Free Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] by The Mists of Time Page A

into the fog like the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland,
until only his eyes were left, glowing green and swirling with gray, and she felt like she was dissolving, too. Her knees gave way.
    “Remember . . . talk to me. Trust me.”
    She was kneeling in front of the window, crying and gasping. The wood floor hurt her bare knees. And the window was open. The chill wind off the bay rippled the draperies now thrown back, though she had closed them before she went to bed. Had she been sleepwalking? Oh, this was
bad
. She hadn’t done that for years. She couldn’t quite remember her dream. Even as she tried, it slipped away. It had been about her stalker, though. And she had found him both frightening and infinitely attractive. And familiar. The fact that she had gotten out of bed and opened the window while she was dreaming about her stalker seemed ominous. Did he have some kind of hold on her through her dreams?
    She pushed herself up and shook herself mentally.
You’re losing your mind.
She snorted.
Like someone could enter a person’s dreams.
She closed the window, peering out to see if anyone lurked in the street. The fog had lifted sometime in the night. The pools of light from the street lamp showed only wet pavement. The grinding of an early garbage truck echoed in the quiet.
    Actually, she felt a little ashamed. She was attracted to a stalker, for pity’s sake. What did that say about her? Was she so desperate for a man to pay attention to her that she would enjoy some guy stalking her? She’d gotten used to the fact that she was invisible to men a long time ago. And in fact, she
wanted
to be invisible in a way, to everyone, because she was invisible to herself on a very basic, elemental level. She was the ultimate imposter, walking around in society pretending to be somebody she probably wasn’t. She had no origin, no childhood. She had been abandoned by her real parents, obviously. She didn’t make friends, because she never really shared herself with them. What was hers to share? Not her secret quirks like hearing what people would say. That would only make people think she was crazy. So she was a courteous acquaintance of Mrs. Kim at the doughnut shop or whatever clerk was currently employed at the liquor store or the docents she supervised. But that was it. No deeper, no closer.
    If only she were invisible to her stalker. He was sick, sick,
sick
for following her. And she might be sick for being attracted to that. Was it because he was the only man who ever noticed her? She’d heard about women who made up men following them just for the attention.
    She glanced to the clock. Five A.M. There was no way she’d get back to sleep. She turned on the light and blinked against the glare. Her bedroom was done in blues and greens, and in March she could still use the big quilt from her grandmother (well, not
really
her grandmother).It matched the Chinese wool rug from her father’s old house, now laid in front of the bed.
    What to do? She couldn’t leave the apartment to go to the doughnut shop for a coffee, not with her stalker somewhere out there. If she did, she’d wake Medraut, and she didn’t want to deal with him, either. Her laptop was out in the living room. But there was no way she could muster the focus to write, anyway. Her mandolin made too much noise. That would be inconsiderate. She grabbed a manuscript from a stack by the desk. Publishers sent them when they asked her to give a quote for the cover. She crawled back under the quilt.
    In the first ten pages she knew it wasn’t going to work as a distraction. The book was clearly overplotted. Too many coincidences and connections between the characters, and they didn’t seem organic and natural at all. She could predict every turn it would take on the way to the happy ending. Was she getting bored with romance? Or was it just that she was a writer and she couldn’t just
feel
the romance anymore but had to analyze how the story was written?
    She