Lady Of Eve

by Tamara Leigh

  Graeye relinquished Henri, and Gilbert gently drew her into his arms, exercising care in consideration of her injury. Though the wound healed well and, of late, caused little discomfort, he continued to handle her as if she were exceedingly fragile.

  She was not. Thus, it was she who pressed her body nearer his, who drew herself up to her toes to more fully give her mouth to him, who chased his lips back to hers when he started to lift his head, who whispered into him, “Night, come soon.”

  He drew back, searched her eyes, and said low, “Then I can be assured this time you will stay with me?”

  Remembering that long ago night when he had beseeched her to remain and she had agreed only so she might flee him, she drew a hand up and pressed it between their two hearts. “All through the night, all through the day, all through our lives, Husband. May God take note.”

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you enjoyed Graeye and Gilbert’s love story. If you would consider posting a review of Lady Of Eve at one of the online retailers below, even if only a sentence or two, I would so appreciate it. Thank you for joining me in the middle ages. I wish you many hours of inspiring, happily-ever-after reading.

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  EXCERPT

  DREAMSPELL

  A Medieval Time Travel Romance

  A TIME TO LIVE. A TIME TO DIE. A TIME TO DREAM.

  Sleep disorders specialist Kennedy Plain has been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. When her research subject dies after trying to convince her he has achieved dream-induced time travel and her study is shelved, she enlists herself as a subject to complete her research. But when she dreams herself into 14th-century England and falls into the hands of Fulke Wynland, a man history has condemned as a murderer, she must not only stay alive long enough to find a way to return to her own time, but prevent Fulke from murdering his young nephews. And yet, the more time she spends with the medieval warrior, the more difficult it is to believe he is capable of committing the heinous crime for which he has been reviled for 600 years.

  Baron Fulke Wynland has been granted guardianship of his brother’s heirs despite suspicions that he seeks to steal their inheritance. When the king sends a mysterious woman to care for the boys, Fulke is surprised by the lady's hostility toward him--and more surprised to learn she is to be his wife. But when his nephews are abducted, the two must overcome their mutual dislike to discover the boys' fate. What Fulke never expects is to feel for this woman whose peculiar speech, behavior, and talk of dream travel could see her burned as a witch.

  PROLOGUE

  London, 1376

  Even I would have killed for thee.

  Dawn lit the words etched in stone, bade him draw near. Aye, he would have killed for her, though not as it was told he had done. Still, this day he would die. For three years, he had languished in this wretched cell awaiting a trial that was only a formality, and yesterday he had been brought before his peers. Now, with the newborn day, the Lieutenant would take him through the city to Smithfield where a noose awaited him.

  He rose from his pallet and crossed his cell to where he had carved the words by which he would soon die. Head and shoulders blocking the light that shone through the small window, he traced each letter through to thee.

  “Nedy,” he whispered, remembering everything about her, from the gentle curve of her lips to her long legs to mannerisms not of this world. More, he remembered the last time they had kissed and the promise she had made him—a promise not kept. But at least he had loved.

  The door opened, but it was not the Lieutenant who came for him. Though the years had cruelly aged the man who stepped inside, rounding shoulders that had once been broad, there was no mistaking the third King Edward.

  “Wynland.” The king inclined his head.

  It was three years since Fulke had been granted such an audience, but he remembered himself and bowed. “Your majesty.”

  Edward peered into his prisoner’s face. “You are prepared to die?”

  “I am.”

  “Yet still you say it was not you?”

  Fulke stared at him, those few moments all the confirmation needed of the idle talk of guards. Edward’s mind was on the wane. Was the recent death of his son, the Black Prince, responsible? Though not since the queen’s passing seven years ago could he be said to be right in the head, this was worse, as evidenced by his neglect of affairs of state. The great King Edward was no longer worthy of the crown, the power he had once wielded now in the hands of his greedy mistress, Alice Perrers.

  “I trusted you,” Edward said, his jaw quivering in his fleshy face. “When all opposed your wardship of your nephews, I granted it. When my fair Lark was attacked, I would not believe ‘twas you.”

  It was an opening for Fulke to defend himself, but he was done with that.

  “Have you naught to say?” Edward demanded.

  “I have had my say, my liege. There is no more.”

  Edward cursed, turned to leave, and came back around. “Beg my forgiveness and mayhap I shall allow you an easier death.”

  “There is naught for which I require your forgiveness.” This did not mean he did not seek the forgiveness of others. But it was too late for that.

  Anger staining the king’s face, he looked around the cell and lingered on the words that covered the walls. “I was told of this. The troubadours pay well for the guards to bring them these words by which they compose songs of love.”

  Fulke considered all he had carved into the stone these past years—words never spoken.

  “Why do you do it?”

  Feeling a pang at his center, Fulke said, “That she might know.”

  Edward shook his head. “You loved wrong in choosing a woman such as that when you could have had—” His voice broke. “I would have forgiven you anything, except my Lark.” He stepped from the cell.

  As the door swung closed, Fulke stood motionless, each moment that passed drawing him nearer his last. Finally, he crossed to his pallet and retrieved the worn spoon that was only one of many to have lent itself to his writings. Thumbing the rough edge of all that remained of its handle, he eyed the last words he had inscribed: Even I would have killed for thee. They said much, but there was more.

  When they came for him an hour later, the final line read: And now I shall die for thee. As he stood to be shackled, he considered his words carved around the walls. They were for Nedy, wherever she was.

  CHAPTER ONE

  University Sleep Disorders Clinic

  Los Angeles, California

  “I was there,” Mac said amid the tick and hum of instruments. “Really there.”

  Kennedy waited for his eyes to brighten and a grin to surface his weary face. Nothing. Not even a flicker of humor. Dropping the smile that was as false as the hair sweeping her brow, she said, “Sorry, Mac, I’m not buying it.” She turned to the bedside table and peered at the machine that would monitor his sleep cycles.

  “You think I’m joking?”

  Of course he was. For all the horror MacArthur Crosley had endured during the Gulf War, he was an incorrigible joker, but this time he had gone too far. She unbundled the electrodes.

  “I’m serious, Ken.”

  Her other subjects called her Dr. Plain, but she and Mac went back to when she had been a doctoral student and he was her first subject in a study of the effects of sleep deprivation on dreams. That was four years ago and, at this rate, it might be another four before she was able to present her latest findings. If she had that long…

  Feeling the snugness of the knit cap covering her head, she said, “Serious, huh? I’ve heard that one before.”

  The familiar squeak of wheels announced his approach. “It happened.”

  Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking, the minute hand climbing toward midnight.

  “Listen to me, Ken. What I have to tell you is important—”

  “Time travel through dreams,
Mac?” She uncapped a tube of fixative and squeezed a dab onto the electrodes’ disks. “How on earth did you hatch that one?” Though she might concede some dreams prophesied the future, time travel was too far out there. “Let’s get you hooked up.”

  “That’s not what I’m here for.”

  She turned and found herself sandwiched between the table and the wheelchair that served as his legs.

  “I’ve been holding out on you, Ken. I would have told you sooner, but I couldn’t—not until I was certain it wasn’t just an incredibly real dream.”

  “Come on, Mac. It’s midnight, I haven’t had dinner yet, and I’m tired.”

  He clamped a hand around her arm. “I’m dead serious.”

  Though she knew she had nothing to fear from him, alarm leapt through her when a tremor passed from him to her. Never had she seen Mac like this, and certainly he had never taken his jokes this far. Was it possible that what he said was true—rather, he believed it was true? If so, he was hallucinating, a side-effect not uncommon among her subjects, especially beyond sixty hours of sleep deprivation. But she had never known Mac to succumb to hallucinations, not even during an episode four months back when his consecutive waking hours broke the two hundred mark. That had complications all its own.

  He released her and pushed back. “Sorry.”

  Kennedy stared at him. The whites of his eyes blazed red, the circles beneath shone like bruises, the lines canyoning his face went deeper. Forty-five years old, yet he looked sixty, just as he had when his two hundred and two waking hours had put him into a sleep so deep he had gone comatose. But he had reported eighty-seven waking hours when he called an hour ago.

  He had lied. Kennedy nearly cursed. She knew what extreme sleep deprivation looked like, especially on Mac. True, he had cried wolf before, convinced her of the unimaginable to the point she would have bet her life he was telling the truth, but this came down to negligence. And she was guilty as charged.

  She consulted her clipboard and scanned the previous entry. Five weeks since his last episode, a stretch considering he rarely made it three weeks without going a round with his souvenir from the war. But why would he under-report his waking hours? Because of the safeguard that was put in place following his coma, one that stipulated all subjects who exceeded one hundred fifty waking hours were to be monitored by a medical doctor?

  Knowing her own sleep would have to wait—not necessarily that she would have slept since she was also intimate with insomnia—she said, “How many hours, Mac?”

  He pushed a hand through his silvered red hair. “Eighty…nine.”

  “Not one hundred eighty nine?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I would if you’d listen.”

  Realizing she was picking an argument when she should be collecting data, she rolled a stool beneath her. “Okay, talk.”

  He dragged a tattooed hand down his face. “The dreams aren’t dreams. Not anymore. When I went comatose, I truly crossed over, and that’s when I realized it was more than a dream. And I could have stayed.” He slammed his fists on the arms of his wheelchair. “If not for the doctors and their machines, I would have stayed!”

  Pain stirred at the back of Kennedy’s head. “You would have died.”

  “In this time. There I would have lived.”

  Then he truly believed he had been transported to the Middle Ages of his serial dream. Interesting. “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  Was this more than sleep deprivation? Had Mac snapped? “I know it seems real—”

  “Cut with the psychobabble! Sleep deprivation is the key to the past. It’s a bridge. A way back. A way out.”

  She took a deep breath. “Out of what?”

  “This.” He looked to the stumps of his legs, wheeled forward, and tapped her forehead. “And this.”

  Stunned by his trespass, Kennedy caught her breath.

  He sank back in his wheelchair. “In my dreams, I have legs again. Have I told you that?”

  She gave herself a mental shake. “Many times.”

  “I walk. I run. I feel my legs down to my toes. It’s as if the war never happened.”

  She laid a hand on his shoulder. “It did happen.”

  “Not six hundred years ago.”

  She lowered her hand. “What makes you believe this isn’t just an incredibly real dream?”

  “I don’t know the places in this dream, and I’ve never seen any of the people.”

  That was his proof? Though dreams were often forged of acquaintances and familiar landscapes, it wasn’t unusual to encounter seemingly unfamiliar ones.

  He reached behind his wheelchair, pulled a book from his knapsack, and pushed it into her hands. “I found this in an antique book shop a while back.”

  It was old, its black cover worn white along the edges, all that remained of its title a barely legible stamped impression. She put her glasses on. “The Sins of the Earl of…?”

  “Sinwell,” Mac supplied.

  Kennedy forced a laugh. “Catchy title.” She ran her fingers across the numbers beneath. “1373 to 1399. History…never my best subject.”

  “He’s the one.”

  “Who?”

  “Fulke Wynland, the man who murdered his nephews so he could claim Sinwell for himself.”

  Mac’s dream adversary. Though he had told her the dream arose from a historical account, he hadn’t named the infamous earl or the British earldom for which Wynland had committed murder.

  “I’m in there.” Mac nodded at the book.

  Kennedy raised an eyebrow.

  “Look at the pages I marked.”

  A half dozen slips protruded from the book. She opened to the first and skimmed the text. There it was: Sir Arthur Crosley. Okay, so someone in the past had first claim to a semblance of MacArthur Crosley’s name. What proof was that? She read on. With the King of England’s blessing, the errant knight pledged himself to the safekeeping of orphaned brothers John and Harold Wynland. She read the remaining passages, the last a single sentence that told of Sir Arthur’s disappearance prior to the boys’ fiery deaths.

  Kennedy set the book on the bedside table. “You’re telling me you’re Sir Arthur?”

  “I am.”

  “Mac, just because your name—”

  “When I first read it, there was no mention of Crosley. His name—my name—appeared only after the dreams began. And when the book says I disappeared, guess where I went.”

  Pound, went her headache.

  “That’s when I came out of the coma, Ken.”

  Worse and worse. “But you’ve reported having these dreams since then. If what you say is true, where are those experiences documented?”

  “They’re not. Though I’ve returned four times since the coma, the present keeps pulling me back before I can save the boys from that murderer.” Fury brightened his eyes a moment before his gaze emptied.

  “Mac?”

  “Fifty waking hours isn’t enough, not even a hundred. It takes more.”

  This explained the man before her whose years came nowhere near the age grooving his face. “Two hundred?”

  “It’s a start.”

  She held up a hand. “The truth. How many hours?”

  “Two hundred seventeen.”

  She came off the stool as if slung from it. “You know how dangerous—”

  “Better than anyone.”

  He didn’t look like a madman, but he had to be. “You’re forcing it, aren’t you? You could have slept days ago, but you won’t let yourself.”

  “Dead on.”

  Kennedy reached to rake fingers through her hair, but stopped mid-air. There was too little left beneath the cap, stragglers that served as painful reminders of her former self. She laid a hand to Mac’s arm. “You’re going to kill yourself.”

  His smile was almost genuine. “That’s the idea.”

  Over-the-edge crazy. Deciding her efforts were better spen
t admitting him to the university hospital, she straightened.

  “I’m not going,” Mac said.

  For all his delusions, he could still read her like a book. “Please, Mac, you have to.”

  “It’s my way out.”

  Pound. Pound. “You think I’m just going to stand by and let you die?”

  “You don’t have a say in it.”

  “But you’re my patient. I can’t—”

  “You think I like living in this thing?” He gripped the arms of his wheelchair. “When I lost my legs, I lost everything—my wife, my boys, my career. All I do is take up space, and I’m tired of it. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  Didn’t she? Her world was crumbling, and though she had no choice as to whether tomorrow came, he did.

  His gaze swept to her cap, and he muttered a curse. “I’m sorry, Ken.”

  She crossed the observation room and stared through the window at the monitoring equipment.

  “How’s the chemo going?”

  She tossed her head and achingly acknowledged how much she missed the weight of her hair. “It’s going well.” A lie. There had been progress early on, but the tumor was gaining ground.

  “The truth, Ken,” he turned her own words against her.

  She swung around. “This isn’t about me.”

  “You’re wrong.” He wheeled toward her. “My dream is a way out of the hell I’m living. And it could be yours.”

  Nuts. Positively nuts.

  He rolled to a halt. “Not my dream, of course. Something of your own choosing.”

  Pound. Pound. Pound. She stepped around him. “I need to take something for this headache.”

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll discuss this some more.”

  After a long moment, he said, “Sure. Can I borrow your pen?”