt. Let alone the fact that the doom of mankind might very well hang in the balance.

  Nobody actually knew what would happen if the time travelers of Project Anasazi didn’t find the twelve pieces of the Karanovo Stamp and put it back together. And nobody wanted to find out. Would invaders from the Centaurian Federation come here and destroy every woman on the planet? That was Athena’s theory, at any rate. It was probably true, even if it sounded like sci-fi bullshit.

  Alex snorted. If someone had told her a year ago that such a thought would enter her mind and not cause her to think she’d gone crazy, she would have never believed them. But then, she heard dead people talk and wasn’t crazy, either.

  And Athena wanted her to jump next? Alex had two words for the professor: hell no.

  She picked her way over to where Professor Carswell was staring down at a ruined computer console.

  “Project Anasazi is over, isn’t it?” Alex asked quietly.

  Athena looked up, startled. “Of course not. I’ve still got the headband, and the programming to amplify its sine waves is a fairly straightforward algorithm. I even have backup copies of the software. I can be up and running again in a matter of hours. It may take a few days to repair the booth, but it’s not a difficult job. And of course, the Ad Astra notebook is safely tucked away.”

  “Well, that’s good. And I hope Tessa is okay, but you don’t look so great, Professor. What’s really going on?”

  Athena’s penetrating gaze pinned her in place. “There’s not a scorch mark anywhere in the room. Not one.”

  Alex looked around with fresh eyes. The professor was right.

  Athena continued, “Explain to me why, then, if the blaze never reached this lab, the firemen ransacked every desk and filing cabinet, and smashed every computer in this room to smithereens?”

  Alex didn’t say anything. She decided at that moment that she would wish Project Anasazi all the best, but there was no damned way she was going to follow Tessa in this suicide mission.

  The instant their lips touched, their auras blended into an indigo vortex of such intensity Rustam could hardly look at it. The power writhed around them, sinuous and seeking, forcing them inevitably together.

  Her mouth opened beneath his in a gasp of surprise, and desire such as he’d never felt raged up in him. She tasted of mint. And her pheromones shouted of sex. His arms swept around her and he all but inhaled her.

  It was too much. His mind lost control of it all, and the power around them leaped and spun wildly. A frisson of alarm skittered down his spine. Uncontrolled power of this magnitude was incredibly dangerous. It could destroy them both.

  Tessa’s arms crept around his neck and the colored strands flew even faster, whirling crazily about them. Their energy fields merged into a burning sphere so bright he was forced to close his eyes against its blinding glare.

  It built and built until it went supernova, exploding around them in a display of firewo
rks that buffeted his mind so violently he barely managed to remain conscious.

  Tessa collapsed against him with a cry, her body limp in his arms. Had she fainted? Dizzy himself, he held her close while she slowly roused.

  A familiar, but stronger than normal, thumping sound startled him. And then he recognized it. Their hearts. Beating as one in perfect simpatico.

  And he was lost.

  Out of the sudden blackness around them, completely devoid of blue or violet, came a new sensation: her lips moving against his neck, soft and warm. He tucked his chin down to gaze at her, and she lifted her face. Kissed him again, pulling him into her effortlessly.

  He had no will left to resist. Down, down he fell, into an endless, dark tunnel of need so overpowering he could barely form thoughts, let alone resist it. He was helpless in the face of her feminine allure.

  If she was the weapon of a new breed of magicians, then his people were well and truly lost. Not only was he incapable of fighting her, he had no desire to fight this. None. Even if it led him to his doom. He was mesmerized. Entranced. The great sorcerer ensorcelled.

  “Tessa,” he groaned, “what have you done to me?”

  They fell onto the bed together. Her body moved sensuously across his and he could only fling his arms wide and surrender, to let her have her way with him.

  Her thigh rubbed across his arousal, her lush breasts pressing through thin fabric against his bare chest. Her nails lightly raked his neck and shoulders, sending frissons of pleasure shuddering across his skin. Her hair fell in a white-gold curtain about them, glistening in the moonlight.

  “What have you done to me?” she muttered.

  He mustered the strength to spear his hands into her hair. To force her to look into his eyes. “Nay, ’tis most assuredly you who have beguiled me. What magic did you use?”

  She stared down at him in the moonlight, her eyes wide, so mesmerizing he could lose himself in their silver depths forever.