Always and Forever (30 page)

The first time I saw her she was standing with her back to me, her chestnut brown hair hanging in long, curls down her back, and she was clothed in ice-blue silk. The moment she turned and those silver-gray eyes found mine, my heart was no longer my own.....

Quinn lost herself in their very poignant love story.

The banging wouldn't stop. Why wouldn't the banging stop?

Quinn tried to block out the noise as she settled more deeply into Archer's arms but the banging kept up, louder and more insistent. And then the shouting started, the worry and fear lacing through the disembodied voice calling her name. Archer held her closer, tighter, but she felt herself being pulled away. The harder he tried to hold her to him, the more she slipped away.

"I don't want to go."

"Stay with me, Quinn."

But even as he spoke the words she was yanked from his outstretched arms.

"Quinn, no!"

"Archer!" She reached for him but she felt herself being ripped away. His look of devastation was the last thing she saw.

"No!"

And then she felt familiar warm hands on her shoulders and when her eyes opened, she saw him standing over her. Quinn didn't think before wrapping her arms around Gabriel's neck and fusing her mouth to his.

Gabriel had been calling Quinn for days but she wasn't answering, not her cell phone or her house phone. After four days, he was mad with worry and so he climbed into his Aston Marten and drove the two hours to Quinn's cottage.

When he arrived, it was dark but no lights were on and her car was in the drive. Panic and fear gripped him as he rushed to the door and started banging and shouting out her name. After five minutes with no answer, Gabriel broke the pane of glass and unlocked the door.

When she screamed, he leapt up the stairs two at a time. He entered her room but he wasn't expecting to see her in the midst of what appeared to be a night terror. Her hair was plastered to her head and her light-weight nightgown was sticking to her heated, damp skin. She was thrashing about in her bed so violently he feared she was going to hurt herself so he moved to touch her, give her some kind of human contact to ground her. When her eyes opened, the flash of silver was breathtaking and before he said a word, she had her mouth on his.

It wasn't a conscious thought that had him wrapping his arms tightly around her waist and pulling her up against him as he lost himself in her. Sanity pushed at the haze of want currently burning through his brain and, with great effort, he pulled his mouth from hers and held her a safe distance from him.

It was then that he realized she wasn't awake. Her lips were swollen from his kiss and her face flush with passion. He knew he could take her in that moment, lose himself in her as he had wanted to do for so long, but that would make him lower than pond scum. He allowed reason to take over and gently eased her back onto the bed and covered her with the quilt. He settled onto the edge of the bed and stroked her hair until she fell back into a deep sleep.

He moved to the chair and stayed awake watching her and wondering what she had been dreaming about that caused her to respond so completely to him. But was it even him that she was responding to?

Quinn came awake slowly and though she had gone to sleep rather early the night before, she still felt very tired. She stretched as tidbits of her dream came back to her and she couldn't help smiling because some of her dream had seemed startlingly real. As she sat up she heard that deep baritone coming from across the room.

"Good morning."

It was instinct that made Quinn pull her blanket up to her chin as her eyes sought and found Gabriel. He was sitting as comfortable as you please in her bedroom.

"Gabriel? Why are you in my bedroom? Hell, why are you in the Cotswolds?"

The expression on his face was thunderous and when he spoke his voice was clipped with anger.

"I've been calling for days. No one could get a hold of you so I drove out here to make sure you were okay. When I got here, I heard you scream so I forced myself in only to find you in the throes of a very intense dream."

Quinn blushed because she knew very well what she had been dreaming about for the past four days and then she remembered how real her dream had felt. She couldn't bear to ask but she needed to know.

"Did I kiss you?" Quinn could barely make eye contact.

If possible, he looked even angrier at that question. "Yes," he answered.

Mortification swept through her. "I'm sorry."

He abruptly stood. "Don't be." He pulled a hand through his hair before he asked, "Are you okay?"

"Yes."

"Very well, then I shall return to London." He started for the door when Quinn called to him.

"Wait. Why? What's the rush?"

He didn't look like he was going to answer. Then he turned so suddenly and faster than she thought possible he was standing inches from her, nose to nose.

"Because when a woman kisses a man the way you kissed me last night, it makes that man forget himself. And in this particular case I don't want to forget myself."

She was almost speechless. The look of lust burning in those green orbs had her pulse racing, but she did manage to ask rather weakly, "Why in this particular case?"

His gaze never wavered when he answered, "Because it wasn't me you were kissing."

And with that he turned and left the room. She heard his footfalls on the stairs and the closing of her front door. Moments later, a powerful engine roared to life then quickly faded in the distance. Quinn just sat on her bed dumbfounded.

"What the...?"

Three days later, Quinn was sitting on a plane heading to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to meet, Tessa, her friend with Mayan expertise that she had sent the pictures of Derek's odd necklace to.

She'd spent far more time thinking about Gabriel's rather abrupt departure than she should have and though she knew she needed to talk with him, she just wasn't ready to face him.

He was upset because she kissed him believing him to be Archer and he was right. How did she explain her feelings for a man who'd been dead for over three hundred years? It was one thing to theorize about past lives and souls calling to each other. Not as easy to explain that she was actually in love with a man who lived three hundred years ago and she had literally moved through time to be with him.

Oh, she could see how that explanation would go over. She wondered if she would get all of the words from her mouth before the paddy wagon pulled up and the doctors, wielding large syringes filled with mind-numbing narcotics, came filing out of the back to take her away.

The other point she wanted to make to Gabriel, one she knew based on his reaction the other day wouldn't be well received, was she truly believed they were drawn to each other because in some sense he was Archer. Archer had vowed to find her and he had. She knew this unequivocally because she had gone twenty-seven years without finding love, had never even known what she was missing. But when she found it, she knew it was real. She knew it was because Gabriel and Archer were one in the same and she was drawn to that man like a moth to a flame. But convincing Gabriel of this, hell, she'd have an easier time convincing him that aliens were camping out in his backyard.

Her thoughts turned to her friend's phone call, the conversation that had her catching the company plane to Mexico. It was because of a book, a very old book that had her catching a red-eye. The Dresden Codex was a Mayan book so old it was written in glyphs. It contained astronomical tables that were frighteningly accurate. The two most notable were the Lunar series, that mapped the cycles of the moon, and the Venus cycle, that detailed the schedule of sightings of Venus in the eastern sky just before sunrise.

Using these tables the Mayans made predictions on the success of agricultural crops, of wars, coming illnesses and the like. But the Codex covered another topic, though not in the same detail as the other two: time travel. There was another chart in the Codex that plotted out the stars and their alignment in the sky during the various phases of the moon's cycle and the location of Venus.

What her friend Tessa, an anthropologist who specialized in Mayan culture, recently uncovered was a link to this mapping and their meditative rituals: rituals that involved transcending one's current consciousness. She'd uncovered accounts where the meditator was successful in projecting their soul onto a spot on the celestial line when the stars were lined up in such a manner with the moon and Venus as to create a rip in the space-time continuum or, in layman's terms, the Mayans had actually discovered time travel.

The glyphs on Derek's necklace corresponded to the celestial alignment most conducive for projecting through time. However, there seemed to be some negative effect on the human body from the travel. Tessa had yet to quantify it but it was so devastating that the Mayans quickly abandoned the practice almost as soon as they started it. Quinn was eager to learn more and so she dropped everything and caught a plane.

Tessa met Quinn at the airport and as soon as they saw each other it was as if all the years since graduation dissolved away. Time in Mexico made Tessa's mocha-colored skin darker than ever, making her pale green eyes even more dynamic. Her tall willowy body was sculpted with more muscles from work in the field but the expression on her face and her voice were exactly as Quinn remembered.

"It's so good to see you," Quinn whispered as she embraced her friend.

"I was so glad when you called me. It has been too long, Quinn. Way too long."

"I couldn't agree more."

Tessa stepped back and admired her friend. "I've known you a long time. Business first?"

As they drove toward the temple, Quinn studied it with awe. It was unbelievable to her how well preserved they were considering their age. She loved it here, had planned to study the temples with Tessa until she stumbled onto a forgotten castle in England and everything changed.

"So how's your work at Whispering Winds? I heard the Duke is a hottie."

Quinn didn't know if Nicholas was a hottie since she had avoided any contact with him, but even if he was, it wasn't Nicholas that made her heart beat faster.