Across Time: Across Time Book 1

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  He searches my eyes. “What will it take to keep you, Sarah? Name it, and if it’s in my power it’s yours.”

  He is willing to give me anything. Give up anything. For the first time in my life, I realize, I am not alone. He will follow me no matter how far I fall, no matter what I need to do or become. That small part of me that was holding back, scared and uncertain, flutters away. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him, breathing in and out.

  “I love you,” I whisper, kissing the corners of his mouth, his jaw. “I love you so much.”

  His breathing sharpens as my mouth moves to his neck. “If you keep doing that, this conversation might need to take place at another time.”

  I’m not sure who he’s turned me into, but the mere suggestion of sex with him has my entire body primed and ready. My nerve endings seem to rest on the very surface of my skin, a thousand tiny points of need. I climb into his lap, my knees on either side of his hips. My teeth go to the lobe of his ear.

  “Oh?” I ask. “Why’s that?”

  He inhales. “Because in about thirty seconds you will have me promising to buy Versailles for you.”

  I pull my dress out of the way, let my weight rest on his. He’s already swelling against me and I feel stupid, blind with want for it. “It would be fun to live in a palace,” I tell him. My hand goes to his belt.

  “It’s yours.” His voice is rough and low, wanting. “We’ll leave tonight.”

  His hand slips inside my dress, cupping a breast, flicking at it with his thumb in a way that makes me gasp. I reach into his boxers. He is thick and heavy in my hand, my thumb spreading over the tip until he is slick there.

  “Dieu,” he groans. “You’re not sore?” His eyes are closed and he sounds breathless, desperate.

  “I’m fine,” I say, rubbing against him. In truth, I’m sore. But it doesn’t stop the want in any way, shape or form. If anything, it makes it worse.

  He reaches between us and pushes my panties aside, lining his cock up with my entrance – swollen with need, and raw. I sink into him, head thrown back. It is pleasure and pain at once, exquisite in a way I can’t begin to explain to him. It hurts like hunger, like something that won’t go away until it’s been sated.

  I ride him slowly, drawing it out though I’ve felt close since the moment I grabbed his belt. His mouth is on my neck, fingers flicking open the buttons of my dress to go lower. My nipple draws tight in his mouth while he seems to grow inside me, stretching me further than I imagined possible.

  His lids are heavy, eyes dazed beneath them. “You’re going to get tired of me,” he says. His hands go to my waist and he pulls me down on him hard, jerking upward to meet me. “I will want this every day. Every hour. You’ll get tired of it.”

  I can no longer keep my eyes open. I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my face in his shoulder, moving faster. “I’m not ever going to be tired of you,” I say, gasping as he thrusts upward again. “Oh God, I’m close.”

  He increases the intensity of the thrusts. His fingers dig into my back. “It’s so hard not to let go,” he hisses. His index finger trails down my ass, brushing lightly against the puckered ring there, and I gasp.

  “Did you like that?” he asks.

  I ride him harder, blind now, desperate to finish. “I don’t know.”

  He laughs. Allows his finger to brush again. Once, twice—as he meets me with another thrust—and I am done for. I clench him tight as I go over the edge, dissolve into nothing beyond the feeling of us joined there. He flips me on my back and drives into me with four sharp jabs and then he’s cursing, pulling out, coming on my chest, my neck.

  When his eyes open he looks a little shocked. “Well that escalated quickly,” he says with an uneven laugh.

  I glance down at my ruined dress. “When we move to Versailles, I think I’d like some more clothes. And a washing machine.”

  “Anything, ma reine,” he says, collapsing beside me.

  Marie’s brows go to her hairline when I return an hour later, my dress grass-stained, hair a disaster. “Well then. I guess having a baby in this house will liven things up.”

  “I’m taking a bath. And you bite your tongue,” I reply. “No children. Not until after the war.”

  “If you say so,” she murmurs behind me, sounding as if she is holding in a laugh.

  I fill the tub and sink inside it for the second time today, smiling as I lean my head backward against the edge. We did end up talking just a bit in the orchard. I think he would be happy enough to stay on the farm if that’s what I wanted, but I saw that spark in his eye when I talked about moving someday. Living in a city where we can both finish our degrees, where he no longer has to work so hard to make people not take notice of his family. Much of that depends on Marie, of course, but by the time the war is over, she will probably have chosen a path for herself. Perhaps found a spouse who isn’t a priest.

  Except maybe it’s the priest she’s meant to end up with. While a priest seems like the least likely candidate to help produce some kind of supernatural being, if the “circle of light” is a child. On the other hand, there’s a lovely sort of symmetry to it: my strict, religious family saw time travel as evil, and from my few interactions with her, it seemed my grandmother viewed organized religion in the same way, but this would be a union of those things. Marie already exists in both worlds, and if there was ever a priest capable of rising above his beliefs and his training to accept something new, it would be Father Edouard. He would do it for Marie, I’m certain.

  I put on a fresh dress and emerge from the bath to begin helping Marie with dinner.

  “So did you and Henri talk?” she asks mildly, shoving vegetables toward me over the butcher’s block. “Among other things.”

  I stifle a laugh. “You’re not going to shame me, you know. Where I’m from women talk about sex all the time.”

  She looks at me warily. “I obviously don’t want…specifics, given that it’s my brother we’re discussing. But, is it not painful? It seems like it would be extremely so.”

  “I doubt I’d have sought it out if it were,” I reply. “No, it’s the opposite. It’s like a miracle. Or a drug. You’ll see some day, if you ever agree to go on a date.”

  Her smile falters. “Xavier asked me out again last week. I put him off, but perhaps…perhaps I should.”

  I’ve never seen a woman look more grief-stricken or reluctant to go on a date with a handsome man.

  “When you’re in love with someone,” I say softly, “no one else appeals to you. You can convince yourself they do, the way I did with Mark, but it won’t work. It can’t.”

  She swallows. Her hand clenches around the knife’s handle and her head goes down, as if suddenly she’s in so much pain she can’t unclench herself. “Then what am I supposed to do?” she asks, her voice rough. “How do I make it stop?”

  My heart hurts for her. I know better than anyone what it’s like to want something so badly and be certain you can’t have it. “Before you abandon the idea of Father Edouard entirely, ask yourself what you’d risk by trying. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. There’s not a doubt in my head he’d give up everything with a little encouragement.”

  Tears drip down her face onto the butcher’s block. “What if he finds out what I am, though? Even if I chose to hide it, there are times when it might happen. Or we could have a child…like your parents did. And then what? How do I explain what I hid from him? How do I allow a child to be raised the way you were, as if there’s something poisonous inside her? I couldn’t.”

  I shake my head. “Do you think Edouard would be that man? If you do, then perhaps you don’t love him like I thought. Or shouldn’t love him in any case. The person you’re describing does not deserve your affection.”

  She looks up at me, and swallows again. “You really think he’d accept it?”

  It shocks me that she could possibly think otherwise. I suppose even people with loving parents doubt themselves occasio
nally. “I think he’d accept you, exactly as you are. And I think you will never move forward if you don’t try.”

  She bites her lip. “You could perhaps jump ahead,” she whispers. “You know I can’t. But you could go forward a few years and see where things are. If it would all work out the way you say.”

  My stomach swims at the idea. I’m not sure I want to see the next few years. We will suffer at least a little, and possibly a great deal, and I don’t want to know. It would seem like the wrong decision anyway.

  “I love you, but I won’t do that. Anything the two of you become will happen because you opened yourself up to the uncertainty. He would need to risk a great deal. I’m not sure you’d become everything you should be together if you didn’t risk as well.”

  She laughs through her tears. “You’re punishing me for the ankle, aren’t you?”

  I smile. “No, I’ve got a different punishment planned for that.”

  “Oh?”

  “A hideous maid of honor dress. Absolutely putrid. Lime green and covered in bows from head to foot.”

  She smiles at me. “I will gladly wear the putrid lime green dress. There’s nothing I want more than the two of you together.”

  “Perhaps there’s one thing you’d like more?” I tease.

  She flushes. A quiet happiness has come over her face. “Yes. Perhaps.”

  31

  The next weeks are blissful. A promise of things to come.

  Marie is once again absent a great deal, finding ways to spend her afternoons and often her evenings in town. If she’s spending them with Father Edouard, she doesn’t mention it.

  The weather grows crisp. When the grapes are ready we all work together, along with the hired help. Marie and I both wear shirts and trousers since there’s so much time in the dirt, and at night when I go to bathe my arms ache so much I can barely remove my clothes—it’s something Henri would, no doubt, be willing to help with, but he is gone. Out in the fields before I rise, returning long after I’ve gone to sleep.

  With the hired hands on the farm, our interaction is constrained to lingering glances and a brush of hands as we pass, and on Sunday we don’t even get that much: Henri remains in the vineyard while Marie-Therese at last succeeds in dragging me to mass, insisting that no work should be done on Sunday. I’m once more the object of stares, and this time I have to suffer them alone while Marie sits with the choir, watching Father Edouard with lovesick eyes.

  The moment mass concludes I am approached by Madame Beauvoir. I assume she still has no idea that Henri is the one who beat André up or she wouldn’t be speaking to me.

  “I thought you’d gone back to America,” she says. I have no idea what people were told so I’m not sure how to respond, but to my vast relief Marie-Therese appears just in time.

  “Madame Beauvoir was just saying she thought I’d gone to America,” I tell her with a pleading look.

  Her eyes go wide, and then she nods. “Yes. How fortunate for us that storms kept her ship in Le Havre long enough that she changed her mind.”

  Madame Beauvoir is looking me over once more like a prize calf. “I will come call today, then,” she says. “I’d like to hear more about your plans.”

  I wait for Marie-Therese to make an excuse but she merely gives a small, pained smile. “That sounds lovely,” she says.

  “What is wrong with you?” I demand once we’re walking home. “Why in God’s name would you tell that woman it would be lovely if she came to see us?”

  Marie shrugs. “We live in a small town. We can’t afford to alienate our neighbors.”

  “You saw the way she was looking at me,” I reply. “She’s only coming so she can find a way to foist her son on me again.”

  “Well this time you’ll be there,” says Marie with a hapless smile, “so I won’t be able to agree to anything on your behalf.”

  I shake my head. “I definitely will not be there,” I retort. “This is on you. And let me assure you, if you agree to anything on my behalf this time I will clear it up myself and I won’t be nice about it.”

  We get to the house and I continue walking, searching the fields for Henri. I’m tired and irritated and it just feels like I’ve had enough of being away from him, of sharing nothing more than a lingering glance or the vague memory of his arrival in bed well into the night.

  I find him at the far end of the vineyard, alone, since the farm hands don’t work on Sunday either.

  When our eyes meet, he drops his shears, taking five large strides to wrap his arms around me and press his mouth to my neck. “God I’ve missed you,” he says with a sigh. “You seem…upset?”

  I groan. “Madame Beauvoir is coming here to try to set me up with André again. Marie didn’t even try to discourage her.”

  His breath ghosts along the shell of my ear and goose bumps rise on the back of my arms in response. “A ring on your finger might cure that,” he suggests.

  I laugh. “And how do you propose we explain that I married my own cousin?”

  His hands drift upward, cupping my breasts. “No one who’s laid eyes on you would blame me if it were true.”

  My head falls to his chest and for a single moment I allow his exploration, sighing as I force myself to stay his hands. “The calendar suggests you’d better stop doing that,” I tell him. “Unless you’ve found black market condoms, that is.” The few he’d found last month are long gone by now.

  But he doesn’t stop. Instead his hand slides inside my bra, teasing me until I rest on that fine line of pleasure and pain. “You’re sure?”

  My breath rasps. “We need to be responsible, Henri. At least right now we do.” But he persists, growing hard, his breathing tight as he shifts against me. “You’re torturing both of us for no reason.”

  He kisses me with the kind of intensity he does during sex sometimes, when he is on the cusp of losing his last ounce of restraint, and nods at the grass. “Sit down,” he says, his voice rough, his eyes impossibly dark.

  The grass will stain my dress and I know that we can’t continue whatever it is he is planning, but I can’t bring myself to stop. I do as he says and he drops to his knees in front of me. His hands slide the dress up slowly, reverently, to mid-thigh, his mouth hanging open a bit as he takes me in.

  We’ve done so much more than this. But for some reason his eyes on me, on my pale thighs in daylight, is almost unbearably intimate. His hands splay over the skin there and he takes a deep, steadying breath. He loosens the garters and carefully peels my stockings off, first the right and then the left. His hands slide up the inside of my thighs until his fingers land at my core and slip beneath my underwear. His eyes flicker to mine, obsidian now.

  “Lay back.”

  I do as he says, feeling a small tug on my underwear just before it slips down my legs. He pushes my knees farther apart, his fingers teasing me again, circling, and then...his tongue flickers over me. I gasp in shock at the sensation—hot and cold at the same time, almost too exquisite to bear. I’ve stopped him when he’s tried this before, because it doesn’t seem like there’s much in it for him, but today, just for a moment, I allow it. A second and third time, but it still feels as if I should stop him.

  “Henri—”

  “Let me,” he growls, and there’s something so desperate and determined in his voice that I wouldn’t say no if I wanted to, and obviously I don’t.

  He resumes the movement, and when he slides his finger back inside me it becomes something else entirely. Sharp, a fire I crave. “I want to do this to you,” I plead.

  He groans. “You will,” he says. “Very soon.” I arch against his mouth, wanting more, and with a groan he gives it to me, his fingers pushing harder inside me, that flickering tongue never resting until I gasp, my hands in his hair.

  "It's good, Sarah. Let go," he begs. It’s the desperation in his voice that undoes me more than anything else. I cry out, arching free of the ground, and the moment I settle, he is over me with his cock in hi
s hand. I reach for him, swirl my tongue over the top before it slides down his length.

  His eyes are squeezed tight. “I’m so close already,” he gasps.

  I take him entirely into my mouth, gagging a little as he thrusts, hitting the back of my throat. There’s nothing comfortable about it but I’m unbelievably turned on by this, by his desperation, by the way he’s lost control of himself. “I’m going to—” he says. I grab his hips, holding him in place so he knows it’s okay, and he explodes with a coarse shout, coating my tongue and my throat. He gives three more slow slides along my tongue, wringing out the last of it, before his eyes open.

  “I want to do that again,” I tell him.

  His answering laughter is slightly breathless. “You are going to make the most perfect wife.”

  32

  Once the grapes have been harvested, half are sold to a winemaker and half remain for us to process ourselves.

  Henri and I begin to talk about a wedding. I will need papers of some kind, so he goes to Paris for the day to check into it and comes back with the name of someone who can forge a passport and birth certificate for me once I’ve had my picture taken.

  And Marie listens, excited for us and also…troubled. I worry she’s uncertain of her role in the house, and it’s confirmed one afternoon when she comes to me, asking permission for something as if the house is mine rather than hers.

  “Jeannette’s mother is ill,” she says hesitantly. “She’s going to Paris to check on her and is wondering if we can watch the children.”

  I look up from my terrible attempt at knitting with a surprised laugh. “Are you asking me? It’s your home.”

  Marie frowns. “It is yours as well, though, and will soon be more yours than mine.”

  My chest tightens a little. To some extent, it’s just as Henri predicted that night in the orchard: his marriage will make Marie feel displaced. “It will never, ever be more mine than yours,” I reply. “I would not have returned if I thought you’d feel that way.”