Time After Time (3 page)

Straw?
he thought.
Now, why on earth—

“It’s nice to meet you,” Alex said solemnly, holding out one small hand.

“Same here.” Holding that soft slenderness in his own hand, Noah found it impossible to believe—“Are you sure you tamed lions?” he blurted out.

“Very sure.” Her amused smile made it quite obvious that she’d heard that question before.

Noah found himself wondering if the sirens in her eyes had bewitched even jungle beasts, and hastily pushed the speculation away. He also released her hand when he became aware that he’d held it longer than necessary. He felt rattled again
and wasn’t at all sure he liked the sensation. Alex didn’t seem to notice.

She rose to her feet, smiling. “Let me get changed and I’ll put on some coffee. Unless—?” Her lifted brow made the question clear.

“I’d love some coffee, thanks,” he responded. As he watched her move gracefully through the jumble toward the bathroom, Noah told himself that his desire to remain was simply a landlord’s intention to get to know a tenant, and a client’s desire to better know his decorator. He told himself that several times, more firmly with each repetition.

And he believed not one word of it.

By the time he made his way up the stairs to his own loft over an hour later, Noah had stopped pretending even to himself. Alex Bennet was the most captivating woman he’d ever met in his life, and even after seeing the polar bear she clearly meant to keep in her own loft, he felt no misgivings about her decorating ability; she could have done every loft in the building in bamboo and
stuffed wildlife and he wouldn’t have said a word against it.

He’d even given Fluffy an absent pat on his way out.

It wasn’t until much later, sliding between the sheets of his bed and reaching to turn out the lamp, that Noah wondered about Caliban. Alex had not suggested that he meet her pet, and he had been too intrigued by the woman herself to care about anything else. Now he wondered, but only fleetingly. He lay back and closed his eyes, looking forward to tomorrow.

He dreamed of mermaids and sirens, his dream-self incredulous that Ulysses had lashed himself to a mast instead of leaping happily overboard….

Noah woke once in the night, and during the hazy moments between abandoned dreams and wakefulness, he could have sworn he heard a voice. The voice was feminine, familiar yet strange, and the accent was one he’d never heard before. And his sleep-fogged mind told him the girl spoke to him—but to someone else as well.

“Oh, see! Our lifelines match! We are bonded, my love. Fated to share all our lives together!”

And then he was awake.

Noah frowned into the darkness, feeling an oddly displaced sensation. Green woods, he thought, not a dark bedroom … Then he shook his head, pounded his pillow, and fought to recapture sleep.

But he never recaptured the dream.

Alex puttered about her loft for a while after Noah left. She let Caliban out of the bedroom and fed him, reminding herself to be sure to go shopping early the next day. It was late, the storm long gone, and she waited restlessly for her pet to finish his dinner so that she could take him out for his much-needed exercise.

Absently unpacking a box filled with decorative pillows, she piled them on the couch and then sat down among them, finally thinking about what she’d been trying to avoid considering. There were
several things, and heading the list was her new client and landlord.

The return of electricity had brought a definite shock, one she still hadn’t entirely recovered from. Her supposedly short-fat-and-balding client was no such thing; in fact, any comparison with that mythical gentleman was ludicrous.

Noah Thorne was a man somewhere in his mid-thirties, somewhere over six feet tall, and somewhere over a ten in the half-serious rating system Alex’s friends always used.

Alex had never even met a ten before, much less a man who would easily jolt the needle over the top.

He had the kind of hawklike good looks one never expected to encounter in a real person, and if that smile hadn’t been breaking hearts for a good many years, she mused, then Noah Thorne had met a lot of blind women. His thick hair was raven-black and stick-straight, his eyes a curious light blue that was almost gray and almost silver—but not quite.

Half the women Alex knew would have killed
to possess his long eyelashes, and the other half would have killed to possess
him
. After seeing him move around the loft, Alex had been reminded irresistibly of a warrior walking cat-footed on the hunt, silent, dangerous, and nearly as wild as the game he stalked.

When he smiled, that lethal image was overshadowed by charm and humor, but Alex felt faintly unnerved by the instinct telling her that nature had intended just that; even the wildest of beasts could look cuddly and unthreatening at times, lending a feeling of safety that was, to say the least, misleading.

Alex was determined not to be misled.

However, it was one thing for her to tell herself that, and quite another thing to ignore the instant attraction she’d felt. She’d seen the ridiculous images in her mind of Cleopatra meeting Antony, of Guinevere gazing upon Lancelot, of Cinderella raising her eyes to meet those of Prince Charming.…

Ridiculous! She was twenty-six years old, on her own for ten years, and she certainly knew better
than to indulge in childish dreams and unrealistic expectations. Men were men; the best of them possessed annoying habits and beliefs, and the worst of them had some redeeming trait. Period.

Still, there was just something
about
the man. She’d had the odd feeling that they had met before, yet his face had struck no chord of memory.

Alex drummed her fingers silently on a particularly colorful pillow and tried to think reasonably. He was a very attractive man, and in the moment of surprise following the darkness she had seen his interest in her. He had drunk her coffee and gazed at her almost constantly, making her feel breathless and curiously unlike herself—and that was a danger signal.

In fact, it was a hell of a potential problem.

Because Alex wanted very much to get to know him better. It wasn’t his looks that prompted that desire, although they had certainly been a jolt to her system. No, she thought, it wasn’t because he was a handsome man. It was because of the humor in his deep voice and the charm and danger of his smile.

Danger. Alex knew then why she was so attracted to him. For nearly four years, while most girls her age had been playfully experimenting with boys, Alex had learned to handle creatures of the wild. She had learned to read the signs of rage in the posture of a big cat, in the abrupt movement of a bear, and in the flashing eyes of a stallion. And she had survived those years and experiences unscathed because she was very good at reading such signs.

Smiling a little to herself, Alex allowed that instinct to search her impressions of tonight’s meeting with Noah, and her instinct summed up the situation neatly.
A caged lion, a tethered hawk, a chained bear … call him what you will, Noah Thorne is a dangerous man
.

Not dangerous to life and limb, of course, but dangerous to something far more vital. Alex had the strong feeling that any involvement with Noah would literally change her life forever.

So what? You approve of change
, a voice in her head pointed out reasonably.

So there was a problem. Caliban.

Alex looked up as he padded silently around the low partition dividing the kitchen from the rest of the loft, and rose to her feet. “Ready to go out, boy?” Caliban rumbled something that might have been a yes, his big yellow eyes gazing at her with a gentleness she could read and no one else would ever believe.

“Now, look,” she told him, scrabbling through a box for his collar and leash, “we can’t let anyone know you’re here. So you behave yourself, all right?” After nearly six years of successfully hiding her pet, Alex normally would have had little fear of exposure. Except that now she’d met Noah.

Whether he would keep her secret or not she didn’t know, but both her job and her interest in him promised a closer involvement than she’d ever had to deal with during the past six years. Noah had her definite interest, but Caliban had her heart—and sooner than lose him, she knew she would quietly fold her tent and steal away into the night.

Sighing, wondering how long she could keep Caliban’s presence a secret from her landlord—to
say nothing of future tenants—Alex fastened the heavy collar around his thick neck and snapped the leash in place. Then, while he waited patiently, she went through the routine of finding out whether or not there was anyone in the vicinity outside the building.

Feeling fortunate to have a ground-floor loft with a back entrance, Alex checked the rear of the building and felt even luckier. The pool was to the right of her back door, new wooden decking surrounding it and a decorative fence surrounding that; the gate stood open, giving her a good look inside since the moon now shone in a cloudless sky.

Directly outside the sliding glass door was an equally new deck matched by another several yards away for the other ground-floor loft. Looking up, she could see that each loft boasted a deck with a view of the pool. Alex sighed, hoping that neither Noah nor any of the future tenants would spend late nights out on their decks. Then she gazed at the fenced land surrounding this building.

For what was basically a city dwelling, she
thought, there was an abundance of empty land, which was just great for her purposes. She stepped out far enough to look up toward Noah’s loft, assuring herself that it was dark and that he wasn’t on his deck. He might well have been inside in darkness, gazing through his own glass door, but she doubted it.

Ten minutes later she and Caliban were exploring, and she was patiently teaching her pet where his boundaries were. They roamed among the dripping trees and wet, overgrown grass for more than an hour before she finally led him back inside the loft and got ready for bed.

Later, lying sleepily in the darkness of her bedroom, she automatically moved over as Caliban climbed into the bed. She patted his broad head and listened to the grumbling sound he made in contentment. Just as she was dropping off to sleep, she found herself wondering idly how her pet would react to a man in her bed.

Odd … the question had never occurred to her before.

She had taken Caliban out for a run at dawn, then accomplished her shopping before most of the city was even awake; all-night grocery stores, she thought with amusement, were certainly a godsend for people with unusual pets. So was the ability to sleep no more than four or five hours a night, an ability she had possessed as long as she could remember.

Leaving Caliban in the bedroom to sleep off the morning’s exertions and his breakfast, she put away her groceries and began to get her kitchen in order while she watched the sun rising outside. Several hours later she fixed a late breakfast for herself and gazed in approval at her new home. The kitchen was in order and her living area arranged neatly, a profusion of pillows piled on her long sectional couch and two overstuffed chairs. Several large decorative candles graced her inlaid oak coffee table—she’d never again be caught here in the dark for long!—and ceramic
and porcelain lamps sat on the end tables that matched it.

Fluffy stood in a corner near the door with two large potted rubber plants flanking him. Alex had efficiently and as quietly as possible erected her sectional bookcases along the broad wall on the other side of the door, and small boxes of books stood ready to be put into place.

She had taken apart Caliban’s crate and stored the panels in the capacious closet between the bedroom and bathroom doors before stuffing the straw into a large garbage bag along with other assorted trash familiar to anyone who had ever moved. Empty boxes were piled neatly near the door awaiting removal.

It was a good start.

Moving about the loft, thoughtful, Alex carried her coffee cup and planned. The raised platform that took up half the open loft space and ran the length of the streetside wall, she decided, would hold her working materials. It already did, in fact, since she’d asked the movers to leave her working table, desk, and various tools of her trade up there.
A wide set of three steps led up to the platform, and Caliban sprawled to block the way.

Amused, she watched as he methodically licked the bedraggled face of the large teddy bear he clutched between his front paws. “I’m glad the doll finally disintegrated,” she told him, smiling. “That bear’s bad enough, but the doll made your instincts look suspect.” He blinked sleepy eyes and began washing the bear’s face again.

Remembering the large doll her pet had dragged around for nearly two years, Alex smiled. But then a knock sounded at her door, and her smile vanished. “Cal!” she called, heading for the bedroom door.

He got up and lifted the bear in his huge jaws, obediently following her and going into the bedroom. She watched him climb onto her bed with his toy, then carefully closed the door and went to find out who her visitor was.