Read Time After Time for Free Online

and sunny day, and since the pool offered coolness, she suggested they take advantage of it. She regretted the suggestion, however, when Noah took the opportunity to voice his puzzlement.
    “I heard the oddest noise last night,” he told her, floating lazily on his back.
    “Really?” Alex managed to say after treading water fiercely long enough to stop the coughing brought on by swallowing a mouthful of water.
    “Yeah. Howling—no, moaning. Gave me the strangest urge to look over my shoulder. Africa.”
    “Africa?” she queried faintly.
    Noah, his eyes closed against the sun’s brightness, looked thoughtful. “Well, it made me thinkof Africa. Those movies you see with all the weird animal noises, I guess.”
    “Oh.” Alex began to methodically swim laps. She stopped after a lap and a half for two reasons: Because it occurred to her that if Caliban heard splashes, he might decide to join them, and because Noah changed the subject.
    Or did he?
    “When do I get to meet Caliban?” he asked abruptly.
    Alex saw both her new job and her new home disappear in front of her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know,” she answered vaguely.
    “Does his name fit him?”
    “His name?”
    Noah shifted position, no longer floating but treading water to face her. “If I remember correctly,” he said, “Caliban is a character in Shakespeare’s
Tempest
. A savage, deformed slave, I think.”
    “Not my Caliban,” she said lightly. “Besides, I didn’t name him.” She tried to decipher the expression Noah wore, realizing that it was something akin to determination.
    “Alex,” Noah said very gently, “is there something you aren’t telling me about your pet? A special something, I mean?”
    Staring into the compelling blue of his eyes, Alex knew a fleeting sensation of panic. Not for Caliban, but for herself. The secret of “taming” wild animals was twofold: first, convincing the creature to accept a trainer as one of its own kind, and then, to persuade that creature—through the skillful art of bluff—that the trainer is superior, dominant.
    Gazing into Noah’s eyes, Alex recalled the peculiar image of how the big cats had so often looked at her in submission—but this time she was gazing through the cat’s eyes at Noah. And he wasn’t bluffing.
    What she had only sensed intuitively before now hit her with the force of a blow. She was attracted to Noah because of the element of danger she sensed in him, and that frightened her because she now recognized a strength greater than any she had faced before.
    In the circus there had been a very old trainerwho had taught Alex the skills she had needed, and she suddenly remembered a pet theory of his. He believed that only “alpha” or dominant personalities ever became successful trainers. Because, he said, only those innately strong people could convince a savage creature to bend its proud neck. He had said that Alex was an alpha person, a rarity among women.
    And he had predicted lightly, casually, that it would be difficult for her to find a man she could “run in harness” with. Only an equally strong alpha could match her, he’d said, and they were uncommon indeed. She would, he’d said confidently, know when she met one.
    She knew.
    There was no need for some feat of strength from Noah, no need for the beating of chest or shouting of power. What she saw in his eyes was a quiet, understated strength, but beneath that was a flaring of something sharp-edged and primitive. It was as if the strongest cat she had ever faced looked at her now with blue-gray eyes.
    And Alex felt an equally primitive flaring withinher. It was not in her to submit, and her clamoring instincts were telling her now that she was in danger of doing just that. He was stronger. Somehow, he was stronger, and she knew now that his casual companionship of the past days had been the deadly patient waiting of a wild thing.
    “Alex?”
    She blinked, looking at him, seeing how deceptively civilization