“Strike me,” she cursed.
He spied the stone instantly, nestled between her legs. Her left hand gripped an odd wheel while her right twisted a key into a tiny lock just below it. A roar erupted, and he tensed in response.
‘What is that sound?” he asked.
“Your cue to get the hell out of my car,” she replied. “Look, thanks for helping me out back there, but I can handle myself from here on out.”
Rafe took a chance and grabbed her wrist.
“Hey,” she protested.
“I cannot leave you, my lady.”
“Wanna bet?”
From beneath the seat, she withdrew a pistol. He’d never seen such a design before, but he had no doubt the weapon was deadly. He released her and held his hands up in surrender.
“I have no wish to harm you,” he said.
“I have no wish to be harmed, so this should go real easy. Get out of my car.”
He glanced around. So, this thing was called a car.
She used the gun to gesture toward a handle in the door. “Now. I don’t know who those guys were in my room or how they found me, but I’d like to avoid tangling with them again.”
“A wise plan of action,” he agreed.
“But I don’t know you, either. So if you don’t mind…”
With an indulgent grin, he attempted to twist the handle, then figured out that pulling it toward him released the latch. He pushed open the door and climbed out. He had no desire to be shot, though he highly suspected that while she possessed Rogan’s stone, leaving her was not an option.
His theory was tested immediately. The moment he was out of her car, she somehow made the wheeled contraption move. A screech not unlike the caw of a massive hawk echoed against the walls of the odd stone building. Red lights blinked from the back of the vehicle, which drove down a ramp and disappeared.
He looked around. The structure housed rows and rows of these so-called cars, though none of them seemed engaged at the moment. How amazing these modes of transportation were, requiring no horse to pull them, as far as he could see. Just as he was about to investigate a nearby vehicle, the blackness captured him once again, and this time, when he opened his eyes, he was not unprepared to find himself beside Mariah as she sped down the road.
She, however, swerved in surprise, initiating a spin that convinced Rafe that if he hadn’t died centuries ago, he might soon enough.
Five
Mariah squeezed her thighs together, determined not to lose her hold on the damned stone even if she crashed into the telephone pole she was using all of her driving skills to avoid. She eased off the brake and allowed the car’s momentum to carry it through a full rotation before she applied measured pressure to the pedal and counterbalanced the steering so that they went off-road, but missed hitting anything.
Once she had the ignition off, she scrambled for her gun again. Unfortunately, the spin had dislodged it from under her seat. She was unarmed and vulnerable to someone who’d just appeared out of the ether.
Maybe he wasn’t the crazy one?
“Who are you?” she demanded. “How did you get back in the car? What do you want with me?”
For all his swarthy good looks, her mysterious rescuer suddenly looked a bit green around the gills.
“Is this how men travel now? In devices that make one ill? I much prefer a horse.”
“Typical Texan,” she muttered, reaching farther beneath her seat for the gun, finding nothing but a fast food wrapper that was likely over a year old. The last time she’d used this car—a getaway vehicle she’d kept stashed near the airport in case she needed a quick set of wheels—her main ride had been in the shop.
She gave up trying to find the gun. She had a strong suspicion the weapon wasn’t going to deter him. She could no longer deny that he had arrived from nowhere. For the third time. The first two times she’d written off his sudden appearance as a product of her attention being diverted elsewhere. This time, that explanation did not apply.
“Damn it, who are you?” she asked again.
He swallowed thickly, and when he turned, the nauseated look on his face had disappeared. His skin tone had returned to a healthy, sun-kissed complexion reminiscent of the men she’d met in Egypt—though not quite as dark. Set in perfect balance beneath thick lashes, his eyes were a startling gray. His mouth curved into a smile that might have stolen her breath under other circumstances.
“Rafe,” he replied. “My name is Rafe.”
She cursed inwardly as his mellifluous voice rode roughshod over her frazzled nerves. This Rafe was utterly hypnotic—like a living, breathing pendulum.
“Rafe what?” she snapped, determined to ward off any attraction. So what if he’d come to her rescue in the hotel room? Another minute or so and she would have taken control of the situation—though she had to admit that without his intervention, she might not have gotten a spare minute at all.
He eyed her quizzically before finally replying. “You require a surname? Forsyth. Rafe Forsyth, son of John, Earl of Hereford.”
“You don’t sound British,” she decided. Though the inflections of an accent tinged his words, his manner of speaking was more exotic.
“You do,” he said. “Sound British, that is. Only…not.”
“I’m Aussie by birth,” she explained. “American by living arrangements.”
“Aussie? American? I do not understand. Where am I?”
“Don’t you know?”
He leveled an impatient glare at her. “If I knew, would I ask?”
“You’re in Texas, in my car, where I did not invite you. In fact, this is the third time you’ve shown up, and I don’t even know…”
As she stared at him, she realized she’d seen this man before. In her dreams. On the plane. Kissing her.
“You need to leave now,” she insisted.
“I cannot,” he replied. “You have tried twice to rid yourself of me, but I am bound to you for as long as you possess that cursed stone.”
She glanced down at the rock, still clutched between her legs. “What are you talking about? Look, I don’t have time for this.”
“Time is not your problem, my lady.”
“What’s up with the ‘my lady’ crap? This isn’t the seventeenth century.”
“I should hope not, as I was born in the century following. But the fact of the matter is, that bauble you retrieved from Valoren has possessed my soul for quite some time, and from what I can tell by the events of this evening, as long as you have it with you, you have me as well.”
He crossed his arms over his chest—a rather impressive chest, she could tell, as the ties on his midnight shirt had come undone, allowing her a generous sampling of his tanned muscles beneath. With squared shoulders and forearms whose lean tendons were obvious even through his sleeves, the man looked like no stranger to physical activity. And while Mariah was no slouch when it came to self-defense, this guy could probably break her in two with very little effort.
Only, his eyes betrayed not a single violent tendency. He seemed perfectly content to sit in her car and tell her some wild tale about how they were connected to each other through a magical stone.
At that moment, she blinked, then fully processed what he’d said.
He was from the eighteenth century.
The stone possessed his soul.
She swallowed, her tongue suddenly thick and dry. “Come again?”
His impressive lips quirked up at one corner. “Which part shall I repeat? The fact that I was born in 1722, or the bit about the stone you appropriated from the forest of Valoren actually being a magical prison to which I am inexorably tethered?”
She wasn’t exactly an expert on history, but she wasn’t a novice, either. She’d studied archeology with her mother at the Jasper Museum in Sydney before taking off with Ben to steal treasures rather than catalog them. Rafe’s manner of speech, while odd, definitely didn’t fit in her century. Neither did his clothes.
Ben’s warning suddenly rang in Mariah’s ears. He’d cautioned her that the stone was an object of black magic. And Rafe, with his dark hair, liquid silver eyes, sweeping pirate shirt, leather pants and boots, looked every inch a man out of time. Still, this had to be some kind of elaborate joke, right? Some plan cooked up by the endlessly duplicitous and undeniably clever Ben Rousseau to trick her into surrendering the stone?
And yet, how the hell had this Rafe Forsyth materialized inside her moving car?
She leaned forward and banged her head gently on the steering wheel, hoping to knock some sense into her malfunctioning brain. Maybe she hadn’t used her considerable driving skills to avoid an accident. Maybe she’d crashed and Rafe Forsyth was a delusion spawned by a serious head injury.
Her temple pressed to the wheel, she turned and gazed into Rafe’s increasingly concerned eyes. “Am I dead?”
He did not smile, but reached out and pushed a stray hair off her cheek. As his fingers trailed across her face, her skin heated. She was blushing? She never blushed. Of course, she never saw gorgeous men who popped in out of nowhere, either.
“You do not feel dead,” he replied.
“Are you dead?”
He ran his hands down his chest, something she suddenly considered doing herself. Just to hear if he had a heartbeat, of course.
“I do not believe so. I have a body. According to the teachings of my people, spirits do not take physical form.”
She whimpered and banged her head one more time, a little harder than she intended. “Your people? Tell me you’re not in some wild cult that worships rocks.”
“I am Romani.”
Her gaze locked with his again. Of course he was Romani. He looked the part in every way—from his swarthy skin to his dark hair and clever eyes. But if there was one thing she’d learned in her extensive travels, it was never to trust a Gypsy.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“That I am Romani or that I am tied to the stone?”
“Take your pick,” she replied.
His frown indicated deep thought more than displeasure. “I cannot deny that my story is hard to accept, but you must at least believe this—until tonight, I was trapped within the stone you took from Valoren. I had been in that state for hundreds of years and must be tied to that abominable rock still. Each time you’ve attempted to leave me behind, I’ve joined you shortly thereafter, through no actions of my own.”
He wasn’t lying. She knew this, not only from the sincerity in his gaze—and she had a high-quality bullshit detector—but because, weird as it was, his explanation fit with what she knew to be true. She’d left him behind in the hotel room, but she’d taken the stone. All the way down to the parking garage, she’d listened for footsteps behind her and had heard none. He might have taken the elevator, she supposed, but that didn’t explain how she’d abandoned him shortly thereafter and he’d appeared, miraculously, inside her locked and speeding car.
“I don’t understand how this could be possible,” she admitted.
He sighed, but the sound held no impatience. “Of course you don’t. No sane person would. But when it comes to magic, I’ve found it best to put sanity aside.”
Mariah listened intently as he told a tale that would have made a fabulous bedtime story with an angry king, a vile wizard, a love-struck girl and a collection of Gypsies imbued with magic. She found herself so utterly caught up in the drama that the pounding in her head receded. She gasped when he told her how he’d driven his dagger into the stone, only to find himself trapped within the gem itself. He was sketchy on what happened afterward, but she supposed that was natural. As natural as any story of one enslaved by the unexplainable could be.
“Until you touched the gem,” he said, with a clipped edge to his voice that told her his story was finished, “I could not venture outside the stone. Now that you have touched it, I can’t seem to stay within.”
Mariah gulped, then, operating on automatic, restarted the car and drove in calm silence off the shoulder and into the nearest empty parking lot. Neon lights advertising a big, blowout furniture sale threw a funky red glare into the car as she shoved the gear into park. She looked behind her. The street was full of cars. The breeze from their passing tossed the branches of the scrawny trees in the median. Overgrown weeds sprang from cracks in the pavement, which glittered with brown shards of broken beer bottles. She wasn’t dead. She might not believe in heaven, but if she did she wouldn’t imagine the place looked like this.
Which left only one scenario to believe—Ben hadn’t been lying. The stone was magical. She’d seen so many strange and unusual things over the course of the years, but nothing that had made her believe that Rafe’s story could be true. Only, he was the proof, wasn’t he? There was no other explanation for how he could have materialized inside her car. She’d locked the doors. She’d driven away. She’d remembered catching sight of him in her rearview mirror. She had no doubt that she’d left him behind in the parking garage, and yet here he was.
“Remarkable,” he said, bracing his hands on the dash. He gazed out through the windshield, then spun around in his seat to watch the cars speeding by on the street behind them. “This is how everyone travels now? By…what did you call it? A car?”
She ignored his question. “You’re really from the eighteenth century?”
He nodded. The movement of his head was swift and decisive.
“And a curse trapped you in the stone?”
She’d heard his story, but the realization that he wasn’t making up some elaborate tale required her to verify some of the details.
He reached toward her crotch. Instantly, she grabbed his wrist and twisted.
“You are quite quick,” he said with a chuckle.
“If you’re being condescending, I can break your wrist to show you I don’t appreciate it.”
He relaxed his arm, which she pushed away.
“I apologize,” he said. “May I have the stone, please?”
She looked around. Even if he grabbed the mysterious rock and tried to make a break for it, she could run him over with the car before he got fifty feet away. Because, cursed or not, she suddenly understood the full breadth of this stone’s value. She had no idea what she was going to do with the damned thing, but she certainly wasn’t about to let it out of her sight. She placed the rock in his hand, then flicked on the map light.