Heaven and Earth Read Online Free PDF

single bag he’d brought in with him on the bed in the larger of the two bedrooms, dropped his butt on the bed to give it a test bounce.
    The image of Mia drifted into his mind. “Down, boy,” he warned himself. “No carnal thoughts about a woman who might be able to pluck them out of your head, and who’s also your primary research target.”
    Satisfied with his living arrangements, he headed outside to unload the Rover.
    On his second trip he stopped to watch the sheriff’s cruiser pull up, and Ripley climb out.
    “Deputy Todd.”
    “Dr. Booke.” She was feeling vaguely guilty about giving him a hard time on their first encounter. Which she wouldn’t have felt, she thought resentfully, if Nell hadn’t scolded her about it. “You’ve got a lot of stuff here.”
    “Oh, this is only part of it. I’ve got more being sent in tomorrow.”
    Nosy by nature, she looked in the back of the Rover. “More than this?”
    “Yeah. Lots of neat stuff.”
    She turned her head. “Neat?”
    “Lots of it. Sensors, scanners, and gauges and cameras and computers. Cool toys.”
    He looked so pleased with the idea that she didn’t have the heart to smirk. “I’ll give you a hand hauling what you’ve got inside.”
    “That’s okay. Some of it’s pretty heavy.”
    Now she did smirk, and hefted a large box out of the back. “I can handle it.”
    No question about that, he decided and led the way inside. “Thanks. You work out? What do you bench-press?”
    Her brows lifted. “I do twelve reps of ninety pounds in a set.” She couldn’t get a good gauge of his body type in the long coat and the thick sweater under it. “You?”
    “Oh, about the same, considering body weight.” He walked out again, leaving her following and trying to get a sense of his shoulders. And his ass.
    “What do you do with all this . . . neat stuff?”
    “Study, observe, record, document. The occult, the paranormal, the arcane. You know, the different.”
    “Freak shows.”
    He only smiled. Not just his mouth, she noted, but his eyes as well. “Some people think so.”
    They hauled the rest of the boxes and bags in together.
    “It’s going to take you a week to unpack.”
    He scratched his head, scanned the piles now crowding the living space. “I never mean to bring so much, but then, you never know what you might need. I was just in Borneo and could’ve kicked myself for not packing my backup energy detector—like a motion detector, but not,” he explained. “You just can’t find one of those on Borneo.”
    “I bet.”
    “I’ll show you.” He shrugged out of his coat, tossed it carelessly aside before hunkering down to paw through a box.
    Surprise, surprise, Ripley thought. Dr. Weird had one excellent butt.
    “See, this one’s handheld. Completely portable. I designed it myself.”
    It put her in mind of a little Geiger counter, though she didn’t think she’d ever seen an actual Geiger counter.
    “It detects and measures positive and negative force,” he explained. “Simply put, it reacts to charged particles in the air, or in a solid object, even water. Except this one isn’t submersible. I’m working on one that will be. I can hook this up, when I need to, to my computer and generate a graphic printout of the size and density of the force and other pertinent data.”
    “Uh-huh.” She gave a quick glance at his face. He looked so earnest, she thought, so pleased with his little handheld gadget. “You’re really a total geek, aren’t you?”
    “Yeah, pretty much.” He flipped his unit on to check the batteries. “I’ve always been into the paranormal and electronics. I found a way to indulge myself on both levels.”
    “Whatever floats your boat.” But she scanned the piles of boxed equipment. It looked like Radio Shack had exploded. “All this high-tech junk. Lots of dough, I bet.”
    “Mmm.” He wasn’t giving her his full attention. His activated sensor was giving off a low but definite