“Or something like it.”
He nodded, and his throat was too tight for him to manage to say more than, “Go.”
She gave him a sad smile, and went over to join Kaye and Owen who were already standing in the spring’s shallow pool. They each placed their left thumbs over the inside of their right wrists. Ginger’s gaze didn’t leave his.
“On my mark,” Kaye said. “Activate.”
Everyone pressed down hard on the retrieval implant.
The column of light that sprang from the water blinded him. The roar of the shock wave was deafening. Bern refused to look away. The last thing he saw was Ginger’s face as she whispered, “Goodbye.”
Ginger looked up from the photo before her on the desk, and sighed. A copper bowl filled with water sat on the desk, but she wasn’t interested in looking into it. Being a psychic wasn’t as much fun for her as it used to be. It had been six months since she’d gotten back to her own time. Six months and three days to be precise, not that she was counting. She’d done the debriefing and written up her report, and been sent back to her regular life until such time as the TTP deemed her special skills necessary again. For now her regular life consisted of working with law enforcement on cold-case files, and being alone.
She sighed again, and stood up. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate being back. She loved her house and garden. She loved central heating and modern medicine and interactive holographic entertainment and regular meals of anything she wanted. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed shopping for shoes until she’d entered her first mall. She loved being home. It was just that—
She missed Bern.
Her body ached for him when she was alone in her bed at night, but the notion of taking another lover was anathema. Even trying a holo lover hadn’t worked for her.
She got up and began to pace around her office. She was well aware that Bern had returned to the present three days before, and even more aware that it didn’t matter. Maybe there was some way that she could introduce herself to him, but how fair would it be to him when she knew their past and he didn’t? There was no way for them to pick up where they’d left off. There was a good chance he wouldn’t even be interested in her under normal circumstances. Maybe she wouldn’t be interested in him.
She laughed hollowly, still conscious of the ecstasy he brought her when his body joined with hers. “Yeah, right, sure I’m going to forget that.”
Then again, she really wanted the man, why shouldn’t she fight for what she wanted? She should find a way to introduce herself and see what—
“There is someone at the door,” the house’s security system announced. It was an old house with a very basic system, so it wasn’t about to be more informative than that. So, unless the water in the scrying bowl suddenly showed her who it was—which it wasn’t likely to do—she had to answer the door herself. Entertaining a visitor, even someone looking to get their future read without an appointment, was better than pacing around feeling sorry for herself.
The man standing at the door was the last person she expected to be there. And the one person in all of space and time she wanted to see.
“Bern!”
He kissed her before she could say anything else. The fire that had been between them from the first moment sparked to flames. She clung to him with all her might, her body molded against his. If he’d taken her there on the front porch she wouldn’t have minded. Instead he swung her around into the house, and kicked the door closed behind them. They fell together onto the entryway carpet and clothes were quickly shed and pushed aside.
He was thrusting inside her, hard and strong and fast, before she managed to breathlessly say, “You remembered me!” Then she came for the first time and forgot about words for a long time afterwards.
“Of course I remembered,” he said later, when they were lying together in a sweaty tangled heap. “You’re unforgettable.”
She stroked his cheek. “Oh, that’s sweet…wait a minute…that means you’re psychic.” He nodded. “I thought Percy was your team psychic.”
“He was, on the civilian side. The military side always tries to have someone who’ll remember the op on a TTP team.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“That’s because that information is shared on a need-to-know basis. This seems like a good time for you to need to know.”
“Now I understand why Kaye kept talking about your gut feelings. I should have guessed he meant your psychic intuition.”