Thoroughly Kissed

by Kristine Grayson

  “You don’t want to know,” she said.

  He lifted one of his mud-caked feet and sniffed, then made a terrible face. “It really happened, didn’t it? All those things, this morning. They had nothing to do with me. You’re doing it.”

  “Please,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  She shook her head.

  “This was no trick, was it? There was no way, even with practical jokes and a special effects budget the size of David Copperfield’s that you could make an entire medieval village appear and then disappear. We were actually there, weren’t we?”

  “It looks like our feet still are,” she said lamely and wished she could laugh. Then she remembered that it was the wishing that changed things. She didn’t dare wish anything.

  She couldn’t stay here.

  Michael Found frowned. “Your research is based on that, isn’t it? Trips like that. Did you invent a time machine?”

  She let out a small, desperate chuckle. “No.”

  “Then what? I know that this was real somehow. I’ve studied enough magic to know there are things that can’t be easily rationalized or explained.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned on her desk. The office stank of mud and cow dung, and she probably did too. Imagine how she must have smelled for the first twenty years of her life.

  She shuddered. Amazing how the last ten years had changed her.

  “Professor Lost?” he said.

  “So well named,” she murmured.

  “What?”

  She opened her eyes. His beautiful face wasn’t far from hers. He had long blond lashes that accented those marvelous blue eyes. “You may as well call me Emma,” she said wearily. “I don’t really like the reminder that I’m lost at the moment.”

  His frown grew deeper. “What?”

  She sighed. “Professor Found.”

  “Michael.”

  Was that kindness she heard in his voice? She didn’t deserve kindness at the moment.

  “Michael,” she said. “You already think I’m a fraud and a cheat and a terrible professor. And I’ve botched this meeting horribly, and I can’t stay anyway, thanks to the Fates, so I guess there’s not much more I can do.”

  “About what?”

  “I mean, if I tell you the truth, it won’t make things worse.” She almost made that last statement into a question. It just might make things worse. But the job was going to go away anyway. Her dreams of a normal life were over.

  He was watching her, his expression wary. But his arms were no longer crossed. If anything, he was a little too close to her. And, strangely, she didn’t mind.

  “What truth?” he said gently.

  “I’m a witch,” she said. “A young witch. Well, maybe not that young.” And then she snorted. “Purple! You don’t think they knew the poem, do you?”

  “What poem?” He looked at her as if she were still speaking Old English.

  “Nora’s mother quotes it all the time. Something about old women wearing purple because it’s their right to wear purple and to act eccentrically.” She shook her head. “Were they telling me that I’m old? Or was this the royal purple? Or was it simply a color they liked?”

  “Who?” Michael asked.

  “The Fates.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  “Emma, I’m not following any of this.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s my fault.”

  She stood and brushed off the purple skirt. In her brief moments in the past, she seemed to have acquired bits of hay on the front of it. She straightened her shoulders, looked Michael in the face, and pretended at dignity.

  “I’m a witch,” she said again. “A young witch who just came into her powers. Unfortunately, I never bothered to learn how to control them. So everything that happened, everything you saw, I did. And I didn’t mean any of it. I just don’t know how to stop this from happening.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. His frown had become a look of concentration, his blue eyes seeming to peer right through her own.

  “I’d make some kind of sarcastic response,” he said, “but I’m half convinced. Maybe it’s the mud on the shoes.”

  “Or the fact that you lost all your furniture.”

  He smiled. “I got it back.”

  “You did?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “If it happened, it happened by accident. All of it. Including that little foray back in time.”

  “You’ve done that before.”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “But your Old English is fluent.”

  She was tired. “That’s another story.”

  “Emma—”

  She held up a hand to silence him. “I’m sorry, Michael. For all of it. I’m even sorry for your suspicions. I’ll buy you a new pair of shoes too, once I get all of this under control. But I just came into my powers this morning, and I’m afraid what will happen if I go to my classes today. Can you find someone to take my class? I’m in no condition to teach anyone anything.”

  “I’ll take it,” he said softly.

  That didn’t surprise her. Of course he would. That was what he had wanted all along.

  “And not because I feel I should be teaching it,” he said quickly, as if he had heard her thought. (He hadn’t, had he? Oh, that would be embarrassing!) “But because you need the assistance.”

  Then he peered at her. Before she could stop him, he put a hand on her forehead. His touch sent a tingle through her. His palm was warm and smooth and dry. And comforting. “You don’t look well.”

  She blinked hard. She wasn’t fighting tears, was she? She never cried. She hadn’t even cried when she found out she had lost a thousand years of her life.

  She wouldn’t cry now just because she had found a life she loved and was going to lose that too.

  She moved her head away from his hand.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said and left.

  ***

  Wounded dignity. He’d never completely understood that phrase before.

  Michael Found stood in front of Emma’s desk, his hand still tingling from touching her skin. It had been so smooth and soft, and she had looked so sad.

  It was her sadness that startled him the most.

  From his encounter with her the day before—from the times he’d seen her interviewed—and even from her book, he had thought her a capable, no nonsense woman who never allowed anything to upset her. He had thought that she had chosen a time period that allowed itself a lot of interpretation and then had written her pretty little piece of fiction—all as a rational, calculated way of setting herself up in some major university somewhere, a place where she could be a celebrity with minimal effort and summers off.

  The sadness she had displayed a moment ago, the wounded dignity that allowed her to grab her purse, and slosh quietly out of the room, leaving muddy footprints behind her, had changed his mind about that.

  He hadn’t lied to her. He was inclined to believe her. And that bothered him more than he wanted to say.

  The entire morning had bothered him. The loss of the furniture, the way Helen had turned to stone, and then that visit to the medieval village. He hadn’t lied to Emma. He could think of no way she—or anyone else—could have faked that.

  Which left him with several other theories, each as kooky as his time travel question, and none of them rational.

  Except, strangely, her explanation of being a witch.

  He slumped in the chair she had placed across her desk for students. He knew he should leave her office, but he wasn’t willing to, not yet. He wanted to stay close to her.
If he had known her better, he would have taken her home and made sure she was all right. She seemed so lost suddenly.

  Then he smiled. So that was what she had meant when she had said so well named. He had just used her last name. She was feeling lost.

  Well, he wasn’t feeling found. He was feeling a bit lost himself.

  His study of magic, indeed, what he had told his colleagues when he took on the project was the idea that various forms of beliefs in magic had shown up in all primitive cultures. Yet the beliefs also showed up in cultures that considered themselves modern, from the spiritualist craze among the Victorians (leading to odd séances) to the New Age crap that was happening now.

  He was going to try to do a comprehensive history of magic in several volumes, and he planned to cover the entire world eventually. He had had to start somewhere, though, and he had decided to start where he was most familiar—in the West. Magic explained everything from the arrival of spring to the ferocity of winter winds. The Celts were the most creative of all, explaining ground fog as banshees—the ghosts of women who had died in childbirth—and carrying on superstitions that still held today.

  But what if magic were real? What if all the scholarship was founded on the wrong premise? What if there was more to life than what a man could see or feel?

  He shuddered. He had certainly felt his arrival in that medieval village. He had smelled it, too. And heard a language that he had never heard spoken in his life, although he had seen parts of it written. He didn’t understand it, although Emma Lost seemed to.

  And if she did, then didn’t that mean at least some of her scholarship was accurate?

  He shook his head. Everything he believed in had been turned upside down today. What would happen if he wrote a book claiming magic was real?

  If he wrote it as history, he’d be the one whose work would be dismissed as bunk.

  If he wrote it as a New Age tome, he’d probably get rich.

  He smiled vaguely. He had no interest in getting rich. He had, as he had told her, an interest in learning the truth. And the truth was that she was one very upset woman—a woman who had fled his office after his furniture disappeared, a woman who left her own office without locking it after taking him to a place that had looked like England in the tenth century.

  He glanced at his watch. It was quarter to. He had promised Emma he would take her class. He barely had enough time to look up its location and title. He certainly didn’t have enough time to prepare a lecture. He was glad he had been boning up on his medieval history, because he was going to let the students query him about everything.

  But he wished he hadn’t made her that promise. He wished there was enough time to find someone else to take the class. He wanted to talk with Emma Lost some more.

  He told himself that he wanted to find out what she knew about magic. But what had him the most intrigued was the way her skin had felt beneath his palm, the way her luxurious hair caught the light. That fantastic face and those stunning eyes that seemed gray sometimes, green sometimes, and blue at others.

  He was attracted to her, and either she was crazy as a loon, or he was. Or he was dreaming, and he would wake up to find himself in his own bed, feeling foolish.

  Part of him, though, wanted it to be real. Part of him wanted to believe her.

  And that was the part of himself that made him most wary. He wasn’t sure whether he was reacting to the events of the morning, or to Emma Lost’s beauty.

  He had an uncomfortable feeling that if he looked deep enough into his own soul, he wouldn’t like the answer.

  Chapter 4

  The drive home was uneventful. Emma took off her shoes and stockings outside, and then tossed them into the nearest garbage can so that Darnell wouldn’t have anything to roll in. She hoped he was still house-cat sized. She didn’t want to face the lion again, not after the events of the morning.

  She still couldn’t get the stench of the village out of her nostrils. It had looked like her village, the one she had grown up in, where she had met Aethelstan, and that had saddened her. She had forgotten how poor it was, how ignorant everyone was.

  For a brief moment, she had thought she would have to live back there again, and she wasn’t sure she could do it. That brief foray into the past made her realize how much she had grown, how much she had changed, and how hard it would be to ever go back.

  She took a shower, using a lot of lavender-scented soap. Steam rose around her, and she scrubbed until she felt marginally clean.

  Darnell watched, as he always did, from the back of the toilet. He hadn’t reverted to lion form, and he was no worse for his experience of the morning. He seemed to have forgotten it, or deemed it unimportant, or perhaps deemed it his due. She could never tell with Darnell. He was quite egotistical, even for a cat.

  After she dressed, she went into her study to call Aethelstan. Darnell did not follow her, which relieved her. She wanted privacy right now. Or maybe she was just being protective. Whenever people were close to her, they might feel the effects of her wayward magic.

  Before she dialed, she checked the time. A little after ten a.m. on the West Coast. Aethelstan would be in his restaurant, getting ready for the lunch crowd. So far as most people were concerned, Aethelstan was the famous chef Alex Blackstone—so popular that he always got hired to cater Hollywood parties. Famous people flew to Portland just to dine in his restaurant. He had been approached to open others, but he didn’t want a franchise.

  Only Emma, Nora, and a few other people knew that Aethelstan didn’t need the money. Everyone else seemed to think he was a crazy artist who wanted to protect his creation. Actually, Aethelstan wanted to enjoy his marriage. Building an empire—even a food empire—was not his style.

  The phone rang for a long time. As it did, Emma carried the receiver to her favorite overstuffed chair. She had placed it near the window, which had a spectacular view of the backyard. Spring became the garden. The greenery and the budding trees made this place seem like home.

  The thought made her blink hard. She would have to leave here. Studying in Portland would take years. She wasn’t even sure she would be able to come back here to visit.

  Thanks to her writing income, she could afford to keep the house, but she wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for ten, maybe twenty years. And right now, that felt waaaay too long.

  Finally someone picked up the phone. She could hear dishes clanging in the background and the sound of water running in a sink. “Quixotic.”

  “I need to speak to Mr. Blackstone,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. He’s in a meeting—”

  “Tell him it’s Emma.”

  “Ma’am—”

  “It’s miss,” she snapped. “I’m an old friend and it’s an emergency.”

  “Yes, ma’am—miss—yes. I’ll get him.”

  The anonymous voice put her on hold. The piped-in music was soft jazz, sophisticated and quiet. No obnoxious recording telling her the week’s specials or the restaurant’s hours. Just pretty music, already setting an atmosphere.

  Aethelstan was good at things like that.

  Then there was a clunk and the music was gone.

  “Emma.” Aethelstan’s deep warm voice filled the phone. He had managed to keep just a bit of his British accent, even though he had lived in the States for more than a century. “Are you all right? Pedro said there was an emergency.”

  “I came into my powers, Aethelstan,” she said.

  She heard him exhale. Then he said, “Hang on while I transfer phones. Better yet, let me call you.”

  “All right.” She listened as he hung up. Then she carefully hung up as well.

  The early afternoon light was filling the room. She had decorated it in white and gold. The furniture was all upholstered in the same material, a light floral pattern that didn’t o
verwhelm. The carpet was gold, the walls white, and the pictures she had hung on the walls were all flowers. Thanks to the modified Wright design, the study looked like it was part of the garden. This had always been one of her favorite rooms in the house.

  Today, though, it failed to comfort her.

  When the phone rang, she started even though she had been expecting it. She was more tense than she had realized.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come into your powers for another twenty years,” Aethelstan said without preamble.

  “Me, too,” she said. “But the Fates said it all makes sense.”

  “You already spoke to the Fates?”

  “I asked them to reverse it, but they wouldn’t.”

  “No,” he said, “they wouldn’t. They say that—”

  “They don’t interfere. They govern.”

  Aethelstan chuckled. “They used that one on you too, huh?”

  “Yes,” she said, feeling more discouraged than she had a moment before.

  “I think it’s their way of staying aloof from our affairs.” His voice had become gentle now. She could almost see him in the room, his tall form leaning against the doorjamb, his dark hair combed back from his hawkish face. He had aged in the thousand years—only the equivalent of fifteen human years, but that made him seem impossibly old to her, even now.

  Certainly not the young man she had thought the most handsome in their little village.

  “I’m in a terrible bind, Aethelstan,” she said. “I turned Darnell into a lion this morning—”

  “Did you use the reverse spell?”

  “Yes. And it worked, just like the one you gave me to go to the Fates.” She paused. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

  “Let’s just say I plan for all contingencies,” he said. “I certainly didn’t know, but I was afraid it might.”

  He was silent for a moment. She sighed, knowing what he was thinking. “I meant to get training,” she said.

  “It was overwhelming, being awakened a thousand years into the future. It’s my fault, really. I should have insisted—”

  “Someday,” she said, “you’ll have to stop blaming yourself for those lost years of mine. I have.”