with the idea of him using it. She answered quickly, “Most people who put it on experience a blinding headache for several days thereafter. The crown seems to have an affinity for certain brains.”
“Have you determined what it is about those brains that it likes?”
“Everyone it has not bothered has been strongly psychic.” She added with a certain satisfaction, “And everyone it has liked so far is female.”
Grafton’s gaze narrowed. “Are you jacking me around, or are you serious?”
She allowed herself a small smile. “Oh, I’m serious, all right. The crown likes women.”
He grinned. “Can’t say as I blame the thing. I like ‘em, too.”
A shiver rippled down her spine, leaving her body tingling with…something. Oh, good grief. She didn’t go for all that ridiculous boy-girl foolishness. She’d sworn off dating by the time she graduated from college, throwing herself into her research almost to the exclusion of all else. And as a result, her life was calm. Peaceful. Serene. Just the way she liked it. Severely lacking in annoying, overconfident males who oozed testosterone and sex appeal. At least until now.
He asked casually, “When will you be ready to try sending something somewhere? It looked to me like you’ve got all the equipment set up—the quartz booth to contain whatever you send, the computers, the amplifiers.”
She resisted an urge to wince. She’d known it would come to this eventually. Just not yet. She answered reluctantly, “We still have to figure out where we’re going wrong in the programming.”
He said briskly, “I think we should go for it. The numbers I looked at seemed more like minor tweaks than actual errors.”
“It’s your career on the line.”
He laughed, sharply and without humor. “Like I still have a career. I’ve been shunted off to a kooky research project in the middle of nowhere with zilch for funding and run by some crazy civilian chick who claims she can time travel. I’d say my career has effectively tanked, wouldn’t you?”
Damn. She’d been hoping the guy at least had a sense of self-preservation she could use to rein him in. Curious, she asked, “What did you do to get stuck with this assignment?”
He threw her a withering look. “Office politics gone bad. I tried to do the right thing, and took the moral high ground. I came out on the losing end.”
“Nothing like being a small, replaceable cog—with a conscience, no less—in a very big machine, eh? That’s why I could never have joined the military. I would’ve gone crazy or gotten court-martialed, or both.”
He made no reply to that.
She said quietly, “As tempting as it is to rush to the end result on this project, I think caution is the best course. We’re close. Let’s not blow it now.”
He bit out. “I’ll take your opinion under advisement, Dr. Carswell.”
She actually felt her teeth gnashing.
“Introduce me to the rest of the staff,” the colonel ordered briskly.
She was half tempted to argue further, but instead, behaved herself. “Let’s go. And call me Athena. Everyone else does.”
The staff was small: two graduate students coming out of the fields of physics and math to analyze brain waves and crunch numbers, two student programmers to translate the equations into computer code, and two hardware technicians to keep the computers up and running. At one time, the best scientific minds in America had worked on the crown in secret, along with the other artifacts recovered from the Roswell crash. And now they were down to this.
A handful of geeks in a basement lab, a crazy psychic chick and one outcast colonel.
Chapter 2
That night, Athena tossed and turned in bed, the sheets tangling infuriatingly around her legs and her pillow hot and lumpy. It was all Pete Grafton’s fault. He’d been gone for the rest of the morning, and then come back in the afternoon with a security system engineer who’d installed fancy new locks on the lab’s entrance and welded a massive safe to the floor of the tiny conference room next to her office.
The colonel had announced flatly that he was in charge now and things were going to change, starting with beefed-up security. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he had then proceeded to charm the socks off her staff. He’d taken them all out for happy hour, and of course, the drinks were on him. Apparently, he knew that the surest way to impoverished graduate students’ hearts was to give them free food, or even better, free booze. The cad.
She’d had to endure a noisy bar for nearly two hours and sip her way through several glasses of inferior wine because of him and his cursed glad-handing. Her hair still smelled like cigarette smoke even after a long, hot shower. But it had been that or let him steal the loyalty of her staff right out from under her nose. Damned if he didn’t look even better in a blue V-necked sweater with the sleeves pushed up, and a snug pair of jeans, than he had in his dress slacks and white shirt earlier.
Athena punched her pillow a couple of times and forced the tension from her muscles. She was going to sleep now, and Peter Grafton’s sexy smile and bedroom eyes weren’t going to pop into her head again! It was a hard fought battle, but with the help of the wine, she eventually conquered her errant imagination and dropped off to sleep.
And of course, promptly dreamed of him. His appearance in her unconscious mind was downright exasperating.
“What are you doing here?” her dreaming self demanded.
He looked around, interested. “Nice dream. Great decor. Is this your bedroom?”
She blinked and gazed about. They were in a palatial stone chamber lit by flickering firelight and dominated by a massive canopy bed curtained in burgundy velvet. The ceiling was dark wood crudely painted with a vine pattern that was shockingly phallic. One wall held a geometric display of swords and spears, and a pair of enormous tapestries covered two others.
“Sorry, my bedroom’s done in haute flea-market couture. Time travel researchers don’t make the big bucks, I’m afraid. Heck, I’m lucky to make a paycheck at all.”
“Why this whole castle motif, then?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s your dream. You must know.”
“I don’t have a clue. Maybe you remind me of Prince Charming, so I conjured it up.”
“Prince Charming, huh?”
She glared at the dream image of him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
He grinned and went over to the bed to sit down on its high edge. “Dream a more comfortable mattress, will you?”
She scowled and did her best to imagine the lumpiest, most uneven mattress she could. With fleas.
Pete laughed unrepentantly. “So. Are we going to get naked and do the nasty?”
“I’m going
