Whispers on the Wind by Judy Gill

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Lenore, a sensible woman, is not prepared for erotic dreams or to follow the dictates of an alien mind. Handsome Jonallo, torn from his Aazoni mind-linked group of inter-galactic police and badly injured, needs help and Lenore's is the strongest, most receptive mind. Mentally, Jon calls to her, bringing her to him with promises of future joy. But she is a woman of Earth. Or is she? Futuristic Romance by Judy Griffith Gill; originally published by Leisure LoveSpell

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Steady now ... Smoothly, feel the translation approach, glide from one into the other. Slide along, down, wait for the point. Keep the pattern. No fear. No wavers. Come with me, meld, hold, and push!

There! She's there! Joy, satisfaction, elation crackled through the members of the Octad. Zenna, we come! Fricka! Hold the surround and gather ... now!

And over. We are through. Stay tight. Vanter, repel the storm! It comes too fast! The static! Pain! My people! No! Falling away into the noise, the clutter, the spinning maelstrom of the tempest. Oh, hold, please, hold with me!

Reaching, searching, finding ... Nothing. None to touch, none to perceive. Gone, all gone, swirling away, scattered, lost in the vortex ... Alone. Alone. Alone. But for that. There! Again! The small warmth. The soft touch. Not Zenna. But ... safety? Kahinya, help me. Guide me in.

"I'm coming!" Reach out. Reach out. Clasp and ... hold!

Lenore tossed, disturbing the covers, and the man's hands pushed the comforter back, molding her shape as he followed the flowing curves to the flare of her hips. "Come to me, come to me," he whispered, trailing his fingers over her bare shoulders. He spread her hair across the pillow, then drew one long, curling tress down her chest, feathering the tip of the curl around her breasts, over her nipples.

She murmured a plea. As his touch stroked upwards, caressing the undersides of her breasts, her nipples hardened, ached. His breath fanning over them did nothing to ease the sweet pain. She wanted ... She needed ... He must ... Her soft moan became a demand. Herbody arched. She heard herself begging for his mouth, his lips, his tongue, for all the pleasures his touch promised.

And something deeper, some need, to be filled by him....

"Yes, yes. Come to me," he said again and she kicked back the sheet, the ancient, heavy quilt, heat scorching her body from within as the touch of his hands seared her skin from the outside. His light stroking smoothed over her abdomen, leaving a subtle trail of flames in its wake, fire that grew and grew until it threatened to incinerate her where she lay. It traveled down one leg to the tips of her toes. She burned all over and rolled face down as if obeying an unheard request. Even that did not quench the flames.

The sensual assault continued over her back, fingertips walking lightly up her spine, filtering through the thickness of her hair, kneading her scalp. Flat, hard palms spread over her back, massaging expertly, pressing her into the mattress, spanning her waist, fingers sliding under her hipbones, lifting slightly, down her legs to her knees, parting them. Hot breath fanned across the small of her back, over her buttocks as the man knelt by her, surprising, teasing with tiny, intermittent kisses, shocking little nips of teeth. His ministrations sent wave after wave of incomparable sensation coursing through her, leaving her teetering on the verge of a climax she knew would be of shattering proportions.

She ached for it, needed it. It was too much to bear, going so far without completion. Within, her barren womb contracted, begging for ... for his seed? Yes! Fill me, her soul cried. Mate with me. Give me your child.

The craving became a hunger knowing no end, and dimly she recognized it as one having long eroded her, and that only this man could feed it. A baby to hold, a child to love. The logical outcome of these intense feelings, of the union yet to come. The need left her gasping, aching, all but weeping with urgency.

With an inarticulate cry, she rolled to her back. She strained to make out his face, but he was nothing more than shadows and soft sounds, tantalizing caresses of hands whose strength she could only imagine from the exquisite restraint of his touch. She tried to reach out to him, but her arms lay heavy at her sides, her fingers pressing into the sheet.

Blunt nails raked down one leg. "Lenore ... Lenore. Come." His fingers tracked up the other leg, seeking out the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, exploring in widening circles, close, but never quite close enough, tantalizing her with promises of fulfillment that ended just short of fruition.

"Please ... please," she moaned as she lifted her knees instinctively, let her legs fall apart in response to his knowing invasion. "Jon ... touch me! I need you."

"Yes," he murmured, one finger sliding in, parting the wet, swollen folds that protected her entrance. "I need you too. But ... come to me."

Lenore shuddered as he withdrew his touch and backed from her, fading into the night, leaving only a beckoning hand for her gaze to follow and then, that, too was gone.

"No!" she cried out, snapping to a sitting position, managing now to lift her weighted arms, reaching for him.

Clammy sweat beaded her face, trickled between her breasts, chilling her as she awoke from the dream, despite the thick, warm flannel gown she wore. Her chest pumped up and down frantically, too hard, with the force of her breathing, and her heart hammered uncomfortably, audible in the silent, empty bedroom, which she occupied alone.

Empty? Of course. Finally, with difficulty, she brought herself back from the edge. "Stop it, stop it," she said to her crazed libido. "It was only a dream. It wasn't real."

She switched on the light, just to be sure she was alone. The patchwork quilt lay in an untidy heap near the foot of the white-painted iron bed where she had pushed it. A bentwood rocker held a worn teddy-bear. The dresser and highboy both wore white crocheted scarves made by some distant ancestor of her friend Caroline's. This room, where she and Caroline had slept as girls on vacation from boarding school, had, even then, been like a museum display entitled "Late-Twentieth Century Girl's Room." Now, though the bunk beds in the room they'd shared had been replaced by a double bed, it still looked so innocent and virginal that she felt momentarily ashamed of her eroticism.

She poured a glass of water from the carafe on the nightstand and gulped it down before pouring another, and sipping. Her hands shook. The glass rattled for a moment against her teeth. Quickly, she set it down though her thirst was unslaked.

She stared at her reflection in the dressing table mirror, seeing a perfectly ordinary female face on which the residue of distress and frustration mingled with bewildered hurt. She carefully composed her features, reminding herself that the dream had been no more real than any of the others that had plagued her over the past three years. It--and those during the two nights preceding this one--had simply been different manifestations of the same problem: She wanted a baby.

She shoved a hank of hair off her forehead--dark brown hair with what could only be termed--if one were being kind, "body"--certainly not "curl". It was cut in a short, practical style that needed a salon only once every six to eight weeks for a trim. With a frown, Lenore recalled how, in the dream, the man had teased her breasts with her own long, curling locks.

"Good Lord!" she groaned, leaning forward, grasping the covers and dragging them back up over her. A reminiscent shudder of need coursed through her. She lay down, legs and arms rigid. "You're depraved, Lenore Henning!"

I am not! another side of her argued. She was a mature, sensible woman; an accountant who knew that two plus two always made four--not four and a half, not three and a bit, but an indisputable four.

There were immutable truths in this world and she accepted them gladly; they kept life in balance. Truth. Reality. Constants.

Tides rose. Tides fell. Seasons came, seasons went. People were born, they grew up, they grew old, and they died. It always had been so. It always would be so. And she'd do well to stick to the truths that had so-far governed her. There was no place in her life for chimeras that came out of the night to disturb her sleep with images like something out of the Kama Sutra. Not that she'd ever so much as seen a copy of it, but she'd heard of it.

Snaking one arm out from beneath the covers, she switched off the light, hoping sleep would come again.

Hoping for the dream?

Oh, yes ... No!

Yet ... she rolled restlessly to one side. What if, she thought with an anticipatory shudder, what if this time, the dream goes all the way?

Oh, hell! If it did, she wouldn't survive it, that's what. She'd die right there in the front upstairs bedroom of the old, two-story log house she and Caroline owned. She could imagine her friend arriving eventually to discover her skeletal remains under the covers. The autopsy couldn't possibly show she'd died of an excess of lustful pleasure. But she had to laugh as she imagined her skull grinning from ear to ear.

"Fool," she muttered. "You're not just depraved, you're deprived, that's all. Go on back to Frank. That should take care of the problem."

Frank? Hah! Fat chance. Breaking with him after a four-year-long relationship had been a relief. There'd been no spark left, no real connection, if indeed there ever had been. Whatever. There'd certainly never been any Kama Sutra-like imagery. Not like there was with ... Jon.

Jon? She sighed and flopped to her back again, linking her hands behind her head. So now he was Jon. Not "John", but "Jon," as if it were short for Jonathon. And how could she know that? She couldn't, except ... she did. She knew it as well as she knew two-plus-two. Strange, though, the night before, and the one before that, her phantom hadn't had a name. It was only tonight she had called him Jon and had known the rightness of the name. Jon ... She drew a deep, tremulous breath that shuddered out on the whispered sound of his name. "Jon..."

Her need was as real as he was illusory.

She'd have taken a cold shower, but she knew it would be no more effective than it had been on either of the two previous nights. Besides, early May in the high Canadian Rockies was no time to be taking a cold shower in a barely heated house and she was wide awake anyway without that. She was too aware of her body, of every tortured nerve ending, for her not to be fully awake. Lord above! She imagined she could still smell the man's scent on the pillow beside hers, though it remained as pristine and undented as when she had gone to sleep in the double bed.

This whole damned phenomenon must, she decided, be part and parcel of the burnout syndrome, though not one the doctor had suggested she might encounter. Tears, depression, anger, bizarre behavior--such as breaking up with Frank--if Frank's opinion were to be taken into account--sleeplessness, and unexpected bursts of manic energy followed by the kind of exhaustion that had sent Lenore to her doctor in the first place. Those, the doctor had said her patient could continue to expect with greater frequency unless she took a serious break from mental stress.

She'd ordered two months rest, minimum, adding that if Lenore were a man, she'd recommend something physical and mindless such as chopping wood. She'd suggested one of the back-to-basics communes that had sprung up in the fifty years since the millennium. Lenore, though, was too much of a loner to want that. Besides, here, in this old house, she was about as back to basic as she could get. The place wasn't even powered by a household Ballard Cell, for heaven's sake!

Stacking the pillows behind her, Lenore hitched herself up and leaned back. "Is enjoying wild sex with a stranger a back-to-basic requirement?" she muttered, then wondered if talking aloud to herself came under the heading, "bizarre behavior." Likely.

And he was a stranger. Even dead asleep, she knew she was begging a man she'd never met before to continue his erotic seduction. In her dreams, though, it didn't feel like bizarre behavior. Then, it felt damn good, better than any real-life encounter she'd experienced in all of her thirty-seven years. That being the case, how could her imagination conjure up something like what she'd been experiencing?

It simply made no sense.

But neither did lolling around staring at a ceiling now tinged with pale shafts of light spreading themselves from the tops and sides of the chaste white eyelet curtains over the dormer window.

Tucked up against the western slopes of the Rockies, the log house received dawn later than the valley floor below where the Fraser River ran. Daylight entering her west-facing room meant it was long past the time she normally arose.

It was definitely time to get up.

And chop wood?

She just might do it. If physical exhaustion would eradicate the symptoms of mental exhaustion, it would be worth it.

Stepping off the rag rug and crossing the cold floor, Lenore whipped back the curtains, rolled up the shade, and leaned on the sill, gazing out over the land, idly picking at chipped paint.

The sight before her dispelled the last vestiges of the dream.

Golden light sparked the snowcaps of the Cariboo Range that formed a wall on the western side of the valley, gilded the dark tips of evergreens and spread like melted butter down the slopes toward the river. Smoke, blue-gray and lazy, arose from chimneys in the town along the riverbanks. Didn't anyone use fuel-cells up here, even now? When they were young, she and Caroline had called place and everything in it, "The Time-Warp", though both had loved their summers there with Caroline's grandparents, Grandma and Grandpa Francis. It had been a welcome relief from the relentless regimentation of boarding school.

The sense of being in a time-warp increased when a woman emerged from a house and began pinning clothing to a line where it would dry in the breeze. Now there was a back-to-basic woman if there ever had been one. A convoy of three transport trucks took turns passing each other on a long, straight stretch of highway, then a car and a pickup zipped past those, northward bound. She smiled, empathizing with the pleasure she knew the drivers would be taking in the freedom and individualism of controlling the speed and behavior of their own vehicles, here, far from the dictates of the traffic-controlling glideways of more populated zones.

The river, also northward bound, shimmered as it moved. It swept up the valley until it turned in a vast arc far beyond, where the Cariboo Range parted conveniently to let it slip through. There it turned west, and south, to continue its journey to the Pacific, fed by snow-melt from mountain range after mountain range along its way.

A week ago, when she'd arrived, patches of melting snow had lain along the sides of roads where plows had stacked it throughout the winter just past. Now, even that was gone, though behind the cabin, a thick bank of it remained in deep tree-shade, clear, cold water trickling slowly from it as it melted to form a tiny rivulet.

That rill ran to the year-round stream from which the house drew its water supply. In turn, the stream emptied into an even brisker creek that bubbled and danced, jumping in exuberant spurts in its rock-strewn bed, beside the narrow, twisting track leading down from the constricted bench where the cabin stood. Eventually, it spilled into the Fraser and in time, joined the spreading fan of mud and silt reaching far out into the Strait of Georgia, five hundred klicks away near the northern end of the Cascadia Corridor. There, it evaporated, rose in the form of clouds which condensed and fell as rain, as snow, to melt and trickle into the rivulet, which ran to the stream which became the creek which added to the river and evaporated, again and again and again.

Always, that thought had pleased her when she and Caroline had set little bark boats afloat in the creek and watched them bob away--to the ocean, the girls had been sure. There was a pleasing, satisfactory continuity in it she had recognized even as a child, a child with few roots and those tenuously planted.

That sense of continuity was what she'd come here for, not unsettling dreams that could never be fulfilled. What she needed was that beautiful, peaceful sense of eternal cycles spinning slowly, slowly, like the very earth on which she lived.

This was a good place to be and she was grateful that Caroline let her come here whenever she chose.

She swung the window wide and sucked in a breath of the thin, crisp mountain air. Maybe that was half her problem right there--the thin air. Oxygen starvation did weird things to people. She'd adapt in a few more days. All she had to do was concentrate on the normalcy of life as it really was, not let herself dwell on ridiculous dreams and fantasies.

A tractor on the valley floor worked a field with a plow. Gulls and crows followed it in a wheeling cloud as if a celestial hand sprinkled salt and pepper over the land. In scattered clumps among the fields, along the roadsides, and around the ranch houses, deciduous trees stood almost quivering with eagerness, flaunting the new yellow-green of quickening life.

Possibly, that was the other half of her problem. Spring, to say nothing of a biological clock that had come too damned close to trapping her into a relationship that had utterly no meaning to her. It continued to tick away, and each spring its alarm rang more and more sharply in her soul. Though never like this.

Lenore sighed and shoved herself back from the window. It was time to put erotic dreams behind her with the night and get on with the practical pursuits of the day. What was needed here was a serious dose of the pragmatism that had served her all of her life. Dreams were for the weak of mind. Fantasies, for fools. And she was neither.

First thing after breakfast, she'd scrub the kitchen floor then she'd immerse herself in some good, escapist fiction.

Later on, she'd spend an hour--at least an hour--working on the afghan she'd started crocheting years ago. She'd bake bread. She thought she remembered how, and if she didn't, downstairs was a collection of museum quality cook-books. She might even turn on her compad, which she hadn't done once since her arrival. If the doctor had had her way, Lenore wouldn't even have brought it. Leaving it behind, though, would have meant cutting herself off much too thoroughly.

With plenty to occupy her, she would not spend even one minute thinking of a bronze-skinned stranger named Jon, with golden hair and grass-green eyes and broad, muscular shoulders.

What?

Bronze skin? Golden hair? Green eyes? Dammit, it had been dark in the night! He had been nothing more than a shadowy shape, a soft whisper, sure hands, and hot breath. He'd had no form, no color, no substance beyond those hands.

From the top dresser drawer, she selected a good firm bra for her full breasts, cotton panties that came right up to her waist, and thick socks. Not the garments of a fanciful woman. Not the garments of erotica. They were her clothes, the kind she always wore, good quality, practical, they lasted. They provided value for money.

And that, she decided, stomping down the stairs to make herself a good, practical, warm breakfast of cooked cereal, was what was important in life. Getting good value. Nobody ever got that from a dream

Burning ... Pain. Swirling dark, welcoming, warming....

No! Must hold, focus, concentrate. Bones to knit, blood to stanch, wounds to heal too large too deep too big for one alone ... Help me. Help me. Where are you? I ask so little. A small, warm point of light. Return, return!

No one. Nothing. Sleep and heal and let the swirling dark glide in ... I must not die! Kahinya, seek help. Seek ... Zenna!

Jonallo! Zenna clutched mentally at the Kahinya encircling her neck as, for an instant, one brief, heart-wrenching moment during a risky translation, her brother Jonallo's presence swept through her senses, stunning her. So strong was it, she nearly lost her focus, came perilously close to sliding out of the already unsteady link she had maintained, aided by her amplifier, with the criminal B'tar.

Then, agonizingly, the fleeting connection with Jon was no more. Had it, even for that split second, truly, been?

On the ground again outside the house she shared unwillingly with her captors Rankin and B'tar, she resumed her corporeal form. In that first instant of full, Earthly awareness, she saw her three-year-old daughter, Glesta running toward her, tawny hair streaming behind her, stubby legs pumping, a glad smile on her face. Zenna caught an equally glad sob in her throat as the only reason she obeyed Rankin and B'tar's dictates flew into her arms.