Nikola wasn’t sure how to best answer that question, but being in a somewhat benevolent mood despite the insistent throb of his personal parts, he made an attempt at answering it. “Perhaps penguins were not allowed on the ship that you sailed on to Europe. However, I will admit that I have never seen a pink penguin, and I take quite an interest in natural history. The only descriptions I’ve read all state that they are in shades of white, black, and gray, some of which have slight touches of color around the head.”
“No, it’s not…er…it’s not a real penguin.” For some reason, Io seemed flustered by this turn in conversation. He was more than intrigued by that phenomenon. “It’s my Tingleator. It’s shaped like a penguin, you see.”
He frowned, but not because they were approaching a shaded section of the road into the valley below. He had no difficulty seeing the road even in the darkest of nights. No, his was a frown of incomprehension, and that was something he disliked intensely. He hated feeling left out of knowledge. “I am unfamiliar with a Tingleator. You will describe it to me.”
“Sorry, that may have been too regional. It’s my hoe, you know?”
His frown deepened.
“My hoe for the ladygarden.”
Perhaps she was mad. Her conversation certainly didn’t make too much sense. “You wish to discuss gardening?”
“No, it’s not
that
kind of garden. Oh, god, you’re going to make me spell it out, aren’t you?” Her breath teased his cheek again as she sighed. “Because my life couldn’t be any more embarrassing than sitting on some strange man’s lap talking about vibrators.”
“Woman! You are doing this deliberately!” Nikola had reached the end of his patience. He stopped the horse, shifting Io slightly so as to be able to reach into one of his coat pockets.
“Huh? What have I done? Eek! Stop moving like that or I’ll fall again, and I’ve reached my limit of daily falls from a horse!” She wrapped both arms around him, her eyes huge as he struggled to extract his hand from his pocket. “Oh my god you’re going to shoot me!”
“I’m not, but I will admit that it is a tempting thought. Cease struggling or Demeter will object. If you release my arm, I can move it.”
Her eyes narrowed on his. “You’re just going to pull out a gun or Mace or something and get revenge on me because…because…well, hell, I don’t know why you’d want revenge on me. I’m the one who’s been dumped on the ground all night long.”
By sheer dint of superb horsemanship, Nikola managed to keep control not only of his mount and the interested Thor, who kept bumping his back in hopes of treats, but the wildcat in his arms. “I am simply tired of you flaunting your knowledge at me,” he snapped, pulling his hand from his pocket. In it was a small memorandum journal.
“I’m what? What knowledge?” Io stopped struggling and watched with curiosity as he flipped open the journal, and wrote with a small pencil that had seen better days.
“Your words. You are using them deliberately to show me that I am inferior to you, and that I will not have. Is ‘ladygarden’ one word or two? And this ‘vibrator’—is it a proper noun?”
She started to laugh, causing Demeter to lay back her ears in warning. Nikola, with one eye on his annoyed horse, tucked away his journal after making a few notes, and sent Demeter into a fast trot.
Io stopped laughing,
eep
ed, and clung to him in a highly gratifying manner for a few minutes before evidently realizing he wasn’t going to allow her to fall.
She loosened her hold on his arms and gave him a long look from those lovely eyes. “You seriously think I’m using words you’re not familiar with on purpose?”
“I have told you that I have an excellent grasp on the English language. I have not been to the colonies, but I understand that English is spoken there. You seem to have no difficulty in understanding my speech; therefore, you are deliberately attempting to confuse and belittle me linguistically.”
“I can assure you, Nikola,” she said with a telltale twitch of her lips, “that I am not trying to do either. I don’t play the superior game with people, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t with someone for whom English isn’t a first language. I’m horrible at languages, so honestly, I’m impressed with anyone who can speak more than one.”
“I will accept your apology for making me feel inferior,” he said magnanimously.
“I didn’t apologize—”
“But only because you will now proceed to explain the phrases I do not understand. Let us commence with ‘ladygarden.’”
She started laughing again, but after a few false starts, and quite a number of blushes, he was finally able to store the words ‘ladygarden,’ ‘vibrator,’ and ‘love rocket’ away in his mental dictionary.
“Do women from the colonies use phalluses frequently?” he was driven to ask as they neared the outskirts of town.
“It’s no longer a colony…. Oh, skip it. Yes, women in the U.S. use lots of vibrators. And…er…other things. Nonvibratory ones.”
“Why?”
She blinked at him again. He was beginning to find it a wholly endearing gesture. “Why do they use a vibrator?”
“Yes, why? Are there not enough men in the colonies?”
She took a deep breath. He enjoyed the effect that action had on her chest, one breast of which was pressed against him. He began sorting through conversational gambits to pick out the ones that would continue to make her take deep breaths. “Some women,” she said with obvious emphasis, “don’t need a man in their life. Some of us are quite happy as we are, and like to be in control of our sexual needs and gratification, rather than leaving it to a man who may or may not get his jollies in two minutes flat and leave us lying there unfulfilled and so frustrated we could scream.” She took another deep breath, and his penis commended the action. “Not that I’m speaking from experience, you understand.”
“You are a virgin?” He found that difficult to believe, not because he had first assumed she was a prostitute, but because she was so clearly meant for male delight, he didn’t believe any man would be so foolish as to leave her alone.
She sat bolt upright in his lap, her eyes spitting annoyance. “That, sir, is none of your business.”
“You
are
a virgin?”
“No, of course not! I’m in my thirties, for heaven’s sake. What do you think I am, some sort of nun or something? Sheesh.”
“Ah. Good. I dislike virgins. They tend to weep, and wring their hands, and recoil in horror from the sight of an erect penis, and nothing disturbs a man’s peace of mind more than a weeping, hand-wringing virgin shrieking about his penis up and down the house.” A thought occurred to him at that moment, an unpleasant thought. If she wasn’t a virgin, then she must have been with a man. He gritted his teeth at the thought of some man, probably one of those rough, unkempt colonials, sating his manly lust upon her.
“I think a wee chink in your research armor is showing, Nikola,” she said softly, turning her back to him.
He wanted to demand she tell him the name of the lusty colonial who took pleasure in her tempting body. He also wanted to tell himself he didn’t care one infinitesimally small jot about how many men had touched her body, but he knew that thought wouldn’t even complete itself satisfactorily before it was dismissed as irrelevant and untrue.
“In the history books I’ve read,” she continued, just as if he weren’t suffering untold torment envisioning the dirty, slovenly, no doubt ale-addled wastrel as he touched her with his filthy paws, “men were always super big on virginity for their women.”
His fingers itched for the rapier he’d left at home. He’d teach that odious, woman-defiling colonial a thing or two about sullying innocent, silky-thighed maidens!
“I hate to say it, but your Google-fu must not be very strong if you missed turning up that fact.” She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled.
He bared his teeth in return. “This monster who deflowered you—he isn’t on the continent, is he?” Oh, how he hoped for an answer in the affirmative.
Her eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed as she thought through what he had asked. “My first boyfriend? You mean Tony? A monster? You know, I’d point out yet again that you’re way over the line as far as what’s politically correct by asking about him—”
“First?” He pounced on the word. “Good god, woman, how many defilers have there been?”
Her jaw dropped a little. “I can’t believe you just asked—no. You didn’t. In the interests of U.S.-Austrian relations, I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me how many men I’ve slept with. In fact, I think I’m just going to pretend I don’t know you.”
She turned her back on him again, sitting rigidly upright, careful not to touch him any more than she had to.
He didn’t like that at all. He liked the idea of her having multiple lovers even less. And most of all, he didn’t like just how much it mattered to him to find each and every man who had touched her, so he could lesson them within a hairsbreadth of their lives.
“Google…fu…” he growled, pulling out the journal and making another note. Then he added the name Tony, and a reminder to investigate the nearest ship sailing for the colonies.
He could have sworn she giggled, but she kept her back turned to him, and said nothing when they entered the outskirts of town. The silence lasted until she got a good look at buildings they were passing, and then all hell broke loose.
“What the—no!” she wailed, pushing herself off his thighs, almost pulling him off the horse as she struggled to the ground. “No, no, no! This can’t be! It just can’t!”
“The day I understand women is the day that I turn back into a normal man,” he told Demeter, watching as Io ran first to one side of the road, then the other, yelling at the top of her lungs at the small houses that staggered in a drunken line toward the town square. “I suppose I should stop her before she wakes up everyone.”
With a martyred sigh, he dismounted. Io was spinning around the square, her hands clutching her hair, her eyes huge with genuine fear, visible to him even in what remained of the moonlight.
Something in him stirred at the sight of the fear. She didn’t strike him as the type of woman who backed down from any challenge, and yet there she was, looking every inch the madwoman she claimed she was on the verge of becoming.
“Cease this noise,” he said sternly, striding toward her, the horses following him. He stopped and spun around to face them. “Stay there,” he said, pointing to the ground.
Demeter lipped his finger and nickered at him. Thor bit her flank, and received a swift rear hoof to the chest in response.
“Stay,” he repeated before turning back to Io. The horses followed him, just as he knew they would. He sighed yet another martyred sigh. When had anyone, his horses included, ever done as he ordered? “What is the matter now, woman?”
“The town is the matter!” Io wailed, her lower lip quivering. “It’s not right! It’s not the way it’s supposed to be, and even if you guys were some weirdo reenactment group, you couldn’t duplicate an entire town, could you? I mean, I can see that it’s right where it’s supposed to be, but it’s not right, not right at all!”
He put his hands on his hips and considered the town. “I don’t see anything amiss. It is not a large town, but it does have three inns, and four wells. I do not know of another of this size that has those amenities.”
She quivered for a few seconds before wrapping her arms around herself. “It’s…it’s…oh my god, it’s true, isn’t it? It really
is
1703. You’re not pretending to be an Austrian duke.”
“Baron,” he corrected.
“I haven’t lost my mind. Well, except for the voices talking to me, but maybe that had something to do with the swirly thing, too, because that’s what did this to me, Nikola.” She took him by the edge of his lapel and shook him with a fervor that boded ill for his coat. “It was that swirly thing in the haunted woods. It sent me back in time. Me! Perfectly normal me! And
now
what the hell am I going to do?”
“What do you wish to do?” he asked.
“Go home!” she answered quickly. “Back to my own time, that is. Not
home
home, because there’s nothing waiting for me there but unemployment and all sorts of stress and crap that I really don’t need right now. But back to 2012.”
He was silent for a few seconds, assessing her behavior. He hadn’t ever run across anyone who’d believed they lived in another time, especially not more than three hundred years in the future, but despite all her talk of losing her mind, and the abuse to his coat, she didn’t strike him as mad.
Quite the contrary, she was reacting just as he thought he might should he be in her shoes. He ignored the memory of just how lovely her feet and ankles and legs and thighs were as she lay splayed on the ground, and instead asked, “Where is this phenomenon that you believe is responsible for you being here?”
She started to answer, then stopped, releasing his coat and giving him a curious look. “Wait just one second…. You aren’t telling me I’m nutso-cuckoo.”
He stared at her for a moment, then pulled out his journal. “Nutso-cuckoo.”
She smiled. “It’s a flip way of saying deranged. How come you don’t think I’m crazy, Nikola? Why haven’t you even said it’s impossible for me to have traveled back in time?”
He shrugged. “I have ample proof that the impossible is often all too possible.”
“You mean because your son thinks he’s a vampire?”
He glanced around the square, taking her arm and pulling her toward the road that led back up the side of the mountain, the horses trailing behind them. “The term is Dark One, as I’ve told you, and if you do not mind, I prefer to keep that news from the townspeople. Benedikt is young, and I have tried to shield him as best I can from the prejudice that arises from the unenlightened.”
“Wait a minute.” Io frowned down at the road for the time it took them to walk past three cottages. “I saw Benedikt and Imogen in my time—whoa, I can’t believe I just said that. Don’t you think I’m handling this whole impossible situation really well? I do. I think I should get some sort of commendation, or award, or at least a ‘Didn’t Go Insane When Others Would Have’ tiara. Where was I? Oh, I saw both Benedikt and Imogen yesterday. That’s my yesterday, not yours. Anyway, I just saw them, and they look a bit older than they do here, but not a lot older, not, you know, three hundred years older. Imogen looks like she’s in her early thirties, and Benedikt a few years younger than that. How can that be?”