A Twist in Time (32 page)

until they popped to the surface.

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Bobbing on the subsiding sensation, she gasped for air, and Galen did the same. Galen looked into her eyes for a long moment, blinking, as she did the same. The moonlight through the line of ports near the ceiling was cool and kind, bathing them in a silver iridescence. There was a breeze inside the room, from somewhere, nowhere, because the ports and the doors were all shut. It cooled their sweat and felt . . . comforting. That’s what it was. The room was filled with comfort and rightness.

It was almost frightening.

“What the hell was that?” she whispered. She had
never
had an orgasm like that.

He gave a tiny, dazed shake of his head and swallowed, hard. “I know not, Lucy.” It had been different for him, too.

He was still inside her and that felt right as well. Her breathing began to steady, as did his. The moonlight was just . . . moonlight. What had she been thinking? And there was no breeze in the room. How silly was that? It must just be that orgasm had unhinged her there for a minute.

What an orgasm.
She hadn’t known it could be like that.
And that spooky feeling of rightness

. . . well, that is just the lovely afterglow of sex.

Isn’t it?

“Lucy,” he breathed, and kissed her head, cradling it against his shoulder.

Stitches!
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“Nay, Lucy. I am okay. Very okay.” He lifted her chin. “Are you okay?” He looked contrite. “I was

. . . I know not the word . . .” He switched to Latin. “Crude? Rough?”

“You were wonderful. Just what I wanted.”

“You are what I want also.” He kissed her hair again. “I like
f rfeaxen.
You are beautiful.”

She looked away. She wasn’t beautiful. Red hair and freckles and way more curves than were fashionable. “I bet you say that to all the women.”

“Nay. The other women know they are beautiful. There is no need to say it.”

Great time to remind her about all the other women in his life. And that they were beautiful.

He must have felt her contract, in spirit if not in body. He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up to his so she could not help but look into his eyes. “You are the one for me. Do you not feel it? I want you, Lucy. The night wants us together. You know it is sooth.”

God, but she needed that to be true. The night might be the only thing that wanted them together. He was from another time. And both their former lives were lost to them. What were
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they doing here, waiting on this boat, for what they did not know? He rolled to the side, keeping her with him, still inside her. She scanned his face, her doubt in her eyes.

“This was always the thread of the Norns.” He said it solemnly. He meant their joining was preordained. That was his explanation for why it felt so right. Tragedy could be preordained, too, though. Maybe this was just the taste of what could be before it was all jerked away from her in some cruel twist of fate.

“Do you believe in fate?” she asked.

That look of shame flickered over his face, and the peace that had hung heavy in the air was torn a little more. What made him look like that? She wanted to help. Whatever he had done, he could get past it, and so could she. No matter how horrible. This was Eostre’s night. And wasn’t Easter all about forgiveness, at least for Christians? Lucy had felt the goodness in him.

She wanted to be part of his healing. She knew very well that she wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d ever been with. But she put her own feelings aside. She wanted to know all of him as she had known him physically in the last moments. She wanted to help him. Taking her courage in her hands as she took his face, she turned it up. A man like this would not give up the secrets of his soul easily.

“Why do you look like that?”

He shook his head. The look flashed across his face and was suppressed. “I do not understand you, Lucy.”

“Don’t give me that. You understand.”

He eased out of her. The peace in the room ebbed a little farther. He looked around, as though he felt it, too. He scooted up to sit against the teak headboard. “It is of no matter.”

She felt the loss of his body inside hers so acutely it was almost pain. She wanted to sidle up under his good arm and curl against him. But she didn’t. She wanted the peace, the feeling of rightness again, but it had to be about more than just fantastic sex. It had to be about who she was, not just that she was close at hand. That was the only thing that could make up for not being the most beautiful woman he knew. And that meant it had to be about who he was, too.

She looked at him. He swallowed. Would he bare himself to her in more than body?

“Your will is as thick as a priest of the Christ Cult,” he complained.

“Is it bad to want to know you?”

He closed his eyes. “What is cannot be . . . otherwise.” His eyes opened. They were bleak.

She wanted to comfort him, but such a man couldn’t bear that. So she said, “But the burden can be shared. Burden?” she asked in Latin.

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He looked away but not before she was sure he understood her.

Another time, without the waft of sureness still hanging in the moonlight, she would have backed down. But not now, not when she had a dreadful feeling that there was only this night to bind them together and that this night was one of few they might have together.

“Now or never, Galen Valgarssen. Whatever makes you look like that, I will always think you are mighty and smart and honorable. You might even have a sense of humor.” She didn’t stop to explain. He might not have gotten all of it. But he got the challenge and the gist. Pain flitted into his eyes again, and now she could not resist. She scooted up and curled beside him, head on his chest, listening to the thump of his heart and feeling the peace seep into her with his warmth.

His arm slipped around her and held her tight against his side.

“My mother was a mighty
wicce,
” he said above her after a moment. She heard it as a rumble low in his chest. “She was from the Old Ones of the west, though she lived among the Saxons.

She served the goddess of horses, Epona. She speaks to horses. Nay, spoke,” he corrected himself. “And other beasts. She is dead now. Her kind always had only daughters. But she loved my father, a Viking warrior, against the law of her kind. On Sahmain night in the circle of stones he got her with a
lytling
to be the priest of Epona after her. But it was a boy. My brother, Eric.

The kin of my mother thought he was a sign from God and he would be a mighty priest, perhaps the most mighty, to lead them against their enemies. But Eric died. My mother cursed the goddess. My father mourned him. Later, I was born.”

He heaved in a breath. Lucy held hers. “My mother named me Galen in the words of my father.

It means . . .” He searched for the English word, then said it in Latin.

“We would say ‘bespelled.’ ”

“
Ja,
bespelled. She hoped I would be mighty in
dr cræft
like my brother.”

“Drycraft?”

He used the Latin.

“Oh, magic. Your mother thought you’d have magic powers and take your brother’s place.”
Boy,
is that a lot to put on a kid.

“But I have no magic. Beasts love me, but I do not speak to them as my mother did. I am not Eric. The magic died with him. Always I was not what they wanted. I saw it in their eyes. ”

“Your . . . your parents were disappointed in you?”

He heaved another breath. Her head rose on his chest and fell. “They loved me. They were good kin. But I knew. And wherever I went in the land around, all knew.”

“How did you bear it?”

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“My father teached me to wield a weapon. I watched him bind the people together, Saxon and Danir, and learned from him. But I was unstill. When I had seventeen years, I went
vikingr,
first to trade up the Seine and then up the Volga to fight for the king there. In the language of the Volga, we are called Rus. The land we controlled, they called Russia. It was a hard time. I was put in a
carcern
in Kiev.”

Carcern. Incarcerated.
“Prison.”

“
Ja.
I was gone many years. When I
gewend
to the Danelaw, my mother was dead, my father feeble. I labored for that part of the Danelaw that held my mother’s people and my father’s. At first Guthrum does not trust me. It is hard. I am half-Saxon. But I fight good. At last Guthrum takes my counsel. The scalds sing of my deeds. Yet still the songs tell of the one the Norns say will save his people, the one I am not. And will not be.”

What a thing to live with. Belonging to neither people, living in the shadow of a dead brother, knowing people expected you to be magic and you weren’t . . . Her heart went out to him.

What could she say? She had expected him to be ashamed of some terrible act of carnage. The scars on his body said he’d lived through many. But he was a product of his time. He was proud of fighting and killing for the king of the Danelaw.

She had wanted to go back to a time when magic was possible. Galen certainly believed it was possible. He was ashamed he didn’t have any. Maybe there was no magic in the world, then or now. You couldn’t count on anything outside yourself to save you.

“Being a good man is enough,” she said quietly. “There are too few of those.”

“Nay, Lucy. Life is hard. Men need . . .” Here he had to ask in Latin the word for “hope.”

“Men looked to me to make life better. To protect them. I could only fight like other men or help in little ways: a bridge, a new saddle for horse.” He had to ask the word for “saddle.” She could feel him getting impatient with himself for not knowing all the words. “They ask me to say the right of the matters they bring to me. So I say which thing is right.” He held her more tightly to his side. She made the leap in her mind. He could not protect his people with magic, or a woman. Was that why he had leaped so blithely from bed to bed, lingering in none? He wanted no responsibility. Yet he fought for Guthrum to unite the kingdom against the invasion only he foresaw coming from the Normans. He struggled to do what he could do, far more than most men could, always believing he was not enough. Was that not the definition of courage?

She glanced up. His expression was so bleak. What comfort was there for such a man? And then she knew. “There are all kinds of magic, Galen Valgarssen. What we had here tonight is magic.”

She scooted up to look him in the face, surer now. “You said the night wanted what happened here. Is that not magic? Is finding each other across a thousand years not magic?”

His eyes softened. Then the heat started in them. “You are magic, Lucy.” She realized her breasts were pressed against his side, his good arm around her shoulders. She breathed in the
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feeling of peace as it hovered in the room again. The light had dimmed in the cabin. Clouds must have obscured the moon. But she and Galen were still here. His gaze roved over her, hungry for her. And she felt . . . beautiful. Who cared if it was a lie?

“No.” She smiled. “But we can make magic together.”

“Now,” he rumbled, kissing her forehead. “More slow this time. I will show what I know of women.” His hand found her breast. “You will yell for me tonight many times.”

“You may yell yourself, big fella,” she murmured into his mouth as he kissed her. The throbbing had begun between her legs, insistent. She was suddenly very glad that the vernal equinox meant there were twelve whole hours of night.

Brad watched the cranes move into place on the asphalt between the parking structure and the hospital, anxiety churning in his breast. The army engineers had determined just where at the base of the machine to hook in and winch it up onto the flatbed truck over the rollers set in front of it. But that didn’t mean the torque might not still damage the machine further. They’d waited until dark to attract as few eyes as possible. But still gang members, old people, and the local prostitutes were way too interested in the goings-on. Arc lights nearly eclipsed the light of the full moon rising over the bay.