swallowed twice before she asked very cautiously, 'How do you know that?'
'I checked.'
'Why?'
'Call it professional curiosity.'
'Professional curiosity, my foot.'
He ignored that. 'Did you take it?'
'Huh? Me?'
'Yeah, you. Did you steal your own file so that you wouldn't run the risk of a bad match?'
'Steal my file? Are you nuts? Until I met you, I didn't even know how to do stuff like that. There must be some mistake.' Orchid broke off when she caught the all but imperceptible trace of invisible psychic energy shimmering in the air between them. 'Stop that this instant.'
'Stop what?'
'You're trying to use your strat-talent to see if I'm telling the truth. Admit it.'
'Everyone knows that there's nothing to those old stories about strat-talents being human lie-detectors.' He lowered his mouth to hers.
Orchid hesitated briefly, tempted to continue the argument. But when she felt the hard outline of his thigh against hers, she groaned and put her arms around his neck. She would save the lecture until later, she thought. And the mystery of her missing file could wait, too.
Right now the heat of Rafe's aroused body was warming her through the sheet that separated them. She was suddenly, desperately aware of his fingertips on her nipple.
No one had ever touched her the way Rafe did. No one had ever aroused the exquisite, almost painfully intense sensations in her that he aroused. She shivered and felt his immediate response.
When they came together like this it was as if they had been made for each other.
The joy of knowing that she had the same passionate effect on him infused her with a heady excitement. She kneaded the sleek contours of his shoulders.
His mouth moved to her throat and then to her breast. She arched in his arms. His hand slipped beneath her. He clenched his fingers around her hip, squeezed gently, and then found the impossibly sensitive places between her legs.
Heat swelled.
'Rafe.'
He rolled onto his back and pulled her down on top of him. When she opened her eyes she saw that his face was set in unrelenting lines of fierce desire. She cradled the rigid length of him in her palm.
'You don't know what you do to me,' he whispered.
When his hand moved up the inside of her leg she cried out and stiffened. His finger, wet and slick with her own moisture, moved across her straining clitoris. A great tightness seized her. She sank her nails into his shoulders and gripped him with her thighs.
He did not thrust into her until the first ripples of her climax began. And then, just when she thought she was at the pinnacle, he entered her, deeply, fully.
The feel of him stretching her and filling her so completely at that moment was almost too much to handle on top of the already effervescent sensations that were sweeping through her.
And then she felt his questing talent searching for her on the psychic plane. She responded to it instinctively, joyously, with a sense of absolute tightness.
Power crashed through the perfectly tuned prism.
She heard Rafe's hoarse shout of release, but she could no longer even open her eyes. She was lost in the synergistic vortex of energy and sensation that engulfed her.
Rafe lay awake for a long time after Orchid fell asleep in his arms. He watched the twin moons move across the arc of the glass dome until they disappeared. His mind teemed with mysteries. He had encountered a great number of them lately. One way or another, they all seemed to revolve around Orchid.
But the biggest mystery of all was Orchid herself.
No, he thought. The most enigmatic mystery in all this was his own reaction to her. He had never experienced anything like it before in his life. So how was it that he could sense the lightness in it?
The following afternoon Orchid drove into downtown with the vaguely guilty exhilaration of a young truant skipping school. It had not been easy escaping from Rafe for even an hour. After the attack on Morgan Lambert he had scarcely let her out of his sight. It seemed to her that he was always prowling nearby, watching over her.
But she had finally managed to convince him that it would be reasonably safe for her to drive to Psynergy, Inc., alone to collect her check.
'Nothing's going to happen in broad daylight on Founders' Day,' she had assured him. 'Whoever these people are, they obviously prefer to do things in secret. A couple of guys wearing ski masks in downtown New Seattle won't go unnoticed. You've got stuff to do here. There's no need to chaperone me.'
Rafe had been reluctant, but in the end he had conceded that she had a point. He stood on the front steps and watched her drive out through the high gates. In the rearview mirror the grim expression of concern on his face was clear. She knew that he was already regretting his decision to let her go into town by herself. She put her foot down very hard on the gas, half afraid that he would find some way to stop her at the last minute.
A peculiar mix of relief and anxiety plagued her as she drove down First Avenue. This business of sharing space with Rafe was turning out to be more complicated than she had anticipated. She was not accustomed to having a man underfoot all the time. The experience left her with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she was grateful to have his strat-talent expertise on her side while they worked to untangle the mysteries surrounding Theo's death and the missing relic.
But her own emotions concerning her lover-client were rapidly becoming more convoluted and complex than the case itself.
She had an unnerving suspicion that this was how it felt to fall in love.
The downtown section of New Seattle was festively decorated for Founders' Day. Banners snapped in the breeze. Restaurants advertised first generation-style beer and old-fashioned Founders' burgers and traditional pear-berry pie. Signs were posted warning that the streets were to be cleared of all parked vehicles two hours before the evening parade began.
The Friends of the Library had erected a display of a huge book made entirely of various colored flowers in front of the public library. It represented one of the first generation hand-made books that the colonists crafted in their desperate attempt to preserve some of the knowledge trapped in their disintegrating computer data bases. Orchid was forced to blink rapidly for a few seconds as she drove past the inspiring flower sculpture. Everyone was entitled to a few tears of pride on Founders' Day, she told herself.
Fifteen minutes later she walked through the door of Psynergy, Inc.
'Happy Founders' Day, Byron. Got my check?'
Byron looked up from the gossip column of his favorite tabloid, Synsation. He stared at her over the rims of his purple spectacles. His expression was one of fasci nated horror.
'Run. Run while you still can,' he hissed as he glanced wildly over his shoulder toward the closed door of Clementine's office. 'Run for your life. Save yourself.'
'I'm not running anywhere until I get my paycheck.'' Orchid walked to the desk, pushed aside a stack of 'Think Exclusive' posters, and glanced down at the open page of Synsation. 'What's the big news today? Any more alien abductions reported?''
'Nothing so tame and ordinary.' He stabbed at a picture on the page. 'Take a good look.'
Orchid studied the grainy photo. It showed a couple getting out of a car in front of a large, sprawling mansion. The picture had obviously been shot from a long distance. Nevertheless, the car looked vaguely familiar. So did the sleek set of the shoulders of the man whose face was turned partially away from the camera. When she looked closer she was almost certain she recognized the vee that dipped to the waist of the slim-fitting gown the woman wore.
'Good heavens, that isn't—?'
'You and Rafe Stonebraker?' Byron grinned malevolently. 'Indeed it is, my dear. The Stonebraker birthday party is one of the social events of the year and,' he paused for emphasis, 'you were there.'
Orchid grimaced. 'I can't imagine why anyone bothered to take a picture of me.'
