Time After Time (7 page)

Any of these workmen, Noah thought in amusement, would have been happy to go out and slay dragons for her. But after a day in her company, each would have made certain she was locked in the castle before they sallied forth to do battle for her.

Otherwise there would have been a few roasted knights.

Alex had always had the capacity to focus all her attention on whatever she was doing at the moment, particularly if it was something she was interested in, or something new to her experience. Because of that, she was aware of Noah’s activities with his camera only at the end of the day when—she strongly suspected—he decided to let her know what he was doing.

The painters and carpenters were packing up for the day, and Alex returned the coveralls loaned
to her before turning to find Noah leaning against a wall with his camera hanging around his neck.

“You didn’t say I couldn’t,” he reminded her, grinning.

“How long have you been taking pictures?” she asked uneasily.

“All afternoon. Got some dandy shots too.”

They were in her loft, which was cluttered again since all the furniture had been pushed into the middle of the large room and covered with huge sheets of canvas. Alex wandered over to her couch and lifted a corner of the canvas. She picked up one of the colorful pillows and held it in both hands as she gazed at Noah consideringly.

“That,” she told him, “was not nice.”

Noah found himself instinctively looking around for something to hide behind, and had to grin again. “Are you going to throw the pillow at me?” he asked politely.

With a sigh Alex dropped the pillow and sank down on the couch. “When I decide to start throwing pillows, you won’t have any warning. You won’t even have time to duck.”

“I can hardly wait.”

Alex gave him a rueful look, then frowned as her eyes turned to the couch.

“What is it?” Noah asked, coming forward.

She was watching the canvas covering the couch. Or, more correctly, she was watching something underneath the canvas. “We’ve got company,” she observed thoughtfully.

Noah watched a small lump move erratically beneath the canvas beside Alex. Before he could suggest she move in case it was a snake or something, she swept back the canvas to reveal their “company.” It was a tiny white kitten with a smudge of black on his nose and brilliant green eyes. With a squeak the kitten lurched the remaining few inches to Alex, climbed fiercely into her lap, and began to purr with astonishing volume.

“Where’d he come from?” Noah asked.

“Beats me.” Alex got up, holding the kitten securely in one hand, and went into the kitchen to find food. “The doors have been open all day; I suppose he just wandered in.” She watched the thin little creature hungrily lapping milk after
nearly falling headfirst into the bowl, then lifted her gaze to Noah. “If I can’t find out who he belongs to, I’ll have to keep him.”

“I had a feeling,” Noah murmured. “You aren’t the type to cart him off to the animal shelter. How will Cal react?”

“Oh, he loves babies,” Alex answered, looking back down at the kitten. “He’ll probably try to wash the fur right off this one.”

Noah turned and headed purposefully for the door.

“Was it something I said?” Alex asked, half-laughing.

“I’m out of film,” Noah said over his shoulder. “And I have to have photos of this meeting!”

Noah got some wonderful shots of the tiny white kitten, back arched and tail bristling, meeting a distant cousin many times his size. Photos of the cautious, gentle advances of Cal. And finally, within an hour or so, he got photos of a tiny
purring bundle of white fur curled trustingly between the tremendous paws of an adoring lion.

Noah spent half the night setting up his darkroom.

“I love this one.”

Alex reached for the picture that had collected four wolf whistles as it was passed from hand to hand among the carpenters. She had been gone all morning running errands in town, arriving back home only seconds before to find all the men gathered in the hallway grinning over a stack of eight-by-ten photographs. For a fearful instant Alex thought that Noah might have forgotten himself and handed over the pictures of Cal and the kitten. But she immediately saw that all these photos were of people.

Mostly her. The picture that all the men were admiring was of her. She was halfway up a ladder, bent forward over the top and waving a sheaf of papers in the patient face of the foreman. He had his hands on his hips, his face nearly level with
hers in spite of her added height, and Noah had snapped the photo at the exact instant the foreman had cast a wary glance at the hammer Alex held in her free hand.

What the men had whistled at, she realized, was the part of the picture showing long golden legs exposed by a pair of just barely decent shorts. She leafed through the remaining pictures, finding herself the focus of each one. And she realized that either Noah was a very good photographer or else had been awfully lucky, because every shot was a beauty. The one she stared at the longest was of herself. Noah had captured something she’d never even seen in a mirror.

In the photo she was leaning back against a door jamb and glancing up as a shaft of bright sunlight fell on her from one of the high windows. Alex couldn’t remember the moment, but she realized that she must have been deep in thought, her mind caught up with plans. Her eyes were wide, her face dreamy and wearing a wistful half smile. She looked more beautiful than she knew herself to be, curiously softened and elusive. But there was
something in her eyes, a glint of something that was more than mischief or spirit.

Or maybe that was just a trick of light.

Alex gazed at the picture for long moments, feeling a peculiar sense of seeing someone else instead of herself. Then she shook the feeling away and looked up to discover that she was alone in the hallway; the crews had returned to work.

Leaving her various parcels where she’d dropped them, Alex headed up the stairs. She checked in on Cal and the as-yet-unnamed kitten, making certain they were still safe and safely locked in one of the lofts. They were fine, both sound asleep and the kitten curled up in Cal’s mane as he sprawled on his side. She went on up and finally tracked Noah down in his darkroom; his front door was open and paperhangers were busy in the bathroom. The door to the darkroom was closed, a sign hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard and thumbtacked to the door announcing merely:
KEEP OUT!

Alex knocked. “It’s me, Noah.”

“Out in a second,” he called.

She leaned against the wall, still holding the photos and glancing around the loft. Noah’s loft was double the size of the others, running the entire length of the building. It was divided in half, the hallway door opening into the living area. Where the rest of the building had solid brick walls dividing two lofts on each floor, Noah’s was divided by a plasterboard wall and an arched entrance into his work area.

Alex was in the work area; the darkroom had been converted from what would have been a bedroom. The second bathroom on this floor had remained, Noah said, because he sometimes used models in his work and a room for them to change or apply makeup was necessary. The raised platform along the street side was cluttered with large filing cabinets, various bits of furniture and other props, but the remainder of the large room was mostly bare. There was no kitchen on this side, which added to the floor space.

Alex was gazing around and thinking vaguely of white walls to increase available light and large screens of various colors that Noah could use as
backgrounds if he chose. The painters had already finished with the living area of this loft, but had yet to reach the work area.

She jumped in surprise when arms surrounded her from behind and a kiss landed just beneath her right ear.

“Hello,” Noah said gaily. “Errands finished?”

Alex silently ordered her heart to quit pounding. It didn’t work. “Um … yes. I’ve got more swatches and wallpaper samples for you to look at.”

“Later,” Noah suggested.

She turned to face him, managing to step back and wave the photos in his face to distract him. “You wasted film.”

“I don’t consider it a waste.” He looked suddenly hurt. “You don’t like the pictures?”

“I didn’t say that. I said you wasted film. Do all photographers take so many shots of one subject?”

Noah crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall. “They do,” he said, “if one subject wears many faces.”

She frowned at him.

“That’s one face,” he noted consideringly, a gleam of laughter in his almost-silver eyes. Then he laughed aloud. “Sprite, you wear more faces than a gallery of paintings.”

Alex managed to hold on to the frown. “Sprite?”

He nodded. “An elf or pixie. ’Course, it also means a ghost, and you do have a—haunting way about you.”

She chose to take him literally. “I don’t rattle chains in the night.”

“No, but you haunt my dreams.”

Alex cleared her throat strongly and looked down at the pictures she still held. “This one’s very good,” she murmured.

“It’s my favorite,” he agreed. “Five parts wistful innocence, three parts elusiveness, and two parts evil.”

“Evil?” Alex stared down at the picture of herself, then looked at him. “I don’t see any evil.”

“You wouldn’t.” Before she could respond, he was going on judiciously. “Just a touch, mind you, a certain look in the eyes. It’s no easier to define than Mona Lisa’s smile, but any man would call it
evil. If I could photograph a siren, she’d have that look.”

Alex had the feeling it was a compliment, but wasn’t at all sure. And she didn’t want to ask. “Oh.”

“I like it,” he told her in a consoling tone.

She was trying hard to define the look in
his
eyes. It was, she thought dimly, rather like the way a hurricane would look trapped in a silver-blue bottle; a tremendous force of nature caged. It made her nervous.

Noah smiled slowly. “You’ve picked up your whip and chair again,” he said.

“You were roaring.” Alex knew it was a ridiculous comment to make, but Noah was laughing.

“Was I? Funny, I didn’t hear anything.”

She swallowed a laugh of her own. “You saw my whip and chair; I heard your roar.”

“What is this,
Wild Kingdom?”
asked a bewildered voice from the archway leading to the living area.

Alex and Noah turned hastily, both momentarily uncomfortable because their imagery was definitely
private and not for outsiders. They found themselves confronting a petite young woman walking toward them. She was dressed as casually as they in jeans and a light sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her bright hair was so red it looked unreal, and overlarge horn-rimmed glasses framed big, spaniellike brown eyes.

No one would ever call her beautiful, but there was an endearing freshness about her cute face. She was the “girl next door.”

And Alex had the oddest impulse to say, But you should be taller! Bewildered by the urge, she pushed it out of her mind.

“The guys downstairs told me I could find the owner up here,” she told them briskly, the earlier question clearly a rhetorical one.

“I’m the owner,” Noah said, and accepted a business card from her automatically. He looked at the card. His lips twitched once, but his glance at Alex was grave as he handed her the card. He introduced himself and Alex as she read the card.

Alex instantly understood his brief amusement; the name on the card read: Theodora Suzanne Jessica
Tyler.
Good Lord
, Alex thought,
another little woman cursed with a big name!
But then she read the remainder of the card, and her amusement was chased away by a chill.

Department of Animal Control.

“What can I do for you, Miss Tyler?” Noah asked politely.

“I’m checking on a report of some kind of large animal. Have either of you seen anything?”

“I saw a German shepherd this morning,” Noah offered. “He was big.”

Theodora Suzanne Jessica Tyler gave him a look. “Not a pet, Mr. Thorne. According to the report, this animal may have escaped from a circus or zoo. The lady who called in was definitely rattled, but she thought what she saw may have been a lion.”

Alex wished their visitor had overheard
anything
except the wonderfully suggestive lion-tamer imagery. She kept her face politely blank with an effort, her heart pounding.

Noah was frowning. “A lion? Loose in San Francisco?”

“Could be. No report of one escaping, but sometimes people are funny about reporting things like that.”

“We’ll certainly keep an eye out, then.”

“Thank you.” The response was automatic and polite, but the shrewd brown eyes were glancing between them thoughtfully. Then she changed the subject, and her voice was friendly. “So you’re converting this building to lofts?”

“In the process,” Noah said easily.

“I’m looking for a place. When will you be ready for tenants?”

“A few weeks, I think.”

“Good. I’ll check back with you. As a matter of fact, I’ll probably be hanging around for a while. The neighborhood, I mean. There aren’t too many places a lion could be hidden, but there are a few. Large, mostly empty buildings. Like this one, for instance.”

Noah’s laugh sounded perfectly natural. “I think I’d know if there was a lion hiding out in this building, Miss Tyler.”

She smiled brilliantly. “Yes, I suppose you
would at that. Well, it was nice meeting you. If you see anything, give me a call.”

“Sure.”

They stood perfectly still for long moments, then Noah headed for the hallway to make certain their visitor had left. When he came back, he found Alex sitting on the edge of the raised platform, her face a little pale.

“That,” she said softly, “is the closest brush I’ve ever had.”

He sat down beside her. “I hate to say it, but I don’t think that’s the last we’ll see of her, Alex.”

She glanced at the card still in her hand, then showed him a crooked smile. “Ladies with impressive names tend to try to live up to them. I can vouch for that. She’ll be back.”

Noah was worried about Caliban’s possible exposure, but he was more worried that Alex would fade into the misty night in order to save her pet. He looked at her steadily. “D’you plan on … living to fight another day?”