Enchantment & Bridge of Dreams (47 page)

T
HE FOG SEEMED TO COME
from nowhere, drifting in little pools that hung in the hollows near the river. Cathlin ran blindly, uncaring where she stepped as the white layers grew thicker.

All the while, the cold words of the medical report danced before her eyes, along with the bold letters of the anonymous note.

Remember?

The river was below her now, a shining trail of green that ran along sloping banks of moss, streaked now with fog.

Fog.

Darkness.

The river…

She shook her head, shoving her hair from her face, trying to separate
now
from
then.
Mud clung to her shoes and branches scraped at her arms and face as she plunged blindly forward into the fog.

“Cathlin! Stop, damn it!”

It was Dominic's voice, but to Cathlin it was somehow unfamiliar, like the voice of a stranger. Wildly, she pushed through the thick bank of flowers, her pulse ragged in her ears.

“Cathlin, wait!”

She shoved past the lilacs, past ferns and anemones, until she came to a sheltered grove in the lee of a granite cliff. Roses danced crimson on stems that coiled all the way up the bank.

Her breath caught. Memories again—a lifetime of memories. Too many to hold inside her throbbing head.

Hard fingers gripped her shoulders. “Damn it, don't run from me, Cathlin!” She was shoved around, caught against a man's chest.

Her eyes were hazy, unfocused. Suddenly she was a thousand miles away. Or two hundred years away…

 

T
HE SHARP WHISTLE OF THE
wind woke him.

He blinked, feeling a strange bed of straw beneath him. Memory dawned. He smiled, sated, happy. “Geneva?”

No answer. No welcoming warmth.

He sat up, frowning at the first gray light filtering through the mill's narrow windows.

She was gone.

 

G
ABRIEL FOUND HER TRACKS
just beyond the bank, set into the soft mud. Grim-faced, vowing the worst of retribution, he stalked her past ferns and mossy stones and thickets still white with drifting fog.

The sun was just visible, burning red over the horizon as he strode over the hill, his eyes locked on the prints that showed her haste.

How could the woman think she could escape him?

Then Gabriel stopped. Here the prints were joined by a second pair.

Devere!

He muttered a curse and ran.

At the top of the next turning in the path he ran her down and pulled her around to face him. “Where is he?”

Her face was pale, determined. “I—I hid from him in the fog. They made their way on toward Stevington Ford. Devere was only wounded.”

“You could have been killed!”

Her face was blurred with tears. “Let me go!”

“Damned if I will. Now answer me. Tell me why you ran away.”

“Because I won't see you hurt. Devere will never give up.
He'll send a dozen men after me if that's what it takes. He wants you, Gabriel, and your love for me is your only vulnerability. I
must
go!” Her voice was raw with desperation.

“You're not going anywhere.”

She shoved at him, her lilac scent intoxicating. “You don't understand. He'll never give up.”

“When we're married, he will,” Gabriel said grimly.

“But—” She swallowed, shook her head. “I cannot.”

“You are married already?”

“No.”

“Then you can,” he said flatly, already decided. “And you will. I will see you safe from Devere.”

“No! You must let me go!” She pulled away and ran into a bower heavy with roses, her hair whipping out around her. “I'll never be safe—nor will anyone who harbors me, not as long as Devere lives. He has killed men and now will exact his revenge against my sister, through his many friends in France who owe him favors.”

“I will help her to safety and see that you are safe from that madman forever. I give you my promise, Geneva.”

“And in the process I will only bring you more pain, you have known so much already!” She turned and ran, her skirts trapping her as they caught in the rose briars. “I cannot. I
will
not!” Gabriel pulled her against him, even as she rained angry fists across his chest. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, her eyes haunted.

“Stop fighting me, woman.”

But she was wild, lost to his words.

And the storm of her brought an answer in him. He seized her twisting body and pinned her against the trunk of a towering oak. She was beyond words, beyond reason, gripped by fear and a terrible remorse for a betrayal she could never forget.

Words failed, reason lost, Gabriel touched her the only way he could, with a need that was as fierce as her regret. Satin pulled
free and linen fell in a heap. Geneva fought him like currents in a spring flood, pummeling his chest and twisting until he buried his hands in her hair and ground his body against hers.

Heat met heat. Wild hunger called to its match.

“No. I won't have you hurt. I
won't!”

“Hurt me,” Gabriel said hoarsely. “Rip out my very heart. For you I would give it gladly, don't you see? Perhaps I already have.” He shoved away her gown; she had dressed in haste and wore nothing beneath. Her body was flushed, the thrust of her breasts testimony to the desire that already gripped her.

He groaned, found the pulse that beat at her neck, stroked the silken skin that hid her heat. He did not stop until he heard her cry out and wrap her hands around him.

“Don't hold me, my love. Let me go.”

“I must,” he said hoarsely. “All my life. Perhaps far longer than this mortal life.” As he spoke Gabriel felt a sharp chill at his neck. But he had no time for chills or warnings, not with Geneva in his arms. “And I'll set my brand on you to prove it, a brand of love that carries all the joy you've given me.”

She stared at him, a universe of love in her eyes as he bent his head and measured the pulse at her neck, then caught the soft skin to his lips.

With a low moan she curved toward him, impossibly lost, feeling the hot brand of desire that would mark her as his forever.

And then they were thigh to thigh, sliding to the damp, dark earth. Both tugged at her tangled satin skirts; together they shredded his shirt and then pushed away his breeches.

He took her there, bowered by roses, cushioned by soft moss and spring ferns with the murmur of the river to lull them and the fog to veil their nakedness. She met him with wild delight, driven by a desire that followed his in equal measure. Control was beyond him and regret beyond her where they lay among the roses, among the fingers of drifting fog.

“Together,” he swore hoarsely, driving home to heaven.

“Forever,” she answered, following him there.

It was a promise whispered, shared and sealed with their joined bodies as they met in mad abandon. And if sheer force of will and human need could forge a bridge of time, then their promise would pass beyond the bounds of death itself.

 

“C
ATHLIN
?” C
ALLUSED
fingers traced the tears on Cathlin's cheeks. She shuddered, her mind on fire, her thoughts a tangled blur, past and present no longer separate.

“Sweet God, love, what's happened to you?”

Gabriel. How very much he had loved her. And the remembering made it far, far worse.

“Talk to me, Cathlin.”

“Let me go!”

“No.” Dominic's hands—
Gabriel's
hands—dug into her waist. “Not until you tell me what's wrong.”

“Don't try to stop me. Not again, Gabriel.” Then the sharp gasp, the horror of realization, the gray pain from deep in the mind that was somehow both Cathlin and Geneva. “No, I didn't mean—”

His eyes were grim. The jaw so hard, so beloved. She
had
to make him go.

“You're here now, here in the twentieth century, Cathlin. You're no eighteenth century heiress fleeing from a madman,” Dominic growled.

She caught a wild breath, shoving at fragments of memory, fighting to hold apart the two worlds still crazily superimposed. “They're both here, caught inside my head.”

“Fight it, Cathlin. Come back. I need you too much to lose you now,” he said hoarsely.

Sweet words. Dangerous words.

“Why, so you can dissect my mind for that monster Harcliffe you work for?” She choked back a sob, hammering at his chest.
“You knew all about me. About the bridge and how my mother died. Damn you for knowing what even I couldn't see clearly.”

“You saw the files.” Dominic's voice was hard with regret.

“Oh, yes, I saw them, Officer Montserrat. Did you enjoy reading about me, about that silly little girl they found crying on the bridge, trying to scrub the blood from her hands?”

“You're a fool if you have to ask me that.”

Ragged laughter. “Then I
am
a fool, a fool along with everything else. How did they phrase it? ‘Vestigial amnesia, trauma syndrome of uncertain outcome and unpredictable prognosis.' Fool? Yes, I'd say the word fool fits me very well.”

“Stop it, Cathlin. Stop fighting and listen to me.”

But she didn't. She only fought him, twisting and furious, the empty place in her head suddenly too full, too heavy with memories, each more shattering than the last.

Around them the fog drifted higher.

Cathlin wrenched free of his hands and stood at the top of the slope, her skirts playing about her, her hair a wild cloud.

Just like another woman long years before.

She pressed her forehead, fighting the rush of images. “Do you want to gloat? Do you want to laugh at the little girl who is still as crazy as she always was?” Her shoulders slumped against an ancient overhanging oak. “Dear God, what's happening to me? Why do I see too much, when for years I couldn't see enough?” She felt him behind her. “Go ahead and laugh.”

“I'm not laughing, Cathlin.” Dominic's voice was raw.

Around him came the sigh of the wind and the whisper of the roses. Dominic staggered before a flood of memories, images of this same bower rich with green moss and veiled with fog.

Madness, he thought. He
couldn't
remember. And yet he did. “Look at me, Cathlin.”

She backed up. “I hate you. You're one of them. You turned my mind into a neat little game in one of those files. My God,
you've
always
been one of them.” She took another step and felt a rock at her back. “Maybe you even sent the note pushed beneath my door, with a scrap of plaid from my mother's dress.”

“When did this come?”

“This morning. Of course you were nowhere to be found,” she said accusingly. Then her voice broke. “Just let me go.”

“Too late, Irish. Maybe it was always too late,” Dominic said hoarsely as the fog swirled up between them.

Cathlin turned and ran up the slope, stumbling as her entirely twentieth century skirt caught on a trailing vine of roses. “No, Dominic, no more. I should never have come back to the abbey.”

“You can't keep this buried, Cathlin. It will kill you. And you can't possibly believe I had anything to do with that letter,” he said grimly.

“I don't know what to believe anymore.” She felt no strength at all, only anger and confusion, like the drifting fog. Memories were coming too fast now, images and emotions bound together, seen in two times and by two different women. “How did you know about Geneva?”