Daring Time (6 page)

"Come closer," he demanded quietly.

His hands rose to just an inch above her creamy shoulders. The need to touch her felt imperative. He realized his gaze was glued on her breasts and that he was imagining his hands cradling the weight of them while his forefinger whisked over the tightening, rosy nipples. The heavy head of his cock strained for her almost as though it was made of metal and Hope was a powerful magnet.

He forced his eyes up to her face.

"If something should happen ... if this"—he glanced down to the narrow space between them—"connection should be broken when we touch, I want you to try and contact me through the mirror."

Her eyes widened. "The one in my bedroom? You were there. You saw me as well?"

"Oh, I saw you all right," he muttered grimly. He thought of the way the mirror had felt yesterday for a second when he touched it: not solid, not liquid, but not like empty space, either. More like ... a fullness, an indescribable web of possibilities. "Use the mirror, Hope. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

He frowned slightly when he heard her solemn whisper. God, she was sweet. Not to mention sexy as hell without ever intending to be. He really didn't want anything to happen to her—

"And under
no
circumstances should you venture out alone over the next few days.

Agreed?"

She nodded.

"Don't go
anywhere
with a stranger. Am I making myself clear?"

"Even you?" She looked dazed as her hand sunk toward his chest.

"I don't understand what's happening here, Hope, but I'm no stranger to you," he growled before he reached to claim her .. .

... And hissed in monumental frustration when his hands closed on empty air.

Ryan charged into his bedroom down the hall still naked and damp, but impervious to the chill in the hulking old house. He swung open the wardrobe door and stared at the image of himself in the antique mirror. His wet hair spiked up from his head at haphazard angles. His cock and balls hung heavy between his thighs, still semi-aroused .. . still expectant.

"Hope?" he demanded. After he'd repeated her name several times, each time the volume of his voice escalating, he closed his eyes in profound frustration. Christ, what did he think he was going to do?
Scold
her into the year 2008?

He shouldn't have tried to touch her. Since when did he let his cock rule his actions? How was he going to reach her now? How the hell was he going to keep her from being murdered?

And did he really believe such a thing was a possibility?

Ryan thought of the dazed arousal in Hope's dark eyes when her hand had hovered above his chest.

It didn't matter what he believed. He
knew
he'd just spoken with a woman named Hope Stillwater. He
knew
danger and death hovered over her.

He
knew
he'd do anything in his power to stop her from being harmed.

When it came down to it, belief and bone-deep knowledge were two very different things, Ryan realized for the first time in his life as he stared blankly into the looking glass.

His gaze sharpened on the outer edge of the mirror. Was it his imagination or had an inch or so of the fogginess cleared? He touched the cool, hard surface and cursed. No give to the solid ect. No be No Hope.

***

Ramiro looked pissed off enough to bite through metal the next day as he and Ryan left the Immigration and Naturalization Ser-vice Detention Center in Chicago's Loop.

Although he doubted his expression gave away much, Ryan was every bit as furious as Ramiro after interviewing the twenty-year-old kid who would be extradited back to Mexico within the week.

"My grandparents live in a village about the size of that kid's! So do my aunts and uncles and cousins. It could have been
their
vil-age Donahue sent Chirnovsky and that other asshole Gutierrez to rape. One of my cousins could have been lured with all their lies into doing slave labor for Donahue, just like that kid was. A woman from my family could have been kidnapped for their white slavery ring. Saturday night can't come quick enough for me," Ramiro exclaimed heatedly, referring to their sting operation to finally collar Jim Donahue.

"Donahue's done," Ryan stated flatly.

Ramiro took a deep breath and nodded as they walked out onto Monroe Street, seeming partially mollified by Ryan's steadfast assurance.

When Ryan parallel parked on Eighteenth Street at eight p.m. later that night, he just sat for a moment and stared out the car window at the imposing French Chateauesque-style limestone mansion he now owned, the multiple towers and cupolas, the ornate ironwork, the sloping mansard roof. Ryan couldn't imagine a more unlikely place for him to live or a house more perfectly suited to Hope Stillwater's elegant, lush American beauty.

He'd been preoccupied all day with the final details of Jim Donahue's downfall but thoughts of Hope had never really left him. It felt a little bizarre to be entertaining concerns and worries about such an ephemeral woman when the very real details of his job demanded his attention. But just behind the scenes of his awareness he'd been forming a plan to try to contact her tonight.

Just like he had last night, he took another hot bath in the deep claw-footed tub. He had to admit he was getting used to bathing, the hot water loosening his muscles after his daily workout in the gym beyond what a shower could do. He was hyperalert the entire time for sounds of Hope, but she remained distressingly absent.

Afterward he opened the wardrobe door wide and stared into the antique mirror. He willed Hope to appear, but only his tense face looked back at him.

He left the wardrobe door open so that he could keep an eye on the mirror and sprawled on the newly assembled brass bed, watching the ten o'clock news on the portable television that used to sit on the kitchen counter in his loft.

Once he looked back at the television after glancing at the mirror for the hundredth time only to see Jim Donahue's beefy face filling the screen. He spoke at a local charity event for Children's Memorial Hospital. Ryan sat up slightly in bed, his attention narrowing to a sharp focus like a predator's when it sights prey.

Donahue still carried the vestiges of handsomeness, but his body and face were going to fat. He was already a big man—maybe an inch or two shorter than Ryan—but the rich foods and alcohol that his lifestyle afforded him and which he partook of liberally were finally taking their toll. At forty-eight years old, Donahue was a heart attack waiting to happen.

Maybe a prison diet would tack on a few extra years to his worthless life, Ryan thought with a sense of grim satisfaction as Donahue flashed a sharklike smile at the end of the sound bite. It really steamed him to see scum like Donahue being kowtowed to by the press as a community leader and respectable businessman.

For Ramiro's sake, Ryan hoped his partner wasn't watching the sickening display.

He irritably clicked off the television and stood to look into the mirror again.

"Hope. I need to speak with you. You're in danger," he said, feeling like an idiot for talking to himself but just desperate enough not to care.

Two more nights. All he had was
two more nights.

He stalked across the room and picked up the leather-bound book of sonnets. He'd already checked the pages once this evening for some kind of message—hadn't Hope said she'd seen what he'd written? But there was nothing. Although he hadn't completely ruled out writing her a message of warning, he'd rather give her such an alarming message in person.

He needed more than just to leave her a message. He needed to reach her.

Protect her.

When he approached the mirror again there was still no sign of her, but Ryan noticed that the band of fogginess at the edge of the glass was definitely narrower. He ran his hand along the filmy band. He'd wondered if it wasn't decreasing last night, but tonight it was evident that it was.

Did the clarifying mirror somehow relate to his connection to Hope?

"Hope,
please"
he entreated, feeling foolish.

Feeling
helpless.

How the hell could he reach her?

As he stood there and talked to himself, wearing nothing but a pair of dark blue sweats, his skin roughening as he caught a chill in the drafty old house, Ryan started to wonder if he wasn't losing it.

Should he schedule an appointment with one of the police counselors? He and Ramiro had put in a lot of long hours on the Jim Donahue investigation. Maybe the stress was finally getting to him!

Maybe his visions of the delectable Hope Stillwater were all part and parcel of a stress-induced psychosis?

If that were the case, his libido must be playing a major part in his hallucinations. He recalled the way Hope had looked last night bared to the waist, her flawless skin dewed with moisture, her high, full breasts quivering slightly as she trembled. Or when he'd seen her in the mirror wearing that sinfully sheer gown, her large, pink nipples pressing against a fabric so translucent it did nothing to cover the triangle of dark hair between her shapely thighs.

Ryan groaned as his cock stiffened against his thigh. He shoved his hand down his sweatpants and fisted it, trying to alleviate the pain of lust that had sliced through him at the graphic memories of Hope. How was it that the daughter of a wealthy social reformist minister wore such a revealing garment?

And more important, why had Hope Stillwater been in those erotic photographs?

It had been a mistake to think of those photos, Ryan realized as he withdrew his cock and shoved the waistband of his sweats below his balls. He stroked the length of his penis as he stared into the mirror, but he wasn't really seeing himself masturbate. Instead he was imagining those erotic images of Hope: her thighs spread wide and her lips opened in a silent keen of pleasure as her pussy was being eaten; the crop frozen in the action of smacking against the voluptuous curve of a white, shapely breast crowned with a stiffened, distended nipple.

God, what he wouldn't give to tie down that gorgeous creature and make her scream with need and desire.

He groaned as his pistoning motions on his cock became more rapid. He briefly considered getting the photographs out of the bedside drawer where he'd placed them and bringing himself off several times just like he had the night he'd found them. But he found that his imagination was all too sufficient when it came to fantasizing about Hope.

So he remained in place, his right hand jacking his cock with more and more force. If only it were her small, elegant hand caressing the straining column of flesh. He squeezed just beneath the head and a stream of clear pre-cum oozed out of the slit. He imag-lined the liquid melting on Hope's pink tongue as she looked up at him with huge, velvety eyes that always seemed to convey a sense of her innocence and a profoundly carnal nature all at once.

The image was so real he groaned roughly. A light seemed to flash. He opened his eyelids, startled, only to find that it was no longer his own image staring back at him from the mirror.

Hope stood there, her cheeks flushed a bright, vivid pink. She once again wore the tiny, sheer gown.

And her hand was every bit as busy between her thighs as Ryan's was.

FIVE

Hope turned the last page in her book of sonnets and set it down dispiritedly on her bedside table. What had she really expected, after all? Ryan hadn't told her to try to communicate with him using the book. Instead he'd specifically mentioned the mirror.

Her gaze traveled to the opened wardrobe door. Despite the fact that she'd been quite busy today—taking up her post at Central Station and planning her father's birthday celebration with the housekeeper— she'd still managed to stare into the depths of the gilded mirror at least a hundred times today.

Never once, however, had she caught a glimpse of Ryan's handsome face.

The memory of how he'd looked standing in that tub, like a naked statue of some warrior god come to life, left her breathless yet again.

It surprised her a little that she believed wholeheartedly that he was a man from the future. Hope supposed the reason for the relative ease for her faith in the impossible was Ryan himself. There was something about him that she couldn't see with her eyes or put precisely into words, but she sensed it nonetheless.

Ryan Vincent Daire was different. He wasn't of her world.

There was something else she knew about him instinctively. She desired him. Hope supposed desire is what one called this overpowering need and hunger that overcame her in his presence, anyway.

And even in his absence.

She had said she would use the mirror to try to contact him again, but what, exactly was she supposed to do to penetrate the barrier of time? All she possessed were her too brief memories of him ... and her desire.

She stood slowly from the brass bed. A moment later she extricated the balled-up Marlborough gown from the deep recesses of her wardrobe.

The last time she'd seen Ryan in the mirror she'd been wearing the Marlborough gown and he'd been looking at her with a mixture of surprise and stark arousal. Hope had become all too familiar with that addicting hot look in his eyes when he'd studied her half-naked body last night in the bathroom. She moved quickly before she could change her mind, locking her bedroom door and lifting her cotton nightgown over her head.

The Marlborough gown slipped over the sensitive skin of her breasts and belly, finally tickling the tops of her thighs as it settled on her naked body as lightly as a lover's whisper.

Her throat spasmed convulsively when she once again stood before the gilded mirror. Did Ryan enjoy seeing her in the Marlborough gown? What sort of women did a man who lived in the twenty-first century find attractive?

At five feet six inches, Hope considered herself relatively tall for a woman. But Ryan towered over her. Were people perhaps larger in the future? He was so big. Everywhere.

Her cheeks and chest flushed with color when she pictured his long, shapely penis. Hope knew she had nothing to compare Ryan to except the statues she'd studied in France, Italy and Greece during her grand tour with an avid curiosity that could not be termed wholly artistic in nature. From what little knowledge she possessed, however, she suspected very strongly that most men were not as fortunate in their proportions as Ryan.