Bannockburn Binding (Beloved Bloody Time) (20 page)

Rob pulled at the seat of the jeans. “They don’t feel all that natural. Not after thirty years wearing a kilt.”

“You liked the silk robe well enough,” Lee pointed out.

“Aye, well, the silk is different. That’s decadent.” Rob grinned. “I like silk on Tally, too. Only a lot less of it than is in my robe.”

But he’d quickly grown used to trousers and liked their simplicity.

In bed, though, rarely a night passed when anyone ended up wearing anything. Even as the summer swung into winter, thanks to the advanced textiles in the bedding that Lee brought back to cover them at night, there was no need to bother with insulating layers of clothing.

So, this morning, which had been an oddly warm morning, Rob had woken to find Tally had kicked off her portion of the covers and lay on her side, her naked body utterly relaxed in sleep. Her golden hair, like ripe corn in the field, was spread across the mattress. Her belly, rounded with the growing baby, caused Rob’s heart to stutter.

His son.

Lee had confirmed it was a son. He had even brought back shadowy images of the still forming child inside, after running a scanner over her belly, then taking it back to a laboratory for processing.

That was a day Rob had got more than a little drunk, and not just over the fact of his son.

As Rob lay watching Tally, remembering that watershed day, Lee, who had ended up between them during the night, slid his hand over Tally’s abdomen and rested it on the baby, lightly enough not to wake her.

Rob circled his arm around Lee’s chest. “It’s not like you to be awake at this hour,” he murmured, his lips close to Lee’s ear, so Tally wouldn’t be disturbed.

Lee took a moment to reply. “Time is running out, Rob. I feel like I can’t spend too much more of what I have left with you and with Tally back here in the past in human form, mindlessly sleeping and wasting it away.”

He turned his head slightly. Toward the pillow.

Rob lifted himself up onto his elbow and lifted Lee’s chin, turning his face so that Lee was looking at him.

Tears were glittering in Lee’s eyes and he shut them to hide the tears away. But it merely squeezed the tears out.

“Hey,” Rob said softly. “Ye think ye the first to shed tears over this pickle we’re in?”

Lee’s green eyes focused on him again. “I’m not used to this. To…crying.”

“Neither am I,” Rob admitted. “Until you and Tally came along, I had no idea what love
really
meant. I thought it was a troubadour’s word. A poetic thing, full of light and splendour and happiness.”

“It is that,” Lee whispered.

“And it’s cruel and hard and wounds,” Rob insisted. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Listen to you,” Lee said. His hand glided over Rob’s shoulder. “The poetic savage.”

Rob grinned. “The savage poet, you mean.”

“I’ve known a time or two when you could be described as savage, but you’re a long way removed from the man Tally met at Stirling Castle, now.”

“I’ve you two to thank for that.”

“Thank?” Lee looked sad. “Your life is never going to be the same again, Rob. You can never go back. You’ll never want to go back. We’ve done you no favours at all.”

Rob touched his mouth to Lee’s, to silence him. “You’ve no idea how profound a gift you’ve given me. I can’t demonstrate it and you can’t see it because you’ve spent centuries living with it, so it has blinded you to its influence.”

“Time?” Lee asked dryly. “Time is a curse you don’t understand until you have it. Don’t envy us.”

Rob shook his head. “There you are. You can’t see it.” He leaned down the fraction of an inch more and kissed him again, this time properly. The kiss lengthened, grew heated. When Rob drew back again, Lee was breathing hard.

“All I know,” Lee murmured, “Is that a man who grasps the concepts of time and physics as you have and the next morning speaks so eloquently of abstract emotions like love…that man has no place in the fourteenth century.”

Rob shrugged. “I’ll manage.” He pushed Lee so his shoulders were flat on the mattress. “I managed to snare the both of you, didn’t I?”

Lee tried to sit up, but Rob settled on top of him and held his shoulders down easily.

“Aye, ye did, ye scoundrel,” Lee replied, imitating Rob’s brogue, which Rob rarely fell back into these days. Usually only when he was tired or stressed did his Scots appear.

Rob spread Lee’s thighs with his knees, his own cock stirring with sudden strong interest.

Lee caught his breath. “A proper scoundrel,” he muttered, his hands cupping Rob’s ass.

“Now there’s a sight for a girl to wake to see,” Tally said, her voice a mix of sleepiness and growing interest. She eased herself into a more comfortable position. “Don’t mind me,” she said.

Rob settled on his knees. “When I know you’re going to be watching every tiny movement and drooling, I don’t think it would be possible to ignore you.”

Tally grinned and sat up. She reached for the little pot of lubricant on the chest of drawers next to the bed.

Lee groaned. “Now she’ll torture us to death.”

Rob slapped his thigh. “And you hate every minute of it.”

Tally dipped into the pot and coated her fingers, while Rob appreciated the rounded fullness of her breasts. They had grown larger and fuller in the last few weeks, to both Lee’s and his satisfaction. Rob had also discovered that Tally’s nipples were extraordinarily sensitive now. He could bring her to writhing, panting desperation, begging for release, just by sucking and biting her nipples.

His cock hardened and throbbed at the memory.

Tally curled her slick hand around Rob’s shaft, making his hips jerk and thrust. Her other hand cupped his balls, squeezing gently, while her finger slid beneath to stroke his perineum.

Rob closed his eyes and clenched his fists. Tally knew exactly how to bring him to devastating ruin. She could play his senses like a harp.

When Rob was certain she was not going to spare him, Tally lifted her hand away. He groaned in frustration.

Tally transferred her moist hand to Lee’s testicles. He sucked in a surprised breath. His cock was erect, but at her touch it jerked and hardened, the head swelling and flaring.

Tally avoided his cock, though. Her slippery fingers stroked the back of his balls, then descended to his perineum. Rob, guessing her intention, spread Lee’s thighs wide, giving her access. Tally dipped her fingers down into the valley of Lee’s anus.

Lee moaned, his eyes closing and his hips shifting.

Talley pushed her fingers inside, evicting another hard moan from Lee. His cock was throbbing now.

So was Rob’s, from a combination of watching what Tally was doing, Lee’s reactions and his own anticipation.

As Tally removed her fingers, Rob replaced them with his cock, lifting Lee’s hips to give himself better access.

Lee clutched at the rough-hewn bars of the headboard, a long-drawn out groan emerging as Rob slid into him. When Tally gripped his cock, he choked off a cry, his knuckles whitening.

Rob began to thrust almost without thought, driven to it by Lee’s responses and Tally’s actions. Tally countered his thrusts, travelling the length of Lee’s rigid shaft each time he drove into Rob.

Lee grew taut and Rob could see the frantic beat of his pulse in his throat.

“Ah, Christ,” he murmured desperately and came with an upward flex of his hips. It was all the encouragement Rob needed to bring on his own delayed climax. Two more tiny thrusts and he came, the pleasure tearing through him.

“No, you don’t,” Lee said.

Rob opened his eyes to see Lee had his hand around Tally’s wrist, preventing her from leaving.

Rob grabbed her ankle. “I concur.”

Tally tried to look annoyed. “I have things to do, you know.”

Lee laughed. “What things? Rob and I are your personal slaves and Morag takes care of everything else. You have Nayara orchestrating a small army at the monastery for you. You’re more a lady of leisure here than you are at the agency.” As he spoke, he hauled her slowly back to his side.

Rob withdrew from Lee and helped arrange Tally’s limbs on the bed, turning her so she lay across the mattress. It would give him the room he needed. He spread her legs open and saw the tell-tale gleam of moisture. Tally loved watching Rob and Lee together. It never failed to arouse her.

Tally sighed as Rob laid on his stomach between her thighs. “No sex in the last trimester, remember?”

“I said you couldn’t take full penetration,” Lee amended. “That’s utterly different.”

“Completely,” Rob agreed and took her neither lips into his mouth. He pushed his tongue between them, quickly finding her swollen, heated clit.

Tally squirmed beneath him and when he glanced up, he saw that Lee was bent over her. He presumed Lee was teasing Tally’s breasts, although Tally’s big rounded belly stopped him from seeing if Lee’s mouth was drawing on her nipples. The little noises Tally was making made him suspect that was exactly what Lee was doing—teasing her nipples with his teeth and lips.

Rob returned to driving Tally as crazy as possible. He plunged the tips of three fingers inside her pussy. She was sopping wet and they glided inside the heated channel. Tally moaned deeply. She was trembling and her hips lifted in the tiny movements that told Rob her climax was building.

He listened to her breath. There was a particular breathless catch in her throat that she made, a quick series of them, as her climax hit, often just before she held her breath for endless seconds, then screaming.

That little hitch of breath was for Rob one of the most erotic sounds in the world. Tally’s screams were rewarding, but that catch of her breath could—and had—tipped Rob over into his own climax, so powerfully did it move him.

So he listened to Tally now and he teased her and stroked her clit with his tongue and teeth. He thrust his fingers gently in and out of her pussy, feeling the muscled walls clamping around him.

Then he transferred one of his moistened fingers to her anus and slipped it inside.

Tally exploded. Her breath caught and held, her body stiffened, then she screamed, her fingers digging into the sheets. Her channel squeezed around Rob’s fingers in rippling waves.

It had been a wonderful start to a morning that had been utterly perfect, to Rob’s mind. They had leisurely showered together in the bathroom-shower-room that Lee had jury-rigged out of the spare room next to their bedroom. It served as an arrival chamber for Lee when he jumped back from his trips, so the equipment in the room was sparse and hugged the walls. Everything in the room folded back against the wall when it needed to.

Modern plumbing, Rob had discovered, was something for which he would sell his soul. Hot water on tap. The concept was so simple, yet such a wonderful convenience.

Rob had watch Lee go about assembling the pipes and fittings, completely and utterly baffled about Lee’s final intentions. Unlike any of the esoteric equipment and projects Lee had turned his hand to around the cottage, this one had no ancestors from Rob’s time that gave Rob a clue what Lee might be doing.

When Lee finally gave Rob and Tally a tour of the bathroom and turned on the overhead shower to demonstrate, then held Rob’s hand under the hot water falling from the showerhead, Rob was stunned as the ideas and concepts slammed through his mind.

“The contraption you installed on the roof,” Rob said. “It heats the water?”

“From the sun,” Lee said. “Yes. And stores it, so you can have hot water even at night. It’s very efficient—much more so than the solar panels that were first invented. These are so sensitive to sunlight, they have enough energy left over they could also charge a household-sized battery, but I haven’t bothered with that.” Lee shook his head as Rob frowned. “Power is a discussion for another day, Rob. Leave it. For now, enjoy the benefits of indoor plumbing. You’ll get to like it, I guarantee.”

And he had. It wasn’t just hot showers. The mechanics and concepts of a recycling, flushing toilet had kept him occupied for a day or so and the convenience of it had further convinced him that plumbing was one of man’s prized inventions. While neither Tally nor Lee would tell him when plumbing would come into general use, he privately decided that he would find a way to “invent” his own plumbing once they had gone. There was no way he was ever going back to using a chamber pot again.

They had showered together this morning, although that wasn’t always the case. Often Lee had work that took him away early and just as often, he involved Rob in that work. But not today.

Breakfast had been an odd mix of new and old. Morag, who had silently accepted every strange event she had witnessed inside the cottage and doted upon Tally with the utter devotion of a mother hen, moved around the table helping Lee serve breakfast with patient tranquility. Rob made strong tea in the ceramic pot, in the way Tally had taught him, his mouth watering, for he had acquired a taste for the beverage, too.

Lee made waffles, using a cast iron waffle iron over the coals in the fireplace. The maple syrup was warming near the stove. Morag had brought sausages from a local farmer and fried them on the stove.