It was the dining room. The table was beside them. And Jesse was still standing with her body against Aran’s.
She looked up, blinking.
His black eyes watched her. “Steady, there,” he murmured. “See? Right back to your desk.”
His arms were still loosely around her. He never did let go until he knew she was properly on her feet. She could feel the heat of him through his thin shirt, for her arms were around his neck, the way she always linked them.
So why did it feel different now?
Why was he not stepping away from her?
She drew in a breath that shuddered.
Who kissed who? Did it matter? Although in her heart, she knew it was she who swayed up to press her lips against his. But she thought…hoped…that he bent to meet her mouth with his.
Then she forgot the petty worry and let the magic of the kiss steal her thoughts and disperse the cold that had tried to eat into her the moment they had arrived here. She heard her pack hit the floor. Had it fallen? Had she dropped it?
Then she let the thought go. All thought became inarticulate. Sensory.
When Aran raised his head, breaking the kiss, she was trembling. How long had it been since she’d been kissed like that?
No one ever kissed you like that, Captain Hall! The tiny voice was bodiless. Breathless.
“You kiss just like you do everything else,” Aran murmured.
“I’m sorry, that was—”
“I’m not,” he growled. He pulled her back into his arms and kissed her again.
He held her head—there was no mistaking who was kissing who this time. His tongue pressed against her lips, slid inside and tasted her. She sighed into his mouth.
This time when they separated, Jesse pulled herself out of his arms and almost staggered over to the table. She leaned against the back of the tall dining chair, breathless and shaking.
Aran’s hand rested on the back of her shoulder. “Don’t go anywhere.”
She looked over her shoulder. He was gone.
Jesse fumbled with the chair, pulled it out and dropped into it, her hands clasped together between her knees and tried to command her breath to march steadily.
She still hadn’t properly recovered when Aran reappeared. He wore the rumpled jacket now, and he carried two of Bertrand’s coffee cups in his hands. He put one in front of Jesse. “You look like you need it,” he told her.
She reached for it and was dismayed to see her hand was shaking. Too late now—if she pulled her hand back, that would be even more of a declaration. She gripped the cup, not daring to look at him.
“Jesse…”
“It hasn’t been long enough,” she said quickly.
“It’s been four years.”
She looked up at him, startled. “I mean…Kyle.”
Aran’s eyes grew slightly larger. Then he frowned. “Ah. Kyle.” He put his coffee on the table and pulled out his phone. “Seven o’clock.”
“Don’t you just know that?”
He looked up. “Know what?”
“What the time is?”
He put his phone away. “Local time, measured by clocks cutting time up into man-made chunks? No. I know where I am in relationship to all other times and places, though. That’s how I know you left here only five minutes ago.”
He picked up the coffee cup once more. “Sleep well if you can, Jesse. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She opened her mouth to express at least one of the thousands of questions pushing at her, but he had already gone.
Chapter Seven
The questions didn’t go away. They increased. Even when she dragged herself to the very soft bed very late that night and settled beneath the down-filled quilt and inhaled furnace-warm air instead of salt-ladened breeze, the questions still circled.
The chief question that gnawed at her was why he had jumped away again. Then implied he would return.
Why had he kissed her?
Why had she kissed him? What had she been thinking? He was…he had to be ten years younger than her, and a family friend. He was family, as his family counted things. It was so inappropriate it was embarrassing.
Only it hadn’t felt inappropriate. Not for a second.
And Aran didn’t seem all that much younger than her. The opposite, really. At times it felt like he was much older than her. He didn’t even look young, not anymore.
“I’ve conversed with Plato, with Cicero, with Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius.” She could hear his murmur, the run of names and times and places. “Newton. Einstein. Kings, queens and heroes. I’ve watched the Titanic sink, the Battle of Britain, Martin Luther King’s last speech, the protests in Tiananmen Square. The Berlin wall being built and then being pulled down again. The pyramids being built. Games in the Colosseum. The Gettysburg Address.”
Jesse sat up and blinked at the darkness. If Aran had been to all those places and more—he’d said he’d squeezed the jumps in—then he was older than his birthdate said he should be. He had to be older. Jesse knew from the idle chatter in Taylor’s house that one didn’t just jump back and be instant best buddies with the powers of the day. It took time to assimilate to the real conditions of the era they were in. The history books always got things wrong and jumpers had to adjust on the fly. Then find a way to ease closer to whoever they were interested in, or risk getting themselves executed or run off for being too strange and pushy.
If Aran had stood on the poop deck of Nelson’s command ship at the Battle of Trafalgar, it was a sure bet he didn’t just jump to the deck and risk being noticed by the officers standing around Nelson.
He would have had to earn his place on the deck to be considered one of them.
So how long had he stayed in England, ingratiating himself with the British Navy?
How long had he spent networking his way into an interview with Cicero? Earning a place in Socrates’ classes?
None of those were overnight projects. And he had kept up the appearance of a normal life here, too, so he would have jumped back to a moment after he had left, even if he’d spent days or weeks back in time, so that he could pick up his human life and carry on.
She shivered and laid down once more, her mind overclocking with this new facet to consider.
Somewhere after midnight, she slept, only to wake to a white world and the silence a heavy snowfall imparted.
A text waited on her phone.
When do you take your first break, when you’re writing?
She moved through to the kitchen to put on the kettle and tapped out her response while waiting for it to boil.
Every hour on the hour. Start writing @ 7
Nothing in response.
Jesse made her simple breakfast and took her coffee through to the dining room, set up her laptop and got to work. She found she could work, which surprised even her. All the explosive pressure from the unanswered questions was dammed back.
Waiting.
At eight o’clock, her phone buzzed.
Her heart leapt and began to beat wildly, as she pushed her chair back out from the table.
Aran arrived only a few seconds later. He looked considerably better groomed than he had yesterday, although he wore jeans and a polar neck sweater under his coat, instead of the usual suit. The stubble was still there, though.
“How old are you, really?” she demanded.
Aran grinned. “You’re the first person to ever think to ask me that.” He stepped forward and picked up her hand. “Up you get.”
She got to her feet. “Where are you taking me?”
“Home.”
“Which is where? Because I know that apartment in Georgetown isn’t home for you. It’s just where everyone else thinks you live.”
He pulled her against him, which made her pull in a sharp breath. His arm came around her and he looked down at her. “I’ll show you.”
He jumped.
They arrived somewhere inside, but this time, the air wasn’t perfectly warm t
he way houses with furnaces tended to be. There was a coolness to the air that said this house didn’t have a furnace at all.
The daylight coming through the window was that of midday, but it was a different sort of light from midday in Washington.
And the room was old.
Aran let her go and stepped back, giving her room to look around.
It wasn’t a huge room, and the roof was very low overhead. Jesse suspected that if Aran jumped just a little bit, he’d ram his head against the massive beams running across the ceiling. The beams all ran toward the end of the room where a massive fireplace took up all that wall, and the stonework around it was the wall. All of it. The stones looked ancient, but the iron stove that sat in the middle of the ancient hearth was far more modern. The rest of the old hearth, on either side of the stove, was used to store stacks of wood. The stones under the wood were black with the ashes of fires long gone.
The same ancient stonework decorated the walls surrounding the door just around the corner from the fireplace. The door had a modern look, and had windowpanes on the top half—it was an exterior door, with a mail slot, and through the door’s windowpanes, Jesse could see green growing things.
The floorboards of the room were as old as the hearth, she suspected, but they were mostly covered by a grey area rug. A wing chair of bright purple was pulled up to the fire, and a black and white striped armchair sat opposite it.
The most astonishing thing in the room sat in the corner farthest from the fireplace. It was a modern, gleaming baby grand piano.
The other corner of the room had a staircase climbing up it, and an interior door beneath the staircase, but her gaze came back to the piano.
“Where is this?” Jesse said. “When is this?” she asked suspiciously. “There’s no fire and I’m not cold.”
“You’re learning to ask the right questions,” Aran said, sounding pleased. “I cheated. I wanted you to see this place at its best, so I jumped back to last May. Come and see.” He moved over to the exterior door and opened it. It hadn’t been locked.
He stepped aside so she could move out first.
She stepped out onto a broad beaten path and drew in a long, slow breath, absorbing the surroundings.
Directly ahead of her, the path ran more or less straight, to a weathered wood slat gate and a rock wall. Across the path from the house she’d just stepped out of was an ancient rock-and-mortar wall of another building. A shed or a barn, she guessed, for by the silence around them, she knew this place was not in any city.
Against the walls of the shed, trees had been espaliered, to grow flat and send their branches out in fan shapes.
On either side of the path to the gate was a proliferation of flowers and greenery, shrubs and old tripods and plant stands. The flowers ran across every range of color possible, in broad splashes and banks of blooms.
The scent of flowers and herbs and green growing things, amongst rich, dark earth, was strong.
It was beautiful, in a wildly overgrown way. Even the sides of the path were not crisply trimmed and straight, for plants grew over the edges. Birds flittered and she could hear the murmur of bees somewhere nearby.
“Wow,” she breathed.
“Now ask me where we are, again,” Aran said, from behind her.
She shook her head. “Somewhere in England,” she judged. “In the south. And it’s so darn beautiful it has to be somewhere like…maybe, the Cotswold?”
Aran laughed. “Glad I didn’t put money on that one. Come and see why I bought this place.”
Bought it?
She tucked the question away and followed him along the path, out into the middle of the garden. On her far left was a rock wall as ancient as the house, and just as tall, but it stopped after a dozen feet. As they moved passed the end of it she heard running water, but couldn’t see over the top of the bushes and shrubs edging the garden there.
The gate squeaked as Aran opened it. He held it open for her and Jesse stepped through, her attention already on the view beyond the gate.
A very narrow lane serviced the house. It had once been laid with tarmac, but the tarmac was old and rutted, and dirt had filled the cracks, so the road looked as though it was equal parts beaten earth and tarmac. The lane ended where the corner of the garden ended.
Directly across the narrow road was a footbridge with wooden planks and ancient palings on the sides. Climbing plants wound in and out of the palings and hung from the sides of the bridge, dangling masses of flowers down toward the river running beneath it.
Jesse caught her breath and moved toward the bridge on automatic. She wanted to peer over the sides. She wanted to soak in the loveliness.
There was a slight rise in the bridge and she stopped at the top and turned from one side to the other.
The river ran right alongside the house and garden, a wide, slow moving stream of placid dark green water. At the corner where the lane ended and the bridge crossed, the river forked, sending one tributary heading south, the other shooting off to the west, and running under the bridge.
Jesse turned to look to the west. The narrow river ran in a graceful curve and disappeared a mile upstream, among old willow trees and bushes that dipped their leaves into the water.
It was picture postcard perfect.
She sighed. “I would have dropped every spare penny on a place like this, too,” she breathed. “It’s gorgeous, Aran. I can understand not wanting to live in Washington when you can jump here whenever you want.”
“I don’t get back here nearly as often as I would like, although the locals are under the impression I’m here every day, because I time it to make sure I am.” He leaned back against the railing, both elbows on it. “I can show you the rest of the house another time. That’s not actually why I bought you here.”
“Then you didn’t intend for me to feel like an inadequate underachiever?” she asked dryly.
He rubbed his chin. “No, that wasn’t my intention, either. Although I can see why you might think that.”
“I was joking,” she said quickly.
“No you weren’t. Not really.” He dropped his hand. “You don’t joke with me. You keep your shield up. Always.”
Jesse deliberately turned to look the other way, so he couldn’t see her face. “What am I supposed to see, then?” she asked stiffly.
“Possibilities,” he said, and leaned against the railing she stood next to. “The possibilities of time. You really think I bought this place on my junior grunt salary at Abel & Toloni?”
Jesse glanced at him, startled. “I suppose not…” she said softly.
“I told you…” He frowned. “It really was just the other day, on your timeline, wasn’t it? I told you that time has slapped you around long enough. You need to do some slapping of your own, Jesse.”
“Using time,” she breathed. “I remember.”
“Wouldn’t a permanent home, like this, or anywhere else in the world…wouldn’t that suit you better than the permanent gypsy life you put up with now?”
“I’m a poor midlist writer.” She added as gently as she could, “And I’m not a jumper like you.”
He straightened up almost as though she had kicked him. “Which everyone in the family has forgotten, I think. Including me. Which makes me…well, I don’t know what it makes me, but I’m going to make amends.”
“By showing me possibilities beyond my control?” She squeezed the bridge rail. “This place is glorious, but not in a million years could I ever hope to have something like it. It’s just a shitty pipe dream for me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” He walked off the bridge and over to the gate. “Let me demonstrate.”
She squeezed the rail even harder. “I should get back to work.”
“I’ll take you back to two minutes past eight,” he promised. “Just let me show you one more thing.”
Jesse hesitated. “I’m not like you, Aran. I’m honorary family, but that’s because of something I did i
n this time. You guys were bred up to think about time differently. I just get to have a so-so military career and an okay writing career after that. I’m only human.”
Aran walked back to her and picked up her hand. “I’m not the only one you keep the shield up for, Captain Hall. Come on. Let me show you just how wrong you are.”
Jesse protested as he led her back along the pretty pathway to the old house. The house had a thatched roof, she realized distantly as they approached it, which imparted a sense of the surreal, and hammered home even deeper the differences between them.
“I just want to go back to Washington,” she told Aran. “I don’t want to stop off anywhere, not even for coffee. I’ve got work to do.”
“I said I would get you back there so you don’t miss a minute,” Aran said and opened the door for her. His black-eyed gaze was steady. Confident.
“You can’t just use time like this!” she protested, moving through. Now she had been outside, she could smell old ashes, the ghosts of winter fires, coming from the black stove, faint, but distinct.
“Why not?” Aran said, his tone reasonable. He moved over to the hearth and reached in behind the firewood and felt around.
She turned to face him. “It’s dangerous!”
“You think I don’t know that?” His jaw shifted and an emotion flickered in his eyes and was gone too fast for her to guess what it was. He straightened, withdrawing a small suede bag that jingled as he put it in his pocket. “I watched my mother take a bullet in the gut, fired by a six-year-old war veteran. I saw…” And he halted and closed his mouth abruptly. “I’ve seen way too much to be casual about jumping,” he said instead.
Jesse wanted to ask him what he had been about to say, but what he’d said instead was too outrageous to go unchallenged. “Not casual?” she said, her breath snatching away. “You use time, Aran. I don’t know how, but I’ve seen enough—hell, you brought me here to demonstrate just that. You use it, manipulate it. You don’t respect it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said softly. “I respect it as much as anyone in my family. More, even. I’ve been places they wouldn’t dare go. But that’s where I’m different from them. I respect time, but I refuse to let it intimidate me.”
Kiss Across Chaos Page 8
