Kiss Across Chains (Kiss Across Time Series)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “But none of them know what I know.” Taylor took a deep breath. She was in this now. She had to keep riding the bluff out. “My husband is not attending mass today because he has business in the city…with Genesios. I thought I might invite Genesios to dinner tonight. Do I have reason to, Oresme?”

  Oresme studied her, his face impassive. “No, there’s no need to invite him to dinner,” he said flatly. Anger flickered in his eyes. “Tonight, then.”

  He nodded shortly and turned and walked away, his cloak flicking her robe as he whirled.

  Taylor returned to the protection of her guards and slaves. She was shaking, but she didn’t know if it was the aftermath of fear or excitement for the coming night.

  * * * * *

  Close to eleven p.m. by Taylor’s internal clock -- long after the slaves had extinguished all but the most essential lamps and Matthew had bid a stiff and formal goodnight before going to his own chamber -- there was a whisper of sound that was not wind, and Taylor stirred from her sentry duty to peer down the corridor, her heart leaping.

  She had begun her vigil standing at the beginning of the long, wide passageway that ran through the center of the house and connected most of the formal rooms to the slave’s quarters and work rooms. Everyone called the passage the processional, because of its width and elegance. Brody would be brought this way to reach her chambers and so she had stationed herself at the turn from the processional to the entrance to her quarters, to watch and wait in the darkness.

  Eventually, she had slid from her feet to her butt, as one hour had turned to two, then crept into the third.

  Then the whisper of sound. She knew that sound. She had heard it the night they had arrived in Constantinople.

  Chains.

  Taylor peered down the almost-dark processional, watching for movement, her heart thundering now. Oresme was going to abide by his word. In a moment or two she would see Brody and would be free to speak to him and above all, touch him.

  Taylor fought to reign in her agitation and her joy. Neither of them would help her if something went wrong. Brody was not yet in her chamber.

  She climbed to her feet and waited.

  The chink of chains must have been unintended, for the first confirmation she had of Brody’s arrival was the dark shape of men gliding down the processional soundlessly. They were shadowy and impossible to identify except by size and height, which told her that Oresme was not among them.

  Kale hurried around them and came toward Taylor. “All of these men are to be allowed in your chamber?” she asked in a harsh whisper.

  “Just the Celt,” Taylor murmured.

  Kale hurried back to the swiftly moving group and spoke in an undertone to the leader.

  By then the group had reached Taylor. They were all wearing hooded cloaks, she realized, which disguised their features and had let them pass through the city streets without remark. The leader dropped his hood to look at her. He had a scar down one side of his face, and the eye on that side was milky and blind. “We put him in your chamber, remove the chains and withdraw to take up guard at the doors and windows. We won’t give him the run of the place. He’s too clever. No offense my lady.”

  She sighed. “Agreed,” she murmured, and stepped aside.

  They moved passed her, pushing the taller figure between them.

  Brody.

  Her heart thudded painfully.

  Taylor followed the group into the interconnected rooms that made up her quarters. They stopped in the middle of the first room, at the very edge of the area where the rugs were spread across the floor and cushions were scattered around the edges. Delicate, sheer curtains hung from the ceiling to separate the area from the divans further on, and to shield it from anyone who might be able to see in the unshuttered windows. It was a place for relaxing.

  The leader turned and spoke shortly to his men. They tugged on the chains they were holding, unlocking them from the cuffs around Brody’s wrists. Both chains and cuffs had been hidden under the cloak.

  Another chain had been looped through a collar around his neck.

  Then the cloak was stripped from him and the guards departed as promised, leaving Brody standing alone, staring down at the cuffs about his wrists.

  Taylor gritted her teeth, holding back any sound she might make, for Brody looked terrible.

  In the few days since she had last seen him, his physical condition seemed to have deteriorated badly. In the dark tunnels, just before they had separated, she had noticed the unkempt state of his hair, but little else, for she had been busy dealing with the fact of their arrival in Constantinople and Veris’ absence.

  Now, she realized that the wild, tangled locks were in keeping with the rest of him. The tunic he wore was barely worthy of the name. It was a simple shift of rough cloth. It was filthy and the ragged hem was barely long enough to preserve his modesty. It would give him no protection against cold, cuts, scrapes or more. One shoulder had ripped open and had been roughly knotted together again.

  His body was similarly covered in dirt and sweat. Where there was not dirt, she could see bruises, cuts and scrapes.

  He has been beaten. More than once.

  She remembered the blood she had seen seeping through the snowy white driver’s tunic they had made him wear. That tunic had been much more presentable, even smart. Of course if he had got blood on it, someone probably would have found it offensive and taken it out on him.

  “Brody,” she said, moving toward him. “What do you need?”

  He lifted his head to look at her, his dark gaze drilling into her. “Do not touch me!”

  The fury and repulsion in his tone was enough to make her stagger backwards, shock deluging her like a bucket of ice water.

  “You don’t mean that,” she said firmly.

  “I haven’t bathed in the four days we’ve been here, and god knows how long this body went without clean water before that. I sweat and there is blood and more on my body that I won’t burden your conscience with.” He swallowed. “Right now, you are the most precious…the most beautiful thing I have beheld in my entire life—” He looked away and Taylor saw him swallow. Hard.

  He looked back at her again. In the moonlight filtering through the curtains, she could not see the nuances of his expression, but…were his eyes shining?

  “I didn’t know where they were taking me,” he said, his voice low.

  Of course they wouldn’t tell him. He was a slave. They would just bundle him up and tug him to where they wanted him.

  Brody shrugged, a tiny move of his shoulders. “There was some trouble yesterday after the racing. I thought...well, it doesn’t matter. I thought wrong.”

  Taylor knew exactly what he had been thinking. The trouble had centered on him. He had assumed he was being taken away to be dealt with conveniently in some lonely place where there were no witnesses.

  Then it occurred to her with the impact of a too-close thunderclap: Brody was human. That meant blood, sweat…and tears.

  Her step towards him was involuntary and he took a step back in reaction.

  Taylor lifted her hands up, palm out. “A bath,” she declared.

  “Do we have that much time?” he asked doubtfully.

  “We have all night,” she assured him.

  The expression on Brody’s face was infinitely wise. She had never seen Brody show his years as much as he had in that one moment. Perhaps it took being human once more to feel the weight of centuries of being non-human. He looked tired and old. “They’ll come for me long before dawn,” he told her. “As soon as they get tired of waiting, or they get bored or if it gets cold out there, they’ll be back.”

  “That wasn’t what I agreed to.”

  “You’re a woman. Do you think they care what you agreed to?”

  Taylor wanted to scream a protest over that, but she couldn’t. Attitudes were different here and now. She considered it from Brody’s perspective. “You may be right, but I have Oresme over a barrel and he kn
ows it.”

  “You bargained with Oresme?” Brody shook his head. “I didn’t think that snow pea had a price. I’m impressed.”

  “I have a feeling he’s a man who stays bought.” Taylor walked around Brody and turned to look at him. “However long you’re in my rooms for, nothing else happens until you have bathed. Let’s take care of that.” She held out her hand.

  After a long moment, he lifted his hand and slid it into hers.

  His hand was warm.

  Chapter Eleven

  There was water standing by from earlier in the evening. It was still warm. Taylor had already earned a reputation for requiring hot water at all hours of the day.

  She placed the big bathing bowl on the tiles and slid the hassock close by. She would need to stand on it to reach higher than Brody’s head. From the shelf nearby, she unstopped the jar of unguent that foamed on contact with water and was lightly scented and placed it next to the bowl. “This is supposed to have some medicinal properties that I have yet to discover,” she told Brody, “but it makes great soap.”

  She lifted the heavy urn of hot water and climbed onto the hassock with some difficulty, for the hem of her robe got in the way and she needed both hands to lift the urn. Then she looked at Brody where he stood by the window. “Your shower waits.”

  Slowly, he padded across the tiles, his bare feet making no sound. He seemed to be weighed down by heavy thoughts. Even his movements were slow as he stripped the tunic from him. He hesitated before he stepped into the bowl, then he gingerly placed his feet on the broad base. In the moonlight the copper wrist bands flashed as he moved.

  His head was bowed again.

  Brody’s posture, his silence and introversion worried her. Taylor considered him as she lifted the urn and slowly poured a third of the urn over his head, turning the spout so all his hair was properly wetted.

  Of course coming back to this time would have an impact on him. She had seen for herself the awful after-effects Brody’s enslavement had delivered, sixteen centuries into the future, so returning to Constantinople would be a terrible trauma.

  It was just that the Brody standing before her was so different from the man she knew and loved. The Brody she knew devoured life. He laughed a great deal – usually he threw his head back and let his laughter loose with a bellow that shook his shoulders. He did everything with gusto—music, reading, dancing, making love.

  Over the last three nights, in her lonely and luxurious bed, Taylor had lain awake hoping that Brody’s enthusiasm for life, plus sixteen centuries of living and the undying love of two people would give him the resiliency he needed to survive the slave quarters a second time.

  Now, as she put down the urn and poured some of the ‘soap’ onto his hair, she wondered if her hope had been a way of trying to console herself for not reaching him sooner, or if she had underestimated the intimidation and soul-destruction that came with being a slave.

  As Taylor reached out to plunge her fingers into the wet, tangled mess of knots and filth, to lather the soap and distribute it, Brody’s chin lifted and his hand gripped her wrist. “No,” he said flatly, his voice low.

  “But surely you want clean hair?” she asked reasonably.

  “I’ll do it,” he told her. “I won’t have you touching me. Not like this.” He glanced toward the divan sitting a few feet away, where piles of thick folded cloth sat. They were adequate towels. “Sit down, Taylor. Relax. You must have waited up for me to arrive, so I know you’re tired.” He grimaced. “I remember what tired is like, now. It’s not fun.”

  The tears that stung her eyes were hard like bullets and she blinked furiously, trying to hide them. It would hurt to shed them and it hurt to hold them back. This wasn’t Brody, this sad, defensive man. It really was Braenden, a slave with no hope.

  He detached her fingers from the gracefully curved handle of the urn, taking it from her. “Sit,” he told her.

  Taylor stepped down from the hassock slowly, her own gut instincts at war with Brody’s quiet command. She moved over to the divan, but didn’t sit. Her mind was racing.

  Brody had set the urn on the floor next to the bowl and was lathering the soap himself.

  He had turned away from her.

  A single, scalding tear did slide down her cheek and it seemed to burn all the way down. Pain was tearing at her throat.

  As she watched Brody silent wash himself, she twisted her fingers together helplessly, mentally reaching for something, anything that might fix this. If only Veris were here. He would know what to do. He had nearly ten centuries of medical expertise and research lodged in his memory and his whole long lifetime’s worth of folk-remedies and plain common sense.

  Veris knew Brody. He knew him inside out and upside down, in a way only possible after centuries of intimacy. Taylor had known Brody a sum total of eight pathetically short years…not nearly enough to help him now his past was catching up with him.

  She swallowed back the hard, hurtful mass in her throat and looked toward the windows, where the carved stone privacy trellis was dappling the gauzy curtains with moonlight and shadow. Veris was so far away that it could still be daylight where he was.

  Taylor was quite alone. She was scared, human and lacked the experience that so many years of living had given Brody and Veris.

  But Brody needed help. Unlike the first time he had lived through this, she was here. Miraculously, she was here to help.

  Taylor watched Brody pick up the urn to rinse the suds away, as the cool voice of reason whispered in her mind. It’s all up to you, Maggie Taylor Yates. You’re the one that has to do this. There is no one else.

  The pain driving her pity tears dissolved as she realized how fundamentally alone she was. There wasn’t an Internet around to consult for moral support or stupid questions, nor was there anyone she could confide in. They would burn her as a witch or stone her to death if she breathed anything of the truth. She had to provide her own cheering squad…and Brody’s, too.

  If it was up to her, so be it. She would die if she had to, to release Brody from these awful chains—both the mental and the physical ones.

  As Taylor realized and accepted the situation and her own role in it, calm returned. If the worst thing that could happen would be to die to help him then the matter was very simple. She would do whatever she had to. The rest of it was simple problem solving. She was a Ph.D. and had spent her entire professional life using her mind to solve problems. This was no different.

  Taylor drew in a breath and let it out, locking down her determination.

  Then she picked up the big folded cloths she had been using as towels and walked back around Brody to face him. She laid one on the tiles in front of him and shook the folds out of the other and held it out. “Do you want help rinsing?” she asked, keeping her voice light and breezy, like she might have used at home in Los Angeles.

  Brody lifted his chin to look at her sharply. His dark eyes swept over her, from top to toe.

  That was a look she had seen many times before, that full length assessing sweep. Her breath caught. Normally, that look was followed by a kiss or arousing caress, or if he really liked what he saw with that all-encompassing gaze, Brody wasn’t above pressing her up against the nearest wall, or bending her over the closest table top and taking her, hard and fast.

  “I’m fine,” he said shortly and lifted the urn for the last time. He poured the remaining water over his head and returned the urn to the floor. The handle clinked wetly against the metal cuff around his wrist.

  Normal, Taylor thought. He had responded to her being normal, being Taylor of the twenty-first century, not Tyra posing as Ariadne. Of course, those sorts of reminders would pull his mind back toward their time, to when life was infinitely better than now.

  She could do normal. It was safe enough, in the middle of the night and the security of her private chambers.

  Taylor mentally switched language channels. She was more practiced at it now, and the flip to Englis
h came more easily than it once did. With a heft of the cloth in her hands, she said in English, “Step out onto the towel and I’ll wrap this around you. I refuse to let you put that tunic back on.”

  Brody drew in a long slow breath, staring at her. “Why English?” he asked, in English.

  “There’s no local word for ‘towel’ here and now,” Taylor replied lightly. “Come on, move your ass, Gallagher. You wanna eat, don’t you?”

  His stomach immediately growled, loudly enough for Taylor to hear it. She grinned. “That sounds completely fucking weird coming from you.”

  Brody stepped out onto the towel she had laid down for him, streaming water. He stared at her, suspicion growing in his eyes. Then he registered what she had said properly. “Food?” he repeated.

  “Lots of it. Kale warned me you would probably be hungry and that the food they give you isn’t the greatest, so I have some put aside for you.”

  His stomach roiled and rumbled once more and Taylor smiled as she wrapped the sheet around his waist. She hurried over and picked up another one from the divan, then tossed it to him. “Dry yourself off, then come and eat.”

  She hurried through the dividing curtains into the area she had mentally tagged the living room. There were more divans, soft cushions and low tables. The area was designed for lounging around.

  The large tray of meats, cheeses, fruit, bread and wine had been left on the table, under a cloth covering. Taylor carried the heavy tray over to one of the low tables crouched next to the biggest and widest divan and removed the cloth. She poured a glass of wine from the decanter, then moved even more quickly through to the area where her bed was located. It was hidden behind painted dividers with carved fretwork at the top—for nothing in Constantinople, not even the mundane, most workaday tool—went without a single filigree or curlicue of some sort. Adornment was the heart and soul of Constantinople, right along with the richest, deepest and most varied range and hues of color that Taylor had ever seen in all her travels through history.

  Moving as fast as her fingers would go, Taylor searched for and found all the metal pins and brooches holding her hair up in its convoluted up-do. She dropped them into the pewter tray that sat on three legs, next to her bed, that served as a nightstand.