When she turned off the water and reached for the single thick towel hanging on the rod, she paused, dripping.
Music was playing, downstairs.
She listened as she reached for the towel and dried herself.
When the run of notes stopped and then began again, Jesse realized with a jolt that she was listening to Aran playing the baby grand in the living room.
She dried out her hair as much as she could, then braided it. If she let it dry in the braid, the curl would be contained and manageable. Then she put the robe back on and climbed carefully down the narrow stairs to the living room. The steps were uneven, and some bowed in the middle.
She stepped down into the living room where Aran had first bought her.
Aran sat at the piano, a distant look on his face as his fingers moved over the keys.
Jesse moved over to the wide bench but didn’t sit on it, even though he had taken one side of it instead of sitting in the middle. She didn’t know if he would welcome her inviting herself onto his bench while he was playing.
“I knew you had learned to play,” she said, when Aran’s hands grew still and he glanced at her. “I didn’t know you were so good at it.”
Aran shook his head. “My father is good. I’m…adequate.”
She didn’t dispute him. She wasn’t a music nut and didn’t know if his assessment was correct. She just knew that what he had been playing sounded every bit as good as any pianist she’d heard playing professionally. “You didn’t want a career in music?”
Aran moved his right hand over the keys, playing a trilling set of pretty notes. “This is just how I relax.” He frowned. “How I think,” he added, then put both hands on the keyboard and played a completely different tune than the one he had been playing before. It was an oddly compelling run of notes that made her want to listen hard.
“What is that?” she asked.
“It doesn’t have a name yet.”
“You composed it?” Her breath bellowed.
“It’s how I think,” he repeated and patted the bench. “Sit. I won’t bite.”
She sank onto the corner of the bench, giving him elbow room. “How you think…” she murmured. The most natural next question would be to ask what he was thinking about, but that would lead them into the subject she wasn’t yet ready to tackle.
She ran her finger over the satin-smooth lacquered black frame running in front of the white keys. “So, music second. Politics first, right?”
Aran shook his head, his gaze upon the keys. He drew more rippling, climbing notes from the piano and as they hung in the air, fading, he said, “Time is more interesting.”
He meant time jumping was more interesting. The activity which filled his fathers with angry fear he found merely interesting. More than that; he prioritized time jumping above his career of choice.
Jesse opened her mouth, perhaps to warn him that his casual attitude to time would trip him up, but what emerged instead was, “This was great, Aran, but…”
His hands stilled. He didn’t look at her.
Jesse made herself go on. She was committed to finishing the thought, now. “…but we probably shouldn’t do it again. You know that, right?”
Aran’s hand moved. A jarring sour note. He put his hands on his knees instead. He still didn’t look at her. “Why shouldn’t we?” His tone was flat and reasonable.
Jesse could have marshalled an entire brigade’s worth of reason and arguments centered upon his family and how much they would resent her taking up their son’s attention and time, or how they would feel betrayed, when they learned that she had…had…played around with him.
But he was already defensive about his family having too much influence over him, so she said, instead, “You freaked out when I asked you to teach me how to fight, how to defend myself the way you do. You don’t really want me horning in on your life.”
Aran turned his chin and pinned her with his gaze. “I knew you’d misread that.” He put his hands on the keys. A single note quivered. “I had to come here and think it through, myself. Fact is…” He frowned and played another lovely chord. Then a second. “You lowered the shield, Jesse.”
Her heart gave a little lurch. “I did?”
Aran nodded. “Just one little corner, but that was enough to stun me. You asked me to teach you how to fight.” He grimaced. “The great Captain Hall, unsung hero, thinks I have something worthy to offer her.” The notes grew stronger and turned into a melody. “Most women…” He glanced at her and away. “The morning after, I normally get a thank you and a kiss on the cheek. You ask me to teach you guerilla strategy.”
A hard mass was forming in the middle of her chest, making her breathe too hard and too fast. “I forgot to say thank you…”
“You did say thank you. You said it the Jesse Hall way.” He swiveled and their knees came together. He took her face in his hands. “Up until then, I could have withstood the kiss on the cheek, but now I really don’t want it.” His voice was low, ladened with feelings she didn’t have the capacity to identify. Just having his hands on her was making her stomach flutter and her clit to throb.
Damn it, she hadn’t got this out of her system at all. She wanted him now more than ever. She was holding her breath as he studied her.
“I don’t know what this is,” she whispered.
“Neither do I.” His thumb smoothed over her flesh, making it sizzle. “But I want to find out.”
She shivered.
“Do you, Jesse?” he asked, his voice very low.
“I…” She swallowed. I shouldn’t even be sitting here, but… “…I think my sloppy impulse control is growing back.”
Aran sat back, the corner of his mouth lifting even as he frowned. “You never say what I think you might.”
Jesse let out another shuddering breath. “There’s something I wrote that I must get you to read, one day. I joined the Marines to learn discipline, because mouthing off and acting on instinct kept getting me into trouble. Over and over.”
Amazingly, Aran seemed to understand. He nodded. “The Marine discipline is wearing away everywhere else but when you fight, the one area you want to offload it.”
“Maybe I need to offload all of it,” she whispered. “Maybe Captain Hall isn’t really me. Maybe it was just a shell. Built by the military and now useless.”
“She’s not useless,” Aran said. He touched his lips to hers, making her flesh tingle. “She’s you. That facet of you just doesn’t get much light anymore. You need to polish a different facet, now.”
Jesse tried to think beyond tracing where his fingers were sliding down her neck and resting beside the edge of the robe, heating her still-damp flesh. “Aran, I…”
“Hmm?” His hair tickled her chin, as his lips replaced his hands.
“I…” She sucked in a breath as he pulled the robe aside and cupped her breast.
Aran lifted his head. His gaze met hers. “You…?”
His hand stroked. His fingers tangled with her hard nipple, tugging, sending fizzing pleasure coursing through her.
“I can’t think…” she whispered helplessly.
“Good,” he growled, bent his head and drew her nipple into his mouth.
Chapter Eleven
Not thinking became the norm in Jesse’s life.
Whenever she was not in Aran’s arms, she buried herself in writing more and more stories, so she didn’t have to think about what she was doing or examine her motives very closely.
Being in Aran’s arms became the secondary trait of her days. When she was not writing, he would take her back to the living room in England and teach her how to fight his way—his guerilla strategies.
And when she was not sleeping, writing or training, Aran drained her energy and thoughts with sublime, mind-numbing, body-tingling sex. He was inexhaustible in both creativity and vitality…and he used the timescape even there.
More than once, he had surprised Jesse by jumping them to some far away and
very private location while kissing her—which he called traditional family-style jumping. Once, he jumped them elsewhere even as he was inside her. Jesse had climaxed with her back in hot, tropical sand, while a salt-ladened sea breeze played over their skin and the sun warmed them.
There were lagoons and private clearings deep in forests, high mountain valleys no man could reach on foot. Beaches galore. His Paris apartment. The penthouse in a Dubai tower on the one hundred and ninth floor, overlooking the Persian Gulf—or overlooking a plain of clouds with the higher buildings in Dubai punching through like sharp rocks in a white sea.
When Aran was not making her body sing, Jesse wrote, ate the meals Aran prepared or bought, or ate at the restaurants and cafes he took her to. She trained and slept. The days clicked through, one page following the next. She barely noticed. She wouldn’t let herself notice too closely, for that would require examining how much time had passed while she indulged herself. Which would lead to asking herself what she thought she was doing.
It would mean thinking about where all this ended.
In the far back corner of her mind, she did wonder what would bring it all to a screeching halt. Something would. Nothing remained stable forever and this…this thing she had with Aran wasn’t stable. It was unclassified, undocumented, an unknown species.
And on the three occasions they jumped back to 1906 New York to buy more diamonds, it was a high-risk venture.
Einaudi sold them the diamonds while everyone pretended he was a simple jeweler, and that she and Aran had not overcome and disarmed the man Einaudi had sent to take back the diamonds he hadn’t wanted to sell. Jesse could see in Einaudi’s eyes, though, that he knew they could not be underestimated. He also knew they knew who he really was.
Yet she sipped his excellent tea while Aran played the well-off heir and dickered over uncut gems to take back to modern New York and add to Jesse’s retirement fund.
They celebrated the winter solstice, not Christmas, just as the rest of the family did, but Aran refused to return to the big log house in Canada.
“Not yet,” he told her, when Jesse showed him her email from Taylor, inviting her to the solstice feast at their house, which was where the extended family was celebrating the solstice this year. Last year it has been held in Remi’s, London’s and Neven’s house in Brittany.
“I’m not ready to…” Aran sat up and ran his hand through his thick hair, the muscles on his chest bunching at the movement. They were sprawled on the big sofa in the house Jesse was sitting. “I don’t want to have to answer endless questions about you that I can’t answer…not yet, anyway.”
Jesse lowered the cell phone, her heart jumping with fright. No, she didn’t want to have to answer questions, either. “We could go and not say anything at all.”
Aran shot her a glance. “Just by standing in the room with them, we’ll be shouting the facts. You know what vampires can detect even if you say nothing at all.”
True.
Jesse squeezed the phone. “Then I should go, at least. It will look odd if I don’t.”
Aran considered her. “Is that what you really want to do?”
Jesse breathed heavily. “No,” she admitted, her voice tiny. “The idea of looking Brody in the eye…or Taylor… Veris will turn me inside out with that death stare of his.” She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “I’m not ready yet, either.”
Aran pulled her against him and held her. “Spend the solstice with me,” he breathed, his voice rumbling in his chest. “Then neither of us has to be alone.”
So she had made her excuses to Taylor, who had been gracious enough to accept them, even though they sounded weak even to Jesse. Aran assuaged her guilt by taking her to Lucerne for the solstice, for a sleigh ride on the frozen lake. They saw the new year start in New York.
On the first Thursday of the new year, Jesse officially released her little alternative history book, under the Jerry Hale pen name. Then she promptly forgot about it. Jerry Hale, author, was known to absolutely no one. Jesse did no marketing for the book, either. She just quietly put the book out for sale, almost embarrassed by the odd little tale.
Then she swiftly returned to her life and to Aran’s arms, both of which were far more interesting, now.
On January 6th, the owners of the house returned from their extended Christmas vacation and took back possession. Jesse had her backpack filled with her writing gear and her duffel bag filled with her other possessions and clothes and was ready to go, even though she didn’t have another house-sitting assignment lined up. She had been too busy to send out feelers to all her contacts and former clients to see if anyone was heading out of town for a while and needed their house watched.
She had realized she was too late to find a place only a week ago. “I normally start asking at least a month before I have to move on,” she told Aran, as she worked to compile an email to everyone she knew. “This is Portland all over again.”
“What is Portland?” Aran asked, frowning.
He didn’t remember.
Jesse chided herself. Portland had been a different timeline. Her being without a home for three weeks had happened on the timeline when she had died from a New York mugging.
Aran didn’t remember any of it, because he had changed the timeline. He had changed history and let her live.
Jesse shook her head, making it look as casual as possible. “Nothing. Never mind.” She turned back to her laptop.
Aran closed the lid over her hands. She snatched them out.
His gaze was steady. “Don’t worry about finding a place right now,” he said. “It’s winter and January. No one heads out of town at this time of year.”
“I don’t have another house until March,” she pointed out. “I’m supposed to live on the streets until then?”
“I have a perfectly good house in the Cotswold that needs a caretaker.”
Caution rose in her like the tide on fast forward. Her heart fluttered. “What does that mean?” she said carefully. “I don’t understand…”
Aran sat back. “It means absolutely nothing except that there’s a corner where you can park your backpack and an unused dining table…well, kitchen table, anyway. It means I’m taking the pressure off you to find a roof, as I’m mostly to blame for why you didn’t get around to doing it until now, when it’s too late.”
Her heart wouldn’t slow down, even though his attitude was pragmatic and his tone reasonable.
“That’s all?” she said.
“Relax, Jesse. I’m not asking you to move in. I’m offering you a roof and a table to write upon. You can make anything you want out of that, but it’s just a roof and a table to me.”
So when the owners of the house in Arlington came home, Aran jumped Jesse to England. She put her duffel bag down by the fireplace and unhitched the backpack. “I’ll put this on the table,” she told Aran and went into the kitchen to park the pack on the old vinyl chair at the table.
And while she was there, she unpacked everything and set up the laptop and mouse and speakers on the end of the table, facing the sink and the island where Aran did most of the meal preparations.
She checked her mail while she had the laptop running, then checked sales, then opened the book she was currently writing, so it would be ready for her when she next sat down to write.
There was a typo in the last paragraph, so she fixed that. Then she tweaked the grammar in the rest of the paragraph. The next paragraph formed in her head as she fixed it, so she wrote the next paragraph down before she forgot it.
Some time later, Aran turned on the light in the kitchen, got out two plates and put them on the other end of the table. While he cooked two steaks and fried mushrooms in garlic and butter, she continued to write, the scent of garlic and searing beef not quite stealing her attention away from the story.
They ate the steaks at the other end of the table from her laptop, facing each other. Jesse realized she was starving. With all the time-hopping and pl
ace-jumping they did, her only guide on when to eat was her hunger, which she was still learning to recognize.
When they had finished eating, Aran pushed her back toward the laptop, then cleared the dishes and tidied the kitchen. He put a cup of coffee in front of her a little later.
A few pages later, she heard the piano being played softly. It wasn’t a tune, exactly. He kept playing the same notes over and over, except each repetition was a little different, or had different notes…she didn’t know music well enough to know what to call the different parts he played, but she did know what creating something looked like or, in this case, sounded like. He was composing music.
She got back to her story, enjoying the sound of industry on the other side of the wall.
Some time after that, Aran plucked her hands away from the laptop, pulled her to her feet and took her upstairs to bed. It was only then Jesse realized midnight had come and gone.
Her duffel sat in the corner of the bedroom farthest from the bed. It was still zipped up, which she found both reassuring and discomforting.
The duffel stayed in the corner in the days to come, while she pulled what she needed from it and returned the freshly laundered clothes to it, just as she did with every house she had ever lodged in.
January became February. Aran took her to Auckland, New Zealand, for a day cruise to see whales and dolphins. Dinner that night was in a restaurant overlooking the famous harbor.
Jesse toyed with her glass of wine as they waited for their meals to arrived.
“You’re like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” Aran observed.
Jesse nodded and drank. “Sorry.”
“You were fine until we reached the restaurant, so what’s biting you?” His gaze was steady.
Jesse grimaced. “It’s stupid.”
“Because I’ve never had a stupid thought in my life,” Aran shot back. “I must tell you about Božidarko one day.”
“You had a stupid thought in Božidarko?”
“I had a stupid idea and acted on it, and Božidarko was the result. Stop trying to side-track me. I’m not giving you that very long story right now. We’re talking about you.”
Kiss Across Chaos Page 13
