The Bride of Time (26 page)

The frantic search for wolf bites became an unstoppable frenzy of palpable lust. She felt it, too; he could tell by the way she opened to him, arching her body against him, twining her legs around his waist as he lifted and filled her in one swift, deep thrust.

How warm she was inside. How warm, and silky smooth inside and out as he rode her, thrusting deeper and deeper, reaching farther than he had ever reached before. Undulating beneath him, Tessa matched his passion thrust for thrust in such wild abandon it took his breath away. The transformation had obviously heightened her sexual awareness just as it had his. They were perfectly matched. How could she have run from him?

All around them the subtle scent of heather rising from the blooms their bodies crushed wreathed them like an aura. The heady fragrance ghosted through his nostrils, mixing with the scent of violets drifting from her hair. The combined scents were like a drug taking him under, devouring his inhibitions, making him ravenous for her. All else was forgotten. Nothing mattered
but their coupling. In that one brief and perfect burst of raw desire, there were no werewolves. There was no Monty. Nothing existed except their bodies joined in mindless oblivion. A whole month had passed since he’d left London and abandoned the search, and in truth, he’d feared that he had lost her, never to see or feel her, never to love her again.

Oddly, Giles didn’t feel the cool mist rising around him. The climate in Cornwall was fairly in for October, though in London they would soon be feeling snow. Besides, the wolf still lurking deep inside him could stand a colder clime; he’d felt that in his human incarnation since he was bitten. Every sense, every physical experience was heightened come to that, especially his sexual awareness. Now it was magnified a thousand-fold.

First his fingers and then his lips caressed her breasts, laving the nipples into hard, erect buds to feast upon. Tessa arched her back to receive those lips, that tongue. Her very posture was a banquet for his dilated eyes, eyes shared with the feral beast within him.

Her climax riveted him with waves of fiery sensation; her sex gripped his relentlessly as he thrust into her. His release was a volatile surge of unstoppable explosions and she milked him dry in a way he had never experienced before. It left him weak and trembling in her arms as if she’d sucked the very marrow from his bones, as if those bones had melted inside his body and rendered him helpless under her command.

Gathering her, he crushed her close against him, his broad chest heaving; and he devoured her lips, tasting deeply of her sweetness. It was—oh, it
was
—his Tessa in his arms again. It wasn’t a dream, some mad hallucination brought on by the transformation and his longing. She was real and soft and warm in his arms, and he hadn’t harmed her. He hadn’t bitten her, savaged her, ravaged her in his mad, rampaging werewolf incarnation. Still
fearful that he might have, he touched her body all over to be sure, to be certain he hadn’t harmed her in some way known only to the wolf.

Leaking a lupine whine, he crushed her close, rocking her gently as the mist swirled about them like a living blanket. The clothes he’d cast off when the transformation began were but a few yards away—he’d returned to where he’d begun—but he feared to let her go to fetch them. What if she were to run from him again? It would not be borne. Scooping her up, he staggered to his feet, commanding his melted bones to move him, and carried her to the pile of damp clothes scattered about the heath.

Snatching up his greatcoat, he set her on her feet and wrapped it around her. “You will catch your death,” he murmured as she snuggled into it. He eyed his breeches longingly where they lay impaled out of reach upon a clump of bracken and nodded toward them. “May I?” he asked. “Will you allow me the same privilege, or will you run from me again the minute I let you go?”

Tears welled in her eyes, and she nodded. Whether that meant she would or wouldn’t flee he wasn’t certain, but he had to trust it. After a moment he let her go, snatched his breeches, and tugged them on, his eyes never leaving her face. Ready to run after her again if she were to run, he shrugged his shirt on, left the rest, and took her in his arms again.

“Tessa, why
did
you run from me?” he murmured, searching her eyes deeply. What he saw there terrified him. But it was her tears that troubled him most. He wiped them from her cheeks, from her bruised lip with his thumbs.
Her bruised lip?
There wasn’t another blemish on her anywhere. His frazzled mind reeled back to that first time he’d embraced her on the heath, and his thumb froze upon the stubborn bruise that still lingered, just as the wound upon his wrist still lingered, though
the broken flesh had healed. Cold chills washed over him from head to toe and he shuddered.

“This has still not faded,” he observed.

“Giles…don’t,” she sobbed, trying to twist out of his arms.

He held her fast. “No,” he said. “I want to know what’s going on here, and you’re going to tell me right now! Able and I stayed in London, taking turns prowling the streets looking for you for nearly a month before we abandoned the search altogether.” He shook her gently. “I thought you were lost to me forever, Tessa,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “I thought you were trapped in your own time, or somewhere else in time, or dead. Have you no idea what that has done to me? Where have you been? How has this happened to you? Why did you run from me just now? Answer me, Tessa!”

“I…I didn’t want you to see me this way,” she sobbed. “I didn’t want you to find out this way….”

“Find out what?” Giles said.

“That I have become…what you have become.”

“And how should I have found out?”

“I…I don’t know. Just not like this.”

“Who did this to you, Tessa?
Who?
”

He could barely stand to look into her eyes; they were so brimful of tears he winced. She drew a ragged breath. “You really don’t know, do you?” she asked.

“How could I know, Tessa? The last time I saw you, you were running into the mist on Threadneedle Street in pursuit of that damnable demon child from hell! We had just come from our wedding ceremony.”

“But I already had this,” she said, touching the bruise on her lip.

Giles’s hands fell away from her arms. His eyes trembled toward her, flashing toward the bruise. His racing mind reeled back in time to the day the straps broke on
the little carriage. He saw himself embracing her, saw himself holding her prostrate in the bracken and furze, saw himself kissing her…kissing her…

“N-no,” he breathed, shaking his head in denial. “No! Tell me I didn’t…I couldn’t have! Tessa,
tell
me.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you, Giles,” she wailed. “I didn’t know how…”

“Well, I know now, don’t I?” he snapped, raking his hair back roughly. “Why can’t I remember?”

“It was a kiss,” she murmured, “and your teeth pierced my lip. You were on the verge of turning into the creature.”

“You should have told me,” he said in a voice he scarcely recognized. She must have heard that strangeness, too, for she backed away from him then, and he seized her again, crushing her close in his arms. “You know I never would have done this if I were in my right mind,” he said. Tears stung behind his eyes, which remained dry to the point of physical pain. He screwed them shut and loosed a bestial howl that rang back in his ears like a thousand echoes. “I cannot live with having done this to you,” he cried.

Deranged, he fell to his knees, doubled over in the heather, pounding the ground with white-knuckled fists. Thrice from the corner of his eye he saw Tessa reach out her hand only to retract it again. There was no comfort for this. He was so distraught he didn’t hear the wagon approaching, plowing through the heather, or see the driver’s hunched figure snapping the whip over the horse’s head until the animal lumbered to a halt beside him.

“Daughter, come,” Moraiva said.

Giles vaulted to his feet and seized Tessa’s arm as she moved toward the barrel-shaped, yellow and turquoise-colored wagon. “Where are you taking her?” he demanded.

“Away from you till you are calmer,” the Gypsy said.

“You think I would harm her, Moraiva?” Giles asked. He was incredulous. “You actually think it?”

“Not deliberately, no,” said the Gypsy. “But there is still danger for one more night. When the moon wanes she will be returned to you all of a piece. I give her to you now, and she will die at your hands when the moon rises again. I see the pentacle in her here”—she tapped her forehead—“and when you become the wolf again, you will seek her out and ravage her, for she is your next victim.”

Cold chills riddled Giles’s spine. “I would never harm her!” he insisted.

The old Gypsy smiled her patronizing smile. “You already have, Giles Longworth. It is why we stand here, and you will do so again if you do not let me take her.”

“Have I no say in this?” Tessa shrilled.

“No, none,” the Gypsy said flatly. “Not if you would live. He has marked you. The wolf inside him has chosen you. It is because you two are soul mates, and because of the madness in the blood that makes the wolf kill that which it loves most.”

“I have not had my answers from her, Moraiva,” Giles said. “Am I not entitled to those at least?”

“You shall have them when the moon wanes,” the Gypsy said. “You have waited this long. One more day and night will not matter, and it could well mean her life. Are you that selfish, Giles Longworth?”

“She will run again.”

“She will not.”

“If I lose her…”

“You will surely lose her if you do not heed me,” Moraiva sallied with a wry chuckle. “When have I ever caused either of you harm?”

“I cannot lose her!”

“Why do you speak of me as if I am not here?” Tessa cut in.

“Do you still have the pentacle, daughter?” the Gypsy asked her.

Tessa reached beneath Giles’s greatcoat and produced the amulet on a chain about her neck.

The Gypsy nodded. “Good,” she said. “It has spared you much, but it will not spare you this. Get into the wagon. You need more than pentacle magic now. You need Moraiva.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Moraiva lent one of her costumes, an indigo skirt and embroidered gauze blouse, as well as a paisley pongee shawl, and Tessa changed inside the wagon. The Gypsy didn’t return to her people’s camp. Instead, she drove the wagon deeply into the woods at the edge of the moor. When the sun finally broke the horizon line it was bloodred, its rays turning the pink streamers bleeding into the bleak gray dawn to crimson.

“Where are you taking me?” Tessa asked. Giles seemed comfortable with the woman, but she herself didn’t know her well enough to share his opinion.

“A storm comes,” the Gypsy said. “We go where it will be safe.”

“Safe from what?” Tessa snapped. “I have weathered many storms without seeking shelter in a forest.”

The Gypsy smiled. “But you were not a werewolf then,” she said. “And this is no ordinary storm that comes, daughter. It is what the Cornish call a
flaw
. The winds would toss this wagon like a broom straw in the open. We go in among the ancient trees. I will find a likely place where they will protect us.”

“Will the winds you speak of not uproot the trees?”

“Not deeply in the wood, where roots entwine and
support one another. Boughs and branches will fall; there is no way to avoid it, but there will be far less damage than there would be in the open. Did you look at this wagon, daughter? Does it appear damaged to you?”

Tessa hadn’t taken special notice of the wooden vehicle, except to admire the brightly colored designs painted in yellow on a teal background.

“No,” Tessa said. “It seems quite sound.”

“Mhmmm,” the Gypsy grunted. “It has weathered dozens of flaws.” She gestured toward the treetops. “See?” she said. “Already the wind blows, and the sun has scarcely risen above the land. By noon the sky will darken. The sun will try to prevail, but great black clouds will scurry across its face, casting moving shadows on the land that look like living things crawling over the hills. Then the clouds will swallow the sun altogether, the sky will take on a jaundiced hue, and by mid-afternoon the rains will come—stabbing, punishing, horizontal rain driven by the cyclone. You will be glad of this shelter then, daughter, and even at that, protected though we are, the hailstones will pummel this old wagon as if the gods themselves were trying to pelt us to death.”

“Perhaps then, in such a storm, if there is no moon—”

The Gypsy’s coarse laughter interrupted her. “The moon will rise full whether we can see it or not,” she said. “And you will feel its pull regardless.”

Tessa didn’t want to admit it, but she felt the pull already. “W-will Giles feel it, too?”

The Gypsy nodded. “Aye, daughter, he will feel it and he will come for you, but we will be ready for him, eh?”

“Why will he come for me? How will we be ready? I do not understand any of this.”

“Poor child, you are marked. He has marked you, just
as the child has marked him. I told you why. When he bit you, he marked you with the sign of the pentacle. Not everyone can see it in the flesh of the victim, but we Gypsies are endowed with the power of divination, those of us who embrace the gift. What makes it worse is that you are soul mates, and he is the Alpha wolf. He must subdue you—and in your case it would mean death to face him under the full moon.”

“Death for me?”

“Poor fledgling she-wolf, yes, for you,” the Gypsy said. “He bit you when he was turning. This is why he did not remember it. His human consciousness was fading. His was the mind of the wolf.”

“But he would not harm me.”

“Not deliberately, no,” Moraiva said. “But the wolf inside him is another entity—a cursed being whose mindless instinct is to kill, to ravage, to destroy. None can escape the werewolf’s lust for blood, least of all you, who are already joined with it in your soul.”

“Wolves mate for life, Moraiva,” Tessa said emptily.

The old Gypsy nodded. “So we must cancel the curse so you two may live in peace together.”