Water From the Moon Read Online Free Page A

been the one to introduce her to the pants–in–the–boots trick. "Sorry. Habit."
    Cameron sighed and laced up his footgear. The sparring was an old habit, too. He wiggled his toes inside the boots and permitted himself a grin. So, Madame Abrasive was not, perhaps, as tough as she appeared. Not if she remembered his shoe size. He watched curiously while she moved around at the back of the car, using minimum effort for maximum results. There was nothing delicate about her. She was too tall, too strongly built, too unbreakable; every curve was well–defined, but firm, graceful. He liked to watch her move. There was something timelessly seductive about her unselfconscious comfort with her surroundings. What, he wondered, made her so in tune with them? This was not the sophisticated Acasia who’d regaled him with stories of her father’s exploits on the Riviera, the one who’d made polite faces when he’d introduced her to his collection of zoological specimens, the one who’d been cautious in the woods….
    "You ready yet?" she asked, interrupting his thoughts.
    She set a small box on the Cobra’s fender and closed the trunk. Cameron’s heart nearly stopped. Held casually in her hands was a 12–gauge shotgun. What had begun to feel almost like a fantasy was back to cold reality now. She checked the magazine, then pumped a shell into the chamber and added another to the magazine. The rest of the shells were dumped into a pocket of her khaki fatigue pants before she covered the gun’s muzzle with a canvas jacket and slung it over her shoulder. Her expression was one of such detached efficiency when she lifted her face to him that he gaped at her.
    "Who are you?"
    She shoved the cap to the back of her head and perused him quizzically, laughing when realization dawned. The corners of her mouth lifted sheepishly. "Hell, Cam, I don’t know. I ask myself that same question every morning."
    Cameron slid out of the car and walked around to her. "What’s happened to you? This isn’t like you. You hated guns."
    "Nothing stays the same, Cam."
    "No? Then why am I still wondering if I’ll survive you?"
    There was no laughter in the question, and Acasia swallowed and turned away, evading the well–remembered, too–incisive stare. "There’s a trail around here somewhere. Stay close."
    "Casie…" Cameron caught her arm, and she shrugged him away without replying. Her remoteness had him stumped. His memory had kept her the way she’d been: tough but gentle; cynical but open; one of those rare people with whom friendship had been accidental and immediate, verbal communication an afterthought, love part of the natural progression. A friend with whom the conversation, even after half a lifetime, should have resumed as though they’d never left off. Even here. Instead…
    He blinked, and nausea assailed him. His head throbbed, and he swayed, fighting the cloying heat. It came at him unexpectedly and relentlessly from all directions, pressing in on him, giving him the sensation of being trapped inside it. He shook his head to clear it, then focused on Acasia, who had found the trail with deceptive ease.
    "Let’s go," she murmured, and motioned him along behind her, darting through the spaces of light and dark, hardly seeming to notice where she was, as if movement were all that mattered.
    Cameron staggered after her, willing away his nausea by concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, seeing only the way Acasia went, his eyes focused on her fluid grace. Sweat slithered down his face and neck like something alive. He licked the perspiration from his lips and blinked it from his eyes. The buzz of an insect near his ear was deafening, maddening, and he swatted it away.
    He blinked again, and it seemed to his sweat–hazed eyes that the green forest shimmered, allowing the woman before him to slip sylphlike through the shadows. Everything seemed so much closer to the surface here, reduced to the simply primitive. The