The Isis Knot (25 page)

She felt him everywhere. Swirling through her mind. In her mouth that longed to taste him. In her fingertips that needed to touch him. In the sensitive, wet place that desperately wanted him to come home.

He kissed her, harsh and open and frenetic. There was a shift of their bodies as he scooted out from underneath her and laid her down on the ground. His hair dangled against his cheeks and chin, and over his shoulder stretched the star-filled universe. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anything so lovely.

Then he clamped her wrists in his hands and held them down. She’d never craved anything in her whole life more than his weight on top of her, and yet he hovered.

“You would like to know what I feel?” he drawled.

“Yes.” She strained upward, trying to kiss him, but he pulled back his head.

“I feel this.”

His hips scooped downward and he ground his cock into her. The thin layers of fabric nearly dissolved from the heat between them. A shiver of beautiful sensation rippled through her. A low moan escaped her throat and wound its way around their bodies.

He was still staring into her eyes as he said, “I feel
you
, Sera.”

His hips dipped again, giving her a long, luxurious slide, another insistent push. Bending down, he sucked on her bottom lip. Her arm muscles quivered with the need to touch him, but he continued to hold her down.

“But it’s not just your body,” he added. “There’s another part of you I can sense. Your mind or your soul or…”

His words trailed off as his mouth found her throat. At last he released her wrists. One of her hands gripped the flexing muscles of his ass. The other reached between them and stroked him over his pants. Yes. This.
This
was what she needed. She tugged at the rope holding up his pants, loosened it, and slid her hand inside. Took him in her palm. He shuddered.

“Yes,” she breathed. “I feel that, too.”

“There’s something else. Something inside me.” His tongue made a hot, wet line to her ear as he rocked harder into her hand. “It’s like a song. Never-ending. Beautiful and urgent. It pushes me toward you, calling you to me. I want—”

He cut himself off, going stiff again, then pressed his body up to hover over her again. His gaze searched her face as his brow furrowed.

“You want what?” She reluctantly removed her hand.

“I want…” He licked his lips. “I have the strangest urge to call you by a different name.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that, yet she was. She took his face in her hands, loving the feeling of the soft hair against her palms.

“So do I,” she whispered. “Say it.”

He pushed away, rocking back to sit on his heels. With the rope of his pants undone, they gaped open, sagging low, exposing the long, lean expanse of him from shoulders to hip bones. His hands made fists on his thighs, and when his eyes met hers again, they were no longer filled with lust, but with confusion.

She pulled in her legs and came to kneel before him. “Say it,” she whispered again.

He searched her face for several long moments, and then said, “Ramsesh.”

At the sound of that name, Sera’s soul sang in recognition.

She touched one hand to her heart, feeling what beat there, knowing that the name William had spoken somehow did belong to her. She spread her other hand across his chest, letting his heartbeat seep into her fingertips.

The name that had come to her so suddenly only minutes earlier returned, and this time she did not swallow it back. “Amonteh.”

William’s head sagged on his neck. His shoulders rounded. Sera came closer and wrapped her arms around him. His arms slid loosely around her lower back as his forehead rested on her shoulder.

“The skeletons…” Though his voice was muffled, she heard him plainly. Understood exactly what he meant.

Ramsesh and Amonteh. The poor couple who’d been buried in that simple tomb. The dead Egyptian woman who’d once worn the cuff now secured around Sera’s arm.

Deep arousal still made her body pulse with debilitating need. She could not turn it on and off like a switch, and by the erection still pressing against her, it seemed William could not either. The alcohol buzz and the proximity to him only heightened it more, but now it churned together with this new revelation and she had no idea what to listen to. The driving need of her empty body? Or the surreal story swirling around in her head, and all the accompanying questions that came with it?

Just moments ago she’d been lost in her want for this man, so sure in her desire that she’d been easily able to accept everything. Blinded by lust. But whose need was she feeling exactly? Did she truly know this man well enough to want him in the way she did? Or was she merely a pawn for this ancient woman Ramsesh, who clearly owned a part of her? Could Sera claim any rights to her faculties, or had she lost her free will when Malik had sent her into that cave?

Against her, William’s body slackened. As if in disappointment. Or realization of the same.

“What is it?” she asked.

He sagged even more. “My Spectre. He finally has a name.”

CHAPTER 16

Down by the fire, Jem cried out in his sleep. William recognized the sound—the dream of being at Riley’s mercy again. The pain. The fear. The humiliation.

Again, the lad’s presence slid a chilled knife between William and Sera. Again, she edged away from him and he knew that this moment, in all its beautiful revelation, was gone.

With a groan he pried himself away from her and picked his way back down to Jem. It took him a little while to calm Jem down, but it took much, much longer for his desire for Sera to cool. As he sat quietly next to the lad as his shudders subsided, she lay down on the opposite side of the fire, and he watched her drift into sleep. Even after her eyes closed he continued to watch her, listening to the Spec—Amonteh—and concentrating on parsing out what the dead man fed him, and what William felt of his own accord.

When the sun rose, he still wasn’t sure which was which. And by the troubled look in the eyes of the woman who claimed to be from two hundred years in the future, she didn’t know either.

That afternoon, as they trudged along the river toward Sydney, William felt Jem’s presence greater than ever. The lad was a barrier between Sera and him, a muzzle over their mouths. The need to be alone with her—and this time to talk, to ask questions, to pick apart their mystery piece by piece—muddled his mind and made his speech curt.

More than once he’d been tempted to leave Jem at a faraway settlement or farm. But then he remembered that Jem was a bolter, too, and that if Jem were to wander back into the colonist’s world, he would be hanged as such. William also needed Jem’s forging abilities. And then there was Riley. Jem still had healing to do, and since William had taken it upon himself months ago to see that done, he would not turn his back on the lad now.

William spoke little on their walk east, but Sera filled in the spaces. Her voice reminded him of the sultry smoke in the old opium palaces he’d once frequented—low and lingering and addictive. She didn’t attempt to talk with him, however, instead focusing light questions at Jem: “Where were you born?” “Who taught you to read?”

It was clear to William she was trying to reach out to him, but he couldn’t quite figure out why, when just yesterday her frustration over the lad’s presence had outweighed his own.

Jem didn’t let her in, answering her in clipped phrases—“London.” “Master Wren.”—and sidling even closer to William. The name “Wren” made William slightly curious, but he was still so distracted by Sera’s story from last night that he only gave it a second’s thought.

At sunset, after they’d eaten what was left of the lamb they’d managed to carry, and the rum bottle and water skin were empty, the first lights of Sydney glimmered in the distance. The sound of trotting horses came up behind them. William glanced over his shoulder to see three riders dressed in the dark uniforms of colony constables angling toward the town, which would soon put them across his path.

He shoved Jem behind a wide, squat tree with a smooth trunk and large, exposed, snakelike roots, and pulled Sera with him into a mass of tight shrubbery. Instantly his body called to her, as though there had been no space or time since he’d last had his mouth on hers and his cock nearly buried inside her.

“Oh God,” she whispered, weakly prying herself out of his grasp. He let her go, though with the riders getting closer, she didn’t leave the bushes. Her proximity was still enough to scramble his senses.

Even in the shadows, he could see the thousands of questions swimming in her eyes.

“Who were they?” he murmured. “Amonteh and Ramsesh.” The names felt both odd and comfortable on his tongue.

“I was hoping you would know. From Samuel Oliver or from the explorers who were in Egypt at the time.”

He shook his head. The riders were passing now, and they quieted. Jem, thankfully, didn’t make a sound from behind his tree.

When the riders were gone, William turned to her. “They want us to be together.”

A pained look pinched her face. “They want us to fuck. I’m not sure they want anything more complicated than that.”

That mouth… He let his faint amusement show in the tick of a smile. “That’s what I meant.”

“Listen”—she passed a hand over her hair—“I’m not a virgin. I’m far from a delicate flower. In my time that’s not a big deal or anything. But this…this will take some time for me to process. I can feel her desire for you, and I think she might be a little heartbroken, too, and it’s all so confusing I don’t know where she begins and I end. Or the other way around.”

“Your time…” He risked a touch, a gentle graze of his fingers down her cheek. She surprised him by leaning into him slightly. “I’ve had eighteen years to get used to what’s inside me, but I understand what you mean because I struggle with that, too. For me, the larger piece is coming to accept what you told me last night—”

“Will!” Jem’s nearly shouted whisper, followed by a crash of branches. “They’re gone!”

Sera ducked out of the shrubbery. As William followed closely behind, Jem noticed that he hadn’t shoved Sera behind a tree. He looked hurt and betrayed, something William found odd and annoying.

“Let’s keep moving,” William said. “I’d like to get to Sydney before it gets too late.”

An hour later, after the sun had disappeared, the three of them stood on a small rise looking out at Sydney. In the dark the town made a sparkling crescent moon, the torches and cooking fires and the warm yellow windows of homes huddled around the watery curve of Sydney Cove.

A ship was still anchored offshore, lit lanterns swinging from the decks. They were too far away to read its name and it was too dark to make out its shape. William prayed it was the
John Barry.

As they drew closer to Sydney, the smells of the town wafted through the night—animal waste and rotting fish and unwashed human bodies mingled with the aroma of cooking food. The harbor, however, gifted him with the scent of brine and the promise of open water, and it was on that he focused. When he was young, he’d needed it as strongly as he’d needed air.

“I have our papers,” Jem said at his elbow. “But I have none for her.”

The way he said
her
made William cringe.

“Word about us may have reached Sydney by now. They could have our names, our descriptions.” He plucked at his pants. “Convict issued. Yours too. They’re cause enough to stop us, to ask for our papers. We can’t use what you made before; our names are on them. Can you make new ones? And add one for Sera?”

Jem shook his head at the dirt. “The ink spilled back by the river.”

“Bloody hell.” Of all the things…

Sera stepped in front of him, her face grave. “I’ll be right back. Stay here.”

William grabbed her arm as she spun away. Just that simple touch, and the connection between them flared. “Where are you going?”

She nodded toward the sprinkling of lights. “You told me you got caught the first time you ever stole something. Those boots? Why don’t you let a professional handle this?”

But her face was terribly sad, tight with hurt, and he remembered what she’d told him last night. How she’d been forced to steal when she was young, how much she hated it. How hard she’d worked to leave that all behind. If he could save her from doing that again, he would.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

She shrugged, but it was clearly to hide the pain. “It’s a colony of criminals, isn’t it? I’ll fit right in.”

Jem said, “Let her go.” Maybe he just wanted to be rid of her, or maybe he saw the same promise in her that William did. That strength and confidence that seemed so foreign to him. That wherewithal and bravado that perhaps could be a gift to women of her time.

Her time.

It didn’t matter that he’d claimed to believe her last night, the whole truth of it was still a cloak of iron clamped around his shoulders. His chin dropped, his eyes falling to the ground, and by the time he looked back up, her silhouette was already moving like a silent black snake from shadow to shadow. Away from him. Then she was gone.

Back pressed against a tree, he slid down to a crouch, taking long strips of white bark with him. He snapped a wildflower from its stem and toyed with the petals until he felt Jem loom over him.