Time After Time Read Online Free

wakefulness, he could have sworn he heard a voice. The voice was feminine, familiar yet strange, and the accent was one he’d never heard before. And his sleep-fogged mind told him the girl spoke to him—but to someone else as well.
    “Oh, see! Our lifelines match! We are bonded, my love. Fated to share all our lives together!”
    And then he was awake.
    Noah frowned into the darkness, feeling an oddly displaced sensation. Green woods, he thought, not a dark bedroom … Then he shook his head, pounded his pillow, and fought to recapture sleep.
    But he never recaptured the dream.
    Alex puttered about her loft for a while after Noah left. She let Caliban out of the bedroom and fed him, reminding herself to be sure to go shopping early the next day. It was late, the storm long gone, and she waited restlessly for her pet to finish his dinner so that she could take him out for his much-needed exercise.
    Absently unpacking a box filled with decorative pillows, she piled them on the couch and then sat down among them, finally thinking about what she’d been trying to avoid considering. There wereseveral things, and heading the list was her new client and landlord.
    The return of electricity had brought a definite shock, one she still hadn’t entirely recovered from. Her supposedly short-fat-and-balding client was no such thing; in fact, any comparison with that mythical gentleman was ludicrous.
    Noah Thorne was a man somewhere in his mid-thirties, somewhere over six feet tall, and somewhere over a ten in the half-serious rating system Alex’s friends always used.
    Alex had never even met a ten before, much less a man who would easily jolt the needle over the top.
    He had the kind of hawklike good looks one never expected to encounter in a real person, and if that smile hadn’t been breaking hearts for a good many years, she mused, then Noah Thorne had met a lot of blind women. His thick hair was raven-black and stick-straight, his eyes a curious light blue that was almost gray and almost silver—but not quite.
    Half the women Alex knew would have killedto possess his long eyelashes, and the other half would have killed to possess
him
. After seeing him move around the loft, Alex had been reminded irresistibly of a warrior walking cat-footed on the hunt, silent, dangerous, and nearly as wild as the game he stalked.
    When he smiled, that lethal image was overshadowed by charm and humor, but Alex felt faintly unnerved by the instinct telling her that nature had intended just that; even the wildest of beasts could look cuddly and unthreatening at times, lending a feeling of safety that was, to say the least, misleading.
    Alex was determined not to be misled.
    However, it was one thing for her to tell herself that, and quite another thing to ignore the instant attraction she’d felt. She’d seen the ridiculous images in her mind of Cleopatra meeting Antony, of Guinevere gazing upon Lancelot, of Cinderella raising her eyes to meet those of Prince Charming.…
    Ridiculous! She was twenty-six years old, on her own for ten years, and she certainly knew betterthan to indulge in childish dreams and unrealistic expectations. Men were men; the best of them possessed annoying habits and beliefs, and the worst of them had some redeeming trait. Period.
    Still, there was just something
about
the man. She’d had the odd feeling that they had met before, yet his face had struck no chord of memory.
    Alex drummed her fingers silently on a particularly colorful pillow and tried to think reasonably. He was a very attractive man, and in the moment of surprise following the darkness she had seen his interest in her. He had drunk her coffee and gazed at her almost constantly, making her feel breathless and curiously unlike herself—and that was a danger signal.
    In fact, it was a hell of a potential problem.
    Because Alex wanted very much to get to know him better. It wasn’t his looks that prompted that desire, although they had certainly been a