Not Quite an Angel (Harlequin Superromance No. 595) Page 5

  Sameh laughed with the others, a little confused because she’d never read about any earth area called Slobovia. With laughter, though, came relaxation. She ate vegetables, sipped her wine and deftly deflected questions about herself by asking Fran about the dramatic paintings she’d done, which adorned the walls of the dining room.

  Sameh was very aware of Adam Hawkins, however, sitting at her right. He said something to Bernie, and Sameh glanced at him. His gene pool definitely emphasized physical attractiveness, she mused. Apart from being tall, broad shouldered, long legged and obviously fit, Adam also had compelling features. But here, too, there was more than a hint of the savage in Adam Hawkins, a slight bend to the otherwise well-formed nose, a bend that suggested physical violence of some sort, a touch of cruelty in the tilt of the long, narrow mouth, stubbornness in the square jaw.

  As she studied him, she was suddenly aware of his clear, intense red aura. Although she tried not to, she found herself glancing his way again and again, because she’d never before seen anyone as surrounded by red as the man at her side.

  Well, red signified vitality, Sameh told herself, swallowing a final mouthful of vegetables. Vitality, and—be honest here, Sameh. She choked on a bit of crusty roll and had to take a gulp of her wine to wash it down.

  His kind of red was pure, unadulterated sexual energy, she admitted to herself, struggling to get her breath. He had sexual energy of a type she’d never encountered before. The men she was used to, cultured men from her time, had all long ago lost the raw intensity that shimmered around Adam like a force field.

  “You all right, Sameh? You going to need resuscitation?” His voice was low and taunting, his lips almost touching her ear, curved in a cynical smile, and she jerked away, knocking her fork off the table. “I’ll get that for you.” He leaned over, his dark head almost in her lap this time, and retrieved it.

  Fran got up to check on the children, and Bernie carried plates and cutlery into the kitchen.

  Adam’s aura was touching hers now, intermingling with her own, and she could feel the raw power he exuded. It made her feel prickly and uncomfortable. He was a dangerous, primitive man, she’d known that from the first moment she set eyes on him. The problem was, she had no idea how to deal with such a man.

  “So how’s your work going with Delilah?” His green eyes were on her, and she met his gaze and held it. The other afternoon he’d made her nervous by doing this very thing—sitting totally still and just watching her, not revealing by the flicker of an eyelash what he was really thinking. She’d caught odd traces of those thoughts, however, in spite of his defenses.

  “Working with Delilah is a great privilege,” she said with firm assurance. “She’s a warm and fascinating woman. It’s an honor for me to be able to work with her on her new book.” She knew he thought her an imposter in her job with Delilah, which was perceptive of him. He mistrusted her, which he had every right to do. She wasn’t exactly what she was pretending to be, that was certain.

  Even worse, he seemed to consider her dangerous in some way, a concept so preposterous she could hardly believe her own perceptions. Was he really misguided enough to think she was capable of serious wrongdoing?

  “Uh-huh. I’m sure Delilah’s interesting, all right.” Even now, with those seemingly polite words, he managed to convey both a high degree of skepticism and not a little sarcasm. “I’m afraid I’ve never read any of her books. I’m not really into this New Age stuff.”

  His attitude infuriated her. He could use a little of Delilah’s philosophy and a lot of the maturity of New Age thinking. He also wasn’t honest. She was about to ask him point-blank why he and Bernie had both lied about their reasons for coming to see her, but Frances came back just then with Corey in her arms.

  “This party animal’s determined we’re not having dinner without him supervising,” she said, planting the pajama-clad boy in an armchair close to the table and padding him with pillows so he couldn’t slip out. Corey cooed with delight.

  Adam turned and winked at the baby. “That’s the way, tiger. Don’t let them stuff you into bed and leave you there. You have to keep an eye on them every minute. We’re about to have apple pie and I’ll bet you want a taste, right?”

  In a split second, Sameh could feel the change in the force field surrounding Adam. Aggression became compassion, and she could feel the enormity, the purity, of his love for Corey, as well as the rage he harbored at destiny for putting such a burden on this beloved child. It showed her a whole new side of Adam Hawkins, a side that she found enormously appealing. Without conscious thought, Sameh put her hand on Adam’s arm and smiled at him.

  For the first time, she saw a flicker of uncertainty in his emerald green gaze, but it was gone instantly, and for the rest of the evening, his defenses were again in place.

  When it came time to leave, he turned to her and said, “Do you have a car?”

  Sameh shook her head. She quailed at the very thought of trying to navigate the chaos of Los Angeles traffic. Lord knew she’d had enough problems using the automated sidewalks and people porters in her own time, never mind learning to drive a car here in the nineties. “I always use taxis,” she explained. “They’re really very reliable, and the drivers tell me the most amazing stories.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and gave her that disconcerting green stare again. “I’m sure they do, but you won’t need to call one tonight. I’ll drive you home.”

  His arrogance was enormous, but refusing seemed both petty and rude, which was how she ended up alone with him in his shiny red sports car thirty minutes later, parked with the roof down on an isolated promontory overlooking the ocean.

  “THAT VIEW’S REALLY something, isn’t it?” Adam shuffled through his box of CDs and selected Leonard Cohen. He’d researched carefully over the years and it seemed a vast majority of women found old Lennie’s sepulchral voice and obscure lyrics as sexy as hell. “I live not far from here, and I never get tired of the ocean and sky.”

  Adam intended to accomplish two things. He planned to both interrogate and seduce Ms. Sameh Smith, not necessarily in that order. During dinner the seduction portion had taken alarming precedence.

  Sitting beside Sameh had been challenging. The sticky wine stains on his trousers and shirt had been minor annoyances compared with the sexual desire she stirred in him, a desire so fierce it had taken all his control to suppress it enough so the others wouldn’t notice. Sitting at the dining table with a large napkin across his lap helped a lot.

  Now, all he needed to do was create the proper mood. He was counting on the silver-dappled ocean, the star-studded sky—the smog had lifted because of the breeze—and the car’s elaborate sound system to supply a generous amount of ambience. After that, well, as he’d just told her, his house wasn’t that far away when things got steamy. His heart beat fast and hard, anticipating the sex. He had no doubts whatsoever about his ability or his technique; after all, both had been honed to perfection by constant practice over a number of years.

  He reached across and took her hand in his, stroking her fingers one by one, exploring her palm with his thumb. In another moment, he’d bring her hand to his lips and bite at the tender pad just below her fingers. Then he’d slide an arm around her shoulders and— He froze, and his X-rated version of the next few hours fizzled.

  “You and Bernie took pictures of me and checked my identity.” Her deep throated voice was soft, her words a statement rather than a question. “You don’t trust me, Adam. You’re investigating me.” She was looking right at him, straight into his eyes. He could see the hurt in her expression. “And tonight I realized it was even worse than that,” she burst out. “Why in the galaxy would you believe I might ever harm Bernie or his family, or Delilah? What is there about me that could possibly make you think I could be dangerous to people I respect and like?”

  It was clear she wanted an answer.

  Adam was still holding her hand, trying to figure out how in the hell she kn
ew any of this. Bernie wouldn’t have spilled the beans. No matter how infatuated he might be with Sameh—and he was totally gaga over her, no doubt about that; he seemed to consider her his long-lost sister or something—but he’d never in a million years rat on an investigation. Adam would bet his balls on that.

  Delilah, then? He discounted Delilah right away. She didn’t even know they were investigating her new secretary. And Violet sure as blazes wouldn’t announce it over afternoon tea—Violet was paying the shot to Blue Knights.

  When you don’t have an answer, counter with a question.

  “What makes you think I’m suspicious of you?”

  She gave him a look that squelched him. “Don’t play word games, Adam. I read it in your thought patterns, of course. Bernie was embarrassed. He knew that you were wrong about me from the start. But for you to actually believe that I might do something…something—” she searched for a word ugly enough “—something…malevolent…” She withdrew her hand from his and scowled at him. “That’s truly disgusting of you, Adam.”

  Adam frowned at her. “Hold it, hold it just a damned minute. Go back a little. Did I hear you say you read all this in my, uh, my thought patterns?”

  She bobbed her head, and her blond curls bounced and settled again. The moon was full, and its rays caught strands of her hair and streaked them with silver like a halo. “I didn’t catch all of it. I’m not exactly an expert at thought reading.” She made a disparaging sound in her throat and looked down at the hands now clasped tightly in her lap. It was still a mystery to her why she could see one person’s thoughts and totally blank out on another’s, such as Tyrone’s.

  The bleakness in her tone and on her lovely face got to him, even though he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

  “I’m not much of an expert at anything, really.” She looked out at the moon-filled darkness for a long moment. “But I sensed enough to realize you weren’t telling me the truth. I got that much when you came to Delilah’s the other day.”

  She’d turned to face him again, her voice accusatory. “And of course I knew Bernie had taken pictures of me before that. Cameras give off a particular energy.” She curled her hands into fists and smacked them down on her lap, making the green dress billow around her legs. “It makes me feel…angry, and hurt, and defensive.”

  She gave him that look again. “I just detest being at the mercy of such primitive emotions. It doesn’t say much for my training, you know. I realize full well that anger is residual fear, but darn it all, knowing it with my head doesn’t stop me from feeling it. And really, all you had to do was ask.”

  She held his gaze. “I’d have told you the entire truth if you’d only asked me, Adam. It’s sometimes expedient to withhold details that might hurt someone’s feelings, but as for out-and-out lying—” she sounded vehement again “—well, of course I’d never deliberately lie. Truth is freedom. We all learn that in the nursery. It’s a critical learning experience.”

  It was one his particular nursery had skipped, then. Damn, he’d somehow lost complete control of this conversation again. He blew out a long breath and tried to regain ground. “You’re telling me we just should have walked up to you on the street and said, ‘Hello there, Ms. Smith, who are you and what are you doing here?’”

  She ignored the sarcasm in his voice and nodded emphatically. “Yes. You just should have asked me. I’d have told you the truth. The last thing I want is for you to upset Delilah with some misguided conclusions about who I am and what I’m doing here. Violet Temple has done quite enough of that. My job is strictly a literary matter. I intend to tell Delilah all about myself and my purpose when the time is right.”

  “Yeah, sure you will,” he jeered. “The fact is, there’s nothing about you that anybody should trust. You see, Sameh—” he injected the faintest hint of threat into his tone “—nothing about you adds up. Your ID is as phony as all those so-called references you supplied to Elite Personnel. There are no records anywhere—” he underlined the word “—of Sameh Smith before April of this year.” He waited a long moment and added in a deceptively soft tone, “So now, since you suggested it, I’m asking, lady. Who are you, where do you come from and exactly what are you doing working for Delilah McDonell?”

  He was pretty sure he’d get some kind of phony run-around, but at least it might get her off the offensive for a while, and even provide a few clues he and Bernie could follow up on. He hoped.

  She seemed to relax and settle deeper into the leather seat. “My name is Sameh Smith, at least until I earn my new one—we get to choose when we qualify as Adepts. I was born in the year 2470. I have three dec…I’m thirty years old.” Her deep, calm voice, with its rich undertones of sensuousness, rhymed it all off casually enough. “My tutors sent me back here to do a research paper on Delilah McDonell because she’s an important historical figure in our era.”

  Adam laughed, a harsh bark of sound. “And I’m Luke Skywalker. Welcome to the twilight zone.”

  She ignored him. “I grew up on an agrofarm in the Western parameter. My father was an analog scientist, and my mother ran the baby nursery. There was—” her voice faltered for an instant “—there was an accident when I was sixteen. My parents left the earth plane, and I went to live with my great-grandmother.”

  Adam decided to humor her. If she wanted to play science fiction, what the hell. He’d seen a few sci-fi movies himself. “Why a great-grandmother? Why not just one of your ordinary garden variety first generation grandmas?”

  “Because we’re matriarchal. And my mother’s mother chose to emigrate to Balille, back when we were colonizing the asteroids. She invited me to come to her there, but I didn’t want to leave Earth, and anyway, Great-Grandmother Kendra had always taken a special interest in me.”

  Adam struggled to quell a sinking feeling in his gut. Sameh was so earnest about this bullshit. Maybe a dose of cold, hard reality would help snap her out of it. “She must have been pretty old and feeble by that time, this Kendra. To take on a sixteen-year-old kid when she was already a great-grandmother herself. Let’s see, on the average that would make her about—” he calculated quickly “—seventy, at the very least.”

  Sameh smiled and nodded. “She was over ten decades, actually, but that’s very little. She’s an Adept. In theory she could have as many decades as she wanted. She’s only now in her prime at one hundred twenty years. See, our lifespans are much longer than yours are now, and of course the Adepts live even longer than average because of their emphasis on meditation and diet. We learned to arrest the aging process just after the millennium, and of course we don’t have most of the problems with disease you still have here in the nineties. We have illness, but we manage it differently.”

  “That’s real handy.” All of a sudden he was fed up with all of it. He felt sick inside, because it had dawned on him during the past few minutes that he might be dealing with a real, honest-to-God loony here. She was seriously deranged, no doubt about it. Probably spent those missing years sitting in some library reading H. G. Wells.

  And why did she have to be so damned gorgeous? Why did just listening to that smoky voice rhyming off all this wacky crap make his blood run hot? Humor her. He’d humor her. Sooner or later she’d run down and he’d figure out what he ought to do next about this whole mess.

  “So what exactly do you do, Sameh? What, uh, what kind of career do you have? Back, uh, in the future?”

  “I’m in awareness training where you learn levitation, telepathy, teleportation, stuff like that.”

  Stuff like that. God, this was getting worse and worse. “And when the training’s over, what are your job prospects?” Besides once a year on Halloween.

  “Oh, awareness is the first step toward becoming an Adept. Some Adepts are master healers, others devote themselves to research. It depends where your interests and talents lie. After awareness, we work as tutors for an undetermined period. The theory is that we teach what we most need to learn.
Eventually I’ll counsel or teach, and of course go on studying. It’s a long process.” She was quiet for a moment, and then she gave a huge sigh. Her breasts rose and fell, and his blood heated.

  “That’s if I ever learn the basic disciplines. I’m not exactly a top student.” She sounded dejected, and he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her.

  Comfort be damned. He just wanted to take her in his arms, and that wasn’t kosher, because she was one sick lady. He was trying to remember what he’d read about schizophrenia, and whether that might be the kind of mental illness she had. Did it make them worse if you humored them?

  Was sex beneficial?

  He couldn’t believe all the details she’d created for this fantasy world of hers. She seemed to have an explanation for almost everything. Almost. What would happen if he managed to trip her up?

  “So tell me, Sameh, how exactly did you manage to get back here from the future? Is time travel as easy for you guys as going to San Diego for the weekend?”

  She frowned. “It’s a fairly new development with us, and it certainly wasn’t as smooth as the tutors seemed to believe it would be, that’s for sure.” There was honest irritation in her tone now. “Those techies. They have everybody convinced the method’s foolproof, but there’re a lot of details they haven’t mastered yet, like the landing location.” She shook her head in disgust. “I ended up on a soundstage somewhere in Hollywood. They were filming a movie about dinosaurs, and the techies’ transmission method shut down the whole electrical system. I was in delta state for transport, of course, and when I came out of it, I was absolutely terrified. These huge animals were everywhere. I thought those technodolts had misfired me by thousands of years.”

  Adam actually found himself laughing, and after a moment, she giggled, too.