Well…it was his own punishment for listening. He had compounded the problem by barging in and demanding to know what language they were speaking. Such foolishness! They hadn’t scrambled to cover themselves in shame or make him feel more comfortable when he had invaded their hearth.
Instead they had managed to make him feel a depth of ignorance he’d not felt for centuries.
Veris closed his eyes, feeling a rare rush of blood to his cheeks.
The future!
That was when sense had reasserted itself and he’d managed to pull himself out of there.
Veris snorted against the side of the horse. The future.
But once more an image of Brendan’s naked body as he strode over to let Veris in planted itself in Veris’ mind. The surprisingly broad shoulders and the lean length of him.
The willowy suppleness of his wife, displayed without a shred of self-consciousness in that almost see-through chemise. Veris had been able to trace her rounded breasts beneath the fabric. The darker shape of her nipples.
His body hardened at the memory of both of them, with so much flesh on display and so much knowledge in their heads. They were a siren song to his heart and mind and body.
“God help me,” he groaned and shut his eyes against the images. But the images played on against the insides of his eyelids, teasing and tempting. Taunting him.
* * * * *
Taylor drew the cover off her bed and laid it on the ground, then slipped out of the chemise. She pulled Brody down onto the cover with her. “Make me call your name as I come,” she told him, spreading her legs and trying to guide him between them.
“You wanton voyeur,” Brody accused her as he settled between her thighs. He pushed his cock into her, deep inside. She could feel him stretching her.
She arched in satisfaction as his fingers stroked her clit in round, quick, masterful knowing strokes as he thrust inside her.
“I love your lives, every second of them,” she breathed as her orgasm began to bloom.
“You love hearing about how we fell in love without you, one thousand years ago? How we fucked ourselves stupid without you?” he said harshly, ramming his cock into her in massive driving strokes.
“Yes!” She rolled her head back as her climax hit and gasped.
Brody thrust hard two more times, his fists slamming into the ground by her head as his hips drove into her. He gave a gasping groan as he came.
She felt the shift, the tension in him. The predator had awoken. With a smile, she rolled her head to one side and bared her neck. His teeth pierced her neck with the sweet-sour sting she had grown used to. “Brody,” she whispered, her hand in his hair. “I love you.”
His teeth withdrew, his tongue laved the small wounds. His lips kissed it better. His hands soothed her and told her the predator had withdrawn. “You love even that part of us you can’t have? Our pasts?” He shifted his weight so that he was lying next to her. His hand lazily circled her breasts.
“All of you is all of you,” she said simply. “You wouldn’t be who you are without all that history behind you. Of course I love all of it. Of course I find it all fascinating and want to know about all of it.” She picked up his hand and kissed it. “If I find watching the two of you together exciting now that all three of us are together, why wouldn’t I find it exciting when it was just the two of you?” She put his hand back on her breast. “Just because I wasn’t formally part of the two of you doesn’t mean I get to put my feelings onto the back burner. I still get excited by the idea of the two of you doing wicked things to each other.”
She looked around the tent. “It must be getting late. It’s getting darker in here.”
“The campfires are burning down,” Brody said. “It should be about nine o’clock.” He turned her chin so that her face was toward him. “No envy? No resentment?” he murmured.
She smiled, knowing he could see more in the dark than she could. “God no, Brody. How could I resent what happened long before I was born? Of course I wish Veris had the same devotion for me that he has for you, but I’m beginning to understand why he developed that attachment and why I can’t share it, now you’re finally telling me this stuff. It’s taking the sting away.”
Brody sat up in one smooth movement. “Devotion?” he repeated, with a stunned tone in his voice.
Taylor laughed. She sat up and kissed him. “Devotion,” she repeated firmly. “I’m betting that after your night next to the olive tree, he was back…oh, the very next night. Probably sneaked into your tent in the dead of the night and sneaked out again before morning. Made love to you all night and left you like a limp noodle while he went off to kill Fatimids and build siege engines.”
Brody was silent for a second or two. “You’re scary,” he said at last. “Only I had to work the next day, too.” He turned his head. “Someone’s coming,” he said softly and reached for the tunic she had slashed. “Slip behind the panels and I’ll throw your chemise to you.”
“More firewood! More light! The Lord Toulouse comes!” The cry came from the north.
“Raymond is coming,” Brody said, as Taylor stepped behind the panels. Her chemise drifted over the top of the panels and she struggled to find the hem in the dark and slide into it. She had just arranged the garment properly when the slashed tunic folded over the top of the panel, too. There was more and more light as she dressed, as the fires and noise built as people woke and prepared for the arrival of Raymond of Toulouse.
She slid the tunic off the panels and slipped it on over the chemise and stepped out from behind the panels. She bent over the trunk where she had seen Mary drop the belt from the bliaut earlier that day and fished it out from among the unknown paraphernalia she found there. Hastily, she wound the belt around her waist twice and knotted it so it hung low on her abdomen as she had seen women in medieval illustrations do. It pulled the tunic in around her waist, which would have to serve as an emergency bliaut.
Brody was already dressed in a matching tunic and leggings. She ran her hand under the tunic until she reached the top of the leggings and found bare flesh.
Brody grinned. “It was faster that way,” he murmured.
“Liar.” She withdrew her hand as two knights stepped aside at the entrance to the tent and made way for a slender man with red-gold hair, a long narrow nose and one eye. He seemed weighed down with care and troubles.
He nodded at Brody, who bowed from the waist. “My lord.”
Taylor took her cue. She curtsied. “My lord,” she murmured.
“If you had sent word,” Brody added, “I would have been happy to have attended you. You did not need to stir yourself away from your wife and family at this time.”
“I wanted air, anyway,” Raymond said dismissively. “My wife blames me for this misfortune and I grow tired of listening to her accusations. She was the one who insisted on bringing the babe with us.” He shrugged. “Enough of the matter, I grow weary of it. Water is the need that brings me here, Brendan. The siege engines will be complete in three days, but we only have enough water to last for one, maybe two days. I want you to find some and bring it back to the camp.”
Brody inclined his head. “All the wells and soaks in the region were poisoned by the Fatimids in the city, when they heard we were coming. There are no local water sources.”
“Then you’ll have to range farther afield. We must have fresh water—and fresh meat, too. Add that to your list, while you’re out there.”
“Out in the desert,” Brody clarified, his voice flat.
“Yes. We’ll need you back by the third day.” Raymond inclined his head toward Taylor. “Lady Norwich.”
She dipped into a much shallower curtsey this time, her mind racing.
Raymond nodded at Brody. “Three days, Brendan!”
“Three days, my lord,” Brendan replied.
Raymond stalked out of the tent, his knights falling in behind him like a train. There was a call for more light, more torches, the calls gradually fading as Raymond headed north, back to his camp.
Brody gripped the post on the back of his chair, his head down, his eyes narrowed as he thought hard.
“When does Jerusalem fall?” Taylor asked softly, in English.
“The fourteenth, four days from now,” Brody said, just as softly. “As soon as they get the siege engines finished, the Fatimids surrender.”
“If you’re away from the city for three days, then you’ll have no time to hunt Veris at all. Once the city falls, he and Selkirk will be gone.”
Brody glanced at her. “I can’t defy Raymond. It’s the equivalent of a direct military order. Besides, the entire army here
does
need water.”
“This didn’t happen, the first time around, did it? You didn’t go out for water.”
“No.”
“We’re already changing the past,” she said. “How much is this going to ripple down through history?”
Brody gave a short laugh. “Can we save the philosophy for when Veris is around to chew over it? Right now, I have enough worries to make me want to throw up.” He pressed at his temples. “How the hell am I supposed to be in two places at once for the next three days? We don’t even know if this time jump will let us
stay
here for the next three days!”
Taylor stepped around him so that her back was to the light from the campfires, then tried to turn Brody so that his face was to the light. “Look at me,” she said. “Take your hands away.”
He lifted his hands away and blinked. “Fucking perfect,” he muttered. “Now I need to feed on top of everything else.”
“I think it’s that you need to feed
because
of everything else, but okay,” she said. She stepped away from him, knowing her pulse and heartbeat would make it worse for him now. “Go and feed,” she said softly. “Take care of that first. In the meantime, I’ll do some thinking.”
Brody’s chest was rising and falling. He was breathing too fast. His gaze skittered around the tent.
“Brody!” she called. She couldn’t touch him to gain his attention.
He blinked and looked at her. His eyes were widely dilated. The predator was loose. This creature, though, wasn’t interested in bonding. It was searching for food and she fit the profile.
“Go and feed,” she said firmly. “Now.”
He swallowed. Then he nodded and picked up his knife and pushed it through his belt. Wordlessly, he left.
Taylor shivered as he passed her.
When he had left the camp proper she stepped out of the tent and waved to the nearest page. “Find Mary and tell her I need her assistance at once.”
The page took off at a dead run.
* * * * *
Mary turned out to be a co-conspirator, once Taylor explained what she needed. Twenty minutes later, Taylor steadied herself on the horse that had been brought around for her, feeling that she was very high up from the ground indeed. All the riding lessons she had been taking just for these moments weren’t much use when the saddle, bridle, stirrups and other modern equipment she had been learning to use looked nothing like what she was faced with now. Nor had she been learning to ride while wearing the medieval version of formal evening wear.
But there were reins and she remembered one very basic lesson that the instructor drummed into her from the start.
Your knees are one of the principal steering mechanisms!
Mary was waiting for her, seated upon a smaller gray mare. Taylor gave her a nervous smile. “I really don’t like horses,” she confessed.
Mary laughed. “You hide it well, my lady.”
Taylor gave the horse a gentle tap with her foot and it started forward. Mary kept up alongside her.
“You’d best show me the way, Mary,” Taylor told her. “I’ve been keeping to the camp so much, I’m not entirely sure where Selkirk’s encampment is.”
“Not to worry, my lady,” Mary said. “I know all the camps like the back of my hand.”
She edged her fat horse forward and Taylor’s trotted to keep up. Taylor could feel the warm night air lifting her veil. Soldiers and knights were watching them as they passed fires and tents, one encampment after another. They must have made quite a sight, for not every lord had brought his family with him. Only a very few women and their entourages of help and necessary support systems had made the arduous journey from more civilized climates.
Taylor in her formal wear and with her maid must be quite a sight for these lonely men. She was glad of the long knife tucked into the loop on her belt, even if it was on her right hand side.