Ella fought to get to her feet and see his face. She was aware of the other men—only minutes before insidious menaces to her—now crowding around the two of them like they were at a family reunion.
“Oy, matey, is that ‘er, then?”
“Arrr, she’s a looker, mkubwa. Well done, lad!”
Ella felt herself trembling as images and memories came crashing back to her in swift seconds. Her baby! Halima! Cairo! And her dearest Rowan…who had been lost and was now holding her in his arms, his eyes devouring her with a hunger that matched her own.
He looked like he’d aged ten years. His face was bronze-dark, his blue eyes bright and snapping. His hair was long and he looked as thin as she’d ever seen him—wiry and hard. What was there was all muscle.
“Rowan,” she said again as he crushed her into his arms, holding her so tightly she found herself fighting for breath. “It’s you. It’s really you.”
“How can it be that you’re here?” he whispered into her hair, his hands roaming her back and shoulders as if to prove to himself she was no phantom. “You came after me?”
“If you’d asked me that five minutes ago,” Ella said, laughing in spite of herself, “I couldn’t have told you.” She pulled away and looked into his eyes. “Oh, Rowan,” she said. “I forgot I even lost you and now I’ve found you.”
“God’s teeth, mkubwa, go on and take the room over the Lime and Pistol. We’re heading back to the ship.”
Rowan waved to the men, his eyes never leaving Ella’s. “How did you know I was here? How the hell did you find me?”
“Long story. Let’s get off the street and I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
He reached down to grab her legs and swung her into his arms. “I’m not letting you out of my sight for even a minute,” he said, “in case this is all a dream.”
Ella wrapped her arms around his neck. She didn’t look at her surroundings as Rowan strode down the street and slipped into a back alley. She didn’t question how he knew where he was going. Or care. She was safe and they were together and nothing else mattered now. She clutched him and buried her face in his stained and ripped shirt, the smell of him reviving her senses all over again until she could no longer hold the tears back.
Rowan bounded up the rickety, wooden, outdoor stairs with her still in his arms and kicked open the door. The one-eyed Tunisian, Argo, sat on the floor, a hookah pipe in his hands. He looked up in confusion.
“Out, Argo. Now,” Rowan said.
“Cor, that’s something desperate, mate.”
“Now.” Rowan set Ella down on her feet and the shipmate, barely as tall as Ella, gathered up his pipe and hat and slipped out the door. Rowan shut the door and wedged a chair under the handle. Before he took the two steps back to her, she was in his arms. She felt him lift her up, his arms hard and powerful under her bottom. Their lips met hungrily as if this were the true identification process.
Ella felt the room swirl around her as Rowan carried her to the bed and eased her down onto her back.
“Talk later,” he rasped hoarsely, his eyes glazed with want.
He thinks this isn’t real, Ella thought as she jerked his shirt open across his chest. He thinks I’m going to disappear. She slid her hand into the front of his pants and wrapped her fingers around his cock, hard and ready. He groaned.
“I’m real, Rowan,” she whispered into his ear.
He reacted immediately, wrenching her skirts up and ripping her underclothes down her legs. She parted her thighs as he rammed into her, taking her with all the force and power of ownership. She came in uncontrollable spasms on the second thrust arching her back and letting the waves of ecstasy radiate from her core and ripple through her body. She wrapped her legs around his back as he rode her to his own finish crying out in raw triumph as he did. After it was over, she held him tightly with her legs and arms and felt him tremble.
“You’re home, babe,” she said. “You’re finally home.”
***
An hour later, he’d taken her two more times and each time Ella felt his power and control build until he collapsed on top of her spent but not shaking. She kissed his face and squirmed out from under him, looking at her surroundings for the first time.
“You live here?” she asked, glancing at the rough wooden walls and worn rug on the floor.
“No, I live on a boat,” he said, his voice gravelly and low. His eyes were closed.
“Is that a pirate boat? Were those…friends of yours…pirates?”
He opened one eye. “How do you know about that?”
“I was in Casablanca looking for you. I was told you were taken captive by a pirate named Sully.”
“You were in Casablanca in 1825?”
“I was.”
“You left the baby?”
“I had to. Oh, wait! What’s today’s date?”
“I must have left my Day-Timer in my other suit.”
“No, it’s important. I’ve been seriously out of it for the last week but I have a death certificate back in Cairo that says you die on November 1.”
Rowan opened both eyes. “Okay, we need to find a calendar. How do I die?”
“I don’t know.”
They didn’t speak for several moments and it was when she heard the soft burr of his snore that she realized, even with the knowledge of imminent death, Rowan had fallen asleep. She watched his face, relaxed but newly lined in sleep. He looked exhausted and weathered. Of course he would after crossing the Atlantic in a four-month sail through every kind of weather. Imagining him on the pirate boat—as she had done many times before arriving in Key West—her heart filled with pride and love…and anxiety. She leaned over and kissed his full lips.
How she had longed to see this face. How desperately she had prayed to feel his strong arms around her. She kissed him again, her heart full of the grace she felt showering down upon her.
Now if we can just get back to 1925 Cairo.
She closed her eyes with the sound of his rhythmic breathing in her ear, so familiar, so reassuring. She didn’t know how long she slept, but she awakened to the feeling of Rowan’s fingers slipping into the slick wetness between her legs. She gasped, still half asleep, as he thrust his fingers, thick and hard inside her and she felt herself falling into the rhythm of what he was doing to her. Her body responded immediately. She groaned until she felt the tip of his cock, rock hard and insistent, poised between her legs and she angled her hips up and spread her legs to receive him.
His breath was warm and scented against her cheek. “Tell me it’s really you,” he whispered hoarsely.”
“It’s really me,” she gasped, “needing you in me, now.”
He rolled them both over so that Ella was on top. She grabbed his cock and slipped him inside of her, her head flung back to enjoy every inch of the slide. She groaned and began to move up and down on him, at first languorously and then urgently. Rowan clapped his hands on her hips to keep her in motion on him as she began to lose control.
When she came, emitting a low series of whimpers that pushed Rowan over the edge, he roared his own release until she collapsed on him.
When she had the energy, she lifted her head to look into his eyes. He smiled and gave her naked bottom a squeeze. “You sure I don’t die in bed?” he said.
“That’s not funny, Rowan.”
“I know.” He pulled himself up to a sitting position and leaned in to kiss her. “I love you so much, El,” he said. “A part of me still can’t believe you’re here.”
“I know,” she said, returning his kiss. She leaned back against the rough clapboard wall that the bed was jammed up against. “How did you fall off the ship going to London?”
Rowan shook his head and his eyes looked around the room as if trying to find his clothes. “I don’t even know. One minute I’m on board exploring the ship and the next I’m waking up in a lifeboat with a splitting headache.”
“I guess we’ll never know.”
“What about you? Where are you staying? When did you get here?”
Suddenly Ella remembered Lawrence. She realized that the bastard totally took advantage of her memory loss. She felt a flush of anger.
“Babe?”
She saw Rowan was dressing, and from the dying light outside they’d been there for several hours.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “When I crossed over to 1825 I lost my memory. I didn’t remember you or Tater or Egypt or anything.”
“Holy shit.”
“Olna said it might happen. It was because I traveled too recently.”
“When you went to Casablanca.”
“Which I had to do or else I wouldn’t know where you’d been taken. But I’m not going to be able to go back immediately.”
Rowan was nodding as if thinking. “Do you have any money?”
“I did but…I lost it.”
“You were robbed?”
“You could say that.”
“I don’t suppose you brought something for me to travel back with?”
Her anger at Lawrence erupted into a barely suppressed rage when she had to tell Rowan she’d lost his dog tags, too. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“No worries,” he said, looking nonetheless worried. “I got something that’ll work back on Die Hard.”
When Ella gave him a questioning look, he said, “That bastard Sully took my wedding ring and my lighter. You remember, the one you gave me?”
“Of course. And you think he still has it?”
“I don’t know but it’s all I’ve got. A mate told me he sold the ring in Nassau.”
“Does he even know what the lighter is?”
“That’s just it. There’s something about the guy that makes me think he might be, you know, a traveler like us.”
“Really? Do you think he knows about you?”
“I don’t know. If he did, he wasn’t interested in swapping stories. He had me flayed alive about three months ago—”
“Rowan!”
“And he gave the order to lop off my left hand.”
Ella grabbed for his hand and pressed it to her breast. Her eyes filled with tears at the thought of all that he had endured.
“A command, which, as you can see, was changed at the last minute in the light of the increased amount of work he could get out of me if he kept me able-bodied. And while I’m glad to have my hand, I’ll never forget those three minutes as they strapped my arm down when I expected to lose it. Oh, and did I mention he sold me into slavery?”
“He’s a monster,” Ella whispered as she pulled Rowan back down to the bed. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. He smelled like lemons and soap. Even in a filthy backwater loft with stained linens and a privy bucket in the corner of the room, the scent of his body—male and so familiar—filled her with love and longing for him. She reveled in the nearness of him again and to feel him, real and whole in her arms after so many weeks of fear and separation.
She knew what he had lived through on the pirate ship had changed him. She could see that. She knew he had experienced unimaginable tortures during an elongated stretch of helplessness that was foreign to whom he was fundamentally.
She also knew without a doubt his main intention was not just to retrieve his lighter, but to put a bullet in Sully’s brain.
***
Adele put her French book down and watched the clouds fill and luff through her window and then scuttle away. Ella had been gone for over six hours now and Adele was sure she wasn’t dressed for the change in weather. The poor thing didn’t even have a bonnet on as far as Adele knew, let alone protection against the coming storm.
“Where the blazes could she have gone?”
She directed her attention back to where Lawrence sat in her father’s favorite wingback chair next to the cold fireplace. He was gnawing on his fingers, something she had to say she didn’t find at all attractive. His own textbook lay unopened in his lap.
Lessons had suffered this morning as a result of Ella Pierce’s selfish and unladylike behavior.
“She’ll come home soon,” Adele said for what she was sure was the hundredth time. “There’s no place for her to go.”
“What if she is accosted? She has absolutely no sense, you know.”
Adele did indeed know. Ella acted as mad and irrational as she was now convinced she was. She had no trouble believing at all that the silly cow had gone to the wharfs or any place else a sane, normal person would never dream of going.
“This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t followed your advice.”
She looked at him with surprise. He had never spoken to her sharply. He was looking at her now and she realized that the enforced sitting under the circumstances were not doing him any good. While his leg was crossed, a foot jiggled frenetically as if involuntary.
“My advice?”
“Yes! You said to go through her things and ‘clip her wings,’ I believe your words were. I wish you could have seen her face when she caught me in her room! She looked as if I’d…I’d…” He looked out the window too, as if searching for his words outside.
His profile was classically beautiful, Adele thought. Like the ancient Romans or perhaps a Greek god. Up until last week, she had believed that his lips, though thin and sharp, were the font of all that was glorious and perfect in the world. The thought of them on her own mouth was enough to drench her undergarments within seconds.
Yet it was, in fact, those selfsame lips that had spoken the words to her—in this very room—that served to destroy her world and any hope she had of happiness when he told her he was engaged to be married.
She watched him now as he flipped peevishly through the book on his lap.
“I know you’re upset, Lawrence—”
“Upset? Yes, I’m upset! My fiancée is wandering the streets of Thompson Island with a tropical hurricane bearing down on us.” He jumped up and moved to the window, abandoning all pretense of the lesson or calm.
Adele decided this wasn’t the moment to remind him that Ella was no longer his intended. Yet it was becoming increasingly tiresome to have to reassure him about the woman’s safety. “I’m sure she will return soon,” she said soothingly. “She’ll be hungry and want her dinner. I promise you—”
“This is where your promises have gotten me. I should be out there right now looking for her. Or going to fetch the constabulary.” He stomped back to his chair and slumped into it, looking at Adele with all the petulance of a cranky child. “My precious girl might be lying under a wagon wheel or in a ditch this very minute. And we are doing French verbs!”
It was clear he was only going to get worse if she didn’t stop it.
Adele put her book down and stood, straightening the kirtle of her dress. He watched her approach him, and as she had been careful never to touch him before, he could have no hint or idea of what she might be about to do. She dropped to her knees before him and, without breaking eye contact, pulled her blouse apart, baring her small breasts. He gasped and jerked upright.
But not away.
When she reached for the front buttons on his trousers and pried his member, stiff and hard, from his pants she gripped it tightly in her hand and beheld the wonder in his glazed eyes.
“My dear girl…” he whispered and licked his lips.
It was then she knew she had him.
Lawrence would not be thinking of runaway fiancées this afternoon.
Daisy stepped away from the hinge of the door that led to the library. The image of her bare-breasted mistress kneeling before her tutor was emblazoned across Daisy’s mind.
The craven slut. No better than a hoor from the docks.
Not that she was much surprised. No, it would be fitting whatever the pirates had in mind for her. That was the plain truth. And if Daisy and Georgie were to benefit from what happened to her, well, that was just fine then.
Daisy crept silently into the dining room and beyond into the kitchen so the witch wouldn’t know she’d seen what she had.
Besides, the best laid plans were always them that came as a surprise.
***
Ella looked up from the plate of crab cakes and conch fritters Rowan had fetched from the tavern below. She literally could not get her fill of gazing at her husband and marveling that she had really found him once more across time.
I did it, Tater, she thought. I’m bringing your daddy home to you.
Rowan drank deeply from one of the two tankards of ale he had brought upstairs.
“Don’t get hooked on that stuff,” Ella said, teasingly. “You know you can’t get it back in 1925. At least I hope you can’t.”
He grimaced over the rim of his mug. “I’d kill for a Coke.” He looked out the window. “I hope that’s an exaggeration but I’m not really sure any more.”
Ella knew he was worried about how they were going to get back. They needed a plan. And so far they had nothing.
“Is there a way you could buy the lighter back from Sully?”
Rowan made a face. “Maybe. Although I was kind of getting attached to the idea of putting a gun to his head and just taking it.”
“Let’s work with the buying-it-back approach, shall we? The problem is, I’m broke. Do you have anything to trade that he might want?”
“No. But I might be able to get my hands on something.”
“Something that doesn’t belong to you?”
Rowan gave her a wide-eyed look.
“Rowan. You do remember you’re a US Marshal in another life, right?”
“Don’t worry. I’d just be stealing something that was stolen in the first place.”
“Do I want to hear this?”
“When they grabbed me, they already had a prisoner in their hold—”
“The Dutchman?”
Rowan grinned. “You really were hot on my trail, weren’t you? Yeah, his name was Jan. He tried to buy his freedom by saying he’d give ‘em a treasure he had in Casablanca.”
“I actually heard this part. Did they let him go?”
“At first I thought they did but I’ve since had information to the contrary. Besides, you’re here and you never got a letter from me, did you?”
“A letter? You sent me a letter?” Ella’s brow puckered in a frown.
“Exactly. Well, it doesn’t matter now. But it does kinda confirm that Jan didn’t live long enough to mail it.”
“I’m sorry, Rowan. Sounds like you liked him.”
“He was a good guy, just trying to make his family proud of him and make a life for himself.”
“Did he really have a treasure?”
“That is the million dollar question, isn’t it? Sully said no, but you won’t be surprised to learn that pirates aren’t really a trusting bunch and most of the crew thinks he pocketed the treasure for himself.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on the fact we dropped anchor in the Dry Tortugas and he went ashore alone. General consensus is he went there to bury his bling. If I can find it, I’m pretty sure he’ll trade the lighter to get it back.”
“Rowan, you can’t be serious. Isn’t Dry Tortugas crawling with every manner of degenerate cutthroat—each of whom is probably intent on finding the same buried treasure?”
“Probably.”
Ella felt the euphoria of the last several hours begin to wane. Her bottom lip trembled. “You don’t think just hanging onto me would do the trick?” she said.
He shook his head sadly and put a reassuring hand on her knee to soften his words. “Olna said we need a talisman. That lighter is the only thing I have in this timeline. If I don’t get it back, I can’t leave.”