The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (26 page)

“No, that doesn’t work. They’ll find you.”

“But I have to talk to Anna. I have friends who’ll wonder where I am.”

Adam’s expression was tense. “It’s over, Sophie. Your life. The life you knew. You can’t ever go back to it. Not if you want to live another day.”

I just stared at him. “But I have to.”

“No, you don’t. The life you knew ended the moment that bus was supposed to hit you.” He rubbed his forehead. “Fuck. Maybe I shouldn’t have done anything. Maybe I should have let fate run its course. Dammit, I had to do something, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t think through all the repercussions.” His gaze was intense. He closed the distance between us and grabbed me by my shoulders. “But I just couldn’t let you die. Not like that.”

“Why not?” I struggled to breathe as the warmth of his touch sank into me. Despite my fear and this bizarre and dangerous situation, I found myself oddly attracted to this strange man who’d now saved my life twice. Being pressed up close against him didn’t help. “Maybe you should have. You don’t know me. Why would you screw your own life up to save somebody you don’t even know?”

“But I do know you.” Adam looked away and raked a hand through his black hair, his strained expression lit only by the moonlight.

“How?”

Adam reached into the inner chest pocket of his long black coat and pulled out a piece of yellowing folded paper. He handed it to me.

I took it with trembling hands and unfolded it. It was the sketch – the self portrait I’d done last week. The one the little boy had looked at and never returned to me before he’d disappeared. Only now it looked old and faded. The pencil marks were practically too light to see.

“Sorry for the shabby shape it’s in,” he said, a sardonic curl to his lips. “That’s what twenty years’ll do. And I must admit, some of them have been a bit cruel. But I still have it. I’ve kept it as safe as I could.”

I looked up at him. “How . . . How is this possible?”

“What part? How I’ve stared at that drawing of you for twenty years, imagining who you were, what you were like, what you wanted? How I’ve dreamed about you countless times?” He laughed, but it was humourless. “Funny how the mind can play tricks on you. One blonde lady who was nice to me all those years ago and I’ve never been able to forget her beautiful face. Funny how when nobody’s ever been nice to you, you remember the one who was – even if it was only for a minute. And a little boy’s gratitude can change to something else as he gets older. Something that makes him willing to fuck up his own life when hers is in danger.”

The realization hit me like a tidal wave.

It was him.

This handsome, dangerous man with the haunted blue eyes who stood before me in a dark alleyway – the one I couldn’t help but be attracted to even in the midst of running for my very life – he was the little boy from last week on the corner who was missing his dead mother.

“You . . .” But I couldn’t figure out what to say. I was utterly stunned.

Adam paced to the other side of the alley and then back. “I looked you up ten years ago, thinking stupidly that I’d find you and you’d fall madly in love with an eighteen-year-old kid like me,” he said, with a wry twist of his lips. “But . . . that’s how I found out you were already gone. That you’d died the week after I met you and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it because there were no details about the death of Sophie Shaw, the famous erotic artist. But when I found your name in the Books, I knew . . . I just
knew
I had to do something about that. And here we are.”

I chewed my bottom lip. “My paintings aren’t erotic.”

“Doesn’t bother you that you were dead, just that I’m labelling your art erotic.” He stared at me for a moment before he laughed. “This is not something you want to argue with me about. I know your work. I’ve studied every piece for hours. It’s incredibly erotic.”

My face warmed and I looked down at the sketch again. “I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it.” He drew closer to me until I could feel the warmth from his body shielding me from the cold night.

“So you did all this, you put your own life at risk, because—”

Adam blinked. “Because I’m in love with you.”

My mouth dropped open.

He grimaced and looked away. “I shouldn’t have said that. This is complicated enough without –”

I pulled him closer to me and kissed him, stroking my fingers through his black hair. He resisted for a moment before kissing me back, hard and deep and filled with need. He pulled me closer to him so my breasts flattened against his chest and I felt his arousal press against me. My hands slid down the sides of his face as his tongue slid between my lips to taste me deeper.

A sudden and uncontrollable wave of desire crashed over me. I’d never wanted anyone so much in my entire life. Or so fast. I’d only just met him.

Even though he’d known me for twenty years.

I’d waited so long, painted so many pictures of love and passion, but it had only been a pale representation, a
guess
of what love truly was. I’d never actually felt anything that powerful for anyone before. Not until now.

Adam was the man I’d been waiting my whole life to find – I
knew
he was.

Little did I know how I’d end up finding him.

“We need to go,” he whispered against my lips. “It’s not safe here.”

“Go where?”

He pulled the sleeve of his coat up so I could see he wore a strange watch with a large face on his left wrist. He fiddled with it for a moment, carefully turning a gear on the side of it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It shouldn’t be like this. You shouldn’t have to leave your life behind, but there’s no other way to keep you safe.”

I thought of the friends I wouldn’t see again. They’d be worried and confused about what happened to me. But Adam was right. I couldn’t go back. My life here was over.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said softly. “Where are we going?”

He brought his arm around my waist. “To the future. Twenty years from now. My time. I know a safe house there for those who want to escape from the Books of Fate. You won’t be the first who’s taken refuge there.”

The future.

I nodded. My heart ached at the thought of never seeing Anna or my other friends again, but I knew he was right. “OK.”

He seemed surprised I was so agreeable. “You trust me?”

“I do.”

He nodded. “Good.”

I folded the sketch and tucked it back in his pocket.

“It’s worth money, you know,” he said with a grin. “If anyone knew I had a Sophie Shaw original they’d be very jealous.”

“Feel free to sell it.”

“That’s not going to happen.” He looked at his watch, fiddling a little more with it.

“No?” Despite everything, a smile tugged at my lips. “Can’t bear to part with it?”

“That, of course.” Adam shook his head and met my gaze. “But also because I found my name in the Books this morning as well as yours.”

My smile fell away. “But, wait a minute. What does that mean?”

Adam touched my face, stroking his warm fingers over my cheek and bottom lip. “It means I’m going to die very soon – killed by a bullet to my heart, apparently. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

I heard a sound, a whirring noise, and it filled my ears as white light filled my eyes. Before I could say anything else, demand more answers from him, the world I’d known all my life disappeared forever.

“This is Gloria,” Adam said when a door creaked open on the fifteenth floor of a condo on the Lower East Side.

We’d arrived in the future – as crazy as that sounded – an hour ago. Adam kept checking his watch for some sort of indication that his friends had also come forward with us. He seemed nervous about that, but not because he feared his own impending death. He was so focused on my safety it was driving me seriously crazy.

He also wouldn’t discuss it any more. I asked him questions about how the auditors found people and if there was any way to talk to them rationally, but he just changed the subject. It was very frustrating.

“As I live and breathe.” Gloria’s gaze scanned the length of him. She had dark hair and dark skin and ruby red lips that curled with amusement. “Adam Rizer. Never thought I’d see you here.”

“Didn’t you know I was aware of your secret little operation?”

“Of course, and I knew you wouldn’t tell anyone. But I thought you were a company man. Never go against your uncle for anything.” Her eyes flicked to me. “Ah, I think it’s becoming clearer to me why you’d risk so much tonight.”

“This is Sophie Shaw,” Adam said, averting his gaze from mine.

“The artist,” Gloria replied.

“That’s the one. She’s going to stay here for a while. I’m hoping you can help her get adjusted to everything.”

“It would be my honour. Please, come in.” Gloria opened the door wider for us to enter.

“Thanks,” I said. I had Adam’s hand clutched in mine and I wasn’t nearly ready to let him go yet. After everything I’d been through tonight, the feel of his skin against mine was the only thing keeping me remotely sane.

The apartment was much larger than I’d expected. In fact, it seemed to be the entire floor plus, according to the staircase in front of me, at least the floor above us as well. A safe house in the sky.

“So, breaking all the rules now, are you, Adam?” Gloria asked with a smile.

“Seem to be.”

“I told you she’d be a keeper.”

That caught my interest. “You told him that?”

“I did. When he was younger Adam showed me the sketch of you he always keeps in his pocket. I told him one day you would be together romantically. That you’d know he was the one for you the moment you saw him.”

Adam studied the floor. “It wasn’t like that, Gloria.”

“No,” I agreed. “The moment I first saw him, his buddy, Harris, was slapping me around.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Oh my.”

“It took me another twenty minutes before I knew Adam was the one for me,” I finished, then smiled at her.

Gloria laughed. “See? Like I always say, fate’s a pain in the butt but sometimes it’s not so bad.”

“How did you know?” I asked her. “About me and Adam?”

“Because I’m a seer,” she said. “Or, at least I used to be. But the auditors . . . they twist what we tell them. They change things to make it pure and perfect. Life isn’t perfect – it changes and undulates as we grow and move and breathe. There is not only one destiny for us all to hold true to. Fate can shift depending on our decisions. Believing differently will result in the necessity for places like this –” she waved a hand at her surroundings “– where those who have been rejected from their time, whose lives are in danger from those who wish to control our destinies, can come and know they still have the chance at a real future.”

“Thank you for letting me stay here.”

“My pleasure.”

“I must leave,” Adam said suddenly. “I’ve done all I can. I hope you can forgive me, Sophie. I never meant to ruin your life.”

He turned and walked to the door. I ran after him and grabbed the sleeve of his coat, forcing him to look at me.

“You didn’t,” I said, fighting against the lump in my throat. “You
saved
my life.”

“You didn’t have to say that before. About knowing I was the one for you.”

“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

“It’s too fast for you. I mean, for me it’s been twenty years, but for you –”

“For me it’s been twenty-
five
years.” I placed my palms flat against the firm planes of his chest. “Because I know you’re the man I’ve waited my entire life to find.”

“I’m an assassin.”

“Still?”

“No, but—”

“What you’ve done in the past is finished. We can have a future together now. This can be a clean slate for both of us.”

He shook his head. “I wish that was true.”

“Why are you leaving?” My throat felt thick.

“Because a bullet will find me tonight according to the Books. It’s fate. And if I stay here, it puts you in danger as well. It puts this safe house in danger and now I finally see how important it is.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. My heart ached at the thought that I was going to lose him when I’d only just found him. “What happened to your mother?”

Adam’s eyebrows went up. “My mother?”

“Yes. When I first saw you, you were sad. She’d died.”

He crossed his arms. “That was a long time ago.”

“Maybe for you.”

He gave me a sad smile. “She died of cancer.”

“And the man who took you away?”

“That was my uncle.”

“You said he wasn’t.”

“I . . .” He frowned, as if trying to remember. “I call him my uncle, but we’re not related by blood. He was a scientist – still is. He’s the head of the time travel division I work for. He raised me, then recruited me, thought I’d be good at being an auditor. He was right. I am damn good at it. But it always felt wrong to me. Now I know it
is
wrong.”