“Good stitches,” he remarked. “Alexander did well.”
“I threw up when he was doing them,” Taylor confessed. Maybe if she kept the conversation on the disgusting and the normal, her body would cool down.
Veris laughed. “Your first stitches, I’m guessing.”
“Alexander said they were his first stitches on a woman, too.”
Veris abruptly sobered. For a fraction of a second, she saw heat in his eyes.
Anger
. Then an internal shield dropped down and his expression neutralized.
Taylor grew abruptly aware of Veris’ fingers touching her flesh outside the region of the wound. Accidental brushes. Tiny imprints of the tips of his fingers as he worked. Her skin was hypersensitive to his touch.
“There is no sign of bad blood,” he said. “But I want to clean the wound anyway, just to be sure.”
She nodded.
He rose and moved to the pot sitting next to the fire. There was a smaller cup sitting next to it and he dipped it into the pot and carried it back to Taylor. He soaked a cloth in it, concentrating on the task.
Silence was worse. Taylor cast about for an innocent subject. “How far from Jerusalem are we?”
“They figure we should reach the city by early afternoon tomorrow, if we leave at first light.”
She focused on his use of the neutral word “they”. It would have been Alexander who would have supplied that information, but Veris was not using his name. He had not liked the fact that Alexander, a man, had touched her. Taylor had reminded Veris of that by pointing out that Alexander had never had a female war victim before.
Was this jealousy? From Veris?
“Then good time was made today despite my slowing everyone down.” She was pleased.
“You?” He seemed surprised.
She sighed. “It wasn’t good military thinking, stepping in front of you that way. It slowed everyone down and made a late start. If we had been on campaign, or rations had been short, it could have been a critical blunder. No one said anything, but I know the men thought me foolish. There were other ways to deal with the man. Possibly dozens of them. I just reacted. I didn’t think. Not thinking can be foolish out here. I’ve read about it. I think even you have told me that, too.”
A great weight lifted from her as she finished speaking and she realized that this guilt had been with her all day, hovering in her sleep and the few short minutes she had been awake, making her deeply uncomfortable.
Veris paused in his work to look her fully in the eye. “Yes, it was foolish, if you are only thinking like a soldier. But you will always have my gratitude. Taylor…Yates. That is your name, is it not?
“You and Brody
have
covered a lot of ground.”
Veris smiled a little. “I insisted, after this morning.”
“You know that knowing too much about your own future can be dangerous, don’t you?”
“I didn’t ask about my future. I asked about you.” He went back to work. “There is a difference.”
“That’s typical of you. Splitting hairs so minute you need a microscope to see them.”
Veris lifted his head. “I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. I was teasing. And trying to change the subject.”
“Why change the discussion? You don’t like talking about yourself, do you? You’ve tried to deflect me twice since I expressed my gratitude. Or is it my gratitude that bothers you?” He sat back and put the bowl of water aside, apparently finished with the cleaning. He simply watched her, waiting for her answer.
Taylor licked her lips. “Yesterday, you considered me a hindrance.” She held up her palm, where the scab from his knife cut was still red and healing. “Now I have your gratitude. No one changes their minds that fast.”
His gaze shifted and dropped away from hers. “Brody warned me you do not deal with men as other women do. I keep forgetting that.”
“I treat men as my equals in all but physical strength,” Taylor said. “And I’m used to being treated the same way.”
Veris snorted. Then he glanced at her. “You do not jest,” he said slowly. “This explains much…” He seemed lost in thought. Absorbed for a long moment. Then he stirred and picked up the filthy corner of her tunic where it laid folded back against her shoulder. “This must be changed, and you should bathe and remove all that blood and filth lest it travel to the wound.”
“Good idea,” she said dryly. “I’d love to, except that I’m as weak as a kitten, high as a kite and have one good arm.”
Veris’ mouth lifted in a small smile. “I believe most of what you just said means you approve the idea in general. I will bathe you.” He nodded toward the big pot of water by the fire. “I have all the arrangements in hand.”
Her body seemed to burst into flames and melt into a pile of nameless goo at the idea.
“No, Veris. No. That would be… That’s totally inappropriate. Brody can help me, when he gets back from wherever he is.”
“Brody won’t be back tonight,” Veris said shortly. “He’s camping with his men.”
Taylor drew in a short, hot breath that sizzled on the way down. “Why? Why would he do that?”
“I asked him to.”
“Why?” She tried to breathe, to bring her galloping heart under control and to find words that wouldn’t offend this Veris.
Screw it
, she decided and looked him in the eye. “Are you trying to seduce me?”
Veris smiled a little. “No.” He rose and walked back to the fireplace and brought back the big pot, carrying it by the handle. “This is a common service doctors used to provide for their patients, in Pergamum. It seems to be a lost art, these days, or one passed on to servants as being too menial a task.” He put the pot on the ground close by and settled down next to her, pushing up his sleeves. “I want Brody in my life. You are wedded to his life in a way that the word ‘marriage’ does not even begin to describe. I want to know more about the woman who shares her man so selflessly, that she will take a spear in the chest in order to save his lover.”
“That’s not the only reason I did it,” Taylor replied.
Veris eased her torn tunic from her shoulders and off her arms. “The other reasons?”
Taylor said carefully, “In another time and place, I love you.”
“In that other time and place we are lovers, aren’t we?” Veris said flatly. He looked her in the eye and waited for her answer.
Taylor nodded. A single tear squeezed out from her eye despite her blinking. Veris picked it up on his finger. “You told me you loved me yesterday,” he reminded her. “Now it is only in that other time and place?”
Taylor closed her eyes. Veris, the master logician. She might have remembered not to lie around him. She opened them again. He was still waiting for her answer, so she gave him the truth, the only thing Veris would ever settle for. “I won’t be the one to ruin what you and Brody have now,” she said, trying to make her voice firm, her tone strong. But it came out sounding wobbly and pathetic. “I won’t be the one who gets in the way.”
Veris went back to gently removing her clothing. “You have a remarkable mind, Taylor Yates.”
But it was her body that was responding to what he was doing. She couldn’t help it. This was Veris, her longtime lover, his familiar hands removing her clothing. His scent. His voice. His eyes. His big body.
He even unbound her hair and laid it out on another blanket, leaving her stripped of everything while the night air brushed over her skin like a caress.
Veris first turned her carefully on her belly, then soaked a cloth in the water and washed her from neck to toe in long gliding strokes. He didn’t spare an inch of her. The cloth pushed between her legs and washed her cleft as thoroughly as any other part of her, while her face heated against the blanket.
This is Veris
, she reminded herself. His tongue has been there. His cock, his hands. Why be coy?
It kept coming back to the strangeness of this Veris. They didn’t know him. He didn’t know them.
She heard the cloth drop back into the pot. Then Veris’ hands touched her back, spreading out. Smoothing. The fingertips digging in.
Taylor breathed out as muscles she didn’t know she possessed seemed to all sigh and relax at once. Tendons uncramped, knots disappeared. Veris was not applying as much pressure over her wounded shoulder as he would normally and he wasn’t using the Shiatsu and acupressure techniques he would pick up in the centuries ahead, but he was giving her one of his infamous massages. These massages were deadly, as Brody and she had both learned over the years. If she was tired or Brody distracted by band business and Veris wanted their energy and undivided attention, a fifteen minute massage would have them relaxed, aroused as hell and ready to go.
Taylor swallowed hard. “What are you doing?” she asked, trying to make it sound casual.
“It’s called rubbing. An ancient medical technique. Very good for diagnostics. Good for the patient, too.” He sounded utterly sincere. He either didn’t know what he was doing to her, or he was playing the game very deep indeed.
She just couldn’t figure out why Veris would toy with her this way. He had to be unaware of what he was doing.
So Taylor struggled to subsume her building arousal and ensure that not a hint of it showed in her movements, nor that she made any sound that would give her away. She tried to relax her body. Utter stiffness would be just as telling a statement, too.
Veris remained silent throughout, which was also a first. She was used to him crooning suggestive comments and making other ribald statements as he worked, for Veris usually found the massages just as erotic as they did.
Finally, Veris turned her onto her back, rinsed the cloth and began to wash the blood and gore from her. The touch of the warm cloth and his gaze upon her breasts was almost welcome after the power of the massage. No one ever suffered from a gaze.
The cloth brushing over her nipples made her hiss and she disguised it by drawing in a deeper breath and trying to pretend it was a yawn. She kept her gaze away from Veris’ eyes. Her heart was already a runaway steam train. No need to stoke it further.
The cloth pushed down her body, cleaning thoroughly. Veris rinsed more often now, as the blood was much thicker, especially on the left. The cloth worked its way down to her hips.
Taylor clenched the blankets, fighting not to let her hips flex upward in reaction. The
need
to squirm now that she could not was like a neon sign in her mind’s eye. It was all she could think about. That and what Veris’ hand was doing with the cloth.
The cloth dipped, rinsed and came back to her thighs. His hand separated her legs and lifted one knee. It was gentle, clinical, cool. The cloth washed her leg from foot to hip. Veris followed the path of the cloth with his gaze.
Then the other leg.
Taylor could barely breathe. Veris had somehow ended up kneeling between her thighs. It was far too suggestive for her already seriously weakened pulse.
As he washed her leg, running the cloth from hip to ankle, she shuddered. It was impossible to stop it. Veris could not possibly fail to notice it.
The cloth paused only for a minute fraction of a second. He did not look at her. He finished with a sweep of her ankles and toes.
He tossed the cloth into the pot, but instead of lowering her leg to the ground he turned his head and kissed the inside of her ankle. His tongue swept across her flesh.
Taylor was helpless to prevent the shaky breath she drew in reaction, because she simply hadn’t expected him to do that and not on such a sensitive spot.
Veris closed his eyes and pressed her ankle against his cheek. After a moment he lowered her leg back to the blanket and stood up. For the first time since she had shuddered, Veris looked her directly in the eyes.
Taylor saw a maelstrom of emotions on his face. Confusion was the chief among them, along with a heated arousal that made her own look like a penny candle alongside a nuclear furnace.
Taylor caught her breath.
Veris dropped his hands to his belt buckle and hesitated and she knew why. This was her moment to say no. To halt it.
Her breath quickened.
Veris’ chest lifted as he drew in his own harsh breath. He undressed, his gaze never leaving hers except for brief moments when layers got in the way. Finally he stood naked before her. Magnificent. Exactly as she remembered. His cock was hard and upright.