Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] (8 page)

“While you were working today, I watched the news and a program called
Law and Order
and several others. I went out and walked among the people to hear them talk.”

“You
what
? You left the apartment?”

He took a gulp of wine as she dished him up a slice of pizza. “I met many interesting people, many of them these Hispanics who are illegal.”

“You must have walked over to Mission.”

“I had a taco. Very good. More spicy than the food I know. Spices seem very common here. And I had ale. No . . . beer.”

“Medraut, you . . . you can’t walk around in this century without . . .”
Without what? A chaperone?
Oh, this was
such
a disaster. Her mind did a little cycle around the “take him back, help him live here” dilemma. If he stayed how did she keep him out of jail or an asylum?

He set down his slice of pizza. “Diana, I have changed my mind about going back to my time. I like your time. It has many possibilities. . . .” He smiled. It was a strange, inward kind of look, and his brown eyes gleamed.

He wouldn’t go back. Well, that kind of settled it. She couldn’t
make
him go back. “You can’t tell anyone you’re from another time. They won’t believe you.”

“I know. I thought at first that your time was magic, that everyone was a sorcerer. But this is not true. The people are just people. They gamble and argue and strut in front of the opposite sex. The passage of time has made things so different they only seem like magic.”

“Speaking of magic, how is it that you learned the language in so short a time? And don’t tell me it was from listening to the television.” She wanted to know this for a couple of reasons.

“But it was. I told you. That is my gift.”

Diana narrowed her eyes. “Gift? No one has
that
good an ear for languages.”

“My mother was a witch. That is the magic I have from her, to hear a language and understand it. To understand the way of a people and mimic it.”

His mother was a witch. Right. Well, he was from the fifth century, and they believed stuff like that back then. Diana had learned the language quickly, too, but that was just a child’s natural facility. It didn’t explain Medraut.

They finished the meal in silence as she tried to think. In some ways his belief in magic was what she had gone back in time to find. She smiled ruefully to herself. It hadn’t worked. Medraut believed in magic, but she still didn’t.

As she was cleaning up the kitchen, suddenly the whole situation got too much and she found herself crying, for the fact that the stalker had shot at someone tonight, if not at her, and for the fact that she had brought a
man back from the fifth century out of a kind heart and that seemed so foolhardy she wondered if someone else had done it.
And let’s not forget the creepy dreams I’m having
. More fun waited in her dreams tonight, no doubt. She could hardly wait.

Medraut came and put his good arm around her. “Shhussh. It will be well. I will thrive here; you will see. And then”—here he held her away from him—“because you are alone, you will need a man. I will be your man.”

Revulsion washed over her. He wasn’t coming on to her. He kept his promise. But that didn’t seem to change her reaction. “No,” she said, and slipped out of an embrace that was only meant to be comforting.

Anger flashed across his face. “You reject my offer of protection?” Then his face rearranged itself into sympathy, as if he had made a conscious effort. “I understand. You are not ready. I will be here when you become ready.”

She would never be ready. She ran into her room and shut the door. In the living room, the television came on. It was tuned to another crime show. She locked her bedroom door.

“Get out of my dreams!” she shouted. He pulled her to him with the little chain, which apparently was a lot stronger than it looked, because twist and try as she might, she couldn’t break it. His eyes were gray like the fog, or maybe green, or maybe both. They glowed through the fog like he was some otherworldly beast.

“You’re just a man,” she breathed, more to herself than him, when he had drawn her close enough to clamp her upper arms in a grip that would probably leave bruises. The most horrible part of all was that half of her craved his touch. The bottom half apparently. Her hands moved over his forearms of their own accord. He wore the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up. Her palms
scraped the crisp dark hair. The corded muscles felt more masculine than she had ever imagined a man’s forearms could. And she’d imagined how forearms felt. She was a romance writer after all.

Of course this was just a dream. And the fact that she knew it was a dream meant that it would soon be ending.

“Don’t you know me?” he asked as he searched her face “Don’t you remember?”

She shook her head convulsively. “Remember what?” But he did remind her of someone. Someone she had seen just recently . . . She couldn’t think. It wouldn’t come.

“I am here to protect you.”

“You . . . you frighten me.”

His face took on a hard resolve. “You must talk to me. You must believe me. And then you must trust me. Trust me. Remember that.” And with that he began to dissolve into the fog like the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland,
until only his eyes were left, glowing green and swirling with gray, and she felt like she was dissolving, too. Her knees gave way.

“Remember . . . talk to me. Trust me.”

She was kneeling in front of the window, crying and gasping. The wood floor hurt her bare knees. And the window was open. The chill wind off the bay rippled the draperies now thrown back, though she had closed them before she went to bed. Had she been sleepwalking? Oh, this was
bad
. She hadn’t done that for years. She couldn’t quite remember her dream. Even as she tried, it slipped away. It had been about her stalker, though. And she had found him both frightening and infinitely attractive. And familiar. The fact that she had gotten out of bed and opened the window while she was dreaming about her stalker seemed ominous. Did he have some kind of hold on her through her dreams?

She pushed herself up and shook herself mentally.
You’re losing your mind.
She snorted.
Like someone could enter a person’s dreams.
She closed the window, peering out to see if anyone lurked in the street. The fog had lifted sometime in the night. The pools of light from the street lamp showed only wet pavement. The grinding of an early garbage truck echoed in the quiet.

Actually, she felt a little ashamed. She was attracted to a stalker, for pity’s sake. What did that say about her? Was she so desperate for a man to pay attention to her that she would enjoy some guy stalking her? She’d gotten used to the fact that she was invisible to men a long time ago. And in fact, she
wanted
to be invisible in a way, to everyone, because she was invisible to herself on a very basic, elemental level. She was the ultimate imposter, walking around in society pretending to be somebody she probably wasn’t. She had no origin, no childhood. She had been abandoned by her real parents, obviously. She didn’t make friends, because she never really shared herself with them. What was hers to share? Not her secret quirks like hearing what people would say. That would only make people think she was crazy. So she was a courteous acquaintance of Mrs. Kim at the doughnut shop or whatever clerk was currently employed at the liquor store or the docents she supervised. But that was it. No deeper, no closer.

If only she were invisible to her stalker. He was sick, sick,
sick
for following her. And she might be sick for being attracted to that. Was it because he was the only man who ever noticed her? She’d heard about women who made up men following them just for the attention.

She glanced to the clock. Five
A.M.
There was no way she’d get back to sleep. She turned on the light and blinked against the glare. Her bedroom was done in blues and greens, and in March she could still use the big quilt from her grandmother (well, not
really
her grandmother).
It matched the Chinese wool rug from her father’s old house, now laid in front of the bed.

What to do? She couldn’t leave the apartment to go to the doughnut shop for a coffee, not with her stalker somewhere out there. If she did, she’d wake Medraut, and she didn’t want to deal with him, either. Her laptop was out in the living room. But there was no way she could muster the focus to write, anyway. Her mandolin made too much noise. That would be inconsiderate. She grabbed a manuscript from a stack by the desk. Publishers sent them when they asked her to give a quote for the cover. She crawled back under the quilt.

In the first ten pages she knew it wasn’t going to work as a distraction. The book was clearly overplotted. Too many coincidences and connections between the characters, and they didn’t seem organic and natural at all. She could predict every turn it would take on the way to the happy ending. Was she getting bored with romance? Or was it just that she was a writer and she couldn’t just
feel
the romance anymore but had to analyze how the story was written?

She set the manuscript carefully aside. It was, after all, someone’s life’s work and should be treated with respect. Her movements were almost overly controlled. A bad sign. Inside, her thoughts and feelings caromed around in chaos.

She had to get out of here. Stalker or no.

She dressed in jeans and a bulky brown turtleneck sweater and put on her Ariat boots and a slicker. She was going for coffee, damn it. And then maybe she’d walk up to Powell and Market and take the cable car over the hill to the wharf and watch the fishing boats come in and eat crab from the steaming pots on the sidewalk for breakfast. Stalkers weren’t out at five in the morning. Her stalker would expect her to be safely asleep. If she didn’t take
back control of her life, she really would end in an asylum.

Diana slid in through the door of Moon Donuts, from the dark into bright fluorescent light. The bell over the door jangled. No stalker. She left a note for Medraut, relieved he hadn’t wakened as she tiptoed past the sofa bed. Voilà, her life was hers again. She felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

The shop was owned by a very nice Korean couple. He made the doughnuts in the back, starting about midnight, and she manned the cash register. Their daughters, nieces, and nephews took turns helping during the busy hours, and ran the place when Mr. and Mrs. Kim went back to Korea for three weeks every year. The shop had a small counter and a couple of booths. The smell of grease and sugar and coffee was heaven. The place was empty, of course. People on their way to work wouldn’t start descending on it until six or six thirty. Mrs. Kim poked her head out from the back.

“Hey, Mrs. Kim, how are you?” Diana slid onto the stool at the far end of the counter, against the wall. Mrs. Kim would remark on how early she was here.

“You are up early,” the tiny woman said, going to the coffeepot. She spoke English well but still had an accent. She poured a large automatically.

“Couldn’t sleep.” Mrs. Kim was about to ask her if she wanted her usual maple bars.

“The usual?”

“Crumb, I think, if you have them.” This was a day for breaking out. “Two.” Diana was shocked at what Mrs. Kim would say next.

Mrs. Kim raised her brows. “Is the writing not going well?”

Did she order two doughnuts for comfort only when she
was stuck? Apparently. “Not going at all.” She wouldn’t mention time travelers or stalkers or the fact that she could speak Proto-Celtic, and her dreams. . . .

A terrible thought occurred. What if this whole thing was some elaborate psychosis? They always said that creative people were only a step away from madness, and she’d begun to think that she was going mad anyway. . . . Maybe . . . Maybe none of it was real at all.

The bell over the door tinkled. Diana jerked her head around with a dreadful premonition.

He wore a quilted vest and a plaid flannel shirt. His wide belt was rough leather and his jeans fit him like they were custom-made. His boots looked lived in. His black hair was tousled, like maybe he had just gotten up and run his hands through it. Or like he’d never been to bed at all. This close, his eyes were gray. Her heart pounded around randomly in her chest. He didn’t look like a psychotic apparition.

He didn’t even glance at her but stood perusing the case of doughnuts. If she tried to squeeze past him, he could grab her. Would he do that, right in front of Mrs. Kim?

“What can I get for you?” Mrs. Kim asked politely.

“Two crumb doughnuts and a large coffee,” he said.

His voice was just like it was in her dream, a baritone rumble. Had she ever heard him speak? On the sidewalk when he’d recognized Medraut. That was it. He seemed so familiar! The dark comma of hair flopped over his forehead, the lips . . . Was he ordering what she had ordered just to let her know he knew everything about her? If he was trying to intimidate her, he was doing a bang-up job. She realized she was staring at him, and looked down at her doughnuts.

“Here or to go?” Mrs. Kim asked.

To go. To go. To go.

“Here, I think.”

She felt paralyzed. She hadn’t known what he would say. When had that ever happened? Back in the fifth century . . . And with Medraut. He turned to the counter. He wasn’t going to sit at a booth.
Why
had she taken the stool next to the wall? The narrow space between the stools and the windows meant that if he sat at any of the stools, he’d be blocking her path to the door.

He slid onto the stool beside her, pinning her against the wall. “Mind if I sit down?”

She just stared at him. She’d been wrong. His eyes were blue. Not a bright, clear blue but more a steely blue-gray. At least Mrs. Kim was still here. Diana wasn’t alone with him. What could he do here? Talk dirty? Mrs. Kim wouldn’t like that. And Mr. Kim could come and throw him out. Better not call Mr. Kim. This guy was twice Mr. Kim’s size and had fifty or seventy pounds’ advantage at least. Okay, but Mr. Kim could call the police.