Time Raiders: The Seduction Page 3

  “What kind of combat training do you have?”

  “I’ve studied martial arts for fifteen years. I may not know how to use one of those—” she gestured at his pistol—“but I can handle myself in a fight.”

  Ah. No wonder she’d been so impatient to engage the intruders. He’d have to get her out on a mat sometime and disabuse her of the notion that she was tough enough to take on a fully-trained warrior with her neighborhood-karate-class training.

  She looked too fragile to him, ready to crack. Tonight was not the time to push the issue. “All right,” he conceded. “You can come with me. But I get to go first, and you stay behind me. Got it?”

  A glimmer of a smile tonight. The place was much as Pete expected. No-nonsense. Orderly, except for her bookshelves, which were crammed with texts and scientific journals. Curiously devoid of girlie accoutrements. For a beautiful woman, she seemed shockingly disinterested in flaunting her femininity. But after her—their—intensely steamy dream, there was no doubt she was capable of lush, and thoroughly feminine, passion. Why, then, did she suppress it so completely?

  “Okay, Pete. You can go now.”

  He turned to face her. “I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea for me to spend the night on your couch.”

  She frowned. It was obvious she didn’t like that idea, but her better judgment saw the logic of it. He watched with interest as the conflict between her gut and her head played out upon her face. Finally, reluctantly, she nodded. “I’ll go get you a blanket and a pillow.”

  Hmm. Her head won, did it? What would it take for her feelings to win out sometime? She’d been willing to follow them in her subconscious mind. Maybe he needed to get inside her dreams more often. But next time, he wouldn’t use the crown for a freebie assist. Next time, she’d dream of what could happen between them all by herself.

  She dumped linens on the couch and turned to head for her bedroom.

  “Need me to tuck you in tonight?” he asked.

  She whirled and glared at him. “I believe you already did that once.”

  He grinned, unrepentant. “You sure can dream, Thena.”

  “I didn’t dream that. You invaded my mind!”

  She stomped toward her bedroom, and he followed, stopping in the doorway. He crossed his arms, leaning casually on the frame. “I hate to burst your bubble, darlin’, but I can’t create the dreams people have. I can only insert myself into a dream that’s already happening.”

  She stared at him in dawning horror.

  He continued, “That room…The activities we engaged in…Those were all your ideas, sweetheart.”

  Chapter 4

  “Ooh!” Athena growled in frustration and slammed her bedroom door in Pete’s face. Arrogant jerk! Just because she wanted him to pick up where he’d left off didn’t mean she was about to let him.

  But she wasn’t able to get another wink of sleep all night. And when her alarm went off in the morning, she smacked it into submission with unusual ire. Even her lousy night’s sleep was Peter Grafton’s fault. Everything had been fine until he got here. A tiny voice of reason in the back of her head gave him credit for boosting the lab’s security measures just in time, but the irrational anger in her gut won out.

  She stormed out of her bedroom, ready to do battle with him, but he was gone. She stared in dismay at the rumpled blanket on her couch, and restrained an errant impulse to smell the pillow and see if his aftershave lingered upon it. With her tirade abruptly deflated before she could vent it on him, she slogged through breakfast.

  But somewhere during her second cup of coffee, an evil plan took root in her mind. During the short drive to work it took shape, and by the time she entered the lab, she was chortling at her scheme for revenge over his stunt with her dream. Oh, yes. Paybanot to grin like the Cheshire cat at him and give away her diabolical intentions.

  Everyone on staff was understandably upset by last night’s break-in, but Pete downplayed it. She did nothing to contradict his version of events, and even managed to smile sweetly at him when he shot her a look of gratitude at the morning meeting he’d called. The security company from yesterday arrived to repair her office safe, and Pete left to introduce to campus security the soldiers who’d arrived to take over guard duty in the lab. It was just the opportunity Athena needed.

  As soon as he walked out, she announced, “Okay, gang. Back to work. We have an astral projection experiment scheduled for today.”

  Her team looked surprised that she wanted to work, after last night’s excitement, but they hopped to it, and before long, she was hooked up to both crown and computer.

  “I want to try something new today,” she announced. “I’m going to experiment with projecting an image of myself to someone outside the lab.”

  Surprised looks greeted that. One of the physics guys asked, “How will we know if it works? Do you have someone in mind to project to who knows about your, uh, talent, and won’t freak if your ghost suddenly shows up?”

  Athena grinned. “Oh, yes. I’ve got just the person in mind. Okay, crank up the amplification program.”

  A gentle tingling passed across her forehead and through her brain. The familiar presence of the crown made itself known within her. She was ready.

  She lay back in her recliner and closed her eyes. She went through the centering routine she’d developed from yoga principles, and when every muscle was relaxed, her breathing deep and even, she began.

  It turned out to be child’s play to locate Pete. After last night’s dream encounter with him, she was highly attuned to his mind and found his signature a mile away, in the campus security offices. He was standing in a conference room much like her own. A dozen men in military uniforms and a half-dozen in police-type outfits were listening to him briefing them at the moment. She ignored his speech about threat reactions, and instead picked out a corner in the back of the conference room for her appearance.

  She’d never tried to appear to a single person before, but with the crown’s help, she thought she could pull it off. Athena formed an image of herself in the room, projecting her body into the space and the image directly into Pete’s head. At once she got the sensation of actually being at the meeting with Pete.

  He broke off midsentence, staring at her as she ghosted in and took solid form. Or at least, that was how she would look to him if this was working.

  “Uh, what are you doing here?” he asked.

  All heads turned in her general direction, then swiveled back to him. Perfect. Everyone was frowning. “They can’t see or hear me,” she answered him.

  Pete’s eyebrows shot up. He asked sharply, “Do any of you see anything in the back corner of the room?”

  A chorus of perplexed negatives followed.

  She grinned, and alarm shot across his face. Oh, he didn’t know the half of it yet.

  With a shake of his head, Pete resumed his briefing, studiously avoiding looking back at her. She unleashed her first salvo. She began humming a sensuous tune from one of her favorite jazz singers. She swayed to the music suggestively. His gaze snapped back to her and then away.

  Open launch bay two—second torpedo away! She reached for the asn’t mistaken, Pete was looking rather overheated up there.

  He mumbled on about his plan for deploying men inside the lab, and her blouse gaped fully open, revealing the sheerest, sexiest bra she owned. It wasn’t exactly striptease material, but sweat popped out on Pete’s forehead. Athena grinned again and took the clip out of her hair. It fell about her shoulders in luxurious waves, which she’d learned last night he loved to run his fingers through.

  Still humming, she shed her blouse, letting it drop slowly to the floor. She reached behind to the waistband of her skirt and slid the zipper down with a rough shiver of sound. Pete shivered, too, and began to scowl at her.

  A few confused frowns were thrown in her general direction. The other men in the room couldn’t figure out why the boss was suddenly acting so strange. Time to go for th
e kill.

  Smiling seductively, Athena shimmied out of her skirt, and was gratified when Pete gasped. Every head in the room turned sharply from the schematic he was showing them on an overhead, to his face. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. Didn’t expect the fuddy-duddy scientist to own a thong, did he?

  She reached behind her back for her bra snap. It gave way with a soft pop and the lace gaped forward. That was a definite blush staining Pete’s face. Down her arms the undergarment slid, joining the pile of clothing at her feet. Smiling beatifically, she hooked a finger under the lace garter riding high on her thigh.

  “Enough!” Pete barked. “Uh, five minute break, everyone. Go get some fresh air and stretch your legs. You, uh, need to get used to the altitude.”

  She grinned. The campus was at seven thousand feet—enough that even a well-conditioned soldier would need a few days to adapt. Still, they both knew it for the excuse it was.

  The room emptied, leaving the two of them alone. “Oh, dear,” she gushed, “I forgot to take off my stockings. And my other garter. How silly of me.” She propped one high-heeled shoe on the nearest chair and reached for the top of her thigh-high stocking.

  “This is completely unprofessional,” he burst out.

  She paused in the act of rolling down a black stocking, and innocently raised an eyebrow. “Why, this is my work. I’m experimenting with selective astral projection, where I become visible only to one individual in a room full of people. I’ve never tried it before, but I’d say it has been a smashing success, wouldn’t you?”

  He started to answer, but one of his men walked back into the room just then. Pete snapped his mouth shut. However, a furious shade of red lingered on his face and neck. It was most gratifying.

  While he was distracted, Athena used the moment to drop the projection and return her consciousness to the lab. That should do it. Point made about screwing around with the crown. Not to mention they were now even in the sexual practical jokes department.

  “You okay, boss?” one of the techs asked in concern. “Your heart rate and respiration spiked abnormally high in the middle of that sequence.”

  She grinned in satisfaction. “Yup. I’m great. How does the readout look?”

  She spent the rest of the morning immersed in analyzing her brain wave output on long printouts spread across the conference room table. Pete brought in his troops after lunch, and they ran noisy and generally irritating practice attacks upon the lab, but the grating violins in the soundtrack got on her nerves. This was never going to work.

  In desperation, she headed for the kitchen and fished out the bottle of white wine that had been rusticating on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator. Ever since the disastrous, wine-induced dream of Pete, she hadn’t touched a drop of the stuff. But tonight, she felt a need for a little chemical assist in relaxing.

  She poured herself a glass of wine and returned to the living room. Glancing through her library, Athena pulled out a book she’d been meaning to read—a study of different forms of psychic ability and possible links between them. The volume fell open to the chapter on various psychic uses of dreams, from visions of the future to medical diagnosis.

  She sat down on the couch and started to read. Although she didn’t learn much about how Pete’s gift worked, she did discover that his projection into her dream was a great deal like her own astral experiments. It might be interesting someday to hook herself up to the crown for an astral projection and use him as the subject of the operation. Perhaps the combination of their brain waves would cross whatever threshold the computer wasn’t quite able to breach.

  But that would involve working with Pete. Closely. Brain to brain. And that she could do without.

  She finished her glass of wine and got a refill before heading to her bathtub. She wasn’t usually a soak-in-a-tub kind of girl, but tonight she was desperate. She ran a hot bubble bath and eased into the steaming water, and as she sipped the crisp, cool wine, had to admit this wasn’t so bad. But she quickly grew sleepy, enough that she began to worry about falling asleep and drowning. Athena climbed out of the tub, pulled on a loose T-shirt and headed for bed.

  Sometime later, a vague pounding roused her from a deep sleep. A group of students had rented the house next door recently and were prone to loud parties on the weekends. She groaned, yanked a pillow over her head to drown out the bass vibrations of their stereo, and went back to sleep.

  For maybe a minute.

  And then the floorboard right outside her bedroom squeaked, and she was suddenly completely, horrifyingly awake.

  Chapter 5

  Pete reached for the doorknob and burst into Athena’s room, dreading what he might or might not find there. Sam Garvey said she’d left around six o’clock. She hadn’t answered Pete’s repeated calls to her cell phone. All the lights in her house were off and it was barely nine o’clock. Where the hell was she? Didn’t she understand she was as priceless a resource as the crown or Ad Astra journal?

  He only hoped the men who’d broken into the lab hadn’t figured that part out and kidnapped her. Or worse. With that thought on his mind he held his breath, praying not to find an empty bed or a bloody corpse as he frantically scanned the dark bedroom.

  “Thena?”

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” she yelled. “You about scared me to death!”

  Well then. She was alive. And at home.

  And furious.

  “You never showed up at happy hour. And you left the lab and didn’t answer your phone and…and I thought the worst,” he finished lamely.

  “The worst?” If possible, the outrage in her voice increased. “What? That I have a secret lover you were going to catch me with, red-handed?”

  Aggravati same guy who hired those thugs to break in to the lab has finally realized your value and sent them after you.”

  “Oh.” The ire dissipated from her voice.

  “Oh,” he echoed.

  “Well, I’m fine.”

  “Great.”

  “And you’re in my bedroom.”

  “Uh-huh.” He failed to see what the big deal was.

  “You can go now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh,” she repeated in turn.

  He continued to stare at her.

  “Scram, Pete.”

  He frowned. “Actually, I can’t do that.”

  “Why the heck not?”

  “Thena, it occurred to me as I was driving over here in a panic, imagining the worst, that you’re as valuable to the project as the crown or the scrolls. I think I need to put you under guard, as well. It’s too late to reschedule the troops tonight, but I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow. In the meantime, I don’t think you should be alone.”

  “Not that again. The boogeyman has had over a week to come after me since the lab break-in, and nothing’s happened. I’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, well, a week is no time at all when it comes to planning a half-decent kidnapping or murder.”

  “Murder!” she exclaimed. “Oh, come on.”

  “Think about it. The break-in at the lab probably cost someone tens of thousands of dollars. Whoever wants to stop Project Anasazi is a serious player. He can afford kidnapping and murder, too.”

  “Okay, so he’s rich. But that doesn’t mean he’s willing to commit violent crimes to get what he wants,” she argued.

  Pete rolled his eyes. “The intruders blew up the safe. With military grade explosives. And they were carrying automatic weapons. They were fully prepared to commit violence at the drop of a hat.”

  She seemed to concede the point, for she merely twisted her hands in the sheet, hugging it close.

  He eyed her bedroom window’s ancient wood fra

  me, conveniently placed only four feet above the ground. “You don’t happen to have a security alarm on that window, do you?” he asked dubiously.

  “No. I don’t have anything of great value in the house. I’ve never needed an alarm.”

  He s
ighed. “I’ll have one installed tomorrow. In the meantime, scoot over.”

  “What?” she squeaked.

  “It’s either that or you and I are sharing the couch tonight,” he retorted. He lifted a hand before she could get all worked up. “Look. It’s nothing personal. But I’m not letting you out of my sight until you’re properly protected.”

  Oddly enough, he thought he caught a flash of disappointment in her shadowed eyes. It was hard to tell in the dim light coming through her window from the streetlight outside. She moved over in the bed and lay back, covers clutched to her chin, as stiff as a board.

  He chuckled as he kicked off his shoes and approached.

  “What?” she demanded. It sounded as if her teeth were clenched.

  “You look like a scared virgin on her wedding night.”

  “Hah!” she huffed. “You wish.”

  A wedding? Him and her? Not bloody likely. He’d managed to avoid matrimonial entanglements for the past twenty years, and there was no reason to ruin his perfect track record now. He sat down on the edge of the bed and replied blandly, “Nah, vi much work for too little in return.”

  She jerked beside him. “Of all the arrogant, chauvinistic, selfish—”

  He cut her off by leaning over swiftly and kissing her. Thoroughly. At first she resisted, lying taut beneath him. But then, by degrees, she relaxed, first her mouth and then her entire body going soft and warm and liquid. He stretched out beside her, sinking into her with a sigh of profound relief.

  He hadn’t realized just how much he’d wanted her until this very moment. He knew he’d been struggling to hold at bay the burning desire churned up by that amazing dream, but it was only in letting go of it that he was able to measure the power of the need coursing through him.

  “Good grief, I’ve missed you,” he sighed.

  “Missed me?” she murmured against his mouth. “You never had me.”

  He laughed under his breath. “High time we rectified that, don’t you think?”

  “Mmm.”