Read Online Moving Target by Elizabeth Lowell - Free Book Online Page B

headed up into the San Jacinto Mountains. Illuminated manuscripts were his passion and his profession; sketching the vanishing bighorn sheep was his relaxation and his hobby. Before dawn, he had needed both.
    He looked up, then resumed sketching. He doubted that the sheep would be around when his children were old enough to hike the steep sides of the desert mountains. That was assuming he ever had any; at thirty-six, he was no closer to fatherhood than he had been at sixteen. He had never expected it to turn out that way. If he had thought about the matter at all when he was young, he had assumed that he would have descendants stretching out into the unknown future just as he had ancestors stretching back into the unknown past.
    Then the years had gone by and nothing had changed but his age. Realistically, he had to wonder if anything ever would. With each passing year he was getting harder to please, not easier. Females who would have interested him twenty years ago looked like children now. The twenty-somethings he met were married or caught up in their careers. The thirty-somethings were often harried and bitter after a divorce, wholly committed to their careers, or interested only in an undemanding affair.
    Erik wasn’t an undemanding kind of man. He wanted a woman who was intelligent, passionate, honorable, strong enough to be a true partner, and interested in working with him to build a shared life. He had found many women with one or two of those qualities. Once he had found one with four out of five, but she was interested only in his mind.
    A golden eagle plummeted down out of the sky, distracting Erik from his unhappy reverie. Instants later a rabbit broke from cover and raced in unpredictable zigzags through the rocks. Either too eager or too late, the eagle missed its kill. The bird screamed its irritation to the sky.
    Erik whistled in exact imitation of the eagle’s angry cry. The raptor wheeled in a swift circle overhead, peering down as though to discover who his rival was. Erik whistled again. The sound was less fierce this time, more questing than threatening. The eagle answered in kind, made another circle over Erik, then beat its broad, powerful wings and flew up into the sky. The whistle that tumbled back down to earth sounded almost like a good-bye.
    The vibration of Erik’s pager against his body was definitely a hello.
    He would have been tempted to ignore it, but his bosses at Rarities were two of the few people who had his pager number. If they wanted to talk—especially about the pages from the Book of the Learned—he was more than ready to listen. The copies had haunted him all night long. He had dreamed of their letters whispering to him, telling him the secrets of the past. And then he had dreamed of mists and forests, a staghound and a falcon who was his eyes.
    Smiling at his fanciful, medieval mind, he punched a button on the pager. One of Dana Gaynor’s numbers at Rarities Unlimited blinked in the pager’s small window. Moving slowly but not furtively, for he didn’t want to alarm the sheep, Erik reached into the rucksack beside him and pulled out his combination cell phone and computer. A flick of his thumb activated the first number in the speed-dial file.
    Dana picked up her phone before the second ring. “Morning, Erik. Can you talk?”
    “The sheep haven’t sold me out yet.”
    “Lord, are you doing your mountain-goat bit again?”
    “Sheep, Dana. We don’t have mountain goats in southern California.”
    “Sheep, goats, whatever. Hooves and a bad smell.”
    He laughed softly. Dana was a stickler for some kinds of details, but wildlife wasn’t one of them. “I hope this is about the pages Serena Charters sent to my home.”
    “It is. Your private quest just went public.”
    His heart kicked up the pace. “How so?”
    Dana ignored the question in favor of her own agenda. “Is your request to Research for provenance searches on your manuscript pages part of your private