Copper Beach

both hands and anchored her so that she could not escape his mouth.

    She came undone in a storm of energy that dazzled all of his senses.

    “Sam. Sam. ”

    “Right here,” he breathed.

    He shifted position, holding his weight on his elbows. He captured her face between his hands and plunged his tongue into her mouth at the same time that he thrust deep into her still-clenching passage. The convulsions of her release pulled him over the edge within seconds.

    He gave himself up to the rushing freedom of the climax with a hoarse, muffled groan of satisfaction that seemed to echo forever.

    A long time later, Abby became aware of the weight of Sam’s thigh on top of hers. His arm was flung across her breasts. She turned her head on the pillow and saw that his eyes were closed. He looked to be sound asleep. Cautiously, she tried to edge out from under his sprawling weight. He tightened his arm around her, trapping her, but he did not open his eyes.

    “You’re awake,” she accused.

    “I am now.” Reluctantly, he rolled onto his back. “You know, we should do this more often.”

    “What? Meet weird guys in parking garages who try to whack you with psychic flash-bang gadgets so that they can kidnap me?”

    “Must you always focus on the negative? I was referring to the hot sex.”

    She smiled. “Oh, that.”

    He folded his arms behind his head. “Yeah, that.”

    She turned onto her stomach and levered herself up on her elbows. “How was it different tonight?”

    “The sex?” He gazed up at the ceiling. “Let me count the ways…”

    “Not the sex. The dream.”

    “The one you interrupted?”

    “That’s the one, yes.” She paused. “You called my name.”

    “Probably because you weren’t supposed to be in it.”

    “What was I doing in it?”

    “Scaring the hell out of me,” he said.

    “Explain.”

    “It’s the same dream that I told you about.”

    “The one in which poor Cassidy walks down the hall to open the lab door?”

    “Yes. Usually, it’s like some damned video loop. It keeps repeating, over and over again. Always the same. Until tonight.”

    “What was different about tonight’s version?”

    He looked at her, his eyes burning a little in the shadows. “Tonight you were the woman walking down the hall, about to open the lab door. I called out to you. Tried to stop you. But you couldn’t hear me.”

    “You’re worried about protecting me, and that concern came through in the new version of the dream.” She leaned over and brushed her mouth against his. Then she pulled back. “But it’s okay. I’m not Cassidy. If you called out to me or tried to warn me, even in a dream, I would hear you.”

    “Would you?”

    “Yes,” she said. “I heard you tonight, didn’t I?”

    He stroked her cheek with the back of his finger. She turned her head and kissed his palm. He wrapped one arm around her and drew her back down to him.

38

    “WHAT DID YOU MEAN LAST NIGHT WHEN YOU TOLD ME THAT we needed to go back to the start of this thing?” Abby asked. “You said you were missing something about the incident in the Vaughn library.”
    They were eating omelets and drinking coffee in the hotel restaurant. Abby was feeling surprisingly well rested. Which only went to show that if you had clean underwear, a toothbrush and a sexy bodyguard, a woman could handle anything, she decided.

    For his part, Sam showed no signs of exhaustion. He looked sated and satisfied. He also appeared energized.

    “You told me that the day of the home invasion, Grady Hastings specified that he was after a particular encrypted book,” Sam said.

    “Yes. Morgan’s The Key to the Latent Power of Stones. ”

    “According to what little there is about him online, there’s no indication that Hastings was in the hot-books market. He doesn’t have the money for it, for one thing.”

    “He told me that he needed The Key to help him with his research. Evidently, he’s really into crystals.”

    “Like me,” Sam said.

    Abby smiled. “Like you without the Coppersmith money to fund his work.”

    “And without the Coppersmith connections in the rare-books market. And yet he somehow discovered that an obscure, psi-coded book on crystals was in the library of a private collector. How would that be possible if he wasn’t tapped into the underground book world?”

    Abby put down her fork and thought about it. “He said a voice in a crystal had told him how to find the book and that