Return Once More (23 page)

“Yes, we just finished.”

The guards were still staring at us, and Thoth looked as though he was plotting ways to make my death look like an accident. The weight of their gazes made me uncomfortable, and the fact that I wanted Caesarion to keep touching me and saying beautiful things made me wish for at least a modicum of privacy.

More than anyone on this planet would consider appropriate, but we were past caring.

I ignored the germ of worry gnawing a hole in my stomach. Now that the guards had witnessed my appearance, Caesarion's wasn't the only history that had been changed by my unauthorized travel. Thoth and Ammon, along with the manservant and unnamed guard, would be affected by these encounters in ways I couldn't begin to guess. What if I traveled back to Sanchi only to find everyone and everything gone, erased by my stupid impulsiveness?

Caesarion squeezed my arms, concern pushing aside the pleasure in his eyes. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing.” I forced a smile and banished my anxiety. What was done was done. “Can we take a walk, perhaps?”

“Of course.”

He turned to his guards and spoke softly in a local dialect, raising his voice a few times but winning the argument about going off with me alone. We wouldn't wander far, and if we did not return within the hour, he gave them permission to verify their Pharaoh had not been murdered.

It didn't seem like the time to mention that an hour still left me plenty of time to kill him and abscond.

That settled, Caesarion took my hand and led me away from the men and the fire. They had reached Berenice, a beautiful ancient city that rested on the southwestern coast of the Red Sea. The salty breeze twisted refreshing, cool air through my hair, a welcome change from the day we had spent in the baking hot desert, and the sky turned the water a deep blue under its winking stars.

We navigated the beach in silence until we left their earshot. Once nothing except the moon and stars interrupted the darkness, Caesarion dropped my hand and drew me into his arms. They were strong around my waist, and he lifted me to his chest, holding me tight. The musky scent of sweat and man went straight to my head and I closed my eyes, attempting to memorize everything about this moment. He breathed in deep against my neck, as though trying to accomplish the same thing, and the sensation of his breath moving my hair washed my skin with hot tingles.

“I thought you wouldn't come back. That I'd dreamed you,” he whispered against my throbbing pulse.

I shifted, unwilling to remove my arms from his neck but wanting to see his face. “You didn't dream me. But I'm not exactly real, either.”

“You feel real to me, Kaia.”

The husky tone of his voice betrayed his own response to our nearness and flushed me with heat all over again. His lips sought mine, hesitant at first, but with more abandon every passing second. An unintentional sigh slipped out of me when his tongue slid against mine. The two of us pressed together from head to toe, and if becoming one physical being were actually possible, maybe we could have stayed that way forever.

He pulled away too soon and set me back on my toes in the deep sand. My knees weren't working properly, dumping the rest of me into the golden grains too, and I pulled Caesarion down beside me. “I confess I might have returned just to kiss you again.”

His chuckle warmed my heart, and the slight flush of his cheeks in the moonlight made me smile. “Then I am even happier you are here.”

Things couldn't get out of control. A baby from a three-thousand-year-old daddy might not even be possible, but if it was, it had to rank high among hard things to explain away to the Elders. I wanted to kiss him all night, though, so I lay on my back, dragging him down until he braced himself above me, hands sinking into the sand on either side of my shoulders.

Moonlight lit the desperate sorrow in his eyes, and a crease deepened between his eyebrows. “For the first time in my life, I wish it didn't have to end.”

“What?” I asked, reaching up to rub my hand against the tunic covering his heart.

“Everything.”

Pain spilled out of him, coating me with a raw ache. I wanted to say I could save him, that we would steal more hours, more days, but it might be a lie. Oz had changed James Puckle's destiny. Jonah had found a way to alter Rosie's. But I still didn't know how. Or if I could.

“Everything ends, Caesarion. Like you said. But we're together now.”

I pulled him toward me until his elbows bent and propped him against my chest, until our lips met in the quiet, seaside night. The sound of waves licking the shore blended with the roaring between my ears as he kissed me, slowly at first, then with increasing ardor as his hands left the sand and found my hair, and the weight of his body fell onto mine.

My own fingers roamed, finding the corded muscles in his back. My body responded to his, my heart thrilling with every response I elicited from him. I didn't know how long we lay there, exploring one another fully for the first time without haste, but it was not long enough.

He eased away, panting a little while he rested his forehead on mine, our sweat mingling. “I have been with many women, Kaia, but never felt as I do in your arms. I have never loved another.”

The phrase
many women
lodged in my brain, dampening even his first confession of love, and the brain stem tat tried to spill unwanted facts about the Egyptian royals and their free and loose sexuality into the forefront of my mind. I shoved them away and smiled up at him, loving the way he looked framed by the night, secure in the knowledge that no matter how many women he had been with, this was special to him, too.

“I've never been in love before, either.”

I left out the part where I'd never had sex. In the ancient world, a woman's purity was of the utmost importance so that proper and valid heirs could be ensured, even more so when it came to ruling families.

“And have there been other men in your life, my Kaia?” A wrinkle appeared between his eyes, as though he couldn't decide whether he wanted to know or why he had asked the question.

“No. My world is vastly different from yours, Caesarion. We do not grow up so quickly.”

“Explain.”

He lowered his lips to my neck and worked his way to my collarbone, driving all rational thought from my head for the next several moments. I reveled in the feel of his mouth and his tongue, the weight of him, and tried not to pout when he stopped.

“You are used to being given what you demand, I imagine. Including girls—or boys, if the mood strikes you. Why are you not demanding more of me?”

Part of me wished he would go further, ask more—I didn't know if now, in this moment, I could deny him. It might be my only chance to know what it felt like to be with my perfect match, and to give that up in the interest of propriety didn't exactly feel right. The other part of me quaked in terror at the thought of that kind of intimacy at all, and a teeny, tiny voice worried about the man I would one day love enough to marry—that I would remember this one perfect night, and nothing could ever compare. That I'd know I'd settled for less.

“I do not want to hurt you, Kaia. It surprised me, your confession of love back at our camp, but it stunned me more to feel love in return.” A gentle smile softened Caesarion's face. “This is all unknown, to me. I have known familial love, and the love of a people, but never this pull to a woman. I find that I want to protect you, even if it means denying myself what I want very badly, to ensure you remain intact.”

Intact was not how I felt. I felt exploded into a million pieces, scattered over the sand and naked in front of the winking heavens. It was vast and impossible to describe, the feeling of being with him, of hearing him attempt to express the same emotions that rolled through me like waves.

But no matter what decision would be made regarding the two of us and how far we would take these stolen days, tonight I was not ready, and his sweet understanding pricked my eyes with tears. “It doesn't make sense, to love a man I've spent only hours with, and yet I do. Love you.”

He didn't reply, trailing a single finger down my throat until his palm settled over my heart. The Egyptians had been the one to latch onto the idea of the heart as the center of feelings in the body, and even when later sciences confirmed they originated in the brain, the colloquial importance of the heart remained even now, in Genesis.

Caesarion picked up my necklace, toying with it the way I often did when thinking of him. “What is this?”

“A family heirloom.”

His eyebrows pinched together as he squinted at the engravings in the moonlight. “The laurel wreath and the palm branch. Not symbols often paired. What does it mean?”

I closed my hand over his. “That sometimes love doesn't arrive when it's most convenient, but that obstacles can be hurdled when people care enough to find a way.”

“There is no way, Kaia.”

I scooted to the side, and he shifted off me and onto his back, propped up on his elbows as he studied the sea. I turned on my side, my head resting in my palm so I could drink him in. “I want to know more about you.”

“I would not deny you a single desire.”

A shiver raced down my spine at the implication I heard in his words, something silky and sexual, even though I couldn't be sure he'd meant to put it there.
Down, hormones.
“Why are you not betrothed? You are more than old enough, and a Pharaoh of Egypt.”

He glanced at me, gaze lingering a moment before he lay all the way back with his arms behind his head, peering up at the heavens. “My sister is too young to marry.”

I swallowed the revulsion climbing into my throat at the admission. The Ptolemies were a Greek family ruling Egypt and had intermarried for generations. Cleopatra had been married to more than one brother, I thought, but ignored the bio-tat's confirmations. They hadn't known better, and Caesarion had not been forced to cross that strange line yet.

It wasn't strange to him, I knew, and wasting time explaining the facts and dangers of crossing closely related genomes didn't appeal to me. He would be gone long before it would become a worry for him, anyway, and we were not given time travel so that we could fix Earth Before.

Except, based on Minnie's reflection, it seemed as though altering previous outcomes
had
been a consideration at one time.

Caesarion turned his head to look at me, his blue eyes big and full of wonder. “I never expected to know love, Kaia. I have known pleasure, and my sister Selene is a sweet child who will make a fine wife, but love … It is a thing of myth, reserved for the gods.”

I reached out and slid my fingers between his, locking our hands together on the beach between us. “Until now.”

“Yes, my love. Until now.”

“I understand why the guards think me a
sihr,
but what did they mean by a
dark one?
I've never heard that term before tonight.”

“There are ancient stories of people dressed in black, who appear out of thin air and murder without touching. Their victims simply collapse, turned to liquid on the inside, and the dark ones disappear in the same fashion as, well … as you do. It is superstition, nothing more.”

My heart rattled against my ribs. It didn't sound like nothing to me. It sounded like Oz had been popping up other places with his Gavreau waver, and perhaps doing more than knocking over pretty girls. How many times had he traveled, intent on changing one thing or another? It had to have been more than once to start the kind of association the guards had made between my appearance and death.

“What is it? You are as white as the stars, Kaia.”

Words snagged in my throat, partially because of the bio-tat, but more because as soon as I brought up the trouble at home, this time was no longer only ours.

“Please, tell me. Perhaps I can help. I know I don't look it, but I can be quite smart.”

That made me laugh, and the lump in my throat dissolved. “I think you look clever.”

“And handsome?”

“Of course. And handsome.”

He waited, a soft thumb brushing the back of my hand. My muscles relaxed, one at a time, and I knew it was time to ask for his help. It was the reason I'd come back—one of them—and time ran short. “There's a boy.”

“I do not like the sound of that.”

“Not in that way, trust me.” I gave him a smile. “Like I told you, we have strict rules about traveling through time.”

“The ones you're breaking here with me.”

“Well, yes. This boy, he's breaking them, too, but I don't know why. I followed him the other day and he interfered with an important development that afterward disappeared from history. I don't know why, or if he's working alone, or how he can be sure his actions won't have terrible consequences. It could erase more things in the future.”

Silence hung between us for several minutes. Misery brushed the edges of my happiness, not as potent or desperate as it had been during my questioning with the Elders, but still there. Waiting.

Caesarion stared out across the Red Sea, his features thoughtful, and when he faced me again, his gaze looked reproachful. “How do you know talking with
me
will not erase the future?”

“I guess I don't, not for sure. Except we haven't altered your destiny, or Octavian's, or Rome's. Merely the fact that you met a strange girl on your journey, and now your guards have their own
dark one
tale to tell.”

“But this boy, he changed something you know is important.” I nodded, heartsick, and he continued. “How do you know what the consequences will be?”

“I don't. We can't predict the future based on an altered past.”

“Explain.”

“Well … let's say you decided not to return to Alexandria. There are too many trajectories that could result from that one different decision for our sciences to predict the eventual outcomes. It could change nothing in the larger scope, or it could change everything. It would depend on the choices you made going forward—like, would you try to take back Egypt for your family, or would you be content to leave, to settle in Judea or another province and live your life as a commoner? Would Octavian find you anyway? It's … too big. We can't do it. It's why we don't change anything.” I sucked in a breath. “At least, that's what I've always believed.”