Now and Forever (19 page)

"If it's already happened, why would it need our help?"

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe we're part of the bigger picture?"

"No," he said. "Not for a second."

She stood by the window, brushing her hair with a large tortoiseshell comb. "There's a reason for everything that happens," she said, "and I can't help thinking we've been sent here for a purpose."

"There's no purpose, Em," he said, walking toward her. "It just happened and now we have to find a way to get back where we belong."

Her gaze was drawn to the bed pushed up against the far wall.

"You should be in Tahiti," she said, meeting his eyes. "You would have been if you hadn't hijacked that balloon."

"Would you call it fate?"

"I call it temporary insanity."

He drew her close, draping his left arm around her shoulders. "You shouldn't have taken off the way you did."

She tried to move away but he held her fast. "I made a mistake," she said softly. "There was no point to pretending otherwise."

"It didn't feel like a mistake."

"No," she said, "but that doesn't change things. We want different things from life, Zane. We need different things. Not even traveling two hundred years through time can change that."

He understood her meaning. "I'd sleep on the couch," he said, "but they don't have one."

"You don't have to sleep on the couch. We'll manage."

He looked at the narrow bed. "I doubt it."

"It is kind of small, isn't it?"

"Turn over once and we're talking conjugal rights." He reached for the closure on his trousers.

"What are you doing?"

"What do you think I'm doing?"

"I think you're taking your pants off." Hadn't he understood a single word she'd said?

"Best way to take a bath." He gestured toward the tub in the middle of the room. "Is the water still warm?"

She nodded.

"Great." Even with his broken arm he managed to divest himself of his clothing in record time. He placed his gold watch on the window ledge. "You'll scrub my back, won't you, Em?"

"Zane, you really don't want to get into that tub."

"Look," he said, "I'm tired and hot and grubby. If we're going to share a bed, I need the tub."

"But the water--"

"Is just right," he said, lowering his impressive body into the small tub. He frowned, sniffing the air. "What the hell is that smell?"

"Roses," said Emilie.

"From the front yard?"

"From the bathwater," she said, starting to giggle.

"You're kidding me."

"Afraid not. Rebekah gave me some attar of roses to put in the water."

"Why the hell didn't you tell me?"

"I was trying to. You were too fast for me."

"I'm going to smell like a damn bridal bouquet."

"Nobody'll notice."

The look on his face spoke volumes.

She approached the tub, clutching a flannel wash rag. "Would you like your back scrubbed?" she asked sweetly.

He grunted.

"Once for yes, twice for no."

"Don't push it, Emilie," he warned.

She knelt down behind him then leaned forward, dipping the wash rag into the scented water. "Keep your arm out of the water," she advised. "You don't want to get the splint wet."

"I don't give a damn about the splint."

"You will if it ends up smelling like rosewater."

She noticed with a smile that he made a point of keeping his right arm well out of the reach of the bath water. The only light in the room came from a candle set upon the nightstand. Its light sent sent shadows flickering across the wooden floor. Slowly she drew the warm, wet cloth over the muscles of his back and shoulders, watching the drops of water glisten in the candlelight.

The feel of his skin beneath her hands was both strange and familiar and once again she felt that dark need building inside her. It had always been like this. The sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, the way his hair always smelled of sunshine and sea breezes--any one of those things was enough to send her foolish heart into a spin.

If only she didn't want him. This whole ridiculous mess would be so much easier if she didn't yearn for him. She hated feeling so open, so vulnerable, wanting the one thing on earth she shouldn't have.

Thank God she wasn't still in love with him, that what she felt was nothing more than lust.

"That's great," Zane murmured, letting his head drop forward as she kneaded the muscles of his neck and upper back. "Down there...yeah, that's it...."

She watched, mesmerized, as a bead of water inched its way down his spine, fighting the urge to follow its trail with her tongue.

#

This was the life, thought Zane, as Emilie ministered to him. A warm bath--even if the water did stink of roses. Candlelight. A beautiful woman and a waiting bed. He had the feeling all of the elements were about to come together.

For the first time since he hijacked that balloon, he felt hopeful.

"Well," said Emilie, rising and moving away from the tub. "Your back is as clean as it's going to get. I think I'll go to bed."

Zane's thoughts exactly. The feel of her hands against him had focused all of his attentions on the same idea.

She threw back the covers and climbed into the narrow bed. He noticed she was still wearing the pale blue robe, and he grinned. He'd always liked helping her undress.

He watched, amazed, as she yawned, scooted down beneath the covers and closed her eyes.

"You're going to sleep!?"

She nodded, eyes still closed. "Of course."

That's what he got for having an overactive imagination. She'd told him she wasn't interested in continuing where they'd left off two hundred years from now. He'd have to remember his ex-wife was one of the few women in the world who meant exactly what they said.

Not that it made the situation any easier. Climbing into that narrow bed and staying on his own side of the mattress would be a major-league test of willpower and where Emilie was concerned, he'd never had much of that commodity.

"A deal's a deal," he muttered as he climbed out of the tub.

Emilie peered at him through the flickering candlelight. "Did you say something?"

"Not me," he said, grabbing for the scratchy tissues that passed for Early American towels. "You must have heard me yawn."

"Mmm," said Emilie, not sounding terribly convinced. "That must have been it." She turned on her side and closed her eyes. "Last one in bed blows out the candle."

It was going to be a very long night.

Chapter Nine

From sunup until sundown the Blakelee farm was a hotbed of activity. Andrew and the boys set out into the fields soon after dawn, returning to the farmhouse only for food and drink.

Emilie was swept up into the household routine that was uniquely the province of females. She swept the bare wood floors, beat the rugs when necessary, mended stockings and repaired worn trousers. She helped Rebekah with kitchen chores, shuddering at the sight of an unplucked chicken lying on the table, and she was again struck by the realization that knowing about a way of life and actually experiencing that way of life were two totally different things.

Still there was something exhilarating about being tested to the limits of your knowledge and ability and as they began their second week in this strange new world, Emilie found herself more confident that she could find a way to make a life for herself.

#

Unfortunately Zane was finding it difficult to carve a place for himself. Day after day he watched McVie and the Blakelee boys working in the fields while he sat on the top porch step and waited for some sign, some indication that he'd find a way back to the world where he belonged.

He was a coiled mass of energy, a taut mainspring ready to snap. The broken arm kept him from burning off his tensions with hard work. His usual diversions of fast cars and bright lights were unavailable. Pretending he and Emilie were married was easy enough during the day but at night, when she was only a heartbeat away, he burned for her.

In desperation he had taken to sleeping on the floor and, he noted wryly, she had offered no protest. He had only his thoughts for company and as the days passed those thoughts grew increasingly dark.

All around him the talk was of independence but to Zane independence would begin only when he regained financial freedom. He'd been born into money and all that entailed and the pursuits of lesser mortals had always seemed murky at best. McVie had said that once Zane's arm healed he would be an asset in the fields. "Josiah was a large man such as you," Andrew said, "capable of lifting his weight and more."

Pumping iron was one thing. Baling hay was something else again.

He supposed he could get work as a fortune teller but that was probably the best way to insure his place as first in line at the gallows. In his pocket his hand rested on the wristwatch he'd refused to hide with Emilie's twentieth-century possessions. You could probably feed the Continental Army for a year on what he'd paid for the damn thing--and on top of everything else, it no longer worked.

"Wait a minute," he said out loud as he slipped the watch off his wrist. Times may have changed but gold remained constant. If he removed the watch face and separated the band into segments, independence might no longer be as far away as it seemed.

Money could make the difference. He could repay Rebekah Blakelee for her generosity, then purchase a horse and carriage so he and Emilie could return to the lighthouse. He had the feeling that if they were to have any chance at all of returning to the future, they would have to be waiting for that chance at the place where the future began.

#

As for Andrew, he was faring no better than his counterpart from the future.

Each day he worked the farm with vigor.

Each night he slipped from the quiet house to meet with the other members of the spy ring. A spy ring whose numbers were dwindling away faster than the coins in his pocket. First Blakelee. Now Fleming. Arrest warrants had been issued for Miller and Quick.

Papers had fallen into the wrong hands and, to everyone's dismay, invisible ink had proven to be less than reliable. There must be a better means of achieving the desired end but neither Andrew nor the other members of the spy ring could discover what it might be.

Rumors abounded about British troop movements on Long Island and anarchy in the Hudson River Valley. Militiamen in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had laid down their arms and returned home to farms and families in desperate need with promises to return to the front once the harvest was past.

Andrew listened with a keen ear for any mention of a new plot against the life of General Washington, but there was none.

To his puzzlement, he found himself both relieved and disappointed. He wished no danger upon the head of His Excellency, but he wanted to believe that all Mistress Emilie and Rutledge had told him was true. If the general faced no threat to his life, did that mean that the other stories his companions had told him were so much whole cloth?

He had spent much time considering the curious bond between the beautiful red-haired lass and Rutledge. They had once been wed, had stood before man and God and repeated those sacred vows that he and Elspeth had repeated on that long ago summer's day.
Until death...
they had promised and only death's finality could have torn Elspeth from his side.

He had little experience or knowledge of divorce. He knew that it existed, but beyond that the notion was as foreign as it was distasteful. Doubtless it had been Rutledge who instigated the separation. There was much of the rogue about the man. He had not the aspect of stability that a woman found important in the man she would wed.

Of course, he reminded himself, they came from a time and place unknown to him where men watched moving images on giant screens and made a fortune in gold tossing a leather ball through a hoop. Perhaps in that world divorce was an everyday occurrence but still he found that impossible to believe. He wondered what manner of difficulties he had visited upon the lass by forcing her to share a room with the man who had turned away from their conjugal vows.