Time Raiders: The Seduction

Cindy Dees

Contents

The Beginning

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

The Beginning

Fifty thousand years ago, after discovering that human females carried a nascent genetic potential that might one day develop into the ability to star navigate, the Galactic Council planted a dozen pieces of a bronze disc, known as the Karanovo stamp across the Earth, hidden in darkness until mankind advances enough to travel through time and find them.

And then, out of the ashes of the mystery-shrouded Roswell Alien crash in 1947 arose a secret research project called Anasazi. Its improbable goal: learn to use the recovered alien technology for the purposes of time travel.

However, the discovery of an ancient journal, known as the Ad Astra, has given Professor Athena Carswell the information she needs to begin sending modern time travelers back through human history in search of the twelve pieces of the Karanovo Stamp. This stamp, when fully reassembled, will send a signal across the galaxy to the Council, indicating that mankind is ready to from learning how to navigate the stars…

Chapter 1

Not long ago, in the early days of Project Anasazi

Red Rock University

Flagstaff, Arizona

Athena Carswell jolted upright in her leather recliner as a jovial male voice shattered the lab’s deep silence. “Sheesh! You guys look like you’re putting on a funeral! Who died around here?”

“You’re about to,” she snapped. “You just ruined two hours’ worth of data collection and a week’s worth of setup.” She carefully removed an elaborate headband with trailing wires from her head, then whirled in irritation to throw the intruder out.

Wow. She stopped abruptly. The intruder was a serious hunk. Her gaze swept down, then up again. He was tall, athletic and ruggedly gorgeous, with neat brown hair and a sportsman’s tan. But it was his piercing blue eyes that stopped her cold. He was going to make a beautiful corpse when she finished strangling him.

He had the gall to sweep his own gaze assessingly down her body. Abruptly, she was aware of her silk blouse and the way it clung to her curves, the constriction of her bra beneath it, the way her wool skirt hugged her hips rather more closely than she’d like at the moment.

His eyes lit with heat. And that was a definite smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. She didn’t know whether to fan herself or be mortally offended.

Pretty Boy snorted skeptically. “Didn’t seem much like data collection going on. Looked to me like you were sleeping on the job.”

She scowled, insulted at the insinuation that she’d been goofing off. She retorted, “I was trying to control my brain wave output and sync it up to the computer. Being relaxed and comfortable helps.”

He strolled over to the console that housed the powerful mainframe computer they were trying to program to duplicate and amplify human brain waves by several orders of magnitude. She watched him warily. He glanced up at her suddenly, catching her staring at him like a drooling idiot.

Collecting herself, she said sharply, “Uh, excuse me. But didn’t you see the big red Keep Out sign posted on the door? You’re not supposed to be in here.”

He spun to face her, flashing a thousand-watt smile straight off a daytime soap opera. “Ah, but I am. Supposed to be here, that is. I just inherited this outfit.” He made eye contact and purred at her, “Which is to say I’m your new boss.”

Athena stared. “Some colonel is being sent out from Washington to oversee our project.” This guy was altogether too young and…hot…to be a stuffy army colonel specializing in advanced sine wave resonance research.

“Colonel Peter Grafton, U.S. Army, Advanced Research Center, at your service.” He executed an exaggeratedly gallant bow that looked as if it belonged in a Cinderella movie. “You can call me Pete if you like.” His eyes twinkled devilishly as he added, “Or you can just call me sir.”

Hah! She retorted, “I’m a civilian. I’m not required to ‘sir’ anybody, thank you very much.”

He shrugged. “I’ve always thought being called sir is a sign of respect that should be earned, anyway.”

Athena bit back a snarky comment about the likelihood of his ever earning the title from her. But now continued research, and she couldn’t afford to antagonize him. She mumbled a curse under her breath. She’d hated the idea of going to the military for funding, but her team had had no choice. It was that or shut down. Their previous grant from the government was about to expire, and their work was too classified to take to the public sector to fund.

Project Anasazi was so close to success. Just a few more months, maybe even a matter of weeks, and she’d find the last remaining piece of the puzzle. And then…

…and then mankind would have mastered time travel.

With a little help from a piece of alien technology recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash, of course. It hadn’t taken sixty years plus to crack the technology…it had taken almost all of those years to figure out what the crown-like apparatus found on the alien pilot’s head actually did. But after that, it had been a simple matter of learning to interface with the crown. Well, not simple. The math behind brain wave amplification was horrendous. But today’s computers made the calculations possible, and at speeds rapid enough to make using the crown a possibility.

Her studies showed that if the user was a psychic of sufficient power, it should be possible to project an object, or even a person, back and forth through time.

“So. Is that the famous crown I’ve read about?” Grafton commented from shockingly close by. A faint whiff of his aftershave tickled her nose. The subtle scent was green and woodsy. And manly. And wholly addictive.

She tucked the crown carefully in its protective nest beside her chair, making sure not to catch the wires on anything. “Yup, that’s it.”

“Have you figured out how to duplicate it yet?” he asked.

She retorted, “First we have to figure out how the crown works. Then maybe I can build you another one.”

Grafton frowned. “So, there’s no backup if something happens to this one?”

She sighed. That worried her, too. “No. We’d be dead in the water as far as time travel goes. For a while, at any rate. However, we’ve learned the general principles of time travel from the crown, and given what we’re learning now about brain wave amplification, I’d think in another fifty years or so we could figure it out for ourselves.”

“But your report said you don’t think we have that long until something bad happens—”

She cut him off sharply. “My office. Now.”

His eyebrows shot up and he studied her far too intently for comfort. It felt as if he was all but stripping her naked with his burning blue eyes. And at the thought, her body suddenly felt entirely too hot.

She tried to cover up her gaff by adding hastily, “Cup of coffee, Colonel? I can give you an overview of the program and then walk you through where we are now.”

Thankfully, the good colonel was not slow on the uptake. “Coffee. Great. I had to get up at the crack of dawn to fly here this morning.”

Athena caught the curious gazes of a couple of the computer techs. She really hoped they hadn’t heard that ‘not long until something bad happens’ comment from Grafton. She’d deliberately kept that part of the project from her team. They were already under enough pressure what with all the funding problems they’d had. They didn’t need to know that the fate of the world rested on their heads, too.

The moment her office door closed, Grafton whirled to face her. “What’s up?” he asked shortly. I

She replied, “The staff hasn’t seen the classified document you have. They’re not aware of the deadline looming over this project.”

“Why the hell not? They’ll work faster if they know what they’re up against.”

Facing him felt like trying to stand against the force of a hurricane. Lord, he was overwhelming. She was a scholar and an academic, and lived in a quiet world of study and thought. She wasn’t up to dealing with this tornado of a man. But she didn’t have much choice in the matter. Funding and Grafton…or no Project Anasazi.

She tried to explain her decision. “They already give me a hundred percent. And what we do takes tremendous attention to detail. Absolute precision. I can’t afford to have anyone racing through their work and making a mistake. Lives depend on us getting this right.”

“If you’re correct, the future of the world may depend on us getting this right.”

Athena knew that. She’d already bet her reputation and her career on that fact. And as soon as they tried to use the crown, she might very well be betting her life on it.

He made no further argument for the time being, but she got the feeling she hadn’t heard the last of it. After a moment he asked, “Where are we on the project?”

“Close, but we’re missing something in the algorithms, and my brain waves aren’t being exactly duplicated. We’re within a few microns of the right amplitude variations, but we’re not quite there.”

“Have you sent anything back in time yet?”

She jolted. “Good Lord, no. We don’t want to chance breaking the crown by using it incorrectly.”

“Seems to me that at some point you’ll just have to jump off the cliff and give it a go.”

Humph. Military thinking. “That might work when you’ve got a hundred more tanks to blow up where the last one came from. But we’ve got one crown. One shot at getting this technology right.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You might very well discover that last missing bit if you just use it.”

“Too risky.”

He gave her a long, hard look, then said tightly, “That’s not your call anymore, Dr. Carswell.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. A surge of resentment warred with a wave of desperation in her gut. She’d known she was selling Project Anasazi’s soul to the devil. She just hadn’t expected to be confronted by the consequences so soon. She’d hoped to have a couple more weeks before Uncle Sam swooped in and took over. And she definitely hadn’t been counting on this force of nature landing in her lap.

Grafton startled her by saying, “Tell me more about you. The report didn’t say much about your talents beyond the fact that you’ve shown a knack for using the crown.”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “My particular skills seem specially suited to it.”

“You have the ability to astral project, is that right?”

She squirmed, abruptly aware of how perceptively that sapphire gaze was drilling into her. “Well, yes.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“It’s akin to dreaming, but a great deal more vivid. I project my awareness to someplace other than my own body and experience it with exquisite sensory accuracy—as if I’m actually there.”, her life was calm. Peaceful. Serene. Just the way she liked it. Severely lacking in annoying, overconfident males who oozed testosterone and sex appeal. At least until now.

He asked casually, “When will you be ready to try sending something somewhere? It looked to me like you’ve got all the equipment set up—the quartz booth to contain whatever you send, the computers, the amplifiers.”

She resisted an urge to wince. She’d known it would come to this eventually. Just not yet. She answered reluctantly, “We still have to figure out where we’re going wrong in the programming.”

He said briskly, “I think we should go for it. The numbers I looked at seemed more like minor tweaks than actual errors.”

“It’s your career on the line.”

He laughed, sharply and without humor. “Like I still have a career. I’ve been shunted off to a kooky research project in the middle of nowhere with zilch for funding and run by some crazy civilian chick who claims she can time travel. I’d say my career has effectively tanked, wouldn’t you?”

Damn. She’d been hoping the guy at least had a sense of self-preservation she could use to rein him in. Curious, she asked, “What did you do to get stuck with this assignment?”

He threw her a withering look. “Office politics gone bad. I tried to do the right thing, and took the moral high ground. I came out on the losing end.”

“Nothing like being a small, replaceable cog—with a conscience, no less—in a very big machine, eh? That’s why I could never have joined the military. I would’ve gone crazy or gotten court-martialed, or both.”

He made no reply to that.

She said quietly, “As tempting as it is to rush to the end result on this project, I think caution is the best course. We’re close. Let’s not blow it now.”

He bit out. “I’ll take your opinion under advisement, Dr. Carswell.”

She actually felt her teeth gnashing.

“Introduce me to the rest of the staff,” the colonel ordered briskly.

She was half tempted to argue further, but instead, behaved herself. “Let’s go. And call me Athena. Everyone else does.”

The staff was small: two graduate students coming out of the fields of physics and math to analyze brain waves and crunch numbers, two student programmers to translate the equations into computer code, and two hardware technicians to keep the computers up and running. At one time, the best scientific minds in America had worked on the crown in secret, along with the other artifacts recovered from the Roswell crash. And now they were down to this.

A handful of geeks in a basement lab, a crazy psychic chick and one outcast colonel.

Chapter 2

That night, Athena tossed and turned in bed, the sheets tangling infuriatingly around her legs and her pillow hot and lumpy. It was all Pete Grafton’s fault. He’d been gone for the rest of the morning, and then come back in the afternoon with a security system engineer who’d installed fancy new locks on the lab’s entrance and welded a massive safe to the floor of the tiny conference room next to her office.

The colonel had announced flatly that he was in charge now and things were going to change, knew that the surest way to impoverished graduate students’ hearts was to give them free food, or even better, free booze. The cad.

She’d had to endure a noisy bar for nearly two hours and sip her way through several glasses of inferior wine because of him and his cursed glad-handing. Her hair still smelled like cigarette smoke even after a long, hot shower. But it had been that or let him steal the loyalty of her staff right out from under her nose. Damned if he didn’t look even better in a blue V-necked sweater with the sleeves pushed up, and a snug pair of jeans, than he had in his dress slacks and white shirt earlier.

Athena punched her pillow a couple of times and forced the tension from her muscles. She was going to sleep now, and Peter Grafton’s sexy smile and bedroom eyes weren’t going to pop into her head again! It was a hard fought battle, but with the help of the wine, she eventually conquered her errant imagination and dropped off to sleep.

And of course, promptly dreamed of him. His appearance in her unconscious mind was downright exasperating.

“What are you doing here?” her dreaming self demanded.

He looked around, interested. “Nice dream. Great decor. Is this your bedroom?”

She blinked and gazed about. They were in a palatial stone chamber lit by flickering firelight and dominated by a massive canopy bed curtained in burgundy velvet. The ceiling was dark wood crudely painted with a vine pattern that was shockingly phallic. One wall held a geometric display of swords and spears, and a pair of enormous tapestries covered two others.

“Sorry, my bedroom’s done in haute flea-market couture. Time travel researchers don’t make the big bucks, I’m afraid. Heck, I’m lucky to make a paycheck at all.”

“Why this whole castle motif, then?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s your dream. You must know.”

“I don’t have a clue. Maybe you remind me of Prince Charming, so I conjured it up.”

“Prince Charming, huh?”

She glared at the dream image of him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

He grinned and went over to the bed to sit down on its high edge. “Dream a more comfortable mattress, will you?”

She scowled and did her best to imagine the lumpiest, most uneven mattress she could. With fleas.

Pete laughed unrepentantly. “So. Are we going to get naked and do the nasty?”

“I’m going to dream you tarred and feathered if you don’t behave yourself.”

“I like your wit. It’s snappy.”

She glanced down, and was appalled to see herself wearing little more than a filmy negligee of some white, sheer, floaty fabric like fine silk. Where did this gown come from? Surely she hadn’t imagined it! Worse, she was backlit by the fire crackling warmly behind her. It had to be rendering the silk all but transparent.

She looked up, and sure enough, he was devouring the sight as if she were entirely edible. Suddenly, she didn’t know where to put her hands. Her impulse was to cover her private parts, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was uncomfortable. He was so irritating!

“Come here,” he murmured.

Her gaze jerked up. His eyes were intense, glowing cobalt in the firelight. Mesmerized by the flames dancing in them, she eased forward, one hesitant step at a time, until she stood directly in frontg. And it has never lied to me yet. I’m at best an average looking woman.”

“Then there must be something wrong with your eyesight.” She started to argue, but he cut her off. “I’m serious. Your eyes are so extraordinary, I can’t tear my gaze away. The intelligence and warmth that shines out of them is breathtaking.”

She huffed, and he laughed again. “Some women are flashy, some are pretty,” he told her. “Some are fashion model striking. But you—you’re different.”

“Oh, here we go. If you say I’m interesting or unique looking, I’ll slug you.”

He grinned. “You happen to be both of those things. You are…” he thought about it, and then said, “…timeless.”

“What’s that? A politically correct metaphor for looking middle-aged?”

“Jeez. You’re not this prickly when you’re awake,” he grumbled.

She laughed. “Yes, I am. I was just being polite this afternoon. I figured I’d break you in slowly to how miserable I am to work with.”

“Dance with me.”

He took her in his arms and commenced a slow spin, swooping and turning in an airy waltz in space, making her not quite dizzy but definitely light-headed. He held her weightlessly in his hands, one palm resting low on her back, strong and warm against her skin. He twirled her, lifting her up over his head in defiance of a gravity that did not exist, and she felt like a wisp of smoke to his fire. When she was breathless and flushed, he drew her slowly down his body, inch after glorious inch of marble hard muscle. And then he really kissed her.

She thought what they’d done before had been kissing, but that was a candle flame compared to this burning sun. He all but inhaled her, drawing her into him. A hand plunged into her hair, cupping the nape of her neck, his other arm crushing her against him. In turn, she clung to him as if he were the only air in her universe, and she was desperate to breathe him in as well. To be part of him. To be one.

The sky dissolved into a velvet canopy once more, and they were back in the magnificent bed, limbs entwined, their bodies, indeed, joined as one. Their lovemaking started as an easy thing, a gentle flexing of flesh and muscle. It grew by slow degrees, becoming more powerful. Intense. And finally, a driving wildness, a primal thing greater than the sum of them both. Higher and faster, harder and deeper they pushed one another, their panting breaths mingling and their bodies straining together.

Her climax was shattering. It felt as if he’d destroyed her soul and made it whole again all at once. He shouted his release and they collapsed in a sweaty, exhausted, sated heap.

Wow. Further words failed her.

She managed another description: incredible.

“You know, I can hear your thoughts,” he murmured, his lips moving lazily against her ear.

“No way did I dream you being able to do that,” she muttered.

She felt his lips curve in a smug smile. As if he’d come up with the thought-reading bit himself and found it humorous…

She frowned. How on earth was Pete inserting details into her dream? It wasn’t possible. Unless—

Athena bolted upright. And found herself sitting alone in the middle of her bed, the sheets soaked with sweat and hopelessly twisted around her. The piney smell of his aftershave lingered in her nostrils, and the feel of his body on hers was itely not here.

She glanced up at her window. It was closed and locked. She climbed out of bed, nearly breaking her neck as the sheet tangled around her right foot and tripped her. Cursing under her breath, she righted herself and stumbled to the living room. Her front door was locked. A quick pass through the kitchen confirmed that the back door was, too. He hadn’t sneaked into her house and taken advantage of her wine-assisted slumber.

It was almost as if he’d passed through the walls of her house and directly into her sleeping mind—

Horror erupted in her gut.

The son of a bitch!

Chapter 3

It took her under a minute to throw on a pair of sloppy sweats and running shoes, grab her keys and barge out the back door. Swearing a blue streak, she made record time getting to the university and downstairs to the basement lab that held her time travel equipment.

No surprise, a light shone under the door.

She was going to kill him. She slammed her palm against the new biometric panel, and punched in the numeric security code, which, in her state of mind, she was darn lucky to remember. A green light went on above the number pad and she yanked open the door.

“Of all the nerve!” she exclaimed.

Pete jerked upright in her recliner—her recliner—and grinned sheepishly. He looked ridiculous with the crown perched high on his head, too small for him, wires trailing down over his ears. “Hi, Doc.”

The sight of him, the sound of him, staggered her. The intimacy of their shared knowledge was almost too much to bear. The connection between them, forged in her sleeping mind, was more real than ropes tying them one to another. Their gazes met. And just for a second, she saw that he was as affected as she was. An impulse to throw herself into his arms, to continue where the dream had left off, almost overtook her.

But the look in his eyes stopped her. Shock was followed by naked desire, and then a careful masking of his reaction—outright denial, even. And that was what made her snap. Who was he, to hide from her? It was all his fault in the first place.

“How dare you invade my dreams like that!” Her fury continued to gather steam, and she relished the idea of letting him have it with both barrels. “That crown is not a toy! That’s a priceless piece of alien technology. What possessed you to use it for a practical joke? Don’t you have any idea how important my research is? The implications for mankind? Did you hear nothing of what I told you today? It’s vital that we figure it out—not make a game of it!”

He had the good grace to look vaguely chagrined.

An errant thought struck her. “How did you do that, anyway? That thing doesn’t have anything to do with dreams.”

He grinned up at her as he carefully set the crown aside. “It works with dreams if the user’s particular psychic talent happens to be projecting himself into other people’s dreams.”

She stared. Her jaw dropped. “You? You’re psychic?”

“Why do you think I was assigned to this project?”

The anger rushed out of her at once. She sat down heavily in the chair before the computer. “How’s your head?”

“ in this project until he’d come along and yanked the rug out from under her. It felt as if the crown had betrayed her. Worse, her own body had betrayed her, by desiring him. Even her dreaming brain had betrayed her, willingly allowing psychic sex with him.

Suddenly she was tired. Exhausted all the way to her soul. She’d been fighting so long for this project, and all at once it was no longer her fight. “Remember to put the crown back in the safe before you leave,” she said dully. “I’m going home.”

“Help me.”

He was all orders and demands. But he had the checkbook, and that gave him the right, she supposed. With a sigh, she moved behind the recliner and carefully disconnected the crown from the various leads and wires. She carried it to the new safe in the conference room and put it on the table while she opened the digital lock. The door swung open.

Her gaze landed on the contents of the safe and she jolted violently. “How’d this stuff get in here?” she demanded, appalled. The entire contents of the tiny wall safe in her office had been moved in here.

“One of your students shifted the things over after everyone else left the lab today. The security company said this new safe is a lot harder to break into than your old one.”

“You had no right—” she began. But then she stopped. What was the use? He did have the right. Apparently, Peter Grafton had hijacked her entire life in the past twenty-four hours. “Never mind.”

Seeming to sense her mood, he glided past her to put the crown and its storage box into the safe. “What’s that?” he asked quietly.

She glanced in the direction of his gaze. A heavy aluminum tube lay on the floor of the safe, nearly two feet long and stretching almost to the back wall of the enclosure. Was nothing sacred to this man? She sighed. He’d taken over everything else about the project. He might as well have this one last secret, as well. After all, Project Anasazi was Peter Grafton’s gig now.

She turned to face him and said quickly, before she could change her mind, “There’s one more thing I haven’t showed you.” Dammit, he smelled of pine woods and…and her shampoo. We did not have sex. It was just a dream!

He murmured, “I thought we covered everything earlier.”

Yeah, what with her briefing, and then their virtual sex, she supposed she had shown him just about everything she had. She tried to work up a renewed sense of fury at his invasion of her mind, but it refused to come. Instead, an insidious desire to do it again—awake this time—insinuated itself into her unwilling thoughts.

Yanking her focus back to business, she laid the tube on the conference table and tossed him a pair of cotton gloves. She donned a second pair and slipped a set of scrolls from the metal container. Together, they unrolled the ancient vellum, each holding down a corner of the fragile pages.

Pete leaned forward curiously to examine the top scroll more closely. A lock of chestnut hair fell forward over his forehead, and Athena suppressed an urge to reach out and smooth it off his brow.

“Looks like scientific notes,” he murmured. “What language is that? Latin?”

She forced her mind to stick to the business at hand. “Good guess. It dates to about 44 B.C. From Italy, near Pompeii. The author was a woman. A historian named Argenta. She wrote about pieces of a medallion that were hidden across the Earth throu ready to master interstellar travel.”

“Who hid these medallions? Does she say?”

Athena winced. “A group of…star travelers. From a galactic council.”

He gaped. “Aliens?”

“Yeah.”

Pete stared at her first in disbelief, and then in burgeoning amusement. “And you believe this Argenta person?”

Athena winced again. “It gets better. She also warned that certain elements within the galactic community do not want humans to acquire the ability to navigate the stars. She claimed that they already have and will continue to interfere with man’s development of time and space travel…which, according to her, are quite similar to one another.”

His gaze shut down, his expression becoming completely unreadable. Panic clawed at her gut. Oh, God. What was he thinking? At best, he must believe he’d been assigned to watch over a bunch of nut cases. At worst, he was mentally drafting the memo to revoke their funding and shut down Project Anasazi altogether.

Pete stared at the petite woman before him. She didn’t look crazy. She didn’t sound crazy. But without a shadow of a doubt, her assertions were true-blue loony tunes. She had to be messing with him. Jerking around the new guy. Except her desperate gaze never wavered. Not a hint of humor showed in her troubled green eyes. Either she was a hell of an actress or she was dead serious.

“You’re telling me the world will end if we don’t solve this problem?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, it’s not quite that bad. At least I hope not. So far no spaceships have swooped down and abducted any members of my staff to prevent us from doing our work. Although one does have to wonder what the Roswell spacecraft was up to, flying around in our atmosphere like that. Our scientists have positively identified radio and visual surveillance equipment on the Roswell craft.”

Pete had the rank and security clearances to have seen the real Roswell files, and didn’t have trouble wrapping his mind around the idea of humans not being alone in the universe. At least in theory. But this woman was saying that aliens had actually been on Earth, planting medallions and interfering with humans for millennia.

She continued, “We know that someone very badly wants to stop me and my team from acquiring time travel.”

That gave him a nasty start. How did she know that?

But before he could ask her, she continued talking. Rapidly, as if she desperately wanted to get all this information off her chest. “Since only a tiny handful of people know anything about the true nature of our research here, and all of them are completely trustworthy, we have to assume the threat comes from hostile forces outside of that group, which means—”

“Whoa there, Athena. How do you know this threat exists?”

She huffed. “There’ve been two break-ins here at the lab, and one at my house. Both of my assistant programmers have also had recent robberies. And inexplicably, little of value has been stolen at any of the break-ins. It was as if whoever it was searched our homes, didn’t find what they wanted, then snatched something randomly to make it look like a simple robbery.” As Pete gaped at her, she went on. “You have to admit, so many thefts can’t be coincidence.”

Somebody was probing the team’s security perimeter. Testing to see how vulnerable the entire project was. His gut vibrated in warning. He’d spent too many years seeing exactly these kinds of tactics practiced by terrorists. Thank God the Anasazi Project hadn’t had a major breach yet. No doubt about it, his inste he’d get any backup. Five minutes to defend what was possibly the most important equipment and information in the United States. In the world.

Four dark-clad figures eased through the door. Damn. They entered with military precision, quartering the fields of fire and visually clearing the corners of the lab like trained commandos.

Pete sensed Athena’s indignation, her impatience. She obviously wanted him to do something, but he was severely outmanned and outgunned here. The best course was to stay put, unless it came down to defending the crown and the scrolls. But it was damn hard to remain still and watch strangers rifling through the files in the lab, scattering papers on the floor as they searched for something. One of the men sat down at the mainframe and plugged in a nifty electronic gadget to one of the USB ports. No doubt trying to break the password encryption. Thank goodness Pete had had the staff change the passwords that afternoon. One of them had been using his dog’s name, and another her birthday, for heaven’s sake. The new passwords, each containing symbols, numbers and letters, would max out the time necessary for that little machine to break the code.

One of the other men used a crowbar to wrench the doors off the storage cabinets on the far side of the room. All four metal panels went flying, and Athena flinched each time one clattered to the floor. A third man headed for her office.

“Do some military stuff,” she breathed in Pete’s ear.

“I am. I’m hiding from the superior force,” he breathed back. Taking advantage of the intruders’ distraction, he gestured for her to crawl toward the rear of the conference room, under the table. He followed, searching for anything he could use as a weapon—to no avail. Pete made a mental note to pack a sidearm from now on. But in the meantime, he prayed the police and campus security would hurry.

A loud bang made Athena jump violently beside him. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her tight against his side. The bastards had blown the safe—the old one in the wall behind her desk.

Violent cursing erupted from her office. The bad guys must have just discovered that the safe was empty. Pete allowed himed.

“He can just deal with it. He should have warned us that his little professor got a sudden whim to beef up her security.”

Another man replied, “If he wants us to continue with this job, he can damn well pay more, given the heightened security.”

And then the intruders were gone.

Athena sagged against Pete, shuddering.

“You okay?” he murmured,

“Uh, no.”

He laughed quietly. “Looks like I got here in the nick of time.”

“I’ll give you that. Your timing was impeccable.”

“Stay put. I’m going to go meet the police and make sure they don’t contaminate the scene. I want a friend of mine to come have a look at our visitors’ work.”

“Who?”

“A guy I know who’s ex-Special Forces.”

She didn’t ask more, and he got the feeling she grasped perfectly well what he was implying. The intruders were military-trained. Not simple thugs for hire. Project Anasazi had apparently attracted some very dangerous attention.

It took a couple of hours for his buddy to drive up to Flagstaff from Phoenix. But when the guy walked into the lab, he announced in about thirty seconds that the job had all the hallmarks of an East German team. When that country had dissolved, most of its military forces had been dumped on the street, and many had gone mercenary, their services for sale to the highest bidder. Which meant whoever was targeting Athena’s project had considerable financial resources.

The police agreed to set up a perimeter for the remainder of the night, and Pete made the calls to get an army team out here first thing in the morning. He had to artfully dodge questions about why some podunk civilian lab needed such heavy protection, but he called in a few favors, and the team was on the way.

He pocketed his phone and caught sight of Athena, who had collapsed in her recliner and was showing definite signs of aftershock. Pete walked over to her and murmured, “Let me take you home.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Those guys were talking about checking out your house. You’re not going home alone.” His tone left no room for argument, and she nodded, abruptly edgy again.

They swung by his hotel room first—he hadn’t had time to find a place to live yet—and he picked up his Glock pistol, shoulder holster and several clips of ammo. Athena gave him directions to her place, and he pulled up in front of a small, trim cottage with a deep and inviting front porch.

“Stay here. I’ll clear the place and then you can come in.”

“Not a chance. It’s my home,” she retorted.

“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 the 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 frame, 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 sighed. “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.”

The response was noncommittal, but it wasn’t a no. He kissed her again, taking his time and savoring the remnants of an excellent Piesporter Riesling wine on her breath.

“I’m hurt. You drank a good bottle of wine without me.” He smiled against her lips to take any sting out of the comment.

“I thought you liked your happy hours and cold beers.”

He deftly shifted the covers out from underneath him as he answered, “That’s just good office diplomacy. I can take or leave beer, personally. I much prefer a nice bottle of wine.”

“Duly noted.” She reached for his shirt and peeled it over his head as he unhooked his belt. “Hurry,” she urged him as he discarded the rest of his clothes.

He grinned at her as he slipped beneath the covers. “Why? We’ve got all night. And I plan to use most of it, myself.”

She laughed. “Can I quote you on that?”

“Absolutely.”

Their joining was a homecoming, familiar and new at the same time. It was odd knowing her so intimately already, and yet reveling for the first time in the satin texture of her flesh, the gasps that caught in the back of her throat, the way her body molded so perfectly to his. Thankfully, she strained toward him as eagerly as he did toward her. Everywhere he touched her she was responsive, arching up into his hands and mouth, offering herself to his every wanton exploration.

Somewhere in the rush of flesh on flesh and swirling tongues and traded moans, she maneuvered him onto his back and treated him to the same full-body exploration. It drove him half out of his mind. Finally, she relented, and he surged up over her, more than ready to take charge again. He pushed her hands over her head, guiding her fingers around the spindles of her headboard. And then he used his knee to nudge her thighs apart, rendering her largely at his mercy.

The first order of business was to drive her out of her mind. To chase away all remnants of the rational, logical scientist and call forth the passionate woman hiding within. Hell, he wanted to make her forget her own name.

He stroked her damp heat, circling and rubbing and probing until her breathing was fast and erratic. And then he increased the tempo, varying the pressure from deep and strong to light and teasing. A cry broke from her lips.

“Do you want more?” he murmured above her.

“Yes. Please. More.”

Wow. Begging, and he different pattern, but when I figure that into the overall pattern, it will make the necessary corrections to the computer algorithm!”

He sort of followed that. But not entirely.

Athena leaped out of bed, gloriously naked, and he sat up to enjoy the sight of her while it lasted. She threw on jeans and a fuzzy sweater, and flew out the door without another word to him.

So much for a lazy, romantic morning after.

Frowning, he got up, hit the restroom, then pulled on his clothes. He gave it another thirty seconds before she’d figure out that he’d absconded with her car keys from the top of her dresser. He wasn’t kidding—she wasn’t going anywhere without him until she had round-the-clock security.

Ten seconds passed.

“Pe-ter?” Her voice rose in warning. “Where are my keys?”

“In my pocket. I’ll give you a ride to the lab.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’s broad daylight. Give me my keys!”

“Nope,” he replied casually.

She scowled.

Surely she’d learned last night that, at the end of the day, he preferred to be in charge, and that she would have no luck forcing him to do much of anything he didn’t want to do. She didn’t argue any further about the keys, so maybe she had figured that out.

He said, “We can swing by a coffee shop and get a bite of breakfast on the way to the lab. You can’t work on an empty stomach.”

Her scowl deepened.

“Okay, fine. I’ll make it a drive-through,” he conceded. “But you’re still eating breakfast. I didn’t get to buy you the obligatory pre-sex, date dinner last night, so you’re not talking me out of this.”

He thought that was a grin that flickered across her face, but it was hard to tell beneath her impatience. She snatched up a notebook and pen and all but dragged him out to her car. Laughing, he went along.

“Man. Remind me never to get in the way of a mad scientist,” he groused, as she all but bounced in her seat, so intent was she on reaching the lab.

She didn’t reply. She was too wrapped up in scribbling equations. She chewed on the muffin he put in her hand, and drank down the cup of coffee he passed her, but Pete highly doubted she tasted either. He practically had to jog to keep up with her when they reached the science building.

While she sat at the computer and commenced typing at light speed, he checked in with the morning watch. Sam Garvey was just coming on duty again. He was the senior NCO on the security detail and had seen plenty of combat over the years. He was a good soldier. A good man.

Sam told him the previous watch team had reported a quiet night.

“Stay sharp, Sam,” Pete replied. “I’ve got this gut feeling something’s about to happen. Soon.” Something he’d be deeply relieved to have all those guards around for.

Sam nodded soberly. “I’ve got your back, sir.”

It was a comforting thought.

“Eureka!” Athena shouted, startling both him and Sam. They looked over at her sitting at the computer. “I’ve done it! I’ve cracked the code!”

Pete stared in disbelief. “For real?”

She laughed jubilantly. “Get the digital clock off the desk in my office. Synchronize it to the time on your watch and then put it in the booth.”

While he did that, she fetcheudes when subjected to low-frequency sound waves.

Athena stretched out in her recliner. “Do you know what to do on the computer?” she asked anxiously.

He grinned at her eagerness. “Yes. And the directions are right here on the desk, anyway. You do your thing and I’ll take care of this end.”

“Okay, here goes,” she murmured.

He watched as she closed her eyes and seemed to go to sleep in the chair. Sam glanced at him questioningly and Pete nodded back reassuringly. Everything was on track.

And then Athena began projecting her brain waves through the crown. The amplitude of the waves wavering across his computer screen jumped impressively. The red line, generated by Athena, began to come into alignment with the blue line created by the computer. The two lines drew closer and closer together, until only a faint blur between them indicated any disparity.

And then, without warning, the two merged and the single sine wave turned bright green.

“We are a go,” he called out to her.

She didn’t acknowledge his words in any way, but all of a sudden, the green wave went wild before him. A bright flash of light exploded in the booth across the room, and a metallic smell abruptly hung in the air.

He looked into the quartz booth for the dark plastic cube of the clock.

It was gone.

Chapter 6

Athena sat up as Pete and Sam audibly gasped. She looked over at the time travel booth. “Well,” she commented lightly, “I either just sent that clock back in time, or we’ve spent tens of millions of dollars developing a state-of-the-art blower-upper of alarm clocks.”

Pete laughed. “How will we know if it worked?”

“Go check the desk in my office. I sent the clock there. If the experiment worked, it should be sitting on my desk, but reading about fifteen minutes ahead of the current time. It was 10:02 when I sent the clock back. I sent it back to 9:47 a.m., but it will keep moving forward from its set time. It’s 10:03 here now, but the clock will have run for fifteen extra minutes and should read 10:18 a.m. If the experiment worked, of course.”

“Let’s go find out,” he said quietly.

Athena took off the crown and got out of her seat. Her stomach flip-flopped so violently she thought she might throw up. This was it. The moment of truth. She and the two men approached the door to her office cautiously.

A small plastic cube sat on her desk.

Bingo.

Pete reached out with a slightly shaky hand and turned the clock around to face them. Big red numbers read 10:18.

“Hot damn!” he cried, startling her. He turned and swept her up in his arms, dancing her around the lab and shouting, “You did it! By Jove, you did it!”

A lifetime’s worth of work. No one had believed it possible. And she’d just proved them all wrong.

Sam grinned widely and thumped Pete’s back, too.

Elation filled Athena. As if making one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time wasn’t good enough, she got to share the moment with Pete.

“Call the staff,” she gasped between spins around the lab.

“Heck, let’s call the President of the United States!” he retorted jovially.

“Let’s duplicate the experiment with tighter controls before we go and do something that rash,” s through most of the police investigation of the latest break-in.

The crown was safe in its hiding place—the intruders hadn’t searched the trash cans. But it was small consolation in the face of the day’s much larger loss.

The police took pictures and interviewed the survivors until she thought she was going to scream. But eventually, they left, too, handing security over to the remainder of Pete’s team, all of whom had gathered at the lab when word of Sam’s death spread. The soldiers were grim. Furious. Ready to kick some ass and take blood revenge the next time the thugs showed up. And Pete, with his jaws clenched, had given them orders to do so.

Athena didn’t doubt there would be a next time. The crown was still in her possession, after all. But the loss of the Ad Astra journal was devastating. It paled before the loss of Sam’s life, but it was a blow to her work. Regardless of whether the ringleader’s goal was to stop Project Anasazi or control time travel for his own nefarious ends, once whoever was after the scrolls actually read them and saw exactly what was at stake, Athena had faith that person would double his efforts to get ahold of the crown.

Finally, the lab grew still and silent again. Just she and Pete were left, with a cordon of guards outside. The two of them sat down, physically and emotionally spent, she in her recliner and he in the nearby chair at the computer console.

Into the quiet, Pete finally got around to repeating his question. “Is there a copy of the Ad Astra scrolls?”

Athena sighed. “I’ve got rough sketches. But the parchment was too fragile to risk making photocopies. I have handmade copies of the text, of course. But the diagrams—the pictures of how to assemble the medallion…we have only my sketches to go on.” She thought in despair of the exquisite detail of the original drawings and how much information had been lost in tonight’s attack. “I think we have enough to get by, but I can’t be sure.”

Pete nodded wearily.

“Thing is…” she started reluctantly.

He glanced up and gestured for her to continue.

“…now someone else knows where to start looking for the first medallion, too.”

“What about the other pieces?” he asked.

Athena shrugged. “The journal indicates that when we find the first piece of the medallion, it will give us a clue to the location of the second piece, and the second piece of the medallion will lead us to the third, and so on.”

Pete’s eyes opened wide in horror. “And now whoever is behind the break-ins and murder has enough information to go after not only the first medallion section, but all of the subsequent pieces, too.”

“He’s only got to find one, Pete. The scrolls were specific. All twelve medallion segments must be recovered and assembled for the message to the rest of the galaxy to get sent. If our bad guy manages to steal even one piece of the medallion, mankind will not be able to make the contact with the Galactic Council. If he gets to that first piece before us, Project Anasazi will fail and Sam’s life will have been sacrificed for nothing—” Her voice broke and she couldn’t go on.

They sat together in silence for a long time. It was surreal after the day’s incredible highs to have sunk so quickly to this abysmal low. The whiplash effect was almostwe could send someone back in time and leave a little surprise for our intruders.”

She’d have laughed at the suggestion if it didn’t make her want to cry so badly.

“Seriously, Thena. Think about it.”

She sighed. “We’re months or even years away from human trials. Once other government agencies get involved in this work, we’ll have to jump through piles of red tape before any human lives are put on the line. And by then, for all we know, the time line of our history may have moved so far forward that to go back and change today’s events could cause some enormous rift in the time continuum.”

“But if we sent someone back quickly?” he pressed. “Say, tonight? What are the risks to the flow of time for mankind then?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to research the downstream effects of time travel before I can answer that.”

“Agreed. Let’s research that.”

He spoke with such finality, such certainty, that she glanced up at him, frowning suspiciously. What was he thinking?

“Send me back, Thena.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Do it. Tonight. I can save the scrolls and save Sam.”

“The risks—” she began.

He cut her off. “You said yourself that humans will be much easier to transport than machines.”

“But—”

He grabbed her by both shoulders in sudden, violent urgency. “Sam died tonight. One of my men. On my watch. It’s my fault. For the love of God, send me back. Let me save my guy’s life! I don’t care if my own neck is at risk!”

The grief and pain in his voice were unbearable, and the furious agony in his gaze seared her soul like acid.

“I can’t risk you, Pete,” she whispered.

He surged to his feet. “If you give a damn about me, if you care for me at all, you’ll do this!” he raged at her. “If you ever want us to have a future together, you’ve got to help me now. We’re talking about a man’s life, dammit!”

“We’re talking about your life, too.”

They glared at each other in desperation. There was no right answer. Let Sam’s death go unchallenged, or risk Pete’s life to reverse it.

He was first to speak. His voice was bleak. “It probably won’t work, anyway. You won’t generate enough power and I won’t go anywhere at all. But at least we’ll have tried. And I can face Sam’s wife and kids in peace.”

“He had a wife and kids?” Athena whispered achingly.

“Two children. Oldest one’s ten. Wife’s pregnant with number three.”

She groaned in agony.

When the words came, they all but tore her heart in two. “All right, Pete. Let’s try it.”

Chapter 7

It took only a few minutes to boot up the computer and get settled in her recliner, the crown clasping her head with its familiar and strange warmth. Pete turned one of the monitors to face her chair so she could tell when her brain and the computer were synchronized. And then he stepped into the clear quartz time travel booth.

They didn’t speak. Didn’t question the wisdom of what they were about to do. Didn’t trade farewell kisses or even say goodbye. For her part, Athena wedged that this might be the last time she ever saw Pete alive. As it was, she was barely holding herself together enough to concentrate sufficiently to use the crown.

Pete nodded grimly from inside the booth, indicating that he was ready.

She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. Counted backward slowly from ten to one, letting go of all the tension in her muscles one at a time until she melted into the cushions beneath her. She cleared her thoughts. Envisioned a black screen before her mind’s eye. And against that backdrop, began to envision the events of that afternoon. Before the attack.

She hadn’t even asked Pete where or when he wanted her to send him. He’d just demanded to go back. Two hours before the attack ought to be enough. She dared not pop him back into the lab. Nobody knew what would happen if a time traveler suddenly encountered himself in an earlier moment. Rather than risk blowing up his head or blinking him out of existence entirely in some weird time warp, she opted to put him on the front porch of the science building.

The red and blue sine waves began to draw together on the monitor beside her. She closed her eyes again, concentrating on breathing deeply and evenly. There. The same abrupt tingle she’d felt in the earlier time travel experiments. It seemed to emanate from the crown and travel across the top of her skull and then radiate outward through her brain and eyeballs.

She cracked one eye open. The computer screen showed a single green line. She was good to go. Athena took a deep breath, summoned all the power she could muster and imagined flinging Pete back in time.

A light flashed, brilliant even through her closed eyelids. She jolted upright, peering across the lab at the booth.

Pete was gone.

The breath whooshed out of her and all of a sudden she felt violently ill. What had she done? Gasping for air, she sagged in the recliner.

Had she just killed a man?

She lifted her wrist to glance at her watch: 11:46 p.m. After all, every man deserved to have the moment of his death noted and remembered.

Had anything changed at all from before? She looked around hopefully.

The lab was empty. The police chalk marks on the floor indicating spots where evidence was picked up were still there. Stray papers from ransacked files littered the room, and the cabinet doors were still off their hinges, leaning against the far wall.

Her heart sank. They’d failed. The attack had still happened. She’d sent Pete to God-knew-where, God-knew-when. And it had all been for nothing.

Suddenly, the prospect of life without him loomed before her, too crushingly depressing and sad for her to bear. Tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes. How long she lay there and cried silently for what they had lost before it had hardly begun, she didn’t know.

They’d known each other barely a week, but he’d blown into her world with his gorgeous blue eyes, bursting energy and boyish charm, and had swept her completely out of her bland, boring existence. In a single week he’d torn away all the layers of stuffy academia and stodgy routine that she’d drawn around herself for all these years like a shield. He’d reminded her how it felt to be alive.

And she’d loved the feeling.

Given time, she had no doubt she would come to love the man. Maybe she already had fallen more than a little in love with him.

And then she’d killed him.

What on earth had she been thinking to let him talk her into such a stunt? She was an idiot. A fool. Criminally negligent. She deserved to lose him after behaving so stup desperation to sav

Time Raiders: The Seduction

Copyright © 2009 by Cynthia Dees, Lindsay McKenna, and Merline Lovelace.

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