Carl grabbed Reece by both arms and pul ed him into a dark corner behind the stairs. Reece’s attempts to distract him had apparently failed.
“Cut the bul shit, Reece. What’s special about the amulet?” Reece shook his head unconcernedly. Carl intimidated most people, but he didn’t intimidate Reece. Reece knew him too well to be scared of him. He also knew him well enough to know what drove him. It wasn’t to save the world. Carl had a singular self-appreciating agenda. Reece had once been that way—that’s why his partnership with Carl had been such a success—but now that Reece had Lara in his life, he knew there were more important things than fame and fortune. Carl hadn’t discovered that yet.
That’s why Reece had decided to hide the amulet’s power from him. While Reece might be able to deny the allure of using the amulet, he knew Carl wouldn’t hesitate to use it at any cost.
“Not a thing. I told Lara she could put it in one of her displays in the museum. She offered me a pretty good price for it.”
“Is that why it’s in your pocket?”
Reece’s heart skipped a beat. “Carl…”
Carl had that eager look on his face. The one he’d sported in his youth, but had been taken from him by a hard life. “What does it do, Reece? Can it travel through time like you thought?”
“Would I be standing here if it could travel through time?”
“Yeah,” Carl said, “because you handed your balls to Lara the day you asked her to marry you.”
Reece scowled and shoved Carl aside. “If I wanted to try it, I would. I don’t want to.
It’s dangerous.” Perhaps he had misplaced his balls. He sure wouldn’t have been worried about danger six months ago.
Carl grinned. “If you’re afraid, give it to me and I’l try it. Just tell me what to do.”
“I’m not afraid. Something bad will happen if we activate it. It requires a sacrifice.”
“So we throw a goat into a volcano. Problem solved.” Carl’s eyes lit up with wonder.
“How does it work?”
Reece pul ed the amulet from his pocket, holding the two halves together in his palm. Carl stared down at it, his tongue running over his upper lip repeatedly. It seemed a shame to toss this opportunity aside when they’d finally discovered something that might truly be remarkable. He and Carl had travelled the globe raiding tombs for almost a decade. They’d unearthed plenty of artifacts and treasures, but nothing like this.
Reece glanced up the stairwell towards Lara’s office. Even though he wanted to, he’d promised her that he wouldn’t use it, and he would keep that promise.
“It doesn’t work,” Reece lied in a last ditch effort to dissuade his partner. “We tried it and nothing happened.”
“You tried it without me?”
“Yeah. It’s junk. Like I said.”
“I don’t believe you, Reece. I can tell when you’re lying to me.” Carl wrapped both hands around Reece’s, trapping the amulet within their combined hands. “Say the incantation, Reece. I know you know it by heart already.” He did, but he wasn’t going to say it. “Let it go, Carl. It doesn’t work.”
“Prove it.”
Reece could just make something up. Carl would never know. Reece spoke the first three syllables of his fabricated incantation and the amulet in his palm began to hum.
Carl’s pale blue eyes widened and he gasped with excitement. “It does work. I knew it.”
Reece’s heart pounded. He spoke several additional syllables of the incantation as if someone else was controlling his mouth. He wasn’t sure if he were saying the real words that Lara had deciphered or making up his own, but they tumbled from his lips in rapid succession. A brilliant white light filled their hands, bursting from between their fingers. They released their grip and stared down at the disk. Yellow sparks crackled between the two broken edges of the amulet. The brilliant light faded along the stone’s surface except for a series of symbols along one edge which glowed white in rhythmic pulses. Reece’s heart sank when he realized the glowing symbols were the request for a worthy sacrifice. A thick black mist rose up from the disc and faded out of existence.
An instant later, the glowing symbols requesting a sacrifice flickered and changed into different symbols. Reece wasn’t an expert like Lara, but he knew enough hieroglyphics to understand their meaning.
“What does it say?” Carl asked.
“The world is yours.”
“So,” Carl said, the excitement in his expression matching that in Reece’s chest,
“when would you like to go first?”
Lara exited the elevator of the parking garage and hurried toward her car. Her thoughts were in chaos. Why had Reece taken the amulet with him? Did he mean to use it? Would he break his promise to her? Why else would he have put it in his pocket instead of leaving it at the museum?
She paused a few feet away from her car and listened. A presence lurked behind her. She reached into her purse for her can of pepper spray and turned slowly. Before she could even ask if someone was there, an inky shadow materialized in a swirl of thick fog. “Its power may only be released by someone who can offer a great sacrifice.” Lara didn’t actually hear the raspy words. They echoed in her mind in an obscure language that she somehow understood. Long arms extended from the shadow and col ided with her chest. Lara felt the warmth drain from her body instantly and watched a brilliant light burst from her chest before it was extinguished within the shadow. The cloaked apparition backed away and Lara crumpled, dead before she hit the ground.
In our last volume, Loving on Borrowed Time, Reece goes back in time to try to save Lara from her untimely death. Using the amulet, he arrives one year before Lara’s unintentional sacrifice and convinces her that she is in grave danger. He tells her that in the future he found her dead in a parking garage and he has the newspaper clipping to prove it. Though this past Lara has never met Reece, something about the way he looks at her gains her trust. They use the half of the amulet still in Reece’s possession to outrun Carl, who
wants to make sure Lara stays dead. Two random leaps through time later, they are still on the run from Lara’s tragic future and find themselves in a new time and place...
Chapter One
Lara flopped down on the hot sand and put her head between her knees. She took several deep breaths, the desert heat searing her lungs and drawing moisture from her already dehydrated body. Maybe she was overreacting. It wasn’t Reece’s fault that the ancient Egyptian amulet had chosen a particular man as his host. Their leaps through time were random. Reece didn’t get to choose whose body he shared and neither did she. It wasn’t Reece’s fault that they’d left the cool, moist lands of medieval England to arrive in this brain-baking desert. It wasn’t Reece’s fault that someone had murdered her in the future, so they were forced to find refuge in the past. It wasn’t Reece’s fault that he was so sexy the thought of being unable to make love to him for three short (or more likely exceedingly long) days was unbearable. Actually, that was his fault. He should try to be less irresistible.
“Lara?” Reece’s shadow blocked the glaring sun from the back of her neck. “Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah,” Lara said. “Just fine. Give me a moment to adjust to this new body. I think this woman has the flu or something. I feel kind of queasy.” This was no flu. Lara felt queasy because her lover would be doing no loving no matter how much she wanted him. This blew.
Lara stared at their half of the broken amulet dangling from the worn leather cord around her neck. It swayed gently in hypnotic circles. She lifted a hand and fingered the hieroglyphics carved into the artifact’s stone surface. Maybe if she repeated the words represented by those strange little symbols, the freakin’ thing would take them out of this place. Not in three days, like it usual y did, but now. Right now, damn it! There was nothing but hot sand in every direction. She had no idea where they were or when they were. She wasn’t typically a complainer, especial y when it concerned things she couldn’t control, but she had just admitted to Reece that she loved him moments before they leapt here and this had to happen. The amulet had forced Reece’s consciousness to share the worst possible body. It simply wasn’t fair.