Kiss Across Swords (Kiss Across Time Series) (37 page)

She arched, crying out her pleasure as her climax broke over her. She felt Veris’ hand on her breast, his cock pounding into her, his gasping shout as he came.

Brody groaned, pumping into Veris in long, hard, pistoning strokes. It took him longer, but he threw his head back and growled, his canines showing, as he came in hard, working thrusts that made Veris gasp and push deeper into Taylor.

Then Brody released Veris and fell upon the bed next to Taylor, one knee up in the air.

Veris lifted Taylor up and placed her more securely on the bed, then sat on her other side. He let his fingers drift over her body in a way that made her nerves twitch and sizzle but not enough to arouse. Not yet, anyway. He seemed fascinated with her body.

But then, Veris always was.

“I will need to feed soon,” he said. “Certainly, before dawn. It has been a busy few days.”

Taylor glanced at Brody, who frowned and shook his head. “Not me. I’m fine. That’s odd. Technically, I should need to feed slightly sooner than Veris. Or slightly later, depending on which timeframe we’re using. But definitely, by now, I should be feeling the call one way or another.”

Veris was frowning, too, his lips moving. Then he shook his head. “Am I dead in your time?” he asked.

Taylor’s “No!” was half-formed before Brody squeezed her wrist.

“Why do you ask that?” Brody said.

“Why didn’t I come back with you?” Veris demanded. “The only reason I can think of is that something happened to me to prevent me from coming here. I would have to be the gods’ court jester to voluntarily stay away from the pair of you.
Ergo
, something happened to keep me away.” He looked grim. “I’d like to think nothing short of death would keep me from you.”

Taylor sought Brody’s hand and held it.

“We can’t tell you about your future,” Brody said, sitting up. Even to Taylor it sounded weak. Brody hated this as much as she did.

Veris shook his head. “Tell me that I will at least live long enough to see my child.”

Brody shook his head. “I can’t,” he said bleakly. “Not because I won’t, but because I don’t know.”

Veris gave a soft, painful sound.

Taylor covered her eyes to hide her tears. “We don’t know how we’re changing the future, Väinä,” she said. “We’ve tried to minimize it. Fix it. But we don’t know what we’ve done while we’ve undone the damage we’ve known about. We don’t know what we’re going to find when we get back. For us the future is just as blank as for you, now.”

She reached for Veris’ hand. “And I’m scared.”

He squeezed it.

Brody cleared his throat. “If…when we go, Taylor will be here no longer.”

Veris looked up, his eyes narrowing. “We’ve spoken of this already. You won’t remember me. Not like this.”

“Yes, I know. What I haven’t told you about is that there’s a letter in my chest over there. A letter from me, to me. There’s details in it that only I could possibly know about. Give it to me. When I read it, I’ll know that only I could have written it. It will help you convince me of these days.”

Veris lifted Taylor’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “You two are preparing to leave.”

“We’re trying to minimize the damage our departure will make,” Taylor told him. “Last time, when I left, I scarred your life in a way that six hundred years later, it was still affecting you. We’re trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again. We’re trying to make sure you—and Brody, who will have no memory of the time we were here—can deal with the aftereffects.”

“We don’t know when we get to leave,” Brody added. “But we’ve never lingered in a time not our own for this long. We think it will be soon and we have to work on the assumption that it will happen at any time.”

Veris frowned again, staring down at the white coverlet on the bed. His lips were moving again. “Can you hear that music?” he asked. He lifted his gaze to meet theirs.

Brody shook his head. “What music?”

Veris’ frown deepened. “Listen!” He cocked his head, narrowing his eyes to hear better. “And words…” he murmured. “Strange ones.”

Taylor strained to listen, but all she could hear beyond the tent was snoring and the crackle of campfires and the odd murmur of men. Horses snorting. And far off, the night winds of the desert. Strange cries of night prayers from the eastern religions.

No music.

“Can you sing the words?” Brody asked.

“You are the singer,” Veris muttered.

“As well as you can, then,” Brody coaxed.

“They’re a language I don’t know.” Veris closed his eyes, concentrating. The frown smoothed out. His lips moved as he listened to the far off music. Taylor realized that with his vampire senses he would be able to detect something far out of her range. So she lay as silently as she could and waited.

Finally, he sang-chanted softly in English, the words ill-formed and stilted: “…I can take you higher…I’m on fire…”

“Fuck me!” Brody said, sitting bolt upright.

“That’s Bruce Springsteen,” Taylor whispered.

Veris opened his eyes, looking at them. “What is it?”

Taylor licked her lips. She didn’t know what to say. So she settled for the truth. “I don’t know how you can be hearing that music, Veris. It’s impossible. You simply can’t be. It hasn’t been written yet. It’s from our time.”

“If it’s impossible, then why am I hearing it, then?” Brody asked softly. He was breathing hard. He reached for Veris’ hand. “I think…”

Taylor reached for Veris, fright tearing through her, as the distinct beat of Springsteen’s ‘80s hit echoed in her mind. “No! Not yet!”

Veris gathered her up against his chest, his lips against hers. “Stay with me. Stay forever. Please… Brody!”

The Present

Bruce Springsteen was screaming at the top of his lungs about freight trains in his head, which Taylor could fully appreciate right then. It felt like a whole friggin’ rail yard was using her brain as parking space, running backward and forward over her brain cells for the hell of it.

“Come on, Taylor, open your eyes, damn it. Let me see them.”

The light wouldn’t go away, which was worse. She tried to push it away, but it persisted.

Finally, she gave up and opened her eyes. Bad mistake.

“Sick,” she croaked. That was all the warning she could give. She tried to turn her head. She was lifted and turned and held expertly and a bucket slid underneath her to catch what she brought up, which wasn’t much. When she was finished, she was laid back on something soft.

Finally, she could see without being blinded by the low light in the room.

She recognized the ceiling. It was the guest room in her house. Their house.

Almost afraid to look, she turned her head to take in the rest of the room. She was lying on one of the guest beds, an IV drip in her arm, the pole next to her bed.

Brody lay on the other bed, an IV pole and a blood bag on his. He was slowly blinking up at the ceiling.

Veris sat on a chair between them. He was rolling up a blood pressure cuff and had a stethoscope around his neck. But he was wearing the college professor suit pants and shirt he would have worn in Europe and he looked like he had been wearing them for days. They had deep wrinkles embedded in them. The shirt was rolled up to the elbows and open at the collar.

He looked as haggard as Taylor had ever seen him.

She began to cry, unable to help herself.

Brody yanked his IV out, hauled himself to the side of the bed and threw his arms around Veris’ shoulders and buried his face against his neck. Fine shudders and ripples passed through his body.

Veris tried to hug Brody, but his arms were trapped. So he waited.

Brody finally sat back and pushed his hand through his hair and twisted it back off his shoulders. “I stopped needing to feed about two days ago. That’s when you got back here, yes?”

Veris nodded. He reached for Taylor’s hand, gently withdrew the IV and held it, his fingers stroking hers. “I can’t even tell you why in realistic terms. Something just told me I had to come back. I chartered a flight and arrived back and found you both in the library. Taylor was bleeding all over the floor from a deep cut on the shoulder.” Veris shut his eyes and shook his head for a second. “I’ve never had my heart stop by itself…until now.” He opened his eyes again and drew a deep breath. “I’ve been too busy tending you to review my history and for all I knew you were back somewhere in Brody’s timeline. God knows, that was violent enough.” He took off the stethoscope and loosened another button. “So where were you?”

Taylor glanced at Brody. She tried to sit up and found herself surprisingly weak.

“Take it easy,” Veris told her. “You’ve been without food for days.” He helped her sit up and propped her against the headboard. He wiped her tears away with his thumb and sat on the edge of her bed and looked at Brody.

“Brace yourself,” Brody told Veris.

Veris lifted a brow.

“Jerusalem,” Brody said simply. “The first siege. Review your memories. You’ll find all you know about what happened has changed, now, from the moment we met.”

Veris frowned, his focus turning inward.

Taylor glanced at Brody again. She wondered if this was the best and kindest way for Veris to discover what had happened there. But it was the most efficient way, certainly. His own memories were the most accurate way of telling him what had happened.

Veris’ breath halted. “Davina…” he breathed. “Dear God.” His eyes closed and his breathing began again, more quickly this time, as he worked his way through the four days they had spent in 1099 and their combined seduction of a changed Veris.

His head slowly bowed as he realized just how close he had come to destroying his own future. He pressed his fingers to his head, hunched over, as if he were in pain. “No,” he muttered thickly. Then he jerked his head up to look at Taylor. “A child? You’re
pregnant
?”

She nodded.

“I was gone. I had gone away,” he said helplessly.

“I know,” she said simply.

“In my arrogance…” He bent over again, clutching the arm of the chair, his knuckles white with the power of his grip. His shoulders bowed, shaking.

Brody detached Veris’ hands with sheer force, one after another, then wrapped his arms around the bigger man.

Veris tried to turn his head away, but Brody caught his face in one hand and held it steady.

Veris opened his eyes. Tears, slightly pink, glittered and then fell. “It hurts. This hurts more than anything I know.”

“I know, my lover,” Brody murmured. He held his hand out to Taylor. “But you don’t have to hurt on your own.”

Taylor worked her way across the bed using Brody’s strength and wrapped herself around Veris. His big hand found hers in a painful grip.

He laid his head against Brody’s chest and wept.

* * * * *

“You ‘died’ a few days after the siege, from complications from the wound you got from the spear you took protecting Sir William,” Brody murmured, flipping through a dog-eared, year-old
National Geographic.
He was wearing one-way wrap-around sunglasses, a long trench coat and his hair was tied back. Even so, Taylor had a sinking feeling the medical receptionist had recognized him, because she was staring at him almost nonstop.

Veris glanced at his Tag Heuer and grimaced. “Forty minutes he’s kept us waiting. This is ridiculous, Taylor. You’re a woman of means. You don’t have to be kept standing in line like this. I’m not surprised the prick gave you the run around last time. He doesn’t seem to give a damn about his patients at all.”

She squirmed at the reminder. “The reception area doesn’t really look quite the same, though. More changes?” she asked.

They had been discovering all sorts of small and large changes in their world the last four days. The car that Taylor drove was now a Porsche, not the Audi she’d had before. She discovered that she loved driving it and was good at it, too, although both Veris and Brody hated seeing her behind the wheel.

There were small changes to the layout of the house, the clothes she wore, the people she worked with and her own personal memories.