Daring Time Read Online Free PDF

thundered alarmingly loud in her ears.
    She'd heard of drugs causing phantasms but had never before known that sexually sinful behavior could promote hallucinations. Because if her wickedest desires had been given free reign to conjure up a man, surely it would have been the man she'd just seen in the mirror.
    She peeked over the covers cautiously and stared at the wardrobe.
    Why had he been dressed so strangely? His trousers reminded her a little of the thick hickory cloth the men who worked for the railroad wore, but the man's in the mirror had been uniformly dyed indigo blue. She would have assumed those pants marked him as some sort of laborer if it weren't for the short coat he wore made completely of sleek, supple leather.
    He'd been so large—not fat, if anything his hips had been trim and narrow—just big.
    Taller than any man she'd ever seen, with wide shoulders and long thighs the size of a sturdy, young tree trunk. She blushed as she recalled how well those blue hickory cloth pants fit those strong thighs. He'd worn an unusual sort of beard that reminded her of the kind she'd glimpsed on Chinese men. It'd been as dark as his hair, short and well trimmed.
    Who—or what —in God's name had he been?
    If everything about him seemed strange and exotic, his eyes had Struck her as wholly familiar. They'd been a singular greenish-blue hue that brought to mind the color of the Mediterranean Sea on a crystalline day. He'd clearly been shocked to see her, just as she was him, but when he'd glanced down over her ever so briefly something else had flashed into those compelling eyes; something even more exciting than the illicit thrill of seeing herself in a Marlborough gown.
    After several minutes Hope's heart finally began to slow. She sat up in bed and sighed shakily. Had her bizarre, hysterical episode entirely passed? She felt jittery, her nerves still jangled by the incident. Knowing she wouldn't be able to sleep for hours, if at all tonight, she reached for her book of sonnets on the beside table and flipped it open.
    For a long moment, she stared in rising confusion.
    Someone had written in a bold hand in the margin of her favorite sonnet Ryan Vincent Daire, 1807 S. Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 2008.
    The book trembled in her hand. The page had been clean just before she'd stood and put on the Marlborough gown. She'd have bet her life on it.
    She flipped through the pages anxiously but found no other anomalous messages. After staring at the name, her own street address on Prairie Avenue and the number—surely that wasn't
    supposed to signify a year, was it?—for several more minutes, Hope realized that the mysterious writing had been placed directly next to a line from the sonnet. 7
    Love is not time's fool.

THREE
    Ryan studied a translated statement from a twenty-year-old illegal immigrant who was being extradited. The kid claimed his sister and cousin had disappeared at approximately the same time two men had come to their village in Mexico recruiting men for work in the United States. One of the men fit Anton Chirnovsky's description, the other matched that of a former Colombian drug importer named Manuel Gutierrez. Gutierrez had apparently joined the recruiting division of Donahue's white slavery operation. A file suddenly plopped down on his desk. "You going to explain to me what that's all about or not?" Gail Edgerton asked archly when he looked up. Gail worked in the Computer Crime Research Lab. She'd kindly agreed to do a little digging for Ryan earlier this morning even though her blonde eyebrows had shot up on her forehead in disbelief when she'd seen his written request.
    "Thanks, Gail. I owe you one," Ryan muttered as he opened the folder. The words Hope Virginia Stillwater, born: 1881, died: 1906 immediately leapt out at him, She'd been twenty-five years old when she died? What the hell had happened to her? Ryan wondered as something that felt akin to panic unfurled in his gut.
    "How about if we