Every Never After (28 page)

“Is that why you’re suddenly being nice to me now?” Allie could feel her left eyebrow creeping up her forehead along with the touch of frost creeping into her voice. “Help a fellow dork out?”

But Marcus blinked at her, a look of genuine confusion on his face. “Dork?”

She stared back defiantly and, after a prolonged moment, Marcus began to laugh.

“Allie … you’re coated in mud, your hair is a mess, you’re out of your world and your time and totally out of your league.” He put up a hand to forestall impending outrage. “And you’re
still
the coolest girl I’ve ever met. If you’re what dorks are like in the twenty-first century? Sign me up. Take me home.”

Okay. The sudden about-face was … confusing. But, also?
Whoa.
To cover her sudden flusteryness, she shrugged, her fingers toying with the hem of the silk wrap. “I wish I knew how.”

“Well … if you’re stuck here—for the
moment
—don’t you at least want to take a bath and change your clothes?”

She nodded, not looking at him.

“Come on. I’ll take you down to the river.”

She glanced up. Amusement glinted in his eyes at whatever look crossed her face just then.

“I’ll turn my back, I’ll stand guard. Just promise you won’t try to escape again?”

“Like you said,” Allie sighed, “where would I go?”

He was as good as his word.

His back was kept turned and he even kept her safe by shooing away a curious badger that came wombling by. When Allie came back up from the river and out from behind a hawthorn brake that had substituted for a dressing room, she felt clean, refreshed, and a little awkward. Clare could have pulled off the flowy, draped garment and looked like a goddess doing it. Allie, on the other hand, had never worn anything that girly in her life. She wasn’t even sure she’d put the damn thing on right, but it seemed to be covering all the important bits while still leaving her arms free and not tangling around her legs when she walked … hopefully she didn’t look like a complete lameoid.

“Uh …” Marcus was staring at her.

She glanced down, horrified to think she’d missed a fastening or something and that all the important bits
weren’t
covered the way they should be.

“Allie …”

“Not good?” She looked back at him, at the expression on his face.

“Not good,” he agreed, shaking his head. “Magnificent.”

Mag …

No one had ever described her in that way before. Feeling a flush of hectic colour surge into her cheeks, she dropped her head forward so that tendrils of her dark, still-damp hair brushed the sides of her face. Without a blow dryer and flat iron to give her back her sleek, techno-ninja coif, she’d had to improvise. So she’d pulled a few sections of her hair back and plaited it as best she could in a couple of little tiny braids. At least it kept some of it out of her face and left her shoulders feeling bare and cool and …

“You look like a goddess,” Marcus murmured in a suddenly husky voice.

Her. Not Clare.
Her.
Allie McAllister, goddess.

Marcus glanced over his shoulder to where the sun was starting its slow descent. “You need a setting worthy of such a look,” he said. “Come on. I just happen to know where we can get the best view.”

“What about the scathach?”

“Like I told you, they don’t ever appear unless it’s after dark or we send out a patrol. Then they spring up like weeds.” He looked down at her with a gleam in his eyes that made Allie’s toes tingle in the delicate sandals. “But you’re not likely to be mistaken for a patrol grunt looking like that, and it’s still two hours before sunset. I wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes of quality time with you while we’re outside the camp. Try and make up for being such a jerk earlier. If, that is … if you want to.”

Well, did she? You bet she did. If Clare could get distracted by her blue-painted barbarian babe, Allie could certainly do the same with her manly-man legionnaire.

They took it slow so that Allie wouldn’t trip over the hem of her stola. Marcus held her hand, steadying her as they climbed to the top of the hill.

“So … you really think all those songs your mom listens to are crap?” he asked her when they’d almost reached the top where the hill plateaued. Allie noticed clumps of wind-stunted trees growing here and there. In her time, there was only grass at the top of the Tor.

“Not really …” she said. “I mean, not all of them. Duran Duran, for example, has a couple of good songs …” She heard him laugh a little at the Duran Duran recall. “And I like the Police and U2. And some of the New Wave stuff is, y’know, a little goofy and kind of earnest, but … honestly? Most of it’s better than a lot of the crap out there today. With the possible exception of Culture Club. Those guys drive me nuts.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Marcus said, pulling her toward the centre of the plateau. There he shrugged off the military pack he’d been carrying and kneeled on the ground. Then he untied the leather lace that held the top flap closed, dug deep into the bottom of the thing, and hauled out a tightly rolled woollen cloak along with a variety of tools and weapons, all part of every legionnaire’s travel gear. Finally he extracted a small, carefully wrapped
package about the size of a chunky paperback novel and started to unfold the cloth. Allie’s mouth dropped open as four AA batteries rolled out. Marcus looked up at her and grinned, a mischievous light dancing in his eyes. He drew the cloth to the side to reveal the canary-yellow plastic of an old-school portable cassettetape player he held reverentially in his hand. An honest-to-god Walkman. She’d heard about those things. Marcus popped the back cover off and carefully inserted the batteries.

“These are the last,” he said, a touch of regret in his voice. “I brought a whole multi-pack of them with me on that trip to Glastonbury, along with seven or eight mix tapes. The Walkman was brand new—I’d just bought it—but I was so excited about Stuart’s promised spell-casting that I never got around to putting the batteries in the silly thing.” He laughed a little and shook his head.

“That’s probably why it survived the trip,” Allie told him.

Marcus looked up at her.

“The time travel,” she explained. “I told you about my friend Clare … she’s Maggie’s niece, actually …”

That got a raised eyebrow out of him, but at least he didn’t go on another rant about Clare’s aunt this time.

“Yeah,” Allie shrugged. “Long story. Anyway, Clare’s sort of an accidental expert at it. But we discovered that ‘shimmering’—um, that’s what we call the time-travelling even though I voted for ‘zotting’ because it sounds way more retro-cool but I totally got overruled—anyway, it tends to fry anything with an active electrical current running through it. If you can take the batteries out of something you’re fine. But, like, my iPod? Forget it. If I’d been wearing that? It would have been a crispy critter.”

“Your what?”

“My iPod … um. It’s, well, it’s sort of like that.” She pointed at the Walkman. “Only it’s this big.” She made a tiny square with her fingers and thumbs. “And it’s digital—no tapes. But it holds, like, hundreds of songs.”

Marcus blinked at her, his expression falling somewhere between awe, disbelief, and maybe a little disappointment. He looked back down at the contraption in his hands.

“But I think
that’s
cool!” Allie said quickly. “Really. It’s … it’s like steampunk. Sort of. Without the steam. And—hey—you said it still plays. Which my super-snazzy digital device wouldn’t, given similar circumstances. Sometimes low-tech is totally the way to go …” She was babbling.

While she was babbling, Marcus stood and took a step toward her; less than six inches separated them now. Then he reached out and gently lowered a set of foam-padded headphones over her ears. It felt a little weird—Allie was so used to cramming in a set of buds—but these were actually more comfortable. Her babbling drifted off to silence as Marcus pressed the play button on the side of the machine.

The music started off quietly, building slowly as a singer—his voice airy and ethereal—began to sing. Allie recognized the tune, a song by a band called Alphaville. “Forever Young.” She’d heard it before—when her mom was having one of her karaoke parties with her other weird friends—and Allie had always thought it was a touch on the goofy side. Sort of emo, all heightened sentimentality and plaintive lyrics …

Suddenly Marcus took her by the hand, pulling her even closer toward him. His other hand went around to the small of her back, exerting a gentle pressure. Allie blinked up at him, startled, not knowing quite what was going on. Marcus tilted his head down toward her and pressed his own ear against the outside of the headphone that covered Allie’s left ear. Then he began to sway gently, in time with the music, moving in a slow circle and taking Allie with him.

Dancing.

For the first time in her life, Allie McAllister was dancing.

All of a sudden, she could scarcely breathe. She couldn’t believe this was actually happening. She’d never once gone to any of the dances at her high school—no matter how much Clare had
tried to cajole her—preferring to stay home and web-surf or read. She never figured she was missing out on anything special. And anyway, Clare would invariably tell her the next day that she’d probably made the right decision and the dance was lame and the boys were all stupid and grabby or too chicken to ask for dances and what kind of joke decoration was a glitterball anyway?

Nothing special?

Right. If
this
was what dancing was … it was
the
most special thing in the world.

Marcus pulled her closer and Allie melted a little into his embrace. He smelled like leather and iron. And whatever herbs had been in the soap he’d used, bathing in the river that morning—

Oh god, I think I’m blushing …

Thankfully, with Marcus’s face pressed to the side of hers like that, he probably couldn’t tell. Unless he could actually feel the heat radiating off her skin. Suddenly it occurred to Allie that she wasn’t just dancing. She was slow-dancing with a handsome young soldier from not one but
two
other eras entirely, on top of a wildflower-carpeted Glastonbury Tor under a sky laced with cloud streamers of scarlet and mauve, the setting sun a fiery crimson orb sailing low in the sky—
who needs a glitterball?
—to the strains of a song she’d once thought cheesetastic but from that moment on would never hear as anything other than the most romantic song in the world.

Marcus’s hand moved from around her waist up her arm, making her shiver at his touch. He lifted the headphones away from her ears, resting them around her neck so they could both hear the faint notes of the next song. Allie thought it might have been “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. Which was, she thought, a fairly hilarious situational coincidence. But then she stopped thinking anything as Marcus cupped the sides of her face and gazed into her eyes. The blazing warmth returned to her cheeks in a rush. Maybe he wouldn’t notice—

“You’re blushing,” he murmured. “Was it something I said?”

“I’m … I’m just … not a very good dancer,” Allie stammered. “That’s all.”

“I’m going to disagree with you on that.”

She managed to raise a sardonic eyebrow. “You disagree with me on everything.”

“I do?”

“You do.”

“Then let me ask you a question, Allie.” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Do you think I should kiss you?”

Allie thought she could almost hear her heart skip a beat. “No,” she said in a voice reduced to a bare whisper. “Definitely not.”

She was really glad he disagreed with her on that, too.

Maybe, just maybe, life in the first century wasn’t all that bad,
she thought.
Maybe getting stranded here, just like Morholt, had an upside
…
Damn.
The fleeting image of Stuart Morholt nudged Allie out of Marcus-kissing bliss. She’d avoided telling him that the man partly responsible for marooning him in the past was chained up in a tent in his very own camp, but now, when it seemed his feelings toward her had … well, altered, or clarified, or something, Allie was feeling guilty for keeping that bit of information to herself. So finally, standing there wrapped in his arms, she bit the bullet.

“Marcus …” she murmured, and looked up at him.

Seriously,
she thought.
He’s
entirely
too handsome.

“What?” he asked when she hesitated. “What is it? Did I do something wrong?”

“No! No …” She reached up and put a hand on his cheek. “It’s just … I don’t want to wreck the moment … but I do
really
want to kiss you again.”

He smiled, pleased and bemused. “And?”

“And I can’t do that if I’m not being completely honest with you.”

So she told him. About Morholt. Marcus stared down at her, his face blank with disbelief. Allie worried that he’d get angry again, that he’d pull away from her, accuse her of keeping secrets.

Instead … he just laughed.

Allie felt the tension melting from her limbs as Marcus hugged her, the rumble of his laugh reverberating through the wall of his chest.

“You’re kidding me,” he said finally. “The stupid jerk got himself stuck back here too? And then managed to get captured? By
me
? He must have been the one in the hood trying to hide in a thorn bush when we rounded them up after that fight. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him.”

“Well,” Allie shrugged one shoulder, “it
has
been over twenty-five years for him, remember. He doesn’t look quite so much like a Russell Brand–Johnny Depp love child as he did back in the eighties.”

“Russell who?”

She grinned up at him. The yawning maw that separated their pop-culture references was a gap she was more than willing to bridge. Especially if he kept kissing her like that.

“Never mind,” she said. “You’re not mad at me for not telling you sooner?”

“No, Allie …” Marcus shook his head. “Like I said, I didn’t exactly give you much reason to confide in me before now.”

“What are you going to do about Morholt?”

“I think we should have a little chat with him, you and I,” he said, looking down at her. But then his expression shifted and the amused spark in his gaze turned smouldering. “
After
we’re done here …”