“Just the person I wanted to see. Do you know where Nikola is?” I asked, hurrying toward him.
He backed away from me with one hand daintily clutching a scrap of linen to his nose.
“
Mais oui
, of course I know. The monseigneur is where the monseigneur always is at this time of the day—in his study with the tools
astronomiques
, and the bodies of the things most dead, and the little cow maid whose cream he favors.”
“Cow maid whose cream…” I squared my shoulders, outrage inexplicably filling me. Dammit, I would
not
allow myself to care if he was scarfing down the cow maid
or
her cream. Nikola might be Mr. Historical Sexy Pants, but that did not mean I had to give in to those urges that had already led me astray three times with him. “I refuse to give him that satisfaction! Not again, anyway. I have standards, and it’s about time I start standing by them. Just where is this den of iniquity?”
“Study, not den. It is directly above us,” Robert answered, dismissing me with a disinterested wave of his hankie before he continued his way through the room.
“Seriously, the world would be better off without such a dawg,” I growled to myself, firmly intending to march out to the stables to ask for a horse.
Which would explain why I was so surprised when I found myself not only upstairs but standing in front of a door that I assumed led to Nikola’s study.
“Fine,” I told the door. “I’ll just tell him what I think of him dining at Café Io when he has a cow maid on tap. So to speak. Then it’s back on track, and to the stable for a horse before going off to the woods to find my way back home to sanity.”
The door opened just as I was reaching out to knock at it. Nikola leaned against the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest. “Do you always talk to people through doors?”
“I was talking to myself, thank you very much,” I told him with a scowl, looking past him into a dimly lit room. “Where’s your cowgirl?”
“Ah. I, on the other hand, find it much more efficient to speak to someone while she is in the same room as me. No doubt you, having been raised in the colonies, will view that as an odd method of conversing, but I can assure you that it is a standard practice in civilized countries.”
“What part of ‘talking to myself’ didn’t you understand?” I asked him, a bit annoyed at his attitude. “And for the record, in my time the U.S. is a major world power, so you can just knock off the condescending tone, buster.”
“My name is Nikola, not Buster. You seem to have difficulty remembering that.” He tipped his head to the side in a way that made my knees melt. Once again I was overwhelmed with the urge to fling myself on him and kiss the living daylights out of him. “I wonder if that is due to a personality flaw, or if it’s something that you’ve picked up from living with savages?”
I took a deep, deep breath, and was preparing to blast him when he gave a little wave of his hand. “It is of no matter. Since you are busy conversing with yourself, I will return to my studies. Good day.”
He shut the door in my face. I gawked at it for a moment, unable to believe he’d done that. A little titter from down the hallway had me glaring at Elizabet, who held a coal scuttle with her good arm.
“He’s crazy as a loon, you know that, right?” I asked the maid.
She grinned. “We’re all a bit daft here, Mistress Io. Even my own da says I’m not right in my head for leaving England and coming to a foreign country to work for the baron, but I say it’s how you’re treated that matters, and the baron treats us like people, not animals what don’t have no feelings.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t a good employer, just that he’s not going to be awarded a Sane Person of the Year award.” I took another deep breath—just because I felt I needed one—and, without knocking, opened the door and entered Nikola’s study.
Instantly, I felt as if I’d stepped into another world. Which I had, given the whole time-travel thing, but this…“This is amazing,” I said on a long breath, gazing in wonder around the room. It was L-shaped, with the short end to my left, while to the right ran the long side, sunlight pouring through the tall windows, illuminating intricate Middle Eastern carpets that dotted the floor. There were numerous tables of all sizes, from petite round ones to long, solid-looking desks bearing stacks and stacks of papers, books, and odd bits of equipment. A mechanical bird perched in a black iron cage sang as I stumbled forward, too intent on seeing everything to watch where I was walking. A marble mortar and pestle nestled up against a sphere depicting the constellations, which in turn sat on top of mechanical sketches that looked very familiar somehow. I headed toward them, my eyes widening even further when I extracted the top sheet of sketches, and recognized it.
“This is a da Vinci drawing of an airplane,” I said, showing the sheet to Nikola, who sat behind a monstrously large ebony desk crowded with even more books. “A real da Vinci!”
Nikola looked up from where he was tinkering with a three-foot-tall mechanical statue of an African, complete with turban and spear. “Oh, it’s you, is it?”
I walked over to him, weaving my way around stacks of books piled on the floor, a tray with tea things, and two ginger-colored cats who were curled up together in front of a fire. “It’s a da Vinci, Nikola.”
He looked at the paper. “So it is. Not a very practical design, though. But I liked some elements of it, particularly the wings. Stretching skins over the wooden frame to mimic a bird’s anatomy is very intriguing, very intriguing indeed.”
“You don’t understand. This—” I found myself shaking the paper at him, and forced myself to gently set it down. “This is a da Vinci. An original. It should be in a museum! It’s priceless.”
“I don’t think it is,” he answered, returning his attention to the mechanical statue. “I bought several notebooks full of those sorts of drawings, but didn’t see much that seemed very reasonable. Creative, but not terribly useful.”
“Not useful…” I murmured to myself, staggering over to a tall armchair before falling into it. I lifted a wan hand and gestured toward Nikola. “What is it you’re doing there?”
“Working on my automaton. It freezes up after just a few turns.” He glanced over at me again. “Did you want something in particular, or did you just come to tempt me with your breasts and thighs and all the bits in between?”
At the mention of breasts, I sat up, leveling a glare at him. “I’d have thought you had enough of that with this cow maid person that everyone says you’re hot on.”
“Hot?” He blinked a couple of times, then extracted his notebook from a stack of papers. “Used in this context, what is the meaning of the word?”
“Don’t you dare be all endearingly adorable by asking things like that!” I stood up and pointed a finger at him. “I’m onto you now, buster! You’re deliberately being cute so I’ll forget about the cowgirl and let you dine at Ristorante Io. Well, it won’t work, do you hear me? I will not be charmed!”
He set down a small tool, and leaned back in his chair, considering me. “Then I will stop my unceasing and yet obviously futile attempts to sway you with my considerable erudition. Are you here because you believe I need feeding, and that only you can perform that function? If so, I will take this moment to reassure you that I will not trespass on your good nature by doing so again. There are ample numbers of men and women in the village who have provided me with sustenance for the last thirty-nine years, and will continue to do so for at least another thirty-nine more. Assumedly more, since I am now immortal, but I don’t like to presume. You may take your blood and begone, woman. I have no need or desire for either you or it.”
By the time he finished that little speech, he had gotten up and moved around to where I stood, pulling me to my feet until I was pressed against him, the hard lines of his body making all my soft, squishy bits cheer with happiness.
“Stop touching me,” I told him, and leaned in to nip his lower lip.
“I have no desire to—”
His words stopped when his mouth descended upon mine, his tongue instantly barging into my mouth in a manner just as arrogant as its owner.
Oh, you have desire,
I said, feeling the passion flaring to life in him like a burst of electricity.
You have oodles of desire. Oh, dear lord, right there, do that again!
His hands had slid down to my breasts, cupping them and teasing them mercilessly, all the while his mouth was driving me insane with want and need until I felt just as electrified with desire as he did.
I may have misspoken,
he admitted, his tongue mapping out my mouth before retreating back into his own.
I find myself wanting you more than I’ve wanted anything I can think of.
The feeling’s mutual,
I started to say, then remembered my good intentions of keeping my distance from him.
Slowly, with more strength of mind than I thought I had, I managed to push myself back from the warm, solid, so very alluring man, and stepped back, one hand on my mouth. My lips felt sensitized, like they, too, had been touched with electricity.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, his eyes a smoky navy color. Evidently when he became aroused, his eyes grew darker. It was a bizarre phenomenon, and yet at the same time one that intrigued me to no end. I wondered if there was a way I could control how his irises shifted in color.
“Here as in your study, or here as in 1703?”
“Either. Both.”
“I’ve told you how I came to this year. As for being in your study right now, I wanted to ask you to help me find the swirly thing that brought me here,” I heard myself saying. I was a bit surprised at that last bit, since I didn’t remember even thinking such a thing, but once the words were spoken, it seemed to make sense. Who better to hunt for the exact place I’d popped into this world than the man who lived here?
Nikola glanced over my shoulder to the row of windows. “It’s early evening.”
“So?”
“The sun still has an hour to set, and one of the things I’ve learned over the last thirty years is that sunlight does not agree with me.”
“Oh, right, you’re a vampire.” I gave him a weak smile. “I keep forgetting that. Well, I can go hunt for the spot by myself, but I don’t remember anything about where I emerged, so I kind of hoped you’d come with me.”
He toyed with a metal file that he had been holding before he had kissed me. “I might be persuaded to spend my evening in such a search, should the company interest me enough.”
I stiffened. “Is that some sort of a slur? Because if it is—”
“It was an invitation for you to use your feminine wiles upon me, and tempt me with promises of much pleasure to come should I accede to your wishes.” I swear his eyes glittered with humor.
“Oh, that’s what that was. And here I thought you were just making a dig at me. Well, since you want pleasure…” I dropped my eyelids and gave him a smoldering look. “How about we do something really fun?”
His eyes started to go dark again. “What would that be?”
I smiled at the fact that his voice was a bit rough around the edges, but before he could grab me, I snatched up the da Vinci page and held it up. “What do you say we go put this in the eighteenth-century equivalent of an archival protective frame?”
Nikola was silent for a moment before saying in a conversational tone, “If, in the time it takes me to count to four, you do not put down that drawing which for some inexplicable reason you value so highly, you will regret it.”
I glanced from the drawing to his face, wondering if he was pissed.
His eyes were midnight blue.
“Oh,” I said on a breath, and had just barely placed the paper back on the desk before I found myself on my back before the fire, the two ginger cats scooting over with disgusted looks at us. “Nikola, I don’t want to make love to you.”
That’s not what your body tells me.
“I am not responsible for my body’s actions,” I said, my breath coming fast and hard as Nikola paused in the act of removing the cloth around his neck, and his jacket. I flinched at the look he gave me. “I didn’t just say that, did I?”
“You did.” He continued to remove his clothing until he was clad in nothing but his breeches and stockings. “But I find the unique twist of your mind quite entertaining. You are unlike any other woman of my acquaintance.”
“I’m going to take that as praise, because…well, because it feels like praise.”
“It was. Since your body desires me physically, would you mind if I indulged it in some acts that I will personally guarantee to bring it exquisite pleasure?”
“Yes, I mind. I really don’t want to make love to you, Nikola.”
He did that head-tipping thing that was so damned adorable, I just wanted to punch him in the face. “Why?”
It took a few minutes to find the words, a situation that was not made any easier by the fact that his bare chest and arms were distracting me almost to the point where I just tossed all my good intentions to the wind and flung myself on him. “I’ve told you—I don’t become involved with men until after I’ve known them for a long time.”
“That’s not how you feel toward me, however,” he pointed out, damn his delectable hide. “You desire me. I can feel the strength of that desire, one that is more than matched by my own for you. What is wrong with allowing those desires to merge?”
I was still on my back, a little fire warming one side (the castle was, I had discovered, slightly chilly even in the summer, probably due to all that thick stone). Above me was an even warmer man, one who I could feel meant every word he said—he found me very desirable, and was prone to thinking some of the most erotic thoughts I’d ever entertained. I was in a century that was not my own, and might in a few hours be back where I belonged, leaving any physical relationship in which I might wish to indulge myself wholly uncomplicated or fraught with emotional entanglements.
In short, I could have my cake and eat it, too.
“I can’t, because I’m afraid that once might not be enough,” I admitted, hesitant to bare the truth.
“Who says it has to just be once?” He trailed a fingertip down the exposed flesh of my collarbone, making me arch up to his hand.