by Lilly Hale
“Need some help unpacking?”
Her mood instantly lightened. “Trey!” He stepped inside and she went right into his arms, giving him a welcoming squeeze and a kiss.
Rad stepped in behind him and peered around the room. “Jemma here?”
“No,” Elise answered with a smile. “She went out shopping for a few things.”
“Good,” Rad growled and pulled her away from Trey. “Come here, woman. I’ve missed the hell out of you.”
Elise melted into his embrace and turned her face up to receive his kiss. She could feel his hunger as his mouth moved over hers and it lit a match to the fuse of her own desire. She broke from the kiss to take a breath and tease, “Goodness. It’s only been a few days.” Then she felt Trey move up behind her and press against her back, his hands caress her waist. She turned to him and melded her mouth with his in another searing, delicious kiss. When she came up for air, she could feel a flush heating her face and a nagging throb in her pussy. “Oh my gosh, you two. You’re making me hotter than a firecracker lit at both ends. We’d better stop.”
“How much shopping did Jemma have to do?” Trey’s voice was husky.
Elise bit her lip in anticipation. “She should be gone for a little while yet.”
Trey’s mouth curved into a sexy smile. “Good. We should have time for a quickie then.”
Elise laughed then squealed as Rad hoisted her up and carried her over to the settee across the room. “Trey,” she called over his shoulder with a grin. “Lock the door, please.”
In record time, her skirt was removed and she was on her back on the settee, naked from the waist down, her shirtwaist opened to free her breasts, Rad between her upraised legs powering his hard length into her pussy. Trey leaned over her head, bracing himself on the back of the settee while she devoured his beautiful cock like she was a starving woman. It was a fast and lustful mating, Rad slamming into her so hard the settee started to scoot across the wood floor with a loud scraping noise.
“Oh… my God… Rad,” she panted, breaking away from Trey’s cock. “Take it easy, baby. Mrs. Johnson’s downstairs.”
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Rad grimaced, sweat beading at his temples as he continued his powerful fucking, punctuating each word with a deep thrust. “I… can’t…stop…now.” He adjusted her hips slightly and pummeled her sweet spot, driving all other thoughts from her mind, sending her soaring. Through the buzzing in her ears, she heard Rad’s raw grunt of release, felt him leave her body, pump his seed over her mound. He dropped to his knees beside the settee, panting, watching her as she moaned around Trey’s shaft. He caught his breath then cleaned her with his handkerchief.
Elise looked up at Trey. His eyes were smoldering with lust. The sight of him made her pussy clench with renewed need and she released his cock with a little kiss to the tip. “I want you inside me, babe. Please. I need you so bad.”
“Sweetheart,” he sighed as he covered her and slid into her body. “I love you…”
Elise gathered him close and pressed kisses against his neck. “I love you, too.” Then she wrapped her legs around his hips as he began to move, his cock filling her so wonderfully, his smooth strokes driving her steadily toward another peak. It built gradually, starting in her belly then streaming through her arms and legs until she was trembling beneath him, her wavering cry blending with his moan of release.
Afterward, they righted their clothes, then the three of them rested on the settee, Elise sitting sideways on Trey’s lap with her head on his shoulder, her legs lying across Rad’s thighs. Elise sighed. “I needed that. Thank you.”
Rad laughed softly. “No, thank you.” He began to idly massage her feet. “I apologize if I was too rough. If your landlady asks about the noise, just tell her we were moving those trunks around.”
Trey made a noise of irritation. “I don’t like this,” he said, stroking Elise’s arm. “I want you in my bed every night. I hate being reduced to grabbing quick fucks whenever we have a few minutes alone.”
“I know,” Elise agreed sadly. “But it won’t be for forever. We’ll find a bigger place, someplace with more privacy and then we can be together more often.”
Footsteps sounded outside the door and the knob jiggled. Elise jumped up. “Oh, cripes! It’s Jemma already!” She frantically smoothed her skirt and hair. “How do I look?” she asked the men.
“Freshly fucked,” Rad answered matter-of-factly.
“Rad!” Elise hissed, giving him a dirty look then rushed to unlock the door.
Rad glanced at Trey who was regarding him with a raised eyebrow. “What?” he murmured defensively. “She does. Jemma’s going to guess anyway. The room reeks of sex.”
Sure enough, when the older woman walked in, she regarded the scene with a suspicious glance then fastened an angry glare on the two men who were rising from the settee to greet her.
“Jemma,” Trey said. “Good afternoon.” He stepped forward to relieve her of her shopping bag. “We’ve just come by to help Elise with the trunks that were delivered.”
Jemma made a tsk-tsk noise and shook her head. “Now, I may be an uneducated woman, Mistah Trey, but I didn’t just fall off no turnip truck.” She turned on Elise, her graying brows drawn together in a scowl. “Just look at you. Hair all mussed up and whisker burns on your neck… Mm, mm, mm. You look like a hussy what done just finished a’rollin’ in the hay.”
Elise gasped and bit her lip.
Rad cast Trey a look. “See, I told you.”
After much arguing and drama, Elise finally begged Jemma to sit down and listen to them. The old woman complied, but her jaw was still set stubbornly.
“Jemma, I’m sorry we shocked you, but in a way, I’m glad you know now,” Elise said, a little breathless from all the excitement. “I know you disapprove and I understand and respect your opinion, but it won’t change our minds. I love both Rad and Trey, and we’ve decided to be together, so if you want to stay working for me, you’ll have to accept us. If you can’t do that, I understand and we’ll help you find other employment.”
“We love Elise,” Trey added. “I promise we’ll take good care of her.”
“She’ll be happy, we’ll make sure of it,” Rad promised.
“But two men, Miss Lizzie.” Jemma voice was doubtful. “One man’s a plenty big handful on his own. How’s you gonna handle two?”
Elise glanced at Trey and Rad and gave them a smile. “I’ll manage.” Then she turned back to Jemma. “So, will you stay with us?”
Jemma took a deep breath. She still didn’t look happy at all with the situation, but replied, “I’ve been with you since you was a baby, Miss Lizzie. You’s like my own child. I can’t just walk away from you, even if I do think you’s plum crazy.” She slanted a look at Trey and Rad. “’Sides, someone’s gotta keep an eye on these two scoundrels, make sure they’s a’treatin’ you right.” Elise let out a relieved breath and pulled the grumbling old woman into a hug.
Trey and Rad helped the women move the trunks to the bedroom and Jemma started unpacking the clothes and putting them away. Finally, only the wooden crate remained in the middle of the sitting room floor.
"I don't recall bringing this from Savannah," Elise commented.
"That's the things Mistah Trey had me set aside before I left Cottonwood,” Jemma answered. “Things o' yours and your mama's that we thought you might like to keep. Ain't no sense unpackin' ‘em now."
“Jemma’s right,” Trey added. “Hopefully, you won’t be here that long.”
Elise thought about the locket Trey had given her and remembered the reaction it had triggered. Would there be other items in this box that would have a similar effect on her?
"Why don't we open it? I'd really like to see what's inside."
"If that's what you want," Trey replied. "But we’ll need a hammer to get it open.”
“I'll go downstairs and see if Mrs. Johnson has one we can use," Rad offered. He returned a few minutes later with a crowb
ar instead of a hammer, and he pried the top from the crate.
Pulling away a layer of straw, Elise discovered an item wrapped in muslin. When she opened it to reveal a framed arrangement of pressed flowers, her stomach leapt like it had when she'd seen the violet inside the locket. The arrangement was so like the ones she'd made and sold in her shop, it was uncanny.
"Did I make this?"
Jemma shook her head. "You ain't had any interest in pressin' flowers since you was a child. No, your mama made that before she died."
Elise ran her fingers lovingly over the glass covered blossoms. She felt strangely close to the woman who’d so carefully picked and arranged them, for they shared the same love of the hobby. It was one more unexplainable connection between her and Elizabeth’s mother, Hannah McBride. Then she picked up on something Jemma had said. "But I did press flowers as a child?"
"Before you took sick, you helped your mama do it." Jemma smiled as a pleasant memory filled her thoughts. "I remember how the two o' you loved to go apickin' daisies and johnny jump-ups, then press em' between the pages o' your papa's books." She laughed softly. "Your papa used to complain that every time he sat down to read, he ended up with a lap full o' flowers."
Elise stood still and listened in amazement as Jemma described the very vision she'd had when she first opened the locket: Hannah McBride kneeling and handing a violet to a small child--to her. The image had been so vivid!
Shaking, Elise began to pull more items from the box. Disappointment washed through her as the next few items--an empty jewelry box, a small portrait of Elizabeth as a teenager, and a scrapbook that Elizabeth had started but never finished--stirred no feelings at all within her.
The next item was a small portrait of a man. He was very handsome, with strong, familiar features, a high, intelligent forehead and flowing side-whiskers. She didn't need to be told who he was because he was so like Edward. It had to be Chester McBride.
Jemma confirmed Elise's guess. "That there's your papa. That likeness was done just a few years before he died. Poor man. He pined somethin' awful for his Hannah."
Elise had laid the portrait down and was already uncovering another. It was a young boy--Edward, of course. Like a flash flood, another memory came rushing at her:
"Lizzie! You gotta hold still or I can't pick it off!"
She was screaming, couldn't stop screaming. "Get it off! Oh, Edward, please, get it off me!"
"I will! Just hold still." He was bending to pick something off her leg, then there was a tug, and he stood, dangling a squirming, black thing before her eyes. "I got it! And it's a big one, too. Look at him, Lizzie." Edward's hair was plastered to his head, as sorry looking as a drowned rat, but his blue-green eyes sparkled with mischief. "He looks like he's still hungry. Should I put him back on and let him finish his dinner?"
She was screaming again and running, leaving Edward laughing behind her, not stopping until she ran into a woman's embrace--a black woman--Jemma.
"Land sakes, child! What's the matter?"
"Land sakes, child! You all right? Your hands are a’tremblin’ somethin’ fierce." The voice next to her echoed the one in her mind.
"Y-yes, I think so." Shaken, Elise turned to the other woman, needing to validate the vivid memory she'd just experienced. "Jemma, did Edward and I ever go swimming together as children?"
"You did before you got sick. After that you was always afraid o' the water. Couldn't get you to go nowhere near the ol' pond where you and young massa Edward used to play."
Elise's mind was reeling. “Could it be?” she whispered aloud.
“What, Elise?” Trey prompted. “Are you remembering more?”
Elise looked at Trey and Rad, who both stood watching her anxiously. “Yes, I… Oh, my God. I think I know…” She moved shakily to the settee and sat down. “It’s far- fetched, but now it makes more sense than ever. The simultaneous brushes with death that Elizabeth and I both experienced as children at Cottonwood, and then our drastic personality changes afterward… And, and the memories I’ve been having, they’re all from Elizabeth’s early childhood, nothing after that point, after the illness.” She looked up again at them. “Is it possible that I have no memory of my own early childhood before my drowning accident, or the accident itself, because it wasn't my childhood, my accident? Is it possible the memories that are coming back to me now are my own?”
Was she the real Elizabeth McBride?
Trey knelt down beside her and took her hand. “Honey, I don’t understand. Are you saying that somehow you and Elizabeth switched lives as children?”
Jemma pulled another bundle from the crate and handed it to Elise. In a daze, she unwrapped it. Tears sprung to her eyes. Her heart lurched, and she hugged it close to her breast, crying into its musty yarn hair.
It was the doll she'd dreamed about. Her precious doll. Her precious Betsy.
"Do you remember, Miss Lizzie? Do you remember your Betsy?" As Elise traced the black button eyes and smiling mouth lovingly embroidered with pink thread, the ruffles on the red calico dress, she listened to Jemma's emotional voice. "I made that dolly for you when you was born. After you took sick you didn't want it no more, but I hung onto it anyway, hopin' someday you'd remember and want her back. Maybe for your own lil' girl."
Elise looked to Jemma, tears filling her eyes and whispered, "I remember. I do." Then she flung herself into Trey’s embrace. "Oh, dear God, Trey, I do!"
****
Trey and Rad were quiet for most of the coach ride home. They’d just had a hugely improbable scenario dumped in their laps and now they were trying to mentally digest it. Rad gazed out the window, not really seeing the passing carriages and pedestrians, his mind focused on trying to understand Elise’s story. It was crazy, but he knew Elise wasn’t. She was perfectly sane and lucid in every other aspect of her life.
“Let me get this straight,” Rad finally said out loud. “Our Elise was the original Elizabeth when she was small, but then she almost died and somehow switched bodies with another little girl from the future--the nasty Elizabeth. And now, she switched back again and Elizabeth the bitch is gone.”
“It seems so.”
“Do you believe it, Trey?”
Trey’s expression was pained for a moment. “I want to.”
Rad made his decision. He sighed then drew himself up resolutely. “I want to as well. So let’s do it.” At his brother’s questioning look, he urged, “Let’s believe her, Trey. I know it’s a concept that stretches the imagination, the whole idea of souls switching bodies, but there are a lot of things in this world, and the hereafter, that we can’t understand. We accept them as a matter of faith.” Rad felt his throat tighten and his voice grew rough with emotion. “I have faith in Elise. I have faith that she’s here, she’s ours, and it was meant to be this way.”
“But there’s no concrete proof. We can choose to believe her, but we can never really be sure. Can we really build a life around that?”
Classic Trey, Rad thought, always so rational and cautious. But Rad could hear the waver in Trey’s voice that told him his brother’s resistance was half-hearted at best.
“For now, we’ll have to. Look, if she truly did live in the future, she’s bound to know some history, some events from our time, things that have yet to happen. It may take some time for the proof to reveal itself, but I think it will.” A laugh of disbelief broke from Rad suddenly and he shook his head, amazed at his own thoughts. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. She could be mad as a March hare and I’d still feel the same. I’m so fucking in love with her, I don’t care. I’m willing to do or believe whatever it takes to be with her.” He gave his brother a challenging stare. “If you aren’t, then back out now, Trey. I’d be more than happy to have her for myself.”
****
Oliver met them at the door and Trey could see the young man was upset. “Thank goodness you’re home, Mr. Kingston, I tried to send word to your office, but-”
“What is it,
Oliver?”
“It’s Miss Kingston, sir. She’s very upset. She received the responses to her invitations today.” Oliver’s throat worked nervously. “They were all regrets.”
“What?” Trey tossed his hat on the foyer table and removed his overcoat. “That’s impossible. All of them? You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir. She’s beside herself. She’s taken to her room and refuses to open the door.”
“It’s a deliberate snub,” Rad said from behind him. Trey turned and saw the dark expression on Rad’s face and caught its implication. Trey quickly dismissed Oliver then he and Rad adjourned to his study so they could converse in private.
“It’s gotten out,” Rad stated as soon as the door closed behind him. “Someone has found out about us and has made sure everyone in our circle knows.”
“Shit,” Trey ground out, then paced to the window. “This is just like before. History’s repeating itself. Goddamn it!”
“Only now Rachael’s the one who’s suffering.”
Trey drug a hand through his hair. “Who the hell was it? Rachael wouldn’t have confided in any of her friends about this, would she?”
“God, no. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone with it, no matter how good of a friend they were. She had too much to lose if it came out. It could have been one of the servants.” Rad released a deep breath. “Hell, it doesn’t matter. It’s done, now the question is how are we going to clean up the mess this time?”
****
Rachael was inconsolable. Trey’s heart ached and guilt sunk its sharp teeth deep into his gut. As he watched his sister sobbing on her bed, he knew he’d failed her miserably.
“Rachael, please. You’re breaking my heart.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to take her hand, but she yanked it away. “I’ll fix this, I promise. I’ll find a way-”
“You can’t fix this, Trey! You caused it!” Rachael spat, her red-rimmed eyes flashing with betrayal. “Just go away and leave me alone. I hate you!”
She burst into sobs again and buried her face in her arms. “I’m sorry, Rachael,” Trey whispered in a feeble attempt to comfort her. With a heavy sigh, he got up and left the room. There was no talking to her at this point. He would have to wait until she calmed down, then they would figure out something. Perhaps they could take a trip, to Europe maybe, see the historical sites, mingle within a different social circle. Perhaps she’d like it there, maybe stay for a time and study art. She’d always enjoyed her painting and was very good at it.