Kiss Across Worlds (Kiss Across Time Book 7)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  He drew in a breath and let it out, his gaze on the leather writing pad sitting in front of him, with the gold corners.

  Was he even listening to her?

  London gripped her hands together, making them stay still. “Help me to fix whatever it is that is wrong,” she pleaded softly. “Work with me, Kristijan. Then…well, don’t you want children?”

  His head jerked up. He stared at her. Then, horribly, he smiled. “Children,” he said flatly. His gaze shifted to something over her shoulder, making London turn to look for herself.

  Remi was there, his back against the closed door.

  “Remi, for heaven’s sake,” she said with a snap. “This is a private conversation.”

  “Remi stays,” Kristijan said.

  She turned back to him, stunned.

  Kristijan pushed back the chair and got to his feet.

  “Kristijan?” she whispered, bewildered. “What is going on here?”

  “I’m afraid, my innocent little London, that you’ve bought this on yourself. You shouldn’t have pushed.”

  “Pushed?” she repeated. How had she pushed anything? “Don’t you want to resolve…whatever is wrong?”

  “There’s nothing wrong. That’s the problem.” He moved around the desk and sat on the front edge, his knee lifted to rest on it.

  London moved back out of the way automatically and it occurred to her that most wives would not move out of the way. They would snuggle in closer. Only she gave her husband wide berth.

  Her throat was tight was tension as she looked at Kristijan. She knew he was lying. Something was wrong. She just had no idea what it could be.

  Kristijan rested his hands together on his knee, studying her. She realized he was looking at her with pity. “There will be no children for us,” he said flatly.

  Her heart squeezed. “You’re infertile…” she breathed, with building horror.

  “I’m not infertile. I won’t father children with you because I’m not human.”

  Her lips parted. She thought her heart might explode. Buzzing sounded in her mind, hindering clear thought. “Of course you’re human…” she whispered.

  “I was, once,” he said in agreement. “Now, I no longer am. I am a vampire.”

  She couldn’t breathe. London pressed the heel of her hand against her chest, trying to relieve the tight band there. She sipped in air. “You’re joking…”

  Only he didn’t look as if he was joking. No mirth or amusement showed. He just watched her. Steadily, like a cat watched a mouse.

  London shook her head. “You really believe it, don’t you?”

  Kristijan lifted one hand and ticked off items with his finger. “I don’t sleep. I don’t eat.”

  “You said you were chronically insomniac. Apnea! Which killed your appetite! The tensions of big business!”

  “Ah yes, about that business,” he said, reached for a folder on his desk. He opened it. “Remi ran figures for me yesterday. Would you like to know how much tax I paid last year?”

  “Why should I even care?” she cried.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I paid nothing.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Remi said softly, behind her.

  Kristijan’s gaze shifted to Remi. “London insisted upon a frank discussion. I’m being frank.” He looked back at her, as her heart rate zoomed even higher. “I paid no taxes because I have no legitimate income.”

  Legitimate.

  “Who are you?” she whispered. Her mind had shut down. She could barely hear her thoughts for the silent scream building up inside her skull.

  “Remi, would you run through the current list of operations for her?” Kristijan said.

  “All of it?”

  “The highlights will do.”

  “Extortion, industrial espionage, computer network hacking for profit, commercial thievery, drug distribution—most of it light social stuff. No heroin.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Kristijan added with a broad smile.

  “You’re a criminal,” London concluded. She touched her temples, to soothe the ache. Her hands were shaking badly.

  “I am a vampire turning a profit,” he amended. “Profit, London, demands ruthlessness. It needs streamlined operations. I offload anything that is no longer an asset.”

  “I’m not longer an asset,” she concluded numbly.

  “Oh, but you are,” he assured her. “A fine English beauty who turns every man’s head and makes them hate me just a little and want to do business with me, as I am clearly a success in both business and life.” He shrugged. “You are the perfect accessory.”

  London felt sick. “Did you ever…” She remembered Remi standing behind them, listening to all of it. Her humiliation was already as deep as it could be, though. “Did you ever love me?” she asked Kristijan.

  “You know…I’m not entirely sure,” Kristijan admitted thoughtfully. His smile was broad. Cold. “Not that it matters.”

  “It doesn’t?” she asked, as the cold lump in her gut grew larger. She was beyond surprise, now. She wasn’t sure how she was still standing. If she kept still, then her legs would prop her up.

  “I don’t need you,” Kristijan said flatly. “I have Remi.”

  London made herself turn. A careful step around. She felt as though if she moved too fast she might break into a thousand pieces.

  Remi had not moved from the door. His face was expressionless. His gaze met hers. His gaze was empty of pleasure, even pity or disgust. He just watched her.

  “How…how long?” she breathed. She wasn’t sure who she was asking.

  Remi answered. “Since before you met Kristijan.”

  London’s’ breath was shallow and fast. She was dizzy. All the nights Kristijan had not come to bed. All the mornings she had found his side of the bed empty and often, untouched.

  He had been with Remi all those times.

  “Not that it has any bearing on you,” Kristijan said. “Your behavior won’t change.”

  “My…” She had thought herself incapable of feeling anything else. Now fresh alarm fizzed through her. “I’m leaving. How could I possibly stay here now?”

  “Everything you’ve learned was true before you learned it.” Kristijan shrugged.

  London could feel heat rising from her chest, creeping up her neck. As a natural redhead, she had acquired the temper that went with it, only she had what her Irish mother had called a “long fuse”. It took a lot for her to flare into anger. When she did, she lashed out blindly.

  Not this time, though. The sickness, the coldness that gripped her tempered it, made it hotter, yet controllable. It gave her the strength to look Kristijan in the eye. “I am not staying here for another moment,” she said, her words emerging crisp and firm.

  “Oh, yes, you are,” Kristijan shot back. “What good is a wife who isn’t on hand for the world to see?”

  “If you make me stay here, I will kill every deal you have in place. I will be rude to your friends.” All the dinner parties and gatherings they’d had in the big house. All the strangers who had gushed over her. “I will turn up in rags. I will shave my head and wear no makeup. I’ll go barefoot. I will make sure that everyone who ever sees me recoils in bloody horror.”

  “You will not,” he said firmly. Quietly.

  “I will drink everything I get my hands on and vomit on the nearest shoes. I will swear and screech at the top of my voice. I will insult every single one of your associates.”

  He got to his feet. She lifted her chin. She wasn’t afraid. Not right now.

  “You don’t understand,” Kristijan said softly. “I can make you do anything I want.”

  “You can’t make me go back to what I was, ten minutes ago,” she told him. “No one can. I’m going back home and I’m filing for divorce.”

  “Try it and I’ll kill you,” Kristijan said flatly.

  London hesitated. It didn’t occur to her that he might be bluffing. She believed he was capable of murder. That was when
she knew she had got to see and understand the real Kristijan.

  “You can find another pretty face somewhere, I’m sure,” London said bitterly. “Women will put up with a lot for money.”

  “You will not publicly renounce me,” Kristijan replied.

  “Then let me go back to England.”

  Remi moved around the desk to stand at the back of Kristijan’s shoulder. “The season in London, time with you in between. It would look strange, but not ridiculous,” he said softly. “Very old fashioned, that’s all,” he added. “Royalty do it that way all the time.”

  For the first time London wondered about Remi himself. Was he a vampire, too? She had never seen him eat or drink and now this reference to the past.

  Kristijan nodded, his gaze still pinning her to the floor. “You can go back to England.”

  London held her jaw together to stop herself from thanking him. She turned and walked to the door. Remi beat her to it. He held it open for her. She didn’t—couldn’t—look at him.

  By the time she reached the other side of the drawing room, she was running. She only just made it to the ensuite of the bedroom she had been under the mistaken impression was theirs, yet had been only hers all along. There, she vomited until stars danced in the back of her eyes and her head throbbed with the power of her wretches.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “That was where Kristijan found me, five minutes later. I think he waited only long enough to send Remi away on some business.”

  “He beat you,” Neven said. His voice was strained.

  “To make sure I understood my role in the future,” London said bitterly. “He told me he wanted me out of the house in ten minutes, or he would do it again. I packed a suitcase and caught the first train out of Božidarko,” London finished. “I could only see out of one eye and I had to use the toilet on the train to wipe up the blood, but no one in the village said a word. No one helped. They all knew who I was and they were afraid of what Kristijan would do if they tried.” She had dropped her gaze to the countertop, unable to look at either of them. Her cheeks were hot and her armpits prickly with humiliation. “When I got to London, I found out that Kristijan—or maybe it was Remi—had figured out the best way to tie me to them was to torpedo any attempt I made to get a job. Offers would dry up as soon as they reached the reference stage. I don’t know how they did it. It meant I was dependent upon Kristijan.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Remi said. “I found out later.”

  “You didn’t try to stop it, either, did you?” London told him, pouring contempt into her voice.

  Remi’s gaze met hers unflinchingly. “You weren’t left destitute. You could have been.”

  London hesitated, puzzling through his statement. “You paid the allowance?”

  Remi shrugged.

  “Did Kristijan know?” Neven asked, as he slid a plate in front of London. It held an omelet, toast and jam. He held out a knife and fork towards her.

  “Not at first,” Remi said. “Although I didn’t hide it. I took the funds right out of the main account, so he couldn’t help but know. He never said anything.”

  “As long as I turned up every two months,” London added dryly.

  “Yes.” Remi’s tone was not apologetic.

  “Which you made sure of, didn’t you? An escort every time, right from my door to here.”

  “Enough, both of you,” Neven said, his tone firm. “Let her eat, Remi.”

  Remi slid off the counter. “By all means,” he said easily. “Kristijan…” He hesitated, then said, “Neven. There are things to do.”

  Neven nodded. As London took her first mouthful of piping hot omelet, she reflected that even the working relationship between Neven and Remi was different. Kristijan had always given orders. Remi had never checked with him on anything as he had done just now. In the past, if Remi hadn’t been fulfilling an order, he went on his silent way, taking care of things in the background.

  It was no wonder Kristijan’s men and the entire village were afraid of him. Remi appeared unannounced everywhere, seemed to have eyes in the back of his head, hearing that stretched across Southern Serbian and a ruthless determination to get things done. She only had to think of the way he had herded her onto the plane every two months. He never said anything. He never threatened. Yet she had followed him onto the plane, anyway, too afraid to do anything else. She had instinctively known it would not be wise to cross him.

  “Come and eat at the table,” Neven suggested. “We need to talk.”

  She looked at him, startled.

  He smiled. “Nothing like that.”

  She picked up her plate and followed him out to the dining room. As he pulled out a chair at the table, she hesitated. “I’d rather eat in the drawing room, if you don’t mind.”

  He glanced at the table. “Bad memories?” he asked.

  She thought of the silent, awkward meals she had eaten—or tried to eat—while Kristijan and Remi watched her. “Yes,” she told Neven now.

  “There’s a higher side table next to the wing chair,” Neven suggested.

  “That is the one I was thinking of.”

  They moved out to the drawing room and he pulled the table around in front of the chair for her.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” she told him.

  “Do what?”

  “Be considerate. It will make everyone talk.”

  Neven drew in a breath. She could see him do it. He sat in the other chair as she sat down and arranged the plate. “I was puzzled, at first, why even Remi did not seem to miss or mourn Kristijan’s absence. Now, I think I’m beginning to understand.”

  “You’re really him, but from a different timeline?” London asked. “It’s so difficult to believe, looking at you.”

  “We share the same DNA and a certain number of years in the far past—I don’t know how many. I can’t figure out when our timelines split. I’m happy to say that is all I share with him.”

  “Why can’t you figure out when the timelines split? Surely it’s just a matter of thinking back over your history.” She ate more of the omelet, enjoying it. Kristijan didn’t eat and neither did Remi, yet both of them understood the qualities of luxury and didn’t stint on anything. The food here, if it was not the hated Sarma, was good. Everything in the house was high quality, down to the carpet beneath her feet and the supplies in her ensuite, which were from French cosmetic companies.

  “No one knows when timelines split,” Neven said. “There is no alarm or signal. A decision is made, an action taken, that could have had a different outcome. Timelines emerge from those different outcomes.” He shrugged. “You’ll learn all of this as you go along. I won’t be able to teach you everything in a day. It’s a complex subject.”

  “Time travel.” She put her fork down. “You said I was a time traveler. I almost forgot that in the press of everything else.”

  “That’s what we have to talk about. Most time travelers find out by accident that they can travel. You can be spared that danger.”

  “Danger?”

  “Eat,” Neven coaxed, pointing to her plate. “You’re still pale.”

  She picked up her fork once more. “Why is the first time dangerous?”

  “All time jumps are dangerous,” he said flatly, with a note in his voice that said he was speaking from experience.

  “You’re one, too, aren’t you? A time traveler.”

  “We call ourselves jumpers. It is a jump, in reality. We don’t travel through time, we jump from one time to another and skip the intervening years. That’s one thing Wells got wrong.”

  “The Time Machine?” she said, her interest piqued even more. She had seen both versions of the movie and had three copies of the book, one of them a rare first edition. It was stories like The Time Machine that had pulled her into discovering history.

  “Yes, that’s the story I was thinking about,” Neven admitted. “Wells also insisted that a machine was needed to cross time, when it turns out th
at nothing more than human will and special talents are needed.”

  “Human will? Then vampires are not travelers?”

  He frowned. “It’s complicated. Human women are jumpers and few human males. If a male jumper is turned, he can no longer jump. Female jumpers can still jump after they’re turned, although not always.”

  London frowned as she chewed. “You’re a rarity?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “That’s why they think the ability to jump is developed in the zygote stage. Genetics has a limited influence.”

  “Then it is a mutation,” London said. “Otherwise, female jumpers would give birth to both male and female jumpers. It would be passed down in the x chromosome.”

  “You know genetics?” Neven asked, sounding surprised.

  It was another snippet of evidence that he was not Kristijan. “I was studying genetics at King’s College London when we…when I met Kristijan,” she said. She felt her mouth turn down. “When he asked me to marry him, he insisted I give up my studies. I was in love, so I said yes.”

  Neven let out another deep breath. It was a sigh. He shifted on his seat. “There is someone…several someones who will want to tap into your expertise, one day. Only, that is for later.”

  “Who is all the ‘we’s and ‘they’s’ you keep mentioning?” she asked. “You make it sound like a corporation, or a government or something.”

  “Do I?” Neven frowned. “There’s no formal organization. Just a group of people—vampires and humans—who can jump or know about jumping. We’ve been through things together. It tends to build cohesion.”

  It was another hint of danger. “Time jumping is risky?”

  “Always,” Neven replied instantly. “That’s the thing I wanted to tell you. Now you know you’re a jumper, you may think about experimenting. I urge you not to do that, not until you have had even a little training.”

  “As I have no idea how to go about doing it, or even that I can do it, I rather doubt I will be flitting off to watch them build the pyramids.”

  “You can jump,” Neven said. The odd note in his voice made her look up from her nearly empty plate. His gaze was steady. “You don’t know about it yet, because for you it is somewhere in your future, only you jumped back to me in the past.”