The Bride of Time (15 page)

When did he lie down beside her in the pine-scented brush? When did he fold her so close to his dynamic body? He was aroused, the thick bulk of his erection leaning heavily against her naked thigh through his soft buckskin breeches. But for her stockings, Tessa was naked to the waist, her bulky bloomers not having fit beneath the slender style of the frock meant to be worn without underpinnings. She stiffened as his hand reached beneath her skirt and came to rest upon the V of soft hair curling between her thighs.

Stabbing waves of silken fire surged through her to the very core as his fingers probed deeper, and she uttered a stifled cry. “Shhh,” he crooned. “I think you have bewitched me, Tessa.”

Unbuttoning his breeches, he lifted his sex free and drove her hand against his naked hardness. It leapt at her touch, and her breath caught in her throat as he crimped her traitorous fingers around his hot, veined shaft.

Tessa had never been touched intimately before, and she had never seen, much less fondled, a man’s organ. The closest she’d come to such as that was viewing what the masters had made of it in their paintings and sculptures, but
this!
This was gargantuan by comparison to the artists’ renderings. It was warm and alive, as hard as marble, yet as soft as hot silk to the touch.

“I will not ask anything of you that you would not freely give,” he murmured in her ear.

“Giles, please…” Tessa murmured. Her heart was saying one thing and her head another.

“I know it’s too soon, Tessa,” he whispered in her ear. “But…I fear if I wait to make love to you it will be too late…”

“W-why?” she breathed. “Too late for what?”

“I do not know,” he said, between light kisses upon her face, her throat, and décolleté, for he had spread her bodice open, baring her breasts to the mist swirling around them like ghostly spectators. “You came to me out of the night like an answer to a prayer. From the first moment I clapped eyes upon you…I knew it would come to this. I have this gnawing fear that, like the wraith you appeared, you will disappear. It is almost as if you are a figment of my imagination…that you aren’t really…real, like Prinny’s Bride of Time is something his imagination conjured. And yet, here you are…the perfect bride…alive and warm in my arms…”

Now would be the perfect time to tell him why he felt that fear. Now would be the moment to confide that somehow she had folded a pleat in time to come to him. Was that not just as preposterous as his imagining his ward to be a werewolf? But she couldn’t bring herself to speak it, not when his hands were roaming over her body, not while his lips were tugging at her nipples and his sex was growing harder and more urgent under her caress. Instead, she buried her free hand in his hair and held his head against her breast.

Suddenly, the light was gone, and darkness fell around them. Overhead the stars played hide-and-seek among fleeting clouds. Giles’s heartbeat began to quicken. Tessa could feel it hammering against her. His grip became stronger, his arms crushing her against him, his lips smothering, so anxious his teeth pierced her lower lip, and she tasted the salty, metallic flavor of blood. An unstoppable frenzy seemed to take him, and the moan in his throat more closely resembled a snarl.

Tessa gripped his shoulders, searching deep in his eyes. They seemed to glow with an inner fire in the ghostly, undulating darkness. “Giles, the light,” she cried. “It’s
grown dark. You wanted to be back at the Abbey by now!”

For a moment, he stared as if he’d just awakened from a trance. Shaking himself like a dog, he staggered to his feet, raking his hair back roughly as if he meant to keep his brain from bursting through his skull, and reeled off in the direction of the broken chaise.

Tessa scrambled to her feet and ordered her frock. She had stopped him just short of consummation, and her loins ached for him to fill her, ached for his life to live inside her. Her throbbing sex, drenched in the fire of unstoppable passion, was moist and swollen with un-climaxed desire. Across the way, Giles struggled to free the horse from the chaise. He was like a man possessed, grappling with the animal’s bridle, his free hand fisted in the horse’s mane.

“Where is the pentacle?” he thundered, gravel-voiced.

“I-in my pocket,” she cried.

“
Put it on
,” he charged as the horse reared, pawing the misty air, its terrified shrieks amplified by the fog. “Do it now, Tessa!”

Gripped with icy chills from head to toe, Tessa groped the slit in the side of her frock and withdrew the little pocket suspended on its ribbon. Foraging inside, she produced the pentacle. Her hands were trembling so, she dropped it while trying to work the clasp and fell to her knees, groping the ground beneath the mist.

Overhead, the scudding clouds passed over the moon. It shone down eerily, and in its light, Tessa caught a glimmer from the silver amulet hanging from one of the bracken clumps. Snatching it, she fastened it about her neck and started toward Giles, still struggling with the horse. It almost seemed as if the animal was trying to trample him. It seemed terrified.

“No! Stay where you are!” Giles thundered.

Tessa froze in her tracks. Giles had gotten the horse
unhitched, but he couldn’t control it. It seemed to have gone wild, rearing back on its hind legs and bucking, menacing Giles with its high-flying forefeet churning the mist. Though she wasn’t a skilled rider, Tessa had been around horses all her life and she had never seen the like. She was just about to call out a warning, when she screamed instead as the horse wheeled about, struck Giles with its rump and drove him to the ground, then galloped off crazily into the mist.

Tessa started to run to him, but his thunderous voice stopped her in her tracks. “No!” he shouted. “Don’t come!” On his feet now, he began tearing at his clothing like a man possessed. “Run, Tessa! Follow the path the way we were traveling over the hills…You’re almost there…”

“Giles…you’re scaring me now! What is it?”

“Just do as I say! In the name of God, Tessa, don’t look back—run!”

The desperate tone of his voice set her in motion. It was happening again. She was running over the patchwork hills through the mist, her heart hammering in her breast. He was gaining on her, his heavy footfalls vibrating on the spongy heath through the soles of her morocco leather slippers. She couldn’t see his face, though his hot breath puffing against the back of her neck riveted her with gooseflesh. Raw fright forced her to surge ahead, until a clump of bracken snagged the hem of her bombazine frock. It scarcely caused a hitch in her stride. She hoisted up her skirt and kept running—running for her life.

It was her nightmare! But this time, the nightmare was real, and she knew who was chasing her; but it wasn’t Giles, it was a huge snarling wolf snapping at her heels, and she called upon every ounce of her strength to stay one step ahead of it as it closed in upon her.

All at once the steeple of a little church poked through
the misty darkness ahead, and she streaked into the deep shadows that clung about the little graveyard alongside it. On she ran until her legs failed her and she fell in a heap of black bombazine by the side of the road. The last thing she saw before consciousness failed her was a horse-drawn bus tooling along the lane, of the type she was seeking when she fled London. Neither Giles, nor the chaise, nor the wolf were anywhere in sight.

Chapter Twelve

“Don’t touch her! She could be contagious…or in her cups,” someone shrilled—a woman, Tessa thought, coming around. She was so dreadfully dizzy she could scarcely see the press of unfamiliar bodies as individuals gaped at her. They appeared more like a connected wreath surrounding her, a dark presence looming over her, where she lay dazed in the lane.

“Where could she have come from in that scandalous rig?” another wondered. “I’ve never seen the like,’ ave you, Mable?”

“Only in the picture galleries,” said the other. “They wore such frocks a hundred years ago. The fashion come from old Boney’s wife in France. The women back then wore next ta no tops on their dresses at all and no bloomers underneath ’em.”

“All right, you lot, back in the bus!” a man’s gruff voice charged. He leaned over Tessa, a portly man in bus driver’s livery, her woolen shawl in his hand. “This yours, miss?” he queried. “I found it a few yards off over yonder.”

Tessa nodded, and he helped her to a sitting position, wrapping it around her. “Comin’ from a costume fete, was ya?” he asked. “This is the season for ’em.”

Tessa didn’t answer. Why was she so groggy? How long had she lain there by the roadside like this? It wasn’t night any longer; it was daylight. And the horse-drawn bus! There were no such things in Giles Longworth’s time. Had she crossed back over into her own? Her heart leapt in fear that she had. What had become of Giles…of the wolf?

The wolf!

Tessa felt the blood drain from her face. Giles wasn’t anxious to reach the Abbey before dark because of Master Monty at all. He’d wanted to reach the Abbey in daylight because of
himself
, because of what he might become. Giles had been bitten. It was he, not the child, who posed the danger to her on that moor beneath the full moon. Why hadn’t she realized it before? She was so concerned that the Gypsy would betray her secret, she’d forgotten about his. He didn’t want her to see him turn into the beast that she saw streaking through the courtyard. Could he have been the one who did the damage in the studio? Was it in fact Giles who crashed through the oriel window, not Master Monty at all? Could they
both
be werewolves? Was that why he was so insistent that she put the amulet on at the last, why he’d begun to tear off his clothing?

The amulet!

Tessa groped her throat for the silver chain that held the pentacle the old Gypsy had given her. Yes, it was there. It was cold to the touch, and then seemed to burn her fingers. She tucked it inside her bodice.

“She’s a doxy what’s strayed from Whitechapel, is what she is,” one of the women said, climbing back on the horse-drawn bus. “The lightskirts don’t care what scandalous togs they get themselves up in.”

“Here now, none o’ that!” the bus driver said. Then to Tessa, “Where was ya goin’, then?”

“I…I am no doxy,” Tessa defended. “I…I was
looking for the bus station, and I lost my way in the fog. I stumbled over a rock avoiding a carriage. I…I must have struck my head upon it…”

“Where are ya goin’?”

“Where am I now?” Tessa probed.

“Ya don’t know where ya are?” the bus driver marveled. “That bump on the head addled your wits, I shouldn’t wonder, and give ya a fine cut on your lip inta the bargain, I see.”

“I told you I lost my way.”

“Well, you’re a far cry from London, if that’s where you’re comin’ from in that fancy getup. Ladies hereabouts don’t get decked out so peculiar.” He leaned closer. “Beggin’ your pardon, but that’s what’s set them peahens off, ya know.”

London was the last place Tessa wanted to go. She’d traveled in time, but to what time? Would the police still be looking for her? No, she couldn’t chance it with nowhere to go. She had to return to Cornwall, to Longhollow Abbey.

“No, I’m not going to London,” she spoke up. “Cornwall…Longhollow Abbey on Bodmin Moor…”

The bus driver gave a start. His demeanor sent shivers down her spine. “Well, you’re in luck,” he said. “You’re on Dartmoor. I’ll have ya ta Bodmin Moor quick enough if you’ve got the fare. But why would ya want ta go to the old Abbey?”

“That, sir, is my affair,” Tessa said, getting to her feet with his help. Opening her pocket, she paid the man and moved toward the bus.

The driver glanced down at the coins in his hand. “Oy, what’s this ya give me?” he asked.

Tessa felt the blood drain away from her scalp. Fumbling with her pocket, she fished out a twentieth-century coin and offered it. “I’ll have that back, if you please,” she said. “I collect old coins…and that one is quite rare.”

“I should say so,” the driver said, returning it. “About a hundred years old, this.” He took the new one, bit down upon it, then shoved it in his pocket. “That’s better then,” he said with a nod. “Don’t want no funny money, no matter how rare ’tis. It ain’t no use ta me.”

“Don’t let her on!” an old woman passenger called out. “We’re at the crossroads! When I was a girl they buried the
revenant
—evil souls who would rise after death to corrupt the living—at crossroads to confuse them when they got up outta their graves. Where did she come from way out here? By the look of her, she’s confused, all right. Leave ’er, I say!”

The bus driver shook his head. “Well,
I
say she comes. Ya can’t leave a body out here all alone with dark comin’ quick in these parts this time o’ year. Where’s your Christian charity?” Then to Tessa, as he helped her into the lower level of the bus, “In ya get, miss.”

Tessa hesitated, a sea of faces spread with scowls of righ teous indignation trained upon her. Could they actually believe she was a ghoul risen from the crossroads? She shuddered.

“Go on then,” the driver urged. “Pay no attention to the old magpies. There’s naught ta fear. It’s safe as houses…”

Tessa had no choice. Taking her seat, she pulled her shawl close about her, and gave the scenery her full and fierce attention through the little window as the driver cracked his whip and set the horses in motion.

She didn’t have to turn to know all eyes were still upon her. Once they left Dartmoor, the roads widened into new coaching routes wide enough to accommodate both horse-drawn and motor vehicles. It seemed strange to Tessa, having come so recently from a vintage Regency two-seater horse-drawn chaise. But that too had seemed odd to her when she’d first climbed
into it after living in Town and using modern transportation.

She was going mad. She had to be. How was it possible to travel back and forth through time? But she had. What would she find at Longhollow Abbey now? The cheeky bus driver had cast her such a strange look when she’d given it as her destination. If only she knew what year it was. If only she were bold enough to ask. They would surely pack her off to Bedlam if she did. Sane people were generally credited with knowing the current year.