Time After Time (14 page)

Noah’s suddenly crestfallen expression was belied by laughing eyes. “It wasn’t an urge for my body?”

“I didn’t get my teeth rattled,” she said.

“Oh.”

Alex burst out laughing, but still managed to evade Noah when he lunged again. “Oh, no! You have to eat to keep up your strength; I’m determined to get my teeth rattled.”

“Witch!”

“I thought I was a sprite.”

They watched night come over the tiny valley, building a fire in the river-rock fireplace to ward off the chill. Light teasing was the rule, but there
were exceptions scattered here and there that rekindled their need as if it had never been sated.

It was still early when Noah began to bank the fire, and Alex headed for their bedroom, her heart beating in her throat and her body warm from within. She turned down the corners and climbed into bed after shedding the robe, smiling to herself. But her smile became suddenly half worried and half rueful when a four-hundred-pound lion climbed up beside her, carrying a trusting white kitten in his mouth.

Alex watched Cal release Buddy, watched the kitten curl up between the broad forepaws of his friend. And she sighed. She looked up to see Noah standing in the doorway, and shrugged helplessly.

“He’s used to sleeping with me.”

Noah held the door and looked Cal straight in the eye. “Out, pal,” he said pleasantly. “There’s not room enough for both of us.”

She started to warn him that it was unwise to stare any lion in the eye, even gentle Cal. But something, a newer instinct, held the warning unsaid. Instead, she waited silently, looking from the
lion to the man. A part of her was somehow aware that this was a purely male matter, a curiously decisive, silent battle that would need to be settled only once.

And it was.

Returning the stare for a long moment, it was Cal who gave in. He picked his Buddy up and climbed off the bed. And he butted Noah’s thigh gently as he passed by him and left the room.

Calmly Noah closed the door and came to join Alex in the bed.

“Very impressive,” she commented.

His eyes gleamed at her. “Not at all. Just a question of who got the lioness.”

Her arms slid around his neck as he reached for her. “Oh? Well, there’s more than one way to tame a lion….”

She watched the dusty road. For weeks now she had watched. She offered water and what food she had to the weary soldiers making their way back south. She bandaged old wounds and answered
eager questions about the whereabouts of the families in the area.

She searched faces.

Most wore gray, but there were some in blue. The war had split families, tearing more than a country down the middle. Of the blue-clad men she asked hesitant questions.

They had no answers for her.

The war was ended. A tattered, bloody South defeated. She had known, in the beginning, that it would be so. She had lost everything in a hopeless cause. Her father, brothers.

Now … him.

Her heart told her he lived. He was safe. Her mind told her he would not return to her.

More weeks passed. The road became even more empty. Fewer soldiers came by her gate. She waited and watched. At night she lay before the stone fireplace and remembered strong arms and gray-blue eyes.

Until, finally, she turned away from the road, and the memories. But not fully. A part of him lived within her.

She called on strength earned in the battle to survive, and began to repair her war-ravaged land. Her home. There were no tears left.

Alex woke to find tears on her cheeks. She wiped them away, careful not to disturb Noah. His warmth helped ease the coldness inside of her, and she moved yet nearer to his body. His arms tightened around her even in sleep, and Alex relaxed in his embrace.

But she stared into the darkness a very long time before sleep would return, one hand resting on her flat stomach.

“S
HALL WE FLING?”

“Not without music,” she answered.

“Darling sprite, we’ll make our own music.”

“You’re still trying to rattle my teeth, aren’t you?”

“It’s a question of masculine pride.”

“I’ll dance at the wake.”

“What’re we burying?”

“Your masculine pride.”

Noah sighed. “A guy could get hurt in the crossfire,” he observed in a cowed tone.

“You started the shooting.”

“I just asked a simple question.”

“And I answered it. I never fling in the woods.” Alex removed Buddy from Cal’s mouth and set him down on the blanket they had spread in a clearing by the stream. “You were going to fish,” she reminded Noah, “and I was going to read. Those plans still sound good to me.” She picked up her book and leaned back against Cal, using his willing side for a pillow.

Noah sighed again and bent down to gather his fishing rod and tackle box. “You should have told me you didn’t enjoy fishing,” he told her.

“You didn’t ask. Is it going to be a bar to our future relationship?”

“I shouldn’t think so. As long as you don’t object to my fishing.” Noah kept his voice light, his heart leaping as always whenever she casually mentioned a future for them.

“I don’t object a bit,” she said firmly.

He straightened and gazed down at her in silence for a moment, wondering for a countless
time if he dared ask her to commit herself to him. And, for a countless time, he shied away from that.

They had spent days alone but for the pets, days of peace and laughter and passion. In some ways Noah felt secure in her love, and yet there was still something elusive about her. “I love you” was still not an easy thing for her to say, yet she said it often. She was clearly more comfortable now with touching and being touched, quick to reach out to him or respond to him.

Yet he had awakened several nights to find her awake, still and silent beside him in their bed. To his concerned questions she inevitably replied that it had been “just a nightmare” and seemed so unwilling to talk about it that he hadn’t pressed her for details.

“You’re not fishing,” Alex murmured, looking up at him over the top of her book.

Noah pushed the troubling thoughts aside. “Actually, I am,” he told her. “I’m using my sexy body for bait and hoping to catch you.”

“You’re insatiable.”

“Oh, you noticed that?”

“Noticed?” Alex rested the book against her raised knees and stared at him. “Noticed?” she repeated in rising incredulity.

“You should be flattered.”

She cleared her throat in a rather pointed way and lifted the book again.

“Can I help it,” Noah demanded aggrievedly, “if I’m at the mercy of this violent passion you’ve roused in me? Can I help it if I have to grab you every time you walk by?”

“Go fish,” she told him.

“I’d rather catch you,” he said wistfully.

Alex didn’t take the bait.

After a moment, sighing mournfully, Noah made his way to the edge of the stream. He eyed the water, then walked a few yards farther upstream before choosing a spot. But before he could even bait his hook, arms slid around him from behind.

“You caught me,” Alex said breathlessly. “I just can’t resist your sexy body!”

Noah dropped everything.

He could feel her gaze on him as he saddled the horse, and knew without looking what expressions those green depths would hold. No condemnation, no censure, no recriminations. Only quiet strength and a softness that was wistful because a war had robbed her world of softness.

She was a lady.

She wouldn’t ask him to stay, he knew. It was not in her, this gentle and gracious woman, to put herself between him and his duty. She had hidden him, tended and healed his wounds. She had fed more than his body, her beauty and gentle touch a salve to his weary spirit.

She had shared with him her own weary soul … and her bed. Held him in the night as he had held her, with a passion as violent and overpowering as a summer storm.

And now he was leaving her.

Alone, but for a handful of loyal servants. Alone in a war-torn land. Alone amid the shattered remains of what had been her life.

He led the horse from the barn, aware of her soft footsteps behind him. He swung into the saddle, arranged the reins methodically. If he looked at her, he knew, if he gazed into those quiet eyes, he was lost. He was, he realized dimly, lost anyway, because he was about to leave the only anchor he had found in this hated war. The only reality.

And the only person he had ever loved.

“Thank you.” Abrupt. Brutal.

“Take care.” Her quiet, gentle response.

Shoulders stiff, he rode blindly down the dusty road.

Noah woke, cold and shivering, desolate. He had released Alex sometime during the night, and now gently gathered her sleeping body close again.

It was a long time before he felt warm.

He wasn’t a man who had ever thought seriously about impossible things. Analytical for the most part, he considered to be real only what he could see or touch. Yet Noah had more than once
photographed things he had not consciously seen, capturing a moment or a fleeting expression he could not have reasonably anticipated.

Luck, he called it.

But as the days passed, Noah began to wonder more and more often if there were realities that couldn’t be touched, but only felt and believed. He wondered because his analytical mind had begun to add things up. Just flashes. Dreams. Curious, out-of-sync moments. Feelings.

Feelings from other times.

He dreamed almost every night now, usually two separate dreams. One always involved a Union soldier and a woman with blond hair and green eyes who had hidden him, healed his wound, and loved him. The other always concerned a raven-haired Gypsy girl with wild green eyes and a man who adored her.

Noah had dismissed the dreams as the erratic ramblings of his subconscious at first. But a pattern had formed, and there was nothing erratic or rambling about that. The dreams were
serial
. They
had progressed, from instance to instance, each dream continuing to tell a clear and coherent story.

A lord’s son had watched a Gypsy girl dance before a bonfire, her green eyes beckoning, her smile teasing. Meetings followed, secret and secluded, because her family thought little of nobility and his thought even less of Gypsies. Words of love were the sounds of two hearts beating together, desire a pagan song celebrated beneath the trees. They loved and planned. And when he had to leave the countryside on business for his father, he promised to return. And he had returned … to find her gone.

And a wounded Union soldier had found help and solace from a gentle Southern lady who hid him within her home. She had nursed him, fed him. Asking nothing in return, she provided a haven where his weary body and spirit could rest. She was the one spot of gracious beauty in his life, and he loved her. Loved her in a bed where generations of her family had come into the world. Loved her before a crackling fire in an old stone
fireplace. Loved her with the desperation of a man about to return to war. And then he left her.

Dreams. Or … dreams of memories.

Memories of dreams?

He didn’t know.

Often Noah caught himself looking in Alex’s eyes for something. The wild spirit of a Gypsy girl. The quiet strength and gentleness of a woman risking her own safety for his. And shaken, he often found one or both of the qualities he sought in the depths of her green eyes.

Enchanted green sirens, wild and fey, sometimes beckoned to him when he teased or she teased, prompting a flashing image in his mind of black hair and a cool forest glade. Lovemaking by a rushing stream. And in quiet moments her green eyes were soft and wistful, and he could almost smell the musty disuse of an old barn and see dust hanging heavy in the summer air. See a once-gracious house pitted and scarred by a vicious war. Feel the satiny softness of smooth skin reflecting a fire’s golden glow.

He could remember waking from a vague
dream to hear a voice, familiar yet strange, speaking words that had made no sense. Then,

Oh, see! Our lifelines match! We are bonded, my love. Fated to share all our lives together!

Noah didn’t believe in impossible things. But his perception of what was, in fact, possible was beginning to change.

There was so much about Alex that was familiar to him! Tiny things such as gestures or tricks of expression, and larger things—the way her slender body felt in his arms. Familiar. And so right.

How long had he loved her?

Insane, he thought.
I’m insane. I love her so much I’m looking for ties stretching beyond the both of us, for anything that will bind us together
.

He didn’t dare confide the wild suppositions to Alex. She’d think he was stark raving mad!

“We haven’t come up with a way to save Cal from Teddy’s clutches,” Alex reminded him one night as they cuddled together on the couch in front of the fireplace.

“That worries you a lot, doesn’t it?” he asked quietly.

Alex, her determination to hold on to this man strengthened during the past days, silently fought off panic at the thought of having to choose between the two lions in her life. “It worries me,” she admitted. “Before, I would have just—taken Cal away. Moved on.”