Kiss Across Time (Kiss Across Time Series) Read Free

  She could spot jeans and a black tee-shirt, and some facial hair, but not much else.
    The opening of the door also wafted thick, aromatic air over Taylor.   The musky smell was unmistakable.   She grimaced at the strength of it.   “Listen, I don’t care about your little pot party, okay?   You can stone yourself to death for all I care.   I just want to know who wrote that song you were just playing.   Please.   It’s really, really important.”
    He opened the door another inch or two.    “You’re that professor lady.   Next door, right?”
    “Right.”   She wasn’t going to go into the specifics about university degrees and titles here and now.   Instead she gave him her friendliest smile.   “That song you were just playing…the words to that song are very old.   Incredibly old.   Ancient, actually.   Whoever wrote the song used the words, you see—”
    “They stole them?”   The man’s single eye widened.   The door opened up a little further and she could finally see his full face.   He wasn’t quite as young as she thought.   He was closer to her own age of thirty, with full sideburns and shaggy hair.   He was skinny to the point of organ failure and at the moment, his bloodshot eyes looked sleepy from the marijuana.   “They ripped off the words?” he asked again.
    “No, they borrowed them.   You can do that with some very old stuff,” she told him.
    “Oh.”   His interest flagged.   “Then why do you want to know who did it so bad?”
    “Whoever wrote that song had to have access to the words.   That means they know about Inigo Domhnall.   Well, they had one of his manuscripts, anyway.   Or they knew about them.   Or knew about one of his stories.   They heard the words somewhere,” she finished.   “I need to find out where.”
    He tilted his head at her and screwed up his face.   “Why?”
    She cast about for a simple explanation that he could process in his elevated state. Then she gave up.   “Because I just got fired from my job at the university because no one there believes me that the guy who wrote those words, way back in the fifth century, actually existed.   That song you were playing is the first proof I’ve found, ever , that he did.”
    It took the man a few seconds to process her words.   Then his sleepy eyes opened a bit wider.   “Oh, wow, hey, you’d better come in,” he said and pushed the door aside for her.
    Taylor took a deep breath of the last of the fresh air in the corridor and stepped inside.
    The apartment was the mirror of hers in layout, with a small living room and kitchenette separated by a breakfast bar, with an archway that led further into the apartment to the two bedrooms and the bathroom.   She used the tiny second bedroom in hers as an office.
    That was where the resemblance to their two apartments ended.  
    There were three other people sprawled in the living room in various poses and attitudes of the completely stoned.   They stirred themselves when she walked in, but fell back when they saw she was not a cop or anyone in authority.
    There was a glass bong on the chipped coffee table, and a bowl full of weed next to it.   Cans of pop and beer and two butt-filled ashtrays littered the rest of the ash-covered table.
    “My roommates,” the man told her.
    “Hello,” Taylor offered to all three in general.
    An overweight man with green eyes lay in an honest-to-god denim beanbag, his arm around a slender woman with a tattoo of a dragon on the back of her shoulder.   The man belched.   Taylor assumed that was his version of hello.
    A Hispanic man lay on the ratty sofa, his head on the arm.   He was bare chested, and his jeans button was popped, the boxers riding well above the band.
    The guy who had opened the door jerked his thumb toward Taylor.   “She just lost her job.   She thinks the words on the Nocturnal Rain CD will get her job back.”
    Taylor opened her mouth to protest over that huge