Lord of Lightning Page 15

  The literal problem of her panties was easily solved.

  As he eased the cotton crotch aside and stroked her with his fingers, she gasped and arched against him. He’d forgotten how tender and delicate a woman could be, how the petals turned to velvet under a man’s touch. He aroused her the way a gentle breeze stirs an opening flower, with zephyrlike touches, whispering among her shell-pink folds and creases, swirling lightly over the hidden bud of sensation.

  She tangled her hands in his hair and swore softly, anything but gentle. “Make love to me, Stephen,” she said near his ear. “I’m ready, for heaven’s sake. I most certainly am.”

  Her desperation amused him almost as much as it aroused him. A schoolteacher to the last, he thought. Forever in charge. But she was ready. Her breasts felt flushed and taut against his arms, and the softness between her legs was dewy with moisture. Even the petals he caressed were exquisitely responsive, unfurling to receive him.

  Lord knew he was ready. The aching hardness between his legs was a stick of dynamite with a lighted fuse, but he couldn’t give into the tension just yet. He had to put off the pleasure a little longer. For both of them, but especially for her. “Ready isn’t enough, Lise. You have to be on fire. You have to burn for it.”

  This was her first time, and he wanted her out of her mind with desire—so fever-hot and delirious, she wouldn’t feel even the slightest physical twinge.

  A low spasm gripped him as he thought about the explosive pleasure of taking her. “Burn for it, Lise.”

  He cupped her ample breast, aware of its weight and heat as he took the satin bud into his mouth. He drew on her tenderly, creating a cadence that pulled at something deep within him. It was the same primitive rhythm that beat in his body, and within seconds, he could feel the pain of desire mounting.

  “I’m burning,” she cried softly.

  Every muscle in Stephen’s body raged for release as he brought her legs up high around him and caught hold of her hips. “Grab hold of me, Lise,” he said. “Hang on tight. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Lise grasped his shoulders as an unyielding force came up against the most vulnerable part of her body. So this was the mystery of sex, she thought. Her breath caught expectantly as he probed the throbbing softness between her legs. That same soft throb existed in every cell of her being. She could feel it building as he entered her, building with every sweet inch of space he took up within her. It riveted her senses, that beautiful throb. It enveloped her.

  A kind of delirium overtook her as she began to breathe to the slow wonder of his magnificent invasion. He was good, she thought dazedly. This was good.

  “Oh!!” The cry of pain was hers. She felt a quick, piercing sensation. For a second she could feel nothing else, and then the pressure eased, and she was filled with a stinging freedom that was oddly joyous.

  “What are you doing to me?” she breathed. His mouth was hot on her breast and with each tug of his lips, she could feel a new urgency mounting. Within seconds she was moving against the hardness that had pierced her, urging it deeper. The throb was in her, sweet and relentless.

  “I’m trying to do this,” he said, holding her still as he eased into her slowly, gently, and very deeply. “There, now, how’s that?”

  “Ohh, Lord ...” was all she could manage.

  Pleasure rocked Lise’s senses as he began to move. She felt it as a deep stirring within her body, a slow welling of sensation that made her realize she had never truly known the meaning of the word pleasure until now. It was more than pleasure, it was rapture. She didn’t want the sweet pressure to stop. Ever. And then finally, when she was driven nearly crazy with the pure bliss of it, he gathered her to him and pressed into her body with thrilling force.

  She cried out a sigh, clutching at him.

  Stephen shuddered at the sound and abandoned all traces of gentleness, laying claim, taking her. His gut muscles fisted as she gave herself over totally to his vibrant strokes, wrapping her legs around him and pleading with him not to stop. He couldn’t stop, not until he’d ravished her to within an inch of both their lives, not until they were spent and sighing ... not until he’d taken her through the arc of blue light he could see in his mind.

  He caught his breath, amazed as the light seemed to fan through his body, iridescent and pure. He imagined it streaming through both of them, expanding to envelop them. But what amazed him most was that he couldn’t feel the pain of his injuries any longer. He couldn’t feel anything but the racking shudders of their lovemaking.

  “Hold me, Lise—”

  He anchored her with his arms as he rolled to his back and pulled her astride him. Joy rocketed through him as she straddled him gracefully, taking him as deeply into her as it was possible for a man to penetrate a woman.

  All reason fled him, all rational thought. She began to move above him, and everything that followed was a blinding glimpse of ecstasy. Her body was sheened with blue light. Her glowing loins brought him a pleasure so intense, it was metaphysical.

  Somehow he knew when she was peaking. He’d lost track of everything else, of time and space, but her soft cry of pleasure galvanized him. One moment she was rocking above him, a crazy, beautiful goddess of the light, and the next she was folding in his arms, sobbing with joy.

  He rolled her onto her back and drove into her one last time. The release that ripped through him was soundless and sublime, a comet soaring into eternity. There was no riot of bells or chimes. There were no exploding lights. Just the ecstasy he’d glimpsed. Blind ecstasy.

  Her eyes were closed as he tilted her chin up moments later. He thought for a moment that she was sleeping, and then she let out a sigh and a smile. When she finally did open her eyes, they were dilated with pleasure. She looked as though she’d overdosed on mind-altering endorphins or drunk a bottle of straight happiness.

  “Stephen, there are so many questions I want to ask you,” she said.

  He smoothed blond hair away from her face. “And I have a lot to tell you.”

  He’d no sooner got the words out than her eyes fluttered shut again, and she drifted off in his arms. He considered waking her—she was still half-dressed—but he couldn’t bring himself to disturb her bliss. Let her sleep, he thought. There would be time enough later to deal with the rest of it.

  He smoothed down her skirt and looped his arms around her, pulling her closer and wishing he could hold her that way forever. She felt like a part of him, as necessary to life as drawing breath. She was sunshine to a man who came from a world where the sun didn’t exist. She was the only thing in this world he wanted.

  A fiery pain pierced his heart as he glanced at her beautiful, peaceful expression. How the hell was he going to tell her, he wondered. And once he had, how was he going to live without her?

  Lise had no idea what time of night it was when she awoke, but as she stretched and sighed softly, she became aware of two disturbing things ... Stephen wasn’t in bed with her, and the blue glow that filled the room had turned into a flaring beacon. It was so bright, she had to shield her eyes.

  As her eyes adjusted she saw that it wasn’t the rocks creating the strange aura. It was a beam of light that seeped from the storeroom. She straightened her clothing and found her blouse on the floor, hurrying to dress as a sense of uneasiness pervaded her.

  The old door creaked in protest as she eased it open.

  The room was dark except for the intense glow of digital readout displays and one pulsing shaft of brilliant light that shot straight up through an opening in the roof and into the night sky. Lise stared at it with rising alarm. It looked like some kind of space-age doomsday weapon, and for a moment she thought she was caught up in a waking nightmare.

  She searched the room, agitation building. The incessant drone of feedback signals set her nerves on edge.

  “Stephen! Where are you?”

  An alarm signal shrilled and Lise’s heart jolted violently.

  From the far corner of the room
, a figure rose out of the darkness. He stepped forward, blocking the brilliant light.

  Lise began to back toward the door, suddenly terrified. “Stephen?”

  Twelve

  “LISE? YOU SHOULDN’T be in here.”

  Lise was so relieved to hear Stephen’s voice, she barely registered the urgency in his tone. “What’s going on?” she said. “What are you doing?”

  He moved toward her, a streaming shadow, and Lise felt a flash of genuine fear. “What’s wrong?”

  “The work I’m doing—” he said, pulling her with him out the door. “It’s sensitive.”

  They ended up in the cabin’s darkened living room. Stephen walked to the table by the window and switched on a student lamp. As the room warmed and shimmered with amber light, Lise felt the tightness in her chest ease slightly.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You told me you were here because of the quarry lights.”

  “I am—but that’s only part of it.”

  The window glass caught his reflection as he glanced out. It cast his features in an odd, opaque sheen, like light shining off water. Lise’s breathing slowed. He didn’t look like anything human at that moment.

  “Stephen—” The question on her lips was so incredible, she didn’t know how to ask it. “Are you a man? A normal man?”

  “A man ... ?” His surprise ended in a heavy expiration. “Sometimes I wonder. And as for normal? Who’s to say?”

  “But those marks on your body ... the lightning. What do they mean?”

  He turned to her in surprise, then glanced at the jeans he wore. “That’s right. You took off my clothes, didn’t you? That was only fair, I suppose. I seem to be removing yours often enough.”

  He settled himself on the table edge and waited until Lise took the room’s only other chair, a creaky wooden rocker.

  “So, you want to know about the thunderbolts,” he said. “It’s a bizarre story, Lise—in some ways, untenable. I’m not sure I even want to tell it. Or that you would believe it if I did.”

  Something had crept into the room’s atmosphere. Lise could feel it prickle her skin, the uneasiness that came with not knowing what to expect. “Maybe I won’t believe it,” she said. “But at least give me a chance to decide that for myself. Please.”

  He nodded at last. “All right, but first understand that I am a scientist. I don’t believe in black magic or sorcery, but there are things in my past—incidents that I can’t fully explain. Perhaps because of the nature of my work—or the location.”

  “Location?”

  “Scandinavia—” He hesitated a moment, reflective. “The land of ice and fire. It was a few years after my wife died in childbirth. My field was extraterrestrial physics, and I’d been working under a NASA grant when an assignment came up to study the northern lights. My personal life was in shambles. I think if they’d offered me a job on the moon, I would have taken it, just to get away.”

  Lise was thunderstruck by the reference to Scandinavia. More than once she’d likened him to the gods of Nordic legend. But only in her thoughts, so he couldn’t have known.

  “I was based on the northern tip of Norway, and I’d only been there a few weeks when I had the bad judgment to tangle with a glacier. It was the dead of winter, and I got caught in a blizzard.” His jaw tensed with self-deprecating laughter. “I fell into the crevasse of a glacier and landed head first on an ice sheet. I should have been dead—and when I came to. I thought I was.”

  “Why?” Lise prompted.

  “I was in an ice cavern,” he said. “Massive icicles hung everywhere, like crystal chandeliers. Outside of the aurora itself, it was the most incredible sight I’d ever seen. I don’t remember anything else clearly except that there was an old Lapp with chamois for skin and snow-blown white hair chanting over me.”

  “A Laplander?” Lise recalled those stories from her childhood as well. Wonderful tales of fact and fancy about the small, sturdy people who occupied the north-lands of Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

  “That was my guess, but he never introduced himself. He might have been a nomadic Lapp, or even a shaman. I was semiconscious most of the time, but I remember him holding the stones over me and chanting.”

  “The runes?”

  “Yes. It seemed as if every time I opened my eyes he was dousing me in the blue phosphorescence the stones gave off. He kept chanting Jumala and Ilmarinen, and a third word that I recognized as lightning. I learned later that the first two words meant Lord of Sky, and that the old man was actually chanting Lord of Lightning. It was the name he’d given me.”

  “My goodness. What did you do to deserve such an exalted title?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said, laughing. “The study required me to be in Norway during the arctic winter— six months of perpetual darkness. Among other things, I shot pulse lasers into the aurora to study the effect. Maybe the old man saw the lasers and thought I was making lightning.”

  “Lord of Lightning,” Lise said. “It’s really rather beautiful. And he marked you with the lightning bolts?”

  “I suppose it must have been him, although I don’t remember it happening. I finally lapsed into total unconsciousness, and when I woke up, I was in a hospital in Narvik. I’d been found by another research team near the crevasse where I fell. I had a brain concussion, and when I tried to tell them what had happened, they didn’t believe me. They thought I was hallucinating.”

  His quick shrug said that perhaps he agreed with them. “They also told me I should have been dead— and would have been if someone hadn’t dragged me out of that glacier—and then found a way to relieve the cerebrospinal fluid building in my skull.”

  “The old man?” Lise couldn’t hide her disbelief. “How did he do it?”

  “There were no signs of surgery, primitive or otherwise. The stones are naturally magnetic—a legacy of the earth’s volcanic origins. Their phosphorescence comes primarily from minerals that interact with the ultraviolet spectrum. In all honesty, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe that combination has some stabilizing effect on the body’s fluids.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Theoretically? No, probably not. But something happened. I found the stones in my parka pocket when I checked out of the hospital. The old man must have put them there.” He rubbed his hand along his beard-shadowed jawline, an absent gesture. “I’ve stopped trying to make sense of it. I could almost convince myself it hadn’t happened, except for the stones, the marks on my body—and the blinding headaches I still get.”

  His last reference triggered an insight. The headaches could account for those times when his eyes had lost focus and he’d seemed to be in a trancelike state, Lise realized. She needed a moment to digest all the information he’d given her.

  “What sort of scientist studies the northern lights?” she asked finally.

  “An auroral physicist, if you’re curious about the exact title. The job takes me to some of the most inhospital spots on earth. My last tour of duty was Antarctica—the South Pole—three years of trial by ice.”

  He looked beyond her as though he was remembering. Lise could see the storm rising in his eyes, and it had all the bleakness of an arctic winter. She phrased a quick question in the hope of diverting his attention. “So that is why you’re here? To study the quarry lights? You said they were like auroras.”

  He glanced out the window behind him, apparently checking the skies. “Your quarry lights are something of a mystery, Lise. Their electromagnetic properties are similar to auroras, and yet it’s unusual to see the phenomena at altitudes this low. There are other possibilities, including the release of radon, combustible gases from the earth, or natural phosphorescence—”

  He turned back and hesitated, as though deciding whether to go on. “The lights are only part of the reason I’m here. They’re the symptom, not the cause. We’re in the middle of an intense geomagnetic storm—”

  “We?”

  “The earth, Lise—the
entire globe. This last week we were hit by a solar wind with a velocity up to two thousand kilometers per second. I’m talking about sun-spots and solar flares—everything ol’ Sol can throw at us. In other words, the sun is throwing a tantrum, and it’s a beaut.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Not to human life at this point. But it’s dangerous as hell to our worldwide electrical, navigation, and communications systems. That’s the primary reason I’m here—to test a new laser communications device I designed. The Omega is built to withstand magnetic storms.”

  A laser, Lise thought. Not Star Trek or Star Wars. Not even Starman. He was testing a communications device, shooting lasers at ... what? She pointed toward the roof of the cabin. “What’s up there?” she asked.

  “You’ve heard of the Space Shuttle? The Discovery crew is picking up my signals as we speak. Or at least I hope they are. This is the last night of their mission—and my last chance to test the Omega.” He exhaled heavily. “So far the experiment has only been partially successful.”

  “But why would they send you here to test a laser? Lise asked.

  “Because of your quarry lights,” Stephen explained. “They’re emitting electromagnetic radiation in the range I needed for the tests.

  A silence fell around them, bringing Lise alert. She experienced the fleeting surface chill that came with a premonition, and by the time she met his eyes, a trembling had started inside her.

  “What is it, Stephen?” she asked.

  He rose to his feet. “You understand that I have to leave.”

  Lise couldn’t respond. The statement was too fraught with finality, with unthinkable implications.

  “The Omega laser is my life’s work,” he explained. “If I can make it operational, the implications for ground- and space-based communication are”—he managed a grim smile—“at the risk of sounding dramatic, cosmic.”

  Her throat flared with pain. That certainly put it into perspective, didn’t it? Cosmic wasn’t a word a woman could argue with. She heaved a sigh. “When do you go?”