TemptressofTime

Temptress of Time

Dee Brice

Swept away into past lives she
doesn’t remember, she’s thrown together with  two men—her masters, her jailers,
her lovers.

Compassion. Compromise. Control…and
letting go. These are the lessons erotic romance author Diane de Bourgh must
learn before she can find contentment. Walker Mornay and Adrian de Vesay,
noblemen and Masters of Time, are swept into Diane’s journeys through the medieval,
Tudor and Regency eras and their own passionate past lives. They too must learn
lessons of the heart, especially those of relinquishing control to win a
woman—body, mind and soul.

Temptress of Time

Dee Brice

Author Note

This is a fantasy time-travel novel, so I have taken liberties
with historical accuracy. I hope my use of playful anachronism adds to your
enjoyment of the story.

Chapter One

The Lake District, England

Present day

“What’s making you so antsy?” Adrian de Vesay asked,
propping his feet on a leather ottoman and settling into the deep matching
chair. His companion, Walker Mornay, paused long enough to shoot Adrian a
mind-your-own-business glare before resuming his pacing across the immense
library. Adrian wondered if Walker, or anyone else for that matter, had read
even one book from each of the countless shelves. It did seem as if someone had
moved the library ladder a few feet since yesterday, but Adrian wouldn’t ask
when Walker seemed pissed off about something. Normally close-mouthed, Walker
in a full-blown rage was nothing Adrian wanted to confront just now. For all he
knew, Walker had been researching where and when he’d like to go next. If their
Masters—Kronos and his ilk—deigned to send them out again.

“It wasn’t our fault.” Halting at a wall of French windows,
Walker fixed Adrian with a baleful look. “Although you could stop declaring
your undying love too soon. That always scares off our potential lover.”

“Of course it wasn’t our fault.” Adrian refused to take
umbrage at the implication that whatever wasn’t their fault might be his. “Not
the right time or place.”

“Not the right woman.”

Ah.
“Not every woman—even in this day and age—is
ready for two lovers.” He thought for a moment while Walker just stared out the
French windows. “Perhaps, as Kronos suggested months ago, we
do
need to
go back.” He remembered a horde of haughty harridans he’d prefer not to
encounter again and shivered at the thought. One especially opinionated female
flashed though his mind and, despite being unable to recall her name, increased
his dread.

“Or perhaps we should renegotiate our contracts. Insist the
Masters send us each out alone.”

Adrian felt as if someone had lopped off a perfectly healthy
arm. “Is that what you want?” It certainly wasn’t what Adrian wanted. He felt
connected to Walker—more like soul brothers than biological ones, but each
still necessary to the other.

“Of course not!” Walker raked his coal-black hair with both
hands. “It just seems a bit much—them insisting we find one woman willing to
share her life—”

“Her body,” Adrian inserted, humor in his voice, a smile
touching the corners of his mouth.

“Every moment of her life,” Walker went on as if Adrian had
remained silent. “Everyone needs privacy.”

“Maybe you could open up a little instead of standing around
smoldering with unstated desire.” With Walker,
desire
looked more like
lust
,
which might contribute to their inability to find one woman to share their
lives. After all, if one believed even a portion of romance novels, a woman
wanted her man—or men—to think of her as more than a vessel for sexual
satiation.

“Kronos hinted he’s going to make us start over,” Walker
said, sounding disinterested but his tense posture giving away his inner
turmoil.

“Start over? As in start over with Arnaud and his Days of
the Week?”

The room went dark. Outside the French windows it looked as
black as midnight on a cloudy, moonless night.

“It seems…” Walker began.

“That Kronos and the powers that be intend us to start over
right now,” Adrian finished as the vortex swirled around them. Maybe in a few
more centuries he’d grow used to the sensation of being swept away. Something
to pray for…some other time.

* * * * *

San Francisco, California

Present day

Diane de Bourgh stared at the cover art for her next
medieval romance and felt her heartbeat double. The artist must have invaded
her dreams, drawing not only two physically perfect, warriorlike specimens, but
their faces too. The dark-haired man had the face of a fallen angel—cynical and
weary. The blond looked like the kid next door—open to any adventure that might
come his way. Devil and angel in the bodies of sculpted gods, hewn not by
chisels but by long hours of training with sword and mace and shield and by
even longer hours on the battlefield.

What made her heart race like a horse hitched to an
old-fashioned fire engine was the certainty that she knew them both. She could
have met them at a release party her publisher had hosted, but since she made
it a point to arrive late and leave early on those occasions, she doubted
they’d met there. She despised promotional conferences, attending solely
because they increased sales. Besides, the way she reacted to the men was so
intense, so visceral, that were they to appear in her home office she wouldn’t
know which one to throw herself at first. Given that they both looked
accustomed to doing the ravishing, she doubted they’d have any problems in the
sex department.

She was the problem. She had difficulty making choices and
when she did…she usually made the wrong one. On the other hand, if she met up
with one or both of them, she might learn more about true passion and real
love—emotions she found it difficult to write about with any degree of honesty.
She did feel aroused—on occasion—but it felt more like an itch that needed
scratching than a precursor to undying commitment.

With these two, however, she’d bet her last dollar they’d
make the choice for her— just like her medieval hero tried to do with her
spirited heroine. While her heroine had to live within the mores and
conventions of the time period, Diane always imbued the young women in her
books with spunk or wile or feminine charms that made the hero realize his
chosen mate wasn’t a carpet upon which he could tread with muddy boots.

She glanced at the cover art again. The pair seemed so much
like her chauvinist heroes, she vowed that if she ever met them in their own
milieu, she’d teach them a thing or two about how to treat a woman.

Reaching out to shut off her computer, a wave of dizziness
caught her off guard. Nausea roiled in her belly and bile bubbled in her
throat. The room spun as if an earthquake had struck, but it didn’t stop. It
spun until she blacked out, lost in blessed darkness.

Chapter Two

For an instant Diane felt as if she were having an
out-of-body experience, standing at the back of the small stone chapel and
watching two people in medieval clothing being married. In the next instant she
had not only been sucked to the front of the church, but into the body of the
woman being married. If that wasn’t enough to start her screaming at the top of
her lungs, she recognized the guy at her side—the blond from her cover art. Not
that he looked like an adventurous kid now. With his face stark white and his
eyes so dark they had lost all color, he looked as if…as if he’d rather be anywhere
else but here.

Catching a brief glimpse of herself reflected in his eyes,
she saw that she looked about to bolt for the nearest exit. Unfortunately it
lay behind her, along with a crowd of grim-faced people between her and
freedom. At least that was how it felt to her. Incense filled the air, tickling
her nose but also blocking out the extreme body odors of the people standing
far too close. She could barely breathe with them so near. But maybe that was
as much a blessing as the odor-masking incense. If she fainted, the crowd would
hold her upright—at least until the ceremony ended. Then what?

The man at my side will carry me off and rape me.
Consummate the marriage on his brother’s behalf.

Whoa!
Those thoughts hadn’t been hers. What the hell
was going on here? From what she could see of herself in the man’s eyes, her
face hadn’t changed. Judging by the weight pulling her head back, her unbound
hair had grown a lot. She shoved aside all concerns about her appearance and
focused on what was happening to her mind. Trapped in some strange woman’s body
and now hearing that other woman’s thoughts?

A tug on the long sleeve that almost covered her trembling
hand drew her attention to the younger woman pressed to her left side. She
reminded Diane a little of herself—except she had never plucked her eyebrows so
they disappeared altogether. Nor redrawn them halfway up her forehead. Had she?

As Diane was about to touch her face to make sure her
eyebrows were where they belonged, the woman at her side squeezed her hand.
Diane feared her bones would break. “Say yes,” the woman hissed.

Two voices in Diane’s head screamed “no”—one her own, the
other belonging to whom?—but her lips formed the word “yes” and a faint voice
said it aloud.

The minister—priest, she decided, taking in his ornate
vestments—made the sign of the cross. The man at her side released her other
hand as the crowd parted and she could breathe a little better.

What now?

Put one foot in front of the other, Countess de Vesay
,
that other voice muttered in Diane’s brain, sounding bitter and snide.
You
wanted to be a duchess but your chosen duke married you to his friend Arnaud de
Vesay—who could not bother to attend his own wedding but sent his brother as
his proxy.

Okay. Proxy marriages, if Diane remembered correctly, were
only conducted for royals or high-ranking nobles. So, she—this other woman in
her mind—wasn’t a duchess but had still married well enough to warrant a proxy
wedding. Maybe she—this other woman—was pregnant, hence the haste to wed.
Although…just being married would legitimize the baby, but what would her
absent husband believe of
her
? Not her, she corrected. His wife. What
would he believe of her? That she had cuckolded him?

Swell!
Diane would have to suffer the consequences of
early bedding while not having had any of the fun. And if her groom were
elsewhere, how could she claim the child was his?

Think, Diane, think.
There had to be a way out of
this…mess. Debacle? Dream?

She pinched herself. It hurt, although not enough to return
her to her own time and place. Maybe if she pinched her proxy groom instead? He
had left her already and now stood in the chapel doorway, conversing with a
dark-haired, dark-eyed—

Ah crap!
Her sick mind had conjured the other model
from her book cover—the one with the face of a fallen angel. Just now, however,
he looked every inch a devil as his gaze moved over her body, his eyes
predatory, his full lips slightly pursed as if he…what? Intended to take a bite
out of her?

Drawing herself to her full height of almost six feet, she
looked beyond the two men. If all else failed, she could use haughty
indifference to hide the stark terror growing larger and larger in her chest.
It felt heavier as well, constricting her lungs until she collapsed against her
proxy groom, the world spinning as he focused an irritated scowl on her face.

“What now, Lady Diane?” His curt voice scourged her ears.
“If this is yet another…”

Diane? He called me Diane!
Her knees buckling, she
crumpled at his feet. Not only was she trapped in the body of a woman who
seemed to look like her but they had the same name?

By all she found holy, what in bloody blue blazes was
happening to her? Where was she?
When
was she? And why wasn’t she at
home, slaving over edits?

Home. There’s no place I’d rather be.
Grabbing her
temporary groom’s arm, struggling to her feet, she lifted her skirts and peered
at the toes of her satin slippers. Not red. Not even a hint of glitter.

Okay, she couldn’t rely on the Wizard to get her out of this
nightmare. Or a witch—good or bad—or…
ohmigod
! If she told these people
she wasn’t whom they thought, they’d think her either insane or possessed. And
if they thought her possessed, what would they do to her? Burn her at the stake
or weigh her down with boulders before they dropped her into the closest lake?
Hell, given the weight of her gown, they wouldn’t even have to bother with
rocks—she’d sink just like a stone. No, they wouldn’t burn or drown her.
Instead, if she were actually living sometime
before
the fourteenth
century, they would hang her. She’d still be dead, of course, but was hanging
any less painful than burning?

All of which meant she had to get herself out of this fix.

She’d arrived in this world at the chapel doors. Tomorrow…
Yes! In the morning she’d return to the chapel. There had to be some kind of
door…a portal she could go back through.

Of course, if this was just some horrible nightmare and she
woke up in her own bed…she’d make notes and write about the experience in some
future novel.

Her female companion tugged on her sleeve, silently urging
her to hurry. Lifting her skirts to keep her embroidered hem out of the dust,
she followed the two men as, laughing and muttering in French, they crossed the
bailey into the great hall.

A clue as to
when
she was niggled at her brain.
Others around her spoke a form of English she understood—sort of. It resembled
Chaucer’s old English in
The Canterbury Tales
. Coupled with the French
spoken by her proxy husband and his friend, it led her to believe she was
trapped somewhere in England, sometime after the Norman Conquest in 1066. At
this juncture she couldn’t figure any closer than that.

Which presented still another problem. If she said one word
her vocabulary—never mind her pronunciation—would betray her. As if already
feeling rough hemp around her neck, she stroked it and sighed with relief.
Not
about to hang, praise God.
If any good came out of this situation it was
that she could understand what the others were saying. Sort of.

But this woman—this other Diane—had expected to marry a duke.
She rubbed her forehead, momentarily distracted by finding her eyebrows where
they belonged. Deciding to leave the subject of title and rank for another
day—like tomorrow when she returned to the chapel and either got home or
figured out exactly where and when she was—she followed everyone out of the
chapel. Somehow she’d also figure out why this had happened to her. In the
meantime she’d play the mute and not say a word.

The smell of roasted meat and yeasty bread made her mouth
water and her stomach growl. Her substitute groom shot her a lopsided smile
that had her smiling back despite her worries. Taking his outstretched hand,
she mounted the dais with him then sat. His dark-haired companion raised his
tankard and made a toast. The people on benches below the dais mumbled the
man’s words, leaving her somewhat surprised by the tepid reception.

So, either her people disliked her marrying a Norman or they
disliked
her
—or rather that other woman whose name she shared. Her
breath caught as she took a gulp of wine. The sour taste, coupled with her
sinking hopes of aid from the people around her, made her cough. Her ersatz
groom pounded her back as he continued to quaff from his own tankard. Leaning
away from the none-too-gentle beating hand, she offered a brief smile of thanks
then took up a small blade with two prongs and a wickedly sharp edge.

She could do this, she told herself, pricking a bloody chunk
of beef from the trencher in front of her. The meat being too cumbersome to
bite, she knew she couldn’t cut it unless she used her fingers to hold it down
while she sawed at it. Faced with that choice, she snagged a chicken leg and
gnawed on it, ignoring the limp, overcooked vegetables but enjoying the crusty
bread.

“Eat up, Countess,” the dark-haired devil urged, looking
around her fill-in groom. “We leave at dawn.”

So much for a trip back to the chapel. Unless… Of course.
She’d sneak out after everyone else had fallen asleep.

Exhausted though she was, she couldn’t sleep. The feather
mattress sagged under her hips and shoulders. The bed ropes creaked every time
she moved. If that wasn’t enough to keep her awake, every time she closed her
eyes she felt as if the vortex were about to descend again. She might have
welcomed it, except…well, she had no idea where it might take her. She’d have
to wait for a flashing neon sign that read “Twenty-first Century This Way”
before she stepped through it.

Still, if there was a way out of this nightmare, she had to
seize it right now. Morning would be too late. Tiptoeing across the rush-strewn
floor, praying she wouldn’t step on a mouse or other varmint, she eased up the
latch. Breath held, she opened the door.

“Going somewhere, Countess?” the man asked from the doorway
opposite hers, his black eyes wicked. “Coming, perhaps, to spend your wedding
night with me?”

Stepping back, she slammed the door then dropped the heavy
wooden plank into place—shutting him out. Locking herself inside as well.

* * * * *

Dawn.
That black-eyed devil had said they’d leave at
dawn, yet there wasn’t a hint of light in the sky when she stepped outside.
Torches cast eerie shadows over the bailey walls, making her shiver at what
might lie in the darker recesses. Horses shifted restlessly as if wanting to
leave this place with haste. Their warm breath steamed in the chilly air and
their tack rattled as they stomped their hooves. A wagon piled high with
furniture and luggage sat at the center of the dirt area.

Her belongings and bride’s portion of household goods, she
supposed. Other farm carts held tents and food. She began to suspect a long and
uncomfortable journey ahead.
Where’s a limousine when you need one?

A young woman—the same one who’d been at her side during her
wedding—held out a tankard. Steam billowed, carrying the scent of mulled wine
to Diane’s nostrils. She took a grateful sip, noting that the girl wore only a
fur-lined robe over her nightgown. House shoes covered her dainty feet.

“You aren’t coming with me,” Diane hazarded, handing back
the tankard. To her great relief, the girl seemed to understand her and didn’t
look askance at her accent or pronunciation.

“Our uncle, Baron de Bourgh, forbids anyone from his house
to accompany you.” She sounded relieved at the command to remain here. Diane’s
own last name, whispered as if speaking it aloud might summon Satan himself,
made her heart thud like funeral drums.

“Accompany me where?” she managed to force out around the
lump of fear constricting her throat.

The girl waved a hand. “To your husband’s castle.” When
Diane just stared, the girl added, “Somewhere near York.”

Nodding as if she’d known that all along, Diane thought of
all the unrest and outright treason Yorkshire had bred. Would she be caught up
in events like the Pilgrimage of Grace that had led to so many deaths?
Wrong
time frame, Diane
, she thought, not comforted at all. Other dangers could
befall her. Such as some Scottish reiver swooping across the border into
England—the
Debatable Land
, if it existed in this time and place—and
stealing her away. Would he ransom her to her husband or to—

“Where is Baron de Bourgh?”

The girl shot her a puzzled frown. “Our uncle is with
Arnaud…the Earl, your husband. In Ireland.”

“Of course,” Diane replied as if she’d only been testing the
girl—her sister, she supposed. “In all the excitement of the wedding, packing…”
Not knowing what other activities might have made her forget where her groom
had gone, she shrugged. The scant information did nothing to tell her
when
she was. William the Conqueror had relied on his barons to rule England while
he maintained his French court. Much later, Henry the Eighth claimed part of
France as his, but she couldn’t remember if it had been Normandy or some other
French province. With some five hundred years separating the two rulers…

Based on her own clothes and those of the servants scurrying
about, she figured she was some time prior to Henry the Eighth—which still left
a lot of room for missteps and hanging in her path.
Oh dear, back to
witchcraft?

“I’m going to the chapel,” she announced, realizing this was
her last opportunity to try to escape.

“No time,” her substitute groom announced, sweeping her up
to settle her in front of him on his enormous horse.