Miles’s eyes widened, and his throat worked. “Then lead the way,” he said.
She knew she must sound slutty to him—only he’d say something like brazen. But she couldn’t think of a better way to spend her last night on earth than in bed with this rifleman. She pushed aside the little voice in the back of her mind screaming Protocol violation! If she hadn’t ruined everything by letting him see her technology and telling where she’d come from, surely she could have one night with him. Who could stop her now?
They turned at the next corner, and she led him to the shop, now empty for the holiday, drew out her key, and unbolted the heavy lock. After locking the door again behind them, she led him up two flights of stairs to her plain rooms, cold and dark on this winter evening. A few embers still remained of the morning’s fire, enough for her to light a few candles.
She took the blue dress out of her wooden chest while Miles perched on the edge of her unmade four-poster bed, watching her. “You could turn your back,” she pointed out.
“I could,” he agreed mildly. “But who knows what you might take it in your head to do while I’m not watching?”
She thought of the poison hidden in her reticule. She could insist, and swallow it as soon as he wasn’t looking. But she wouldn’t. She needed to get back to her time machine and destroy it first. And besides, she was going to have one last Christmas. One last night. She shrugged. “Watch, then.”
Reaching behind her neck, she began unhooking the brown dress’s fastenings. She’d had plenty of practice by now at getting into and out of nineteenth-century clothing on her own—and her wardrobe had been made as easy to manage as possible without looking inauthentic. She’d put this dress on and taken it off again a dozen times. But under Miles’s dark-eyed stare, her fingers fumbled, and she muttered a curse, trying to find the next hook.
“Do you need assistance?” he asked. His tone was bland, but both amusement and arousal danced in his eyes.
“Yes,” she replied, just to see what he’d do.
With a crooked grin, he stood up, crossed the small distance separating them, and nudged her to turn until her back was to him. He made quick work of the row of hooks, but his breath grew ragged. Experimentally, she edged backward and felt a welcome hardness press against her. She chuckled, low in her throat.
He sucked in his breath and caught her by the waist, holding her still. “Are all women from 2013 this forward?”
She leaned closer to him. “I thought I was being backward just now.”
“Just so.”
“Well, we are when we know what we want.”
His arms entirely circled her waist now, pulling her body against him. He kissed her down her neck, then turned his head to nibble at her shoulder. “I find I like a tall woman,” he murmured.
As good as everything he did felt, Sydney wanted to play a more active role. She twisted to face him. He was just the size she liked, tall enough to keep her from feeling like a giant, but not so huge that he looked like he belonged in the NBA. “And I like a tall man.” She took his face between her hands and kissed him.
He knew what to do with his lips and tongue, and she savored the taste and smell of him, clean and male without the overlay of musky-scented soaps, deodorants, and body spray she was used to with men of her time. She ran her hands down his chest, exploring the braid and buttons of his uniform coat and looking for its fastenings.
He caught her hands and broke the kiss. “I’m expected for dinner in half an hour’s time, and it’s at least a quarter hour’s walk.”
He was really stopping this, after she’d finally decided to screw caution, screw the Protocol, and enjoy this night and him? “You do think I’m too forward.”
“Under your circumstances? Not at all.”
He understood, then. Maybe a little too well. “Then why don’t we stay here?”
“Because I promised my friends I’d dine with them.”
“They’d worry.”
“They would, and I don’t like to break my word.”
“We could come back here afterward.” There, let him think her forward, or brazen, or even slutty. She didn’t care as long as it got him into her bed.
“I did say I wasn’t letting you out of my sight, didn’t I?”
…
As they walked toward his friends’ lodgings, Mrs. Sydney—no, Miss Dahlquist—no, just Sydney, though he must be careful to call her Mrs. Sydney when they were in public—resumed her English accent and cultivated speech without any prompting. When Miles commented on how well she did, she grinned.
“Time travelers need a great many skills. We must know our science, above all else, or we would never be approved to go. But we must also study history, and all the little details of everyday life. You’d be surprised how much such things change—clothing, especially.”
“Having seen my grandmother’s portrait, that surprises me not at all.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t. I’m glad Professor Krakowski is researching the Napoleonic Wars now and not the American Revolution. I would’ve found all that hair powder and those massive skirts even more difficult to adjust to.”
He asked how she dressed two hundred years from now and learned that in her time, women were as free to wear trousers as men, and that when they did wear skirts, they were generally much shorter. Difficult as it was to tear his mind away from the vision of Sydney in garments that put her legs fully on display—how long and lithe her legs were, he had noted even beneath her shift and petticoat—he asked her about the professor she’d mentioned, too. That drew an eager explanation of how the universities of her day functioned, and how her University of Washington, in a city and state still decades away from existence, had become especially noted in the budding field of Historical Epidemiology—studying the illnesses of the past to both illumine history and guide modern medicine.
Her professor and mentor had gained fame shortly after time travel had been invented by traveling back to a war early in the twentieth century. Sydney refused to give him any details of the course of the war or its combatants, but noted that its end had been marked by an especially deadly influenza whose spread had been hastened by the troop movements and the multitude of soldiers living crowded together on bases and training camps. Her professor’s research had led to a greater understanding of this disease, which in turn saved countless lives when a similar disease had menaced her own time.
“Isn’t that dangerous, to go anywhere so deadly?” Miles asked.
“Of course it is, but all of it is risky. Here I am, for instance.” She sobered, but then resolutely lifted her chin. “We’re very careful,” she said, “both to ensure that we don’t bring any of our time’s ailments that you haven’t been exposed to back to the past, and that we’re ready for what we encounter.”
Miles thought he understood better now why Sydney was so dedicated to her work. Clearly time travel was a rare and hard-earned accomplishment for an ambitious scholar. The first time machines had been invented when she was a girl of thirteen, she told him as they walked on. She was the daughter of a mother who taught history and a father who worked as a physician. Growing up surrounded by talk of the past and of sickness and healing, she’d been fired by the idea of combining both passions as one. She’d worked hard at languages, history, and sciences all through her schoolgirl days, and this journey to his time was both the crowning accomplishment of more than a decade’s study and the longed-for first step of a career following in the footsteps of her noted mentor.
No wonder she followed the rules. No wonder she believed she could not belong in his time. But he still couldn’t allow her to destroy herself. He must persuade her to stay and to make her life here. In his Now.
…
Mostly, dinner with Miles’s friends made Sydney feel achingly homesick. They were all kind and courteous, perfectly ready to welcome an unexpected guest into their company. She couldn’t speak German, but all the German officers at least spoke French, and most
had a little English.
But their festive dinner simply wasn’t recognizable as her Christmas. So she ate roast beef followed by plum pudding and longed for turkey and stuffing with pumpkin pie for dessert. She raised her glass in the toasts and remembered how at home after Christmas Eve dinner, everyone trooped down to the den to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story. When the German officers sang—Miles murmured in her ear that the King’s German Legion was noted for being the most musical set in the army—she tried not to mind that none of their carols were familiar and that she couldn’t ask them to sing Silent Night because it hadn’t been written yet.
But after the meal, one of the German officers announced that they wanted to introduce their guests to an old custom of their people and led them into a parlor, where a lemon tree had been festooned with ribbons and oranges. With a flourish, the officer lit a couple dozen candles that had been fastened to the branches. The Germans sang another carol, and after some urging, the British officers countered with I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In.
Suddenly it felt like Christmas after all. She lurked in the shadows where no one could see her tears, but of course she couldn’t hide them from watchful Miles. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s a Christmas tree,” she said. “I never thought I’d see one again.” Never mind that it was the smallest, shabbiest, strangest tree she’d seen outside of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.
He studied her in thoughtful silence. Not long afterward, the party broke up and they made their way back toward her rooms through the wintry night. She found herself telling him all about the Christmas tree at her parents’ house. “I have my own apartment, but I always come over the first Sunday in December to help decorate it,” she said, slipping back into her own accent. “Some people change out their ornaments every few years, make the whole tree have a color scheme or theme, but Mom kept all the ornaments that used to be her mother’s, and all the ones my brother Brian and I made when we were little kids at school. This year—I mean 2013—is my niece Ava’s third Christmas. Last year she wasn’t old enough to understand. She just smiled and laughed at all the lights. This year I could hardly wait to see her on Christmas morning when she found all her presents under the tree.”
She couldn’t stop the tears, and Miles drew her into the shadows and let her cry on his shoulder again. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, of course you must miss them dreadfully,” he said.
“I—I can’t talk about them anymore. It’s too much.” She leaned back for a moment to scrub away her tears, then took his face between her hands and kissed him hard. After a startled moment, he responded. His tongue slipped into her mouth and she savored the taste of port along with his own masculine flavor.
He broke the kiss first without loosening his grip on her. “I believe you said you didn’t intend to let me out of your sight,” she said when he didn’t speak.
“I did, and I meant it, but are you sure? I could sit by the fire and leave you the bed, if you’d like.”
“Where would the fun be in that?” she asked. If this was her last night on earth, she meant to enjoy it to the fullest.
He gave a startled gasp.
“I know I’m not acting like a lady, by your standards,” she told him. “And I’m sure I’m shocking you, but I don’t care. I don’t want to let you out of my sight, either. I want you.”
He kissed her again, hard. “I like your manner of shocking.”
Grief forgotten, she took him by the hand, and they wove their way through the throngs making their way to Christmas Eve mass.
They hurried back to her apartment and stumbled up the stairs together. Sydney had never been more aroused in her life by the time they made it to her bedroom. She shut the door hard, latched the lock, and pushed him against the doorway. He shrugged out of his greatcoat and she pushed her cloak off her shoulders before she went to work on his buttons. God, how many times had she fantasized about this, getting to unwrap her very own sexy Rifleman?
His hands were busy, too, working the hooks at the back of her gown, shoving it down past her shoulders as soon as he had it loosened enough. She heard a seam tear and she didn’t care. She laughed softly.
“Sorry,” he whispered, then bit her earlobe.
“No, you aren’t.”
“Not especially. It can be mended.”
“Never mind.” It wasn’t as if she planned to wear the dress again. And she wasn’t going to stop now and tell him why a ripped bodice cracked her up. So instead she pushed his jacket off and felt for his trouser buttons.
Then he bent to kiss along her neck, tonguing the hollow of her collarbone. One hand grasped her by the waist, pulling her against his erection, while the other dipped inside the neckline of her shift, where her corset pushed her breasts high. When his fingertips found her nipple, she moaned softly and threaded her fingers through his crisp, dark hair. She’d hated wearing a corset, but at a moment like this, it was sexier than any bra she’d ever had.
“You’re still wearing too many clothes,” she complained.
“So are you. But we have all night, do we not? I had no plans to sleep.”
“Me neither.”
“Then why don’t we slow down a little?”
“Okay,” she said. Off his blink, she added, “That’s twenty-first century for Yes, that’s an excellent notion.” She stepped out of the circle of his arms, took him by the hand, and led him to the side of the bed. Holding him at arm’s length, she admired him in the dim firelight. What was it about a man in an old-fashioned white linen shirt? His skin seemed to glow golden brown by contrast, and his dark eyes shone black as he gazed at her.
She wanted to see more. She ran her hands down his shirt front, enjoying the lean strength of his body beneath her fingertips, then reached again for the buttons of his trousers. She hadn’t had any practice with nineteenth-century men’s clothes, and she fumbled at her work, but he waited patiently, his eyes fixed on her hands.
At last she found the final button and pushed the trousers and drawers down past his hips. His cock sprang free and she cupped the head in her hand. So smooth and heavy and warm. She couldn’t wait to have him inside her.
But he took her hand away. “Your turn now.”
She wore front-lacing stays—the wardrobe consultant had said they were the easiest kind to manage without help—and he looked her straight in the eye as he untied the laces, pushing the corset apart until it was loose enough to ease over her head. She lifted her arms to help him but otherwise left it to him to undress her.
Her nipples were rock-hard. The linen of her shift, now lying loose against her skin, was almost a caress in itself, enough to heighten the growing throbbing between her thighs, but it was so much better when Miles cupped her breasts in his hands, palming them through the fabric. Throwing her head back, she leaned into his touch.
“Like that, do you?”
“Mm.”
“I wager you’ll like this even better.” Smoothly, he tugged her shift above her head, leaving her bare except for her stockings and shoes. Somehow it was even hotter than being completely naked. He stood stock still for a moment, just looking at her. “My God, Sydney. You are so, so beautiful.”
Then he lifted one of her breasts up like an offering and bent his head to take the nipple in his mouth.
Oh, God, he knew exactly what to do with his tongue, light and deft and swirling, teasing her peak even harder. She grasped his head and held him firmly in place, arching her hips toward him. His cock, so hard, so long, pressed against her, and all she needed to do was to open her legs and fall back on the bed.
But she wanted to see more of him first. She reached for his shirt and pushed it over his head.
His body was perfect. Not cut like a gym rat, but all tight, lean muscle from a life spent riding and marching. She rested her palms against his chest, in the light dusting of chest hair springing from his tawny skin, paler than his tanned face but still warm a
nd olive in contrast to her own Scandinavian whiteness.
“Has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?” she asked, then mentally cursed herself for how inane it sounded.
But he smiled. “Not in quite some time. And has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?”
“Not for years.”
“Well, then the men of your century have been remiss. I’ve never seen more beautiful hair.” He stroked it, finding her hairpins and scattering them to the floor until her hair hung free, almost to her waist. She’d kept her hair long ever since she’d decided to become a time traveler. While she could have cut it before coming to 1810—it had been one of the rare historical moments when short hair had been in style for women—she’d left it long, reasoning that for all she knew she might be sent to 1860 next.
But all she had left was now. She shook her hair over her shoulders until it half-covered her breasts. Men liked that. At least, the two lovers she’d had in her lifetime both had. And Miles, for all that he was unlike Jason from high school or Kyle from her Stanford days in almost every other way, seemed just as hypnotized by the sight of her breasts peeking through her hair.
“Do you know, I don’t want to wait any longer,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
He swept back her blankets with one hand and they tumbled together onto the bed. She tugged him atop her even as he pressed her onto the rustling straw mattress. She couldn’t quite hold back a giggle, and he raised an eyebrow.
“The beds at home aren’t this noisy,” she explained.
“Ah. All feather beds?”
“No, but do you really want to talk about what people use for mattress stuffing in two hundred years?”
He gave her a long, intense kiss and ran a caressing hand from her shoulder down to her hips, stopping along the way to linger at her breast. He shifted, and she wrapped her legs around him as he entered her—mm, such a good fit, hard and long and strong. Every time she’d had sex before, she’d made sure her boyfriend wore a condom. For a moment, she panicked at the unexpected feel of him bare inside her, warm and slick and intimate. One last night, she reminded herself. Stop thinking. Enjoy it.
Christmas Past (Entangled Ever After) Page 3