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  Her flesh was soaked and ready, swollen tight with need. “Mmmm,” he purred against her breast. “Now, that’s tempting.” She felt his cock jerk in lust against her belly.

  For several long, delicious moments, he played with her, his mouth busy on her breasts, his fingers delving, first one, then two, stretching and stroking. She fisted both hands in his wet hair and wrapped her thighs tighter around his hips, bucking against him, craving everything he did to her.

  He lifted his head so he could press his full length against her belly. His shaft felt long enough to reach her heart. “Ready for more?” he purred in her ear over the sound of the shower spray pounding their bodies with a pleasant sting.

  “Yes,” she whimpered. “God, yes.”

  “Good.” It was a growl, soft with sensual threat. He wrapped both hands around her backside, lifted her and settled her over the straining head of his cock. And slowly, slowly lowered her as he rolled his hips upward, impaling her by delicious increments on his thick shaft.

  “Jesus, Baran!” Jane dug her nails into his wet back and rested her head against his shoulder, gasping at the sensation of being stuffed by him, one aching inch at a time.

  He stopped. Only half of his length was inside her. She groaned and squirmed, hungry for the rest, but he held her suspended, helpless.

  “Baran, please!”

  He looked down at her, droplets beading on his long hair and high cheekbones. His smile held a taunting edge. “What do you want, Jane?”

  “More. God, more!”

  He lowered her another fraction, but not enough. Her senses clamored. She wanted to be full of him again, the way she’d been last night.

  “Is that enough?”

  “No! Oh, oh, you’ve got a sadistic streak, you know that?”

  His smile was slow and deadly. “I have heard that a time or two.”

  And he rammed in to the hilt.

  She screamed in startled delight. Skewered on his long, thick cock, she writhed in his arms, overwhelmed, trembling on the knife edge between pleasure and pain.

  “You okay?” he asked roughly.

  She clung to him, raking his broad back with her nails. “Oh, God! Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. More!”

  With a dark, tight smile, he obeyed, rolling his hips. The momentary discomfort faded with his slow, careful thrusts, teased into full pleasure.

  Panting, she rested her cheek on his shoulder and closed her eyes, concentrating on the unbelievable feeling of his body against her, inside her. The merciless pleasure was so intense, she might as well have been a virgin again.

  “More?” His voice rasped the question. She realized he was afraid of hurting her.

  Jane shuddered. “God, yeah. You feel so—” She broke off, panting, words no match for the raw sensation.

  Reassured, he increased the pace. She realized he’d made himself just as hot as he had her.

  And she was burning.

  Baran gasped at Jane’s tight, slick grip, struggling to control the need to ram into her. She felt so small and delicate in his arms, even as her creamy sheathe milked his cock. He didn’t want to hurt her.

  “God, you feel so good,” she gasped in his ear. He could feel those sharp little claws of hers raking his back again, pricking him on like spurs.

  He yielded to her silent demand, pinning her against the wet wall of the shower and bracing her there so he could fuck her harder.

  As many times as he’d had sex, he knew he must have had a woman as good as Jane. He just couldn’t remember when. Her soft breasts pillowed his chest, hard nipples teasing his skin as those endless legs tightened over his butt. Her slender arms gripped him with a surprising strength, matching the demanding clasp of her hot cunt. “Dammit, Baran,” she gasped in his ear, “I won’t break!”

  He laughed even as his head spun. “Apparently not.”

  Letting go at last, he gave both of them exactly what they needed—long, driving strokes that ground her against the shower wall and stripped his sanity away. The pleasure coiled like a powerful spring, forced tighter with every impact of his body on hers.

  Until she convulsed in his arms, screaming out her orgasm in his ear. “Baran! Oh, God!”

  “Jane!” he roared back, and stiffened, slamming against her with one last ferocious dig that threw him right over the edge. The orgasm crashed him and out of him, exploding from his cock in jets of heat.

  Limp, they collapsed together against the wall with the shower still pelting them.

  Nine

  Baran zipped his jeans, watching with possessive male interest as Jane squirmed into hers. Her pretty breasts quivered with the movement in the cups of a delicate lace bra.

  He found himself wondering again what it was about sex with her that was so much hotter than anything he’d had before. It was nothing short of overwhelming, so different from the casual encounters he’d had with various Warfems and civilians over the years.

  Maybe it was her delicacy; with his strength, he had to be very careful not to hurt her. He’d never particularly enjoyed using that much restraint in the past, but with Jane, the tension seemed to add to the eroticism of taking her.

  And she was so sweetly responsive. Every time he touched her, he could feel her body arching into his touch, writhing for each caress, each stroke, each thrust. His own hypersensitive senses responded to her with just as much intensity—the taste of her skin, the scent of her arousal, the sound of her erotic moans. He smiled, knowing he could easily become addicted to sex with Jane.

  Then the smile faded. He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that….

  “That’s it!” She stopped with her knit shirt halfway over her head, then jerked it the rest of the way down and grinned at him. “I’ve figured out how to explain you to everybody.”

  He lifted a brow, watching her as she hurried over to an armchair sitting in one corner. “Explain me?”

  “Well, I can’t exactly tell people you’re my bodyguard from the future, can I?” She bent over a small black bag sitting in the chair. The sweet curve of her butt did a very good job of distracting him, but he somehow managed to follow the conversation as she continued, “You’ve got to have some kind of cover story. I’ve been talking about hiring a photographer for months, but I never did anything about it. I take adequate shots myself, so I didn’t think I could justify the expense.” She opened the bag and pulled out a black object his computer identified as a camera. Reaching in again, she got out a short, cylindrical object—a lens?—and inserted it into a round opening in the device’s body. “I don’t suppose you know how to use a Nikon?”

  Baran opened his mouth to say no, but his computer interrupted. Skill file present. His brows lifted; it struck him as a fairly esoteric bit of knowledge to have. Knowing Temporal Enforcement, they probably gave him the file because they’d seen pictures he would take sometime in the future. Being TE, however, they hadn’t mentioned it.

  “Actually, I do know how,” he said slowly. “Or I will, as soon as my computer uploads the information into my brain.”

  Jane eyed him. “Well, that’s convenient.”

  He grimaced. “If you discount the general discomfort of the process.”

  “Discomfort?” She frowned, dubious. “And how does that work, anyway?”

  “My comp can use my neural network to implant a skill directly into my brain, the same way you’d program a computer. That’s how I learned English.”

  “Yeah, I’d wondered about that. You don’t have any accent at all, and your slang is dead on. You sound like an American network news anchor.”

  He snorted. “Probably because TE used news recordings to create the file.”

  “So how do they get these files into your head? You don’t have one of those skull-jack things Freika was talking about.” She grinned impishly. “I looked.”

  “I don’t need one. Freika’s my database unit. His computer’s a lot more powerful than mine; it has to be, because it provides so much of his intellige
nce. He keeps data files I don’t use all the time, so he needs a way to access big chunks of information more quickly. Sticking in a crystal’s faster than a download.” Transfer ready, the comp interrupted. “Excuse me a minute.”

  He braced himself. He always hated this part.

  A wall of information and images slammed into his mind like a tidal wave. It was all he could do not to scream.

  Baran’s big body jerked as his eyes widened. His mouth contorted, opened, but all that emerged was a strangled gasp.

  “Shit!” Jane tossed the camera on the chair without a thought for its two-thousand-dollar price tag and ran to catch him. She knew even as she did that there was no way she could support his greater weight.

  She needn’t have bothered; he remained rigidly erect, his body quivering. “Baran!”

  He didn’t answer. She put a finger to the big pulse under his jaw. It pounded furiously, but he didn’t react to her touch. “Baran, talk to me!” Hell, was he having some kind of seizure? Was this some weird Druas attack? Should she call 911? “Baran!” It was a wail.

  His eyes focused. He blinked at her, registered her panic. His body instantly coiled into a combat crouch as he scanned the room, his eyes hard. “What? Where’s the threat?” he barked.

  He was all right! Relief flooded her, followed almost instantly by anger. She thumped him hard in the chest. “You jerk!”

  He straightened and looked down at her. “What? What did I do?”

  “You scared the daylights out of me! What was that all about? It looked like you were having some kind of attack!”

  “I told you, I had to download the skill file.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t mention the flipping epileptic seizure! Next time you have to do some weird future crap, warn me!”

  He lifted a brow at her and strolled over to pick up the camera. “You really were worried, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was, you biped rat. By the way, aren’t you the same guy who won’t even let me out of his sight to use the john? But it’s okay to check out for five minutes to jerk around?”

  Baran examined the camera, then reached into the bag and pulled out the flash. “My computer was keeping watch. It would have stopped the data transfer if Druas had Jumped into the room.” He slid the flash into its hotshoe, then cradled the camera, pointed it at her, and started clicking off shots with the skill of an experienced photographer.

  She glared at him. “I repeat: You could have warned me.”

  He sighed and crouched, moving around her to find another angle. “Yes, I should have. I’m sorry I didn’t realize you’d be alarmed. I’ll keep that in mind in the future.”

  Jane deflated, drawing a frustrated hand through her dark curls. “You do that. Okay, I’ll bite, let me see what you shot.”

  He stood and walked over to hand her the camera. She flicked a switch to display the digital images on the view screen. And whistled soundlessly.

  He’d captured her every expression, starting with angry frustration and finishing with the rake of her fingers through her hair. Each shot was expertly, perfectly framed.

  “Damn. You’re good. The computer taught you how to do this just now?” Jane looked up and shook her head. “Where can I get one of those things?”

  Baran grinned back and pointed at the ceiling. “About three hundred years from now, eighty light-years that way.”

  She looked at him. “Don’t think I want to go quite that far. But…”

  Just then a feline yowl sounded downstairs, followed closely by a startled canine yip.

  “My nose!” Freika bellowed in outrage. “You clawed my nose!”

  Something crashed. Paws thudded on the floor, accompanied by vicious snarls and the sound of breakables shattering. “That’s it, cat! I’m chewing you into pâté and spreading your ass on a cracker!”

  Jane whirled and raced for the stairs. “Stay away from Octopussy, you fuzzy psycho!”

  As she hit the steps at a run, she heard the deep rumble of Baran’s laughter. “One thing about this mission,” he called, loping after her, “At least I’m never bored.”

  “Can’t you hitch this thing to a horse or pour in another scoop of coal and get it to move faster?” Freika demanded.

  “We’re going sixty miles an hour as it is,” Jane gritted out. “Get your head back in the window before a truck comes along and knocks it off.”

  “Sixty?” The wolf was leaning out so far from the backseat, his nose almost level with Jane’s as she drove. His tongue whipped in the wind. “I can run faster than that.”

  “Yeah, right. Baran, tell your partner he’s shortening his life expectancy.”

  “Freika, get back in the…whatever this thing is.”

  “SUV. Do it, Cujo. It’s always fun until somebody loses a head.” She hit the power button for the rear passenger window, rolling it up and forcing the wolf to pull back inside.

  “What’s a cujo?” he asked. “My comp doesn’t have a definition for that term.”

  “It’s a character in a book by Stephen King,” Jane told him. “I’d lend you my copy, but I’m afraid it would give you ideas.”

  The wolf snorted in disdain. “I don’t need some twenty-first-century scribbler to ‘give me ideas.’ I’m more than capable of coming up with my own. You—” He broke off as static blasted from Jane’s dash-mounted police scanner. “Do we have to listen to all that human babble? It’s annoying.”

  “Yes, because it’ll tell us if the cops find another body. Or Druas himself, God forbid, since he’d probably eat them.” She slanted a look at Baran, who was belted into the front seat, looking as if he, too, wanted to go faster but was too polite to complain. “Does Fur Boy always whine this much?”

  Baran smiled slightly. “Yes.”

  “I do not whine,” Freika said in a tone that dripped offended dignity. “I’m simply trying to give you hapless bipeds the benefit of my superior intellect.”

  “No, you’re trying to give me a giant, throbbing pain in my—”

  “Ten-fifty with PIs and entrapment. Southbound I-85 at the ninety-third mile marker,” the scanner interrupted. “Car versus eighteen-wheeler.”

  “Shit.” Jane threw a quick look over her shoulder, saw nothing behind her, made sure there was nothing in front, and whipped into a U-turn, bumping onto the grass shoulder to do it.

  “Where are we going?” Baran asked as she hit the gas and shot in the opposite direction back down the highway. “And what’s a ten-fifty?”

  “A car’s crashed with an eighteen-wheeler—that’s a very big truck. All that dispatcher jargon means somebody’s trapped and hurt. Could be really, really ugly.”

  He looked at her so sharply, the beads on his braid tapped his cheek as his head swung. “Jane, we need to search for Druas. We don’t have time to run off investigating random police calls.”

  “We can take twenty minutes to cover this.”

  “Jane…”

  “I’m a newspaper reporter, Baran.” Face grim, she concentrated on the road. “I’m not going to stop doing my job just because Jack the Ripper’s in town.”

  They entered the interstate at the northbound on-ramp closest to the scene; Jane had known traffic going southbound would be backed up for miles behind the crash, and she was right. As with every other traffic accident she’d ever covered, the scene was chaos. Fire trucks, law enforcement and ambulances blocked the road with lights flashing, while behind them, a line of cars waited for the mess to be cleared away. She’d learned to judge how bad a crash was by the number of emergency vehicles in attendance.

  This one was pretty damn bad.

  After parking the SUV on the broad grass median behind two fire trucks, she grabbed the Nikon out of the back and thrust it into Baran’s hands. “You shoot the wreck. I’ll talk to the cops and bystanders, see what I can get.” Usually she had to do it all at one time; it was nice to have help from someone she could depend on.

  As they got out of the SUV, Jane noticed Fr
eika hopping between the seats to follow Baran. “Fuzzy, get back in the truck. Nobody’s going to want a dog on the scene.”

  He gave her a pale-eyed lupine glare. “For the last time, I am not a dog! And I’m coming with you.”

  “Keep your voice down, dammit!” she hissed. “And you’d better be a dog, because people around here would shoot a wolf. Which would be a very bad thing, considering that each and every one of these cops has a gun.”

  Freika sniffed. “As if they could even hit me.”

  “Take my word for it, they could hit you. These are Southern boys. They grew up shooting the four-legged and furry…Oh, hell.” She spotted a big, boxy truck with a huge antenna and a colorful logo. “You’d better not be a talking anything, because I see a TV live truck, and that kind of media we do not need!” Without waiting to see whether Freika obeyed, she started up the median, grumbling under her breath. “Frigging television poachers. How’d they get in my county so fast? They must have been passing by, because it’s for damn sure they couldn’t have beat me here otherwise. Just my luck….”

  Baran strode past on his longer legs, his attention focused on the cluster of men and emergency vehicles. Freika trotted at his heels.

  Jane sighed and lengthened her stride to catch up. “Well, at least they’re getting into the spirit of the thing.”

  Just ahead, Tom Reynolds waved violently at a driver in the northbound lane, who’d slowed down to stare at the mangled car sitting at a right angle to the jack-knifed semi. “Quit rubbernecking and drive before you cause another wreck, you”—he spotted Jane—“citizen.”

  “Nice save,” she said, pulling her notebook out of her purse. “What are you doing here? I figured you’d be off trying to catch…the guy who killed that lady.” Dammit, she’d almost said Druas. Not good. Tom was far too sharp to miss a mistake like that, and she didn’t want to have to answer the questions he’d ask.

  “I was on the way to talk to the victim’s relatives when the crash happened right in front of me,” Tom told her, thoroughly disgusted. “Jerk driving the eighteen-wheeler did an illegal lane change and drove right over the lady. Who the hell is that?” He stared at Baran’s profile as the Warlord raised his camera and squeezed off a shot.