Jesse nearly smiled. Nearly. He was disarming the man mentally. Letting him think that the last thing they wanted was to step in there.
“Oh, dear…” she added in a weak voice, bringing her hand to her nose. Although the stench was powerful. Urine, horse shit, mold, damp and years of neglect and garbage piling up in the corners and along the edges. It was making her eyes water, just standing at the mouth of the alley. “I won’t go in there. I just can’t. I’ll…I’ll faint if you make me.”
“Tell your lady to shut up,” the man growled to Aran. “Go in there, or I’ll shoot you right now.”
“You can’t just shoot us!” Aran protested. “We could scream. The police—”
The man laughed nastily. He was enjoying himself, Jesse realized. “You think my family don’t have this street sewn up? No cop is coming to save you. Now get in the fucking lane. Now.”
Aran rested his hand on her back, encouraging her to move. “Just hold your breath for a moment, dear, while I sort this out.”
Jesse would have laughed at his patronizing attitude except she was already trying to figure out how he wanted to play this. She let him shepherd her into the position he wanted her to take, while moaning at the stench and waving her hand in front of her face.
The man trod heavily behind them, a dozen paces into the aromatic laneway. The earth squelched under her feet. Jesse’s toes wanted to curl up inside her boots. She didn’t want to know what was making it squish like that.
She swallowed, tasting copper, and turned as Aran did. It put her on the man’s left, where his gun was, and where his right hand rested inside his jacket, ready to pull the gun. Aran was on his right.
Suddenly, she knew what to do. It was right there in her mind. Finally.
Jesse didn’t stop to reconsider or wonder if she might have guessed wrong. Acting fast was always tactically advantageous.
She waved her hand weakly and closed her eyes. “Oh, dear god…I can’t breathe…” She let her knees fold, sinking toward the ground.
The mobster was both experienced and without empathy. He let her slump into the foul dirt and didn’t automatically step forward to save her, as Aran did…which put Aran a pace closer to the man.
Jesse thrust out her foot and surged toward the man.
His gun hand jerked in reaction, but it was already too late. She gripped his elbow and his forearm and bore down on them grimly, holding his arm in place so he couldn’t pull the gun.
Aran was already turning. He used the impetus from his spin to drive his fist into the man’s stomach.
The mobster grunted, expelling hot, garlic-ladened breath. His head jerked forward. Jesse moved out of the way, still gripping his wrist and pushing the gun back into the holster. The jacket yanked aside to reveal their tug-of-war, while Aran followed the blow to the stomach with an upper cut that took the man off his feet.
The gun was drawn out of his holster by his backward movement. Jesse plucked the gun out of his now nerveless fingers as he fell back, his eyes rolling in his head. He landed heavily in the wet earth and groaned.
She bent carefully from the hips and pressed the muzzle of the heavy Colt against his temple. He grew still.
“Carotid is quickest,” she told Aran.
“…the fuck are you people?” the man muttered thickly.
Aran pressed his finger and thumb around the man’s neck, against the pulse points.
Fifteen seconds passed, then the man slumped, his eyes closing.
“That will give us only a few seconds,” Aran said. He took the gun from her, crack it open and shook out the shells into his hand and pocketed them. Then he pulled the gun apart and threw the pieces deeper into the alley. “We’ll jump from here.” He pulled Jesse against him, hard enough to make her breath gust from her. “Sorry,” he added and bent his knees.
She sucked in her breath as time swiped at them.
Chapter Nine
Still warmth. Silence.
No, she could hear the nearly silent hum of her laptop. Jesse glanced over her shoulder, her post-combat shakes already settling in. It was the house she was sitting. The dining room. Her computer. The cup of tea she had been drinking sat beside it, still steaming.
The time on the bottom right of the screen said it was three minutes past eight.
Just as he’d promised.
Aran was still holding her upright, until she oriented herself. She glanced up at him, at his eyes with the long lashes and thick black brows.
“Do you know how my mother discovered she could time travel?” he said, his voice very low.
“I…uh…what?” She couldn’t get her brain to work properly.
He kissed her and his hand pressed her against him, as the kiss deepened and heated and grew into something hot and hard and panting.
Survivor high, she thought stupidly. Everyone felt it, after a battle or close call. It was why there had been a baby boom after the war. It was why the soldiers in her unit had to cool off with alcohol and parties and adrenaline-induced hysteria. There had to be a venting. An expression of relief.
But she had never felt it like this. Not this irresistible need to tear off her clothes and fuck, as hard as she could, as much as she could handle…
Aran bore her backward until her thighs were pressed up against the table, and she was jammed between it and him, which she had no objections to at all. His body was hard and hot, and she could feel his cock rearing between them.
His lips released her mouth and moved over her chin and down her throat, feasting, while his hands…his hands were on her bare flesh. He’d hoisted her teeshirt, and his fingers slid over her belly, up toward her bare breasts.
Jesse wanted it. She wanted him with a power that made her groan. All he had to do was yank down her jeans and drive into her. She would welcome it. She would love it.
She reached for his belt and pulled the end out of the square buckle, breathing hard, and with no thought than to get rid of his clothes as swiftly as possible.
The alarm on her computer begin to ding steadily and relentlessly. It wouldn’t turn off until she moused over and clicked it off.
She groaned.
Aran’s mouth grew still against her throat, just under the corner of her jaw. His hands, too.
“I have to turn it off,” she whispered, her voice thick and distorted.
Aran straightened and stepped away from her. His jeans were swollen, bulging.
Jesse tore her gaze away, and moving stiffly, turned and put her finger on the mouse pad. The alert in the middle of the screen yelled at her: GET BACK TO WRITING, JESSE!
It took two tries to turn the thing off.
She cleared her throat, suddenly too self conscious to look at him.
Aran tugged the back of her teeshirt down, straightening it. “Your task master is right. Get back to work, Jesse.”
Jesse gave a short laugh. “After the last few hours?”
“There’s always going to be hours like the last few. Write, anyway. It’s what you do.” His lips settled against the back of her neck, then he brushed her hair back into place.
She shivered, the tips of her breasts aching.
Silence.
She spun. The room was empty. He’d jumped, just like that.
Her body throbbing, her pulse jumping and her limbs shaky with more than post adrenaline weakness, she fumbled to put the chair back in front of the computer and settled on it.
Her fingers felt thick and awkward. She was still breathing hard.
How was she supposed to work after this?
She studied the words on the screen. They looked foreign. Had she really written them? The story seemed trite, now. Completely uninteresting.
She read the last paragraph. Garbage. She couldn’t remember what she had been thinking when she wrote it, which had been only five minutes ago here and now but was hours ago in her personal timeline.
What else was there to do but write?
Only, Aran would be back.
In her bones, she knew he would be. He had the other half of his object lesson to demonstrate, at the very least.
And her body ached for him to return.
Jesse put her face in her hands. She wanted Aran with a power that was rendering her unable to do anything but think of what she would do to him if he was here right now.
It was so wrong. He was a sibling. Honorary, but that didn’t matter. Her adopted family would crucify her. Taylor would carve her throat open, if she caught even a hint of the fetid yearning running through Jesse’s blood.
They would destroy her for betraying their trust in her.
He was too young, too…
Only he wasn’t young, not anymore. He’d spent so much time in other timelines and places, that he’d caught up with her. She didn’t know how old he really was, anymore. Not in actual, subjective years. And the longer he continued to jump, the smaller the difference in years between them would grow. Perhaps it might even go in the opposite direction—he would surpass her and become even older than her.
Not that he’d ever really had a chance to be young and innocent. Not in this family.
Her thoughts kept pinging about in her head, refusing to settle down and let her make sense of any of it.
So she opened a new document and began to type. Not fiction, this time. Instead, she dumped her thoughts upon the blank page, filling it with emotions, stray feelings, worries, impressions. The stink of garlic. The smell of horse manure that was actually more pleasant. Tea that actually tasted good.
The staggering price of diamonds.
His height. The heat of him.
Her betraying body and clumsy fingers as she tried to analyze as coldly as possible all the reasons why she couldn’t let this progress any further than it already had.
She was playing with fire. Aran wasn’t for her, not even temporarily. He was the beloved son of a grand family that included two fathers who’d survived more than a thousand years of history each and a mother who could leap those centuries with a flex of her knees, and was the glue that held the family together.
Aran was a time traveler himself. He was destined for great things. Yes, even greater than the D.C. minor leagues he disparaged.
Her heart began to slow. Calm returned. Sense with it.
It was just the survivor high. That was all. He was an attractive man. She was woman enough to be able to see that for herself. But it didn’t mean she had to act on it.
She was too old to let hormones get the better of her.
Use your other brain, Captain Hall! she admonished herself.
It hadn’t really been a true battle, anyway. It was a few moments of heightened tension. That was all.
A time jump that had been very nearly without incident.
Nothing to get excited about.
Jesse drew in a deep, deep breath and let it out, and suddenly realized she was starving.
But there was something she wanted to do before she got up and went and made a very early lunch. Or second breakfast, she supposed. She opened her web browser and dived into researching 1906 New York and Canal Street in particular. The power structure of the day and the diamond industry, which must have been informal and unorganized back then.
The mobs. There had been organized crime back then, too.
You think my family don’t have this street sewn up? When she recalled the man’s thick Italian accent she could almost smell the unwashed stench and the lingering, stale garlic on his breath.
The other thing about 1906 that surprised her was that photographs were not as rare as she thought they should have been. There were many of them, thanks to the Internet’s habit of sucking up and holding onto anything digital.
She found a photo of Canal Street from 1906 and studied it curiously. The black and white and grainy focus made the street seem not quite real. She had seen it in full color, moving and sounding like a perfectly normal street instead of something quaint. And the photo was not the section of the street she and Aran had walked, either, but it looked almost the same—street cars and a thick net of wires overhead.
Jesse was finishing her research and thinking longingly of the half-a-sandwich she’d left in the fridge last night when Aran returned.
“Figured you’d find a way back to working,” Aran said, behind her.
She whirled, so startled, her heart began to thud and careen about. But that’s not the only reason you jumped, the cool voice whispered in her head.
Jesse lurched out of the chair and to her feet to face Aran, where he stood in the clear space between the dining room table and the back of the sofa in the formal sitting room. “If you’re going to just keep…keep appearing like this, then I’m moving the laptop to the other side of the goddam table,” she said breathlessly.
“Are you hungry, Jesse?” Was he laughing at her?
“Goddamn it, I’m starving!” she growled.
Aran lowered a leather briefcase to the floor, reached into the unzipped center compartment and pulled out…
“A hamburger!” she breathed, her mouth filling with saliva.
He grinned and held it out to her. “You should learn to eat when you’re actually hungry,” he chided her.
Jesse ignored him. She took the paper wrapped goodness, parked her butt on the edge of the table, unwrapped it and took an enormous bite and chewed swiftly. Only now did she notice that he was wearing one of his expensive suits, a tie and a formal overcoat and scarf. His outfit matched the briefcase at his feet.
“You’ve been somewhere…” she guessed, around a mouthful of relish and beef.
“I’ve been in Amsterdam and New York for over a week,” he told her. “Getting the two diamonds cut and certified, then selling them.” He picked up the briefcase and dropped it onto the captain’s chair at the head of the dining table, then took off the overcoat and scarf.
Yeah, it was one of the silky, slim cut suits underneath. It made him look even taller than he was.
She tore her gaze away from him, her cheeks burning, and concentrated on finishing the burger. There wasn’t much of it left, anyway. “You sold the diamonds already?”
“They were beautiful, once the gem cutter was done. He even offered to buy them from me. But he would have expected a deal and I wanted full price, so I went to my two favourite dealers and asked them for their best quote.”
“You auctioned them?” Her breath evaporated at his chutzpah. “Isn’t that against the rules or something?” She took another mouthful of burger.
“An auction in all but name. They bid against each other. I let them know I had other interested parties, at least two of them. That made it an interesting few hours.” He grinned. Devilment lit his eyes, making them dance.
Jesse remembered the burger and made herself take the last bite, while Aran sorted through the briefcase once more. “I had them make the cheque out in your name, Jesse, but you’ll have to create a holding company for yourself, or taxes will eat you alive.” He came toward her, holding out a certified bank cheque. “I can show you how to do that and what sort of account to put it in, so the interest is maximized. There’s all sorts of ways of doing it.”
She stared at the cheque, all thoughts frozen.
Jessenia Hall.
She glanced to the right, on the next line.
$87,395.49.
Jesse coughed, the dry burger bun scraping the back of her throat. Hastily, she chewed and swallowed, but it lodged halfway down, and she held her hand against her breastbone as it ached. “You can’t give that to me!”
Aran frowned. “That was the entire point of the exercise. This is start up stakes, Jesse.” He put the cheque on the table.
“But they were your diamonds!”
“Pay me back the fifty dollars I used to buy them, once you’ve deposited this cheque,” he told her dismissively.
“Seven hundred dollars,” she said swiftly. “That’s what you told me it was worth, back then.”
“Seven hundred then. But I did this for
you, to show you how. And if you hadn’t been there, it might have ended far differently, so as far as I’m concerned, we’re even.”
“If you’re talking about Stinky, at the end, then it wouldn’t have happened at all if I wasn’t with you,” she said swiftly. “The only reason they figured they could rip you off was because you had a wife you would give up the diamonds for.”
“Stinky?” He raised a brow. This time he really did laugh. Then he tapped the cheque. “Don’t march into the nearest Citibank with this, hmm? Let me explain what you should do with it. Then, every now and again, you can top up the principal, or spread it around and do interesting things with it.”
“Top up the principal? You mean, jump back in time more? I’m not a jumper.”
“I am, and I’m out of a job and bored, and this is a great way to keep my jumping instincts alive.” He smiled a little. “The Jesse Hall Trust Fund.”
Jesse crumpled the burger wrapper and put it on the table, then moved closer to the cheque and peered at it. “This is what you do to buy your car and your clothes and everything? The house in England?”
“This is what I do,” he said, his voice low. “There’s a few other things, too, but they’re riskier.”
She looked up at him. “It was risky enough. Do you know who Stinky really was?”
“Not his name. His connections, I have figured out. Einaudi demonstrated his true colors. He didn’t want to give up the lumpy diamond. He knew it would be extraordinary, once it was cut. So he decided to have it both ways.” He tapped the cheque once more. “You earned this, Jesse. Take it, so I can stop worrying you’ll die of malnutrition.”
She peered at the figure once more. “Eighty thousand dollars,” she breathed. “That’s more than…than a whole year for me…”
“Longer than that, if you set it up right, and keep adding to the capital.”
She swallowed, as a huge well of emotion rose inside her. “It just…it feels like cheating, somehow.”
“It’s not cheating,” Aran said, his tone firm. “You paid for this. You got pushed around by time, a hundred years ago and again, five years ago, when you stopped the planeload of Sarin smashing into Greater London. Time doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t have rules or morals or empathy. You paid and your life hasn’t been the same since. You even had to take risks and work to get this.” He tapped the cheque again. “Now you get payback.”
Kiss Across Chaos Page 11
