ANNA HAD PUT herself into a light trance the way she always did before her performance.
She let the familiar detached feeling flow over her, welcomed the little buzz in her head.
And then from one instant to the next, everything changed. The shabby dressing room disappeared, and she was standing on a high, windswept plain, gasping in shock.
She reached out to touch something familiar, to touch anything. But the world had gone away, and she was in another reality.
She struggled to draw back as she fought to return to the safety of her dressing room. But it had vanished, and she knew that the only way she could go was forward. So she took a cautious step, then another, feeling the strange springy surface beneath her feet. Her bare feet, she realized suddenly.
In the world, she had been dressed in black. Here in this new reality, she was wearing only a gauzy green dress. Green like a field in springtime.
ZACH stared at the woman walking toward him. A light wind blew, lifting her hair and swirling the insubstantial skirt around her shapely legs.
He could see the curves of her body through the thin fabric. Her high breasts, her sweetly rounded hips. The shadows of her nipples and a triangle of dark hair at the juncture of her legs.
This is it. The real thing. What you’ve been waiting for all your life.
Even as the thought flitted through his mind, he wondered what it meant.
The woman had stopped walking, her features tense as he closed the space between them, reaching his hand toward her.
When her lips moved, he heard no sound. But he knew she had said, Who are you?
Zach, he silently answered.
He wanted her to know him. Want him. Trust him. Complete him.
He grasped her shoulder and folded her close, drawing in a sharp breath as he felt her breasts flatten against his chest—his naked chest, because somehow he was wearing only a pair of faded jeans, unsnapped at the waist.
A jolt of arousal shot through him, and he tightened his hold on her as a whirlwind of sensations swamped him. The brush of her raven hair against his cheek. Her slender body pressed to his. The buzz of sound in his brain as she spoke voiceless words he couldn’t quite catch.
He wanted her to raise her head.
As if she’d heard his thoughts, she lifted her face to his.
He felt a shock of awareness go through him. Strange. This was strange. And at the same time so right that it made his insides ache.
Though he longed to kiss her, he held himself still, because some part of him knew that if he did anything that intimate, nothing in his life would ever be the same. Yet the thought of her pulling away made his insides go cold.
He held his breath, willing her to make the decision. She stayed where she was, her lips slightly parted, as though she were having the same thoughts as he. And she didn’t want to be the one to make the first move.
Finally, because that was his only choice, he lowered his head to hers. The first contact of their mouths was like an explosion in his brain, in his body.
He had never tasted anything so rich, so totally tempting as this woman’s mouth.
She made a small needy sound that sizzled through him. Accepting her invitation, he tipped his head first one way and then the other, changing the angle, changing the pressure, changing the very terms of his existence.
Desperate to satisfy his craving for intimate contact with her, he slid one hand down her body, pulling her hips against his erection.
She moaned, moving against him in a way that told him she was as aroused as he.
Thank God.
His other hand moved between them, cupping one of her breasts, then stroking his fingers across the hardened crest.
He needed to be on top of her, needed to plunge inside her.
And she kissed him with the same desperation.
He was about to drag her down to the horizontal surface under their feet when another voice cut through the vivid daydream, or whatever it was.
“Go on. Git! You got no place here.”
A man was speaking to him, and he fought an instant feeling of disorientation as he was pulled back into the heat of a tropical night.
ANNA blinked. From far away, she heard the calypso band playing a little fanfare.
Reaching out, she grabbed the edge of the table in front of her, pressing her fingers against the hard surface, anchoring herself to the world.
She had been sitting there, getting ready to go out and do her show. Then she had been…in another place. Somewhere else. Somewhere she didn’t want to be. With a man who wanted her. A man whose voice spoke inside her head.
Alarm zinged along her nerve endings.
What had happened to her?
She had no reference point to describe the strange experience. And she couldn’t afford the luxury of dealing with it now.
Yeah, right.
She didn’t want to deal with it.
And she had a perfect excuse for thrusting it away with an almost physical effort; she had a job to do. And she was too well disciplined to let this strange experience interfere.
To give herself more distance from the past few minutes, she stood, almost knocking over her chair. She righted it, gripping the back until she felt steady enough to walk.
She had learned to push her own feelings to the background and focus on other people with a single-minded concentration. She did something like that now, imagining the whole audience out in the show room, waiting for her. They would be disappointed if she didn’t go out there and give them the performance that they’d paid to see.
But she was still fighting for every scrap of self-control she could muster as she held on to the chair and breathed the stale air inside the club, grounding herself in the world around her.
“Think about what you have to do now,” she ordered herself.
When she felt steady enough to let go of the wooden rungs, she turned and opened the door, then hurried down the hall toward the stage. Toward reality. And sanity.
ZACH struggled to pull himself back to reality. Someone was speaking to him. A man.
The man from the dream? The guy who had made it clear with a few angry words that they were bitter enemies?
He got ready to defend himself, then realized the nemesis from the dream had vanished. Or maybe he’d never been there.
No. The man speaking now was someone…out here on the street.
Zach was back in front of the Sugar Cane Club, staring at the poster of Anna.
“Come in, mon. Twenty dollar cover charge. You have a good time here,” an islander wearing a brilliant white T-shirt said. He was standing beside the door, gesturing toward the interior.
“What?” Zach croaked.
“Come in, mon. We put on a great show here. Magic Anna. She amazing.”
Magic Anna.
Zach swallowed, pressing the soles of his shoes into the sidewalk and trying to figure out what had just happened to him.
In the daydream, or whatever it was, he had been aroused—ready for sex with the woman in his arms. The woman on the poster. Apparently the effects were only in his mind, thank God.
And he could still walk away from whatever had happened in that out-of-body experience. Maybe he should walk away. Or more likely, run as fast as he could in the other direction.
Instead, he heard himself say, “Sure,” as he dug into his pocket for his wallet. Twenty dollars. Cheap by standards in the States.
When he’d paid for the show, the man swept aside a curtain made of two-inch bamboo pieces strung between round fishing corks.
Still struggling to regain his sense of balance, Zach stepped into a small reception area lined with bamboo posts. He was fighting to stay detached. Yet he felt a breathless anticipation coursing through his veins as he walked into a show room that held perhaps thirty small varnished tables facing a brightly lit stage where a four-piece island-style band commanded one corner.
About three-fourths of the spaces were occupied, and Zach slipped into a bentwood chair at the back of the room, where he ordered a bottle of local beer from a waitress wearing a sarong that looked more appropriate for the South Pacific.
A large man in a flowered shirt and white linen slacks was on the stage, talking.
“I’m Etienne Bertrand and I welcome you to my Sugar Cane Club. We got a treat for you tonight. Magic Anna, all de way from Denver,” he said in a softly accented voice. “A real talented lady. I could talk her up big time. But you see for yourselves soon.”
Several long seconds passed. Zach felt his pulse pound in anticipation.
It speeded up when Anna stepped lightly from the wings. His fantasy had primed him to see her in the green dress. Instead, she wore a simple black sheath like the one on the poster. It set off her slender body and long legs.
He wasn’t the only one who was reacting. And not just the men. He felt electricity crackle in the room—a mixture of tension and expectation. The poster outside had promised something special, and the audience was waiting to see if she could deliver.
“Thank you,” she said in a low, musical voice, yet there was a look of uncertainty on her face that she quickly wiped away.
She must have walked onstage hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. She shouldn’t be nervous about facing the audience. So what was wrong with her? Had she really been in that fantasy with him? Had some force pulled them into that other world together? Or had she been the one who had done it?
Both alternatives seemed impossible.
The woman had been intriguing-looking on the poster. More intriguing in his fantasy. In person she took his breath away—literally. As he struggled to fill his lungs, he felt as though his chest were tightened by iron bands, preventing him from drawing a full breath.
She stood calmly onstage, smiling into the lights. He suspected she couldn’t really see anything beyond shadowy shapes. Yet she turned toward her right, focusing on him. And for a moment it felt like they were the only two people in the room. Just as they’d been the only two people on that windswept plain. Until the other guy had broken the spell.
Zach hadn’t seen him. But he had heard the anger in his voice.
He tried to put the daydream out of his mind. But the feeling of connection with Anna tugged at him. In a moment of madness, he almost climbed out of his chair and started for the stage. Then he forced himself to simply sit there and watch her.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, making it feel like she was speaking only to him. “I hope you had a wonderful time on Grand Fernandino today.”
He closed his eyes, struggling for distance, thinking that his life had started going off the rails yesterday, when José had thought he’d come face-to-face with Pagor down in the Blue Heron.