The Isis Knot (24 page)

How come this part of the story felt like it had happened decades ago when really it had been only a few weeks?

She must have paused too long because William prompted, “You said his name was Mitchell?”

“Yeah. I’d never even known that much before. My mom told me that he was one of her customers once. That he was really rich and in town for one night on business and wanted to go slumming. I think she purposely got pregnant to take advantage of him, but I’ll never know for sure. She said she tried to get him to take responsibility for me but that he never did. Which wasn’t at all true. Apparently he’d been sending her money my whole life to keep her quiet, since if news about me got out it would ruin his perfect life. When he died he left me a letter that described how long it had taken to find me since I’d disappeared after my mom’s death, and that he’d left me this.” She twisted her arm, her sleeve sliding back.

At last she let herself glance over at William, whose expression was nothing short of utter confusion.

“I’d always wanted to know who my dad was,” she went on. “Always wanted some kind of relationship with him, even if it was terrible, because honestly anything would’ve been better than what I had with my mom. I changed my last name to Oliver after I found out about him, before I got up the courage to go to Egypt. I remember sitting there in my car, reading this letter from this strange man who’d given me half my blood. I was confused and scared, and yet I knew right away that I’d turned a corner in my life.” Her hands started to shake. “I just had no clue how sharp that corner would be.”

“Sera.” His expression shifted to pointed curiosity, though apprehension lodged in the corners of his eyes. “I…I barely understood a word you said. Your life, those places, the words you used…do they speak so differently in America?”

She shifted onto her hip and faced him.
Here we go
. “They do. Two hundred years from now.”

He stared. Just stared. Then a pale clarity washed over his face, smoothing out the lines, and his head drew back. “What are you saying?”

“I’m telling you, if you’ll believe me, that even though I am nearly thirty years old, I was not born in the year 1789. I was born in the late 1900s.”

God, he was so still. So impossibly still. Then his lips slowly parted. No sound came out.

“You said you wanted my story, and I wanted to tell you. You should also know about what happened after Malik sent me into that cave. That was only a few weeks ago, and it was in a year beyond 2000.”

Now he made a little choking sound.

“I told you about the skeletons,” she said, “and how I blacked out after touching that one. What I haven’t said, what I couldn’t remember until Elizabeth attacked me and I saved you, was that when I came out of the cave, Malik was waiting for me. He knew, he
knew
, exactly what would happen to me inside that cave. He knew the cuff and that skeleton would give me some kind of magic. But it isn’t just healing. It’s death, too. I felt it when Elizabeth came after me. It wanted to kill her, right then and there. And I could’ve done it, if I’d just released my control.”

A shudder passed through her. She reached out and snatched the rum, taking down a huge gulp. She barely even felt it.

“And Malik knew what would happen. Not only did he know, but he was planning to use me. Control me. He got into my head somehow, like a snake burrowing between my ears. He made me
kill
. There was an innocent man there, the driver who’d taken us up into the hills to the cave, and Malik forced me to kill that man with my mind. Just to prove that I could.”

One of William’s hands went into his hair and stayed there, clutching at the roots.

“I did it because I didn’t know I could stop it. I felt completely powerless against him. He called me ‘his little weapon, his little cure,’ and he could manipulate me by inserting himself into my head. When it was done, I struggled. Fought. I remember crawling away from him, and him laughing at my back. There was an empty sorrow inside one half of me and a gleeful, evil joy inside the other. He grabbed my ankle, yanking me backward. I flopped onto my back, ready to fight again. He was looming over me and I knew I was trapped. Possibly forever. But over his shoulder I could see a star. A single star.”

William’s hand slowly slid away from his head to drop into his lap.

“It was so bright. Brighter than the sun. And it was calling to me in the most beautiful woman’s voice, though I had no idea what she was saying. I answered inside my mind. I remember smiling through tears. There was a flash of white light. It swallowed me. And then I woke up here. In 1819 New South Wales. With no memory.”

“Sirius,” he whispered, though his lips barely moved. “Sirius brought you here.”

Then he took the rum bottle from her and chugged down a couple shots’ worth. Bringing his legs up, he set his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. He sat that way for a long time, so long she had no idea whether to keep talking or to try to touch him or to walk away. She wished she could at least see his eyes.

And then suddenly, she could. They were clear and wide and searching.

“It changes a lot,” she said, “doesn’t it?”

He exhaled. “Does it?”

“I’m not crazy. I think there are too many coincidences between us for you to believe that. Deep down, you must know that what I’ve said is the truth, that I’m not insane—”

“Sera.” He held up a hand and closed his eyes. He drew one breath. Then another. And then opened his eyes. “I have questioned my sanity every single day for the past eighteen years, ever since I tried to steal your gold from Samuel Oliver. I’ve endured my own madness and illness and poverty and disgrace. I cannot question you, and I will not judge.” His head fell back against the rock. “I will believe you, for all the reasons you said. And because you have believed me.” Another deep breath. “And because this is supposed to happen.”

“What is?”

“Us.”

The rum made her tingle all over, made her brain and heart and body be consumed by his presence. She’d told him everything, and now he was staring at her in a way that felt like he was boring into her soul through the gateway of her eyes. The magnetism of him was already so powerful, but the alcohol heightened everything—the shiver in her blood, the trap of his gaze, the warmth between her legs.

She felt herself swaying, lost in him.

And then he looked away. He turned his face to the sky and she watched his throat move as he swallowed. She wanted to put her mouth there, to know how the movement felt on her lips.

He let out a low, short laugh that had little to do with humor. “Sirius.”

She, too, turned to the sky and tried not to think about how even though he was no longer looking at her, his presence was this winch, constantly pulling her in. She was almost shaking with the restraint of not touching him.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“No. That’s the Southern Cross.”

Talk of the stars was doing nothing to calm her. She’d opened the floodgates of truth, he was still here next to her, her brain was all floaty, and her body was screaming for him to touch her.

“Where exactly?” she asked.

He raised a sun-darkened arm and pointed to the sky. “Just there.” He leaned in closer and his breath brushed her neck. “It looks like a diamond tilted on its side.”

Her eyes followed the line of his arm and found the constellation that appeared on the modern-day Australian flag. Everything else about her was tuned to his proximity. Her need for him now bordered on pain.

When his arm dropped and he calmly sagged against the rock, she had to breathe carefully to control her desire, which was riding high and potent. Almost out of her control. Did he feel nothing? Or had her truth destroyed any measure of sexual need in his body?

“This feels oddly familiar,” he murmured, “sitting with you in the open night air, looking up at the sky.”

She gasped, because it did feel familiar. And though that scared her, it didn’t hold a candle to how badly her body wanted this man inside her. She was almost crazed with it, which didn’t make sense, given all that she’d just thrown in his lap. Maybe that was it, that rush of release, that gush of adrenaline over accomplishing something huge and having come out unscathed on the other side. Maybe…

Something touched her hand. A light brush that ignited a million fires all over her body. She looked down. His fingers slid over hers. She lifted her eyes, and he was looking directly into her, his silent question screaming loudly:
Can I have you?

Neither of them breathed. Sera rose to her knees, but it felt more like she was being lifted by great wings, her bones hollow and light. Between their bodies, the rum bottle toppled over, the fiery liquid glugging into the dirt. She looked down on William now, and his eyes positively shone, like twin stars. His breathing started up again, his bare chest punching into motion, and she reached out to touch him.

He was cool and warm at the same time, and his flesh pebbled underneath her palm. She slid her hand from the hard, flat plane of his chest to his neck. There his pulse belied his calm, and she could feel the pounding tempo, set against the still way he watched her. The vibrations beneath her fingers mixed with the strange and wonderful drumbeats already wedging their way through her own body.

She’d always wanted to touch his hair, those frantic waves that hung over his eyes, so she did. Her hand dove into the damp strands at the exact moment he reached for her. But not for her face.

He wrapped an arm around her thigh and pulled her onto his lap. She straddled him, hovering over his legs, her muscles shaking from her restraint. When his fingers curved around the backs of her thighs, all that restraint disintegrated.

She shoved her other hand into his hair and kissed him. Hard.

His beard tore at her face, and she’d never felt anything more sensational. His tongue tasted of rum, sharp and illicit. The sweet, clean scent of the river enveloped them. He groaned into her mouth, and she’d never known that lust had a sound.

They devoured each other, pure and simple. Desperate. Sloppy. Perfect.

Every part of her wanted this man.
Knew
this man. Every part of her reached for him, needed him. Every part and then some, like there were pieces of herself floating just above her skin and they, too, clung to him like magnets.

It was more than familiarity, more than their story. This desire burned hot and real. Everything about it felt
right
.

His hands clenched on her thighs with clear need. She tightened her arms around his neck and lowered her hips to his body. Breath hissed through her nose as her clit pressed against his cock, hard and huge beneath their layers of convict-issued pants.

When he flexed upward, pushing himself harder into her, she gasped and pulled her mouth away from his. Foreheads pressed together, she told herself to breathe. Told herself to maintain control. But the night had grown chilly and he was lava hot. This time he arched up, his mouth claiming hers, his tongue making long, slow sweeps. Such a change from her urgent attack. His tempered pace did nothing to cool either of them down, and the kiss turned ferocious.

He was the one to pull away this time, and it made her whimper. “Don’t stop,” she heard herself beg.

But then his mouth trailed down her neck and softly clamped on the secret spot beneath her ear. “Never,” he whispered.

He kept kissing her, kept tasting her, as his hands finally drifted up from her thighs to her ribs. When his knuckles grazed the underside of her breasts, the motion of his mouth paused. And when his fingertips skimmed over her nipples, he let out such a sound of pleasure that it had her head dropping to the crook of his neck. Her tongue darted out to taste his skin, and suddenly she was flying, completely incoherent of any thought that did not involve William Everard.

As her tongue traveled around his ear, he abandoned the tentative brush of her nipples. His palms made dramatic sweeps across her flesh, touching her with power.

How could someone so new feel so much like a man she’d known forever and missed with all her heart? Why, after she’d told him something so huge and outrageous, were they able to place it aside for the sake of base desire? And why, since this was happening so incredibly fast, her world having been yanked out from underneath her, was she so readily and eagerly accepting a connection with such a strange man?

Because this is a homecoming. You were meant to find him again. And he was meant to be inside you.

The thought came to her so suddenly, so fiercely that she went motionless. The way his body stilled dared her to think that he’d thought the same.

“What’s happening to us?” she whispered against his mouth.

“Us…” He echoed, the same word he’d used earlier. “Does it matter now? It is only about us.”

She leaned back so she could see his face. “What do you feel?”

The strangest urge came to her—the urge to call him another name. A bizarre name. She swallowed it back.

Savage sexual need expanded his pupils. His tongue pushed against his lower lip as he stared into her eyes.

And then his hand was skimming around her ass, dipping low, touching her from behind. Sliding over top of the rough linen of her pants and making her shudder from heels to hairline.