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  He drew in a breath, tilted his chin upward, and leveled her with his most kingly gaze. ‘‘By Mirror Lake. That’s where it’s always been.’’

  Mirror Lake. Where they’d met years earlier; where they’d shared their first kiss; where their tender memories of falling in love were wiped from their minds by the elders.

  And where she and Jared had miraculously found one another once again on the night of his crash. Jared had once told her that her planet was extremely important to his people, that a long-standing tie between their two worlds existed. Now, the reality of those statements hit with the force of a blizzard wind. Her world was critical, priceless to Jared Bennett and his people.

  ‘‘This mitres,’’ she asked carefully, ‘‘what does it do? Really? Just time travel or . . . other things too?’’

  Jared dropped his gaze to his lap. ‘‘The mitres enables us to harness time itself, to bend it to our will as we become its master. The mitres is capable of altering time, creating portals of entry and exit throughout eternity and space. It gives us superiority over all our enemies who seek to kill our people.’’ He paused, drawing in a breath, and Kelsey felt a chill snake down her spine. When Jared stared at her this intently, it always meant something would turn her world upside down. ‘‘And,’’ he continued, ‘‘it’s the only weapon giving us the advantage over Earth’s enemies too. Otherwise, the Antousians would have destroyed you by now. Earth as you know it would no longer exist.’’

  Kelsey absorbed his comments for a long time. Everything seemed to rush to the surface at once, each thought demanding air, sustenance, but she couldn’t lock in on the most important thought and voice it. If this mitres technology was literally the only thing safeguarding Earth, then that meant the data in her mind was more crucial than she could ever have imagined. And that begged a very serious question: Was it better inside her mind or . . . outside.

  It also drove home Jared’s firm belief in the letter’s authenticity. The author claimed that because she had the codes in her mind, she became a leader. The one the rebel Refarians—and the humans—rose up to follow. The author had called her the ‘‘Beloved of Refaria.’’

  Maybe the information shouldn’t be removed—and maybe her destiny demanded that it remain inside of her. Both were strong possibilities.

  ‘‘I think I’m finally getting the picture here,’’ she said at last, understanding that the mitres information in her mind was a far more serious matter than she’d yet realized.

  ‘‘What does it mean that I’m the . . . ‘Beloved of Refaria’?’’ Kelsey asked Jared, still sitting comfortably with him by the fire.

  ‘‘Ah, love. That will take some time to explain. It ties into our prophecies and mythology, but the shorthand version’’—he paused, lifting a hand to touch her cheek—‘‘is that you will bring healing and peace to my people. You will lead them.’’

  ‘‘But you’re their king,’’ she whispered, feeling an eerie chill pass over her skin.

  ‘‘And you are their queen—not just any queen, but one who has been foretold by our mystics.’’

  ‘‘Could I read this prophecy?’’ she asked, a sudden hunger to understand her role burning within her.

  ‘‘I will give you the book later tonight.’’

  She smiled wickedly. ‘‘I’m not sure we’ll be doing any reading later tonight, Jared.’’

  He lifted a hand to her cheek, rubbing his knuckles against her jaw. She’d made no effort to contain her natural disarray of heavy auburn curls; this was Kelsey at her most beautiful, flushed by the fire, her hair unkempt and loose. Mating season or not, he felt a strong flash of desire for his soulmate. ‘‘Jared?’’ she prompted, glancing up at him. ‘‘Are you even listening to me?’’

  ‘‘I’m highly distracted by my wife and her’’—he paused, just staring into her azure eyes—‘‘exotic beauty.’’

  Her large smile spread wider, and she squeezed his hand, still held in hers. ‘‘Maybe later I can distract you down in our bedroom,’’ she practically purred. ‘‘I am the queen of distractions.’’

  ‘‘Ah, my human queen, you are a wicked, dangerous woman to have on hand.’’

  ‘‘Don’t tell me you’re still thinking of sending me back to Laramie?’’ she gasped, her lovely eyes ringed with instant panic. How had she interpreted his comment that way?

  He slipped his other hand onto her shoulder, wanting to reassure her that his earlier decision to send her away had only been a monetary lapse of judgment. ‘‘No, no! I can’t live apart from you—and you’re truly safest here, where I can guard you myself.’’ He gestured toward the letter in her hand. ‘‘The letter is a warning and a wake-up call. Our enemies are closing in upon us, and I won’t have you anywhere but near me, right here in my camp.’’ He gave her a seductive half smile. ‘‘And in my bed, love.’’

  ‘‘Whew! That’s a relief.’’ She laughed joyously, tugging him down to the floor where she sat. She looped both arms about his neck, drawing his mouth toward hers for a kiss. ‘‘We have a lot of serious work to do—speaking of your bed.’’

  A low, rumbling sound escaped his chest, but the supernatural fire he’d felt last night—the telltale physical signs that his mating heat had begun—still felt cool. He cupped her face in both hands, crushing his mouth against hers, a fierce display of his anger and passion. He desired her as much as ever, yet he knew his own D’Aravnian body better than she ever could. Something had shifted cold in him last night after finding the letter—and after the arrival of the visitors. Something that he couldn’t seem to click back into gear.

  Oh, gods in heaven, how will I tell her? he lamented, all the while plunging his tongue deep into the liquid warmth of her mouth. Love, love, he reflected, I don’t want to hurt you!

  Groping at his face with both hands, Kelsey pushed his mouth off of hers. ‘‘Hurt me how?’’ she demanded, all color draining from her face. ‘‘What aren’t you telling me, Jared?’’

  ‘‘You weren’t meant to hear that,’’ he panted, still aroused from her kiss.

  ‘‘Of course I heard it.’’

  ‘‘No, those were my thoughts.’’ He shook his head in disbelief; he’d never intended for her to hear what was in his mind. ‘‘Our bond must have . . . opened. Even though I never felt it engage.’’

  ‘‘We’re probably connected half the time now, Jared,’’ she told him evenly, the scientist in her emerging. ‘‘I mean, our bond keeps intensifying and growing, keeps becoming a more natural part of us all the time.’’

  He reached for her again, drawing her face closer toward his until he could feel her warm breath against his cheek.

  ‘‘Tell me what you’re hiding,’’ she persisted. ‘‘I need to know.’’ There was anguish in her voice that almost leveled him to his knees.

  He drew in a shaky breath. ‘‘My . . . cycle.’’ He couldn’t bear to tell her the rest.

  She began to laugh, a nervous, explosive sound. ‘‘Is that what this is about? Again? We’ve already talked about this, a bunch of times. I know it started for you when we bonded—’’

  ‘‘It’s over,’’ he told her bluntly. ‘‘My mating season has ended before it even began.’’

  ‘‘That can’t be true!’’ she insisted, shaking her head in stunned disbelief. ‘‘Last night—’’

  ‘‘Was probably the best I’m capable of,’’ he explained hoarsely, gathering both of her hands into his own. ‘‘I’ve not cycled in all my thirty years, Kelse. I told you so, you know it. Something sparked in me after our mating and marriage, yes, but . . . with the turmoil of last night’s events, it seems to have snuffed out the urges altogether.’’

  ‘‘But you want me!’’ She clutched at his arms in desperation. ‘‘Just now, I felt how much you want me. This is insane.’’

  He dropped his head, feeling his eyes sting with emotion. ‘‘I wish I were different, Kelse. I wish I were wrong.’’

  ‘‘I refuse to accept this.’�
� She flung herself into his arms, burrowing against him. ‘‘Not without a fight. I felt what happened in you last night—I know what was starting.’’

  ‘‘Perhaps I’ve given you a child already,’’ he half whispered against the top of her head, but his voice sounded as dull as the words did to his heart.

  She clung to him hard. ‘‘I won’t give up, not like this.’’

  He fought the urge to cry. If there was any single thing he ached for in all the universe, it was to make this woman happy. To give her a full life, children, family. A home. Gods, he wanted her to have it all; and he wanted to have it all with her. ‘‘Then, love, I shan’t give up either,’’ he lied. His heart pounded a dull, lifeless beat inside his chest.

  She pulled apart from him, her eyes bright and alert. ‘‘You can talk to Thea,’’ she suggested, full of excited enthusiasm. ‘‘That’s it, she can totally advise you. I mean, you’ve told me she cycles—and a lot, right? Then you need to ask her for help and advice.’’

  He grimaced. Kelsey was so intent on solving their crisis that she wasn’t thinking through the situation properly. ‘‘I couldn’t hurt Thea that way.’’

  Kelsey shook her head, over and over, as if she could deny their destiny—could prevent it from happening. ‘‘But she could help.’’

  ‘‘I’ll think about it. Right now we have other issues to address,’’ he reminded her, reaching for the letter. ‘‘Like whether I can truly trust this Marco. According to his letter, he betrayed us a first time, and I need to make my decision about his presence in this camp.’’

  Chapter Eight

  Language Specialist Hope Harper stared at her computer screen, luminous in the dungeonlike darkness of her work cubicle, and blinked. Retrieving her eyeglasses from atop her head, she leaned in closer, needing to verify that her eyes hadn’t misled her once again. Granted, she’d been translating intercepts for the past few days with hardly a break except to catch a few hours of sleep, but this latest batch seemed highly irregular. Working in linguistics for the FBI she was accustomed to unusual data, to unrecognizable dialects or obscure languages. But these new intercepts were far more disturbing than any they’d had her transcribe before.

  For months they’d had her working with the counterterrorism unit, code-breaking the same unknown language, running it through filters and programs and all sorts of data interpretation. Security had briefed her in so that she had the clearance for what she was doing, but she wondered why, despite that fact, they were keeping her on a need-to-know basis, telling her almost nothing about the language itself. Then, in the past weeks, her superiors had urged her to go deeper, further and further into her analysis until she could practically speak the strange language in her sleep—and until she’d finally become convinced as to the truth of what she was actually dealing with. Lost dialect my ass, she thought, adjusting her Bose headphones, listening for perhaps the thousandth time to the man known sometimes as Jared, other times as J’Areshkadau, rattle off instructions and other directives in his native tongue.

  The language was totally alien, not any undiscovered eastern European dialect as they had suggested to her—classic cover story. Her higher-ups didn’t say it and they didn’t have to. She was no idiot, and listening to the latest cassette tape—an aerial transmission intercepted by the Air Force—only confirmed one fact: The people they were tailing were into some serious, heavy stuff. But it wasn’t her job to question or interpret, at least not in this case, only to analyze data. She had wondered, too, why they hadn’t simply sent the tapes off to headquarters; after all, they had an entire language team there in DC. Surely someone would have been better equipped to handle the case. But they’d chosen her. For whatever bizarre, inexplicable reason, she was the one with the job.

  In the past ten days the heat surrounding the case had been turned up considerably. More military intercepts had been sent in to the Denver office where she worked, and although she wasn’t certain, she believed there had been some kind of crash over in the Yellowstone area of Wyoming. She’d heard rumblings to that effect within the counterterrorism unit, though she was being kept in the dark by her superiors. She couldn’t shake the sense that there was a connection.

  But at least she had an inside track on information. Her twin brother Chris was the lone special agent manning the Jackson, Wyoming, office, in charge of more than twenty-five thousand square miles of backwoods territory. Usually he focused on bank robbery, the occasional Al Qaeda suspect, violent crimes—but if there’d been a crash in Yellowstone he’d be right in the thick of things. That’s why she’d been pestering him for days trying to get more details. So far, he’d kept quiet except to indicate through slight voice inflections that she was onto something with the link between the crash and her case. But that was the way with them; as children, they’d shared their own private language, often not even needing to exchange a word aloud. They still possessed their intuitive understanding, even now, well into adulthood. Her family had laughed at their ‘‘twintuition,’’ as they called it; as adults it sometimes still served them well.

  Leaning forward in her chair, she began typing an e-mail to Chris.

  Special Agent Harper:

  Am thinking of ski trip to Jackson Hole. Want to do some boarding?

  Your loving sis

  That ought to get a response, she thought with a mischievous grin. Chris smothered her like a doting father, and it always ticked him off that she continued to snowboard despite her illness and, now, the ever-increasing problems with her eyesight. But she needed to hear his take on recent events, and the only way to get that out of him was in person over a few beers.

  Almost immediately a reply appeared in her in-box, Chris practically shouting at her across cyberspace that she was insane and going to get herself killed one of these days. Then after his cyber-rant he added much more pleasantly that he’d love to see her. She picked up the phone and dialed his number at the Jackson FBI office.

  Marco pulled his Chevy truck up to the main cabin, his lungs barely able to fill with oxygen. It seemed he’d begun to hold his breath eight miles back down the road. He hadn’t seen Thea again since she’d left his room last night, but it hardly meant he hadn’t thought of her. She crowded his brain with images and memories and feelings, all of them as alien as they were familiar.

  Sabrina, riding at his side in silence, had been right that his need to follow Jared, to serve at his side, wasn’t the only thing luring him back to the compound. Thea Haven possessed a mystic’s power. She had lain with him, in his bed—he, a ridiculously underexperienced virgin—tantalizing him to the far edge of his self-control. In that moment, he’d known what it would be to make love to Thea, over and over, tumbling in her arms, inhaling her wildflower scent, pushing her lithe, petite body beneath his own massive one.

  Did he remember making love to her in some other lifetime? Not exactly, but the memory-thoughts were so fresh, so powerful, that he had no way of determining what they’d actually experienced together and what might be glimpses of their future. His hands tightened around the steering wheel, trembling against his will.

  Beside him Sabrina sat up tall in her seat. ‘‘So this is it,’’ she said, watching as three soldiers filed out of the cabin and toward their vehicle. She turned to him curiously as the men raised their weapons, gesturing for them to remain in the Chevy.

  ‘‘I didn’t say he trusted me yet.’’ Marco held up both hands as the soldiers approached the vehicle. ‘‘But he will.’’

  Their doors were opened simultaneously, and Marco was wrangled outside roughly, then pressed face-first against the side of the Suburban. Hands frisked him, confirming that he was unarmed, and he endured the entire process patiently. Jared would come to trust him—all of the Madjin—soon enough.

  ‘‘The main compound is connected to Base Ten via an elevator-shaft system,’’ Thea explained to Marco as they stepped into the corridor that led to the transport loft. She was keenly aware of his body near to
hers, just behind her, and rued once again that she had somehow been tapped to give him a tour of their base facility. ‘‘We chose this location because of its position atop an old mining shaft. We installed a state-of-the-art elevator system, easily converting the former structure to suit our needs.’’

  Arriving at the elevator, she pressed the panel. Beside her Marco listened, nodding dutifully, but she had the distinct impression he wasn’t hearing a word she said. When the lift arrived, the doors slid open noiselessly and they stepped inside. Staring up at the lit panel that indicated the ten levels they had to descend, she struggled to keep her body in check. Being so near to Marco—and now in such confined quarters—was almost more than she could bear.

  Reaching around her, he slammed his hand against the panel, causing the elevator to stop middescent.

  ‘‘What are you doing?’’ she demanded hotly.

  ‘‘This.’’ He cupped her shoulders in his large hands, backing her against the elevator wall. His massive body pushed against hers; his hot breath fanned her cheek. ‘‘And this,’’ he murmured, reaching for both of her hands. Their fingers threaded together as if they were one. Slowly, he lifted her hands over her head, pinning them against the wall. The position caused her full breasts to strain within her uniform top. With his knee, he spread her thighs apart. From top to bottom, he’d laid her bare.

  She could hardly breathe and he just stood there, sliding his gaze up and down her very exposed body. ‘‘I like you like this,’’ he whispered huskily, licking his lips. ‘‘You belong this way.’’

  ‘‘Looking like you’re about to take me?’’ she gasped, and he spread her hands a bit wider over her head, tightening his grip on her.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ he agreed thickly, leaning his dark head closer until she noticed the damp, curling hairs along his nape. From the snow, she thought, but then she noticed his heavy breathing and a thin sheen of perspiration on his forehead. ‘‘I want to take you,’’ he said. He worked his knee between her thighs, up and down, massaging her until she felt her panties grow damp.