Hotter Than Hell (45 page)

Though she was fully clothed, the wet dress clung to her body and outlined her breasts and hips in a way Bern found irresistible.

“People generally get undressed before bathing,” she said.

“And before sex, too.”

She laughed, and reached below the water to grab onto her soaked skirt. “Wet wool,” she muttered. “Now I smell like a sheep.” She gave him a once-over.

“Does that make me a ram?”

She was holding the dress up around her thighs. He caught a glimpse of pale skin through the steaming water. “Don’t stop now,” he urged. He wanted her naked.

She inched up the skirt some more.

“Oh, lord,” he groaned. He splashed through the waist-deep pool and grabbed her. “Don’t tease me, woman.”

She threw back her head and laughed, and he took the opportunity to kiss the base of her throat.

“Help me,” she said. “This thing weighs a ton.”

It took him a moment to realize that she was talking about her wet dress, but once he caught on he grabbed a double handful of soaking wool and yanked while she pulled and squirmed.

Soon he had her as naked as he wanted her. The water gave her skin a translucent sheen.

“You look like milk in moonlight,” he said. Then he remembered her name. White. “You look like your name, Dr. Virginia White.”

“Ginger,” she answered instantly. “No one calls me Virgin—of course around here no one calls me Ginger, either.”

“What do they call you?” he asked, while his hands got very busy.

She drew back. “Priestess,” she answered. “Or the Lady of the White Bird Spring when they’re being formal.” She ran her hands down his chest, admiring the rippling muscle beneath his damp tunic. “Who are you?”

He needed to know how she’d gotten separated from her team, how she’d gotten here, and why she was part of the indigenous power structure. But he needed something else even more right now.

“Later, he said. “We can get to it much later…” He pressed his hips against her. “Touch me,” he demanded. He circled her nipples with his thumbs.

She found the hem of his tunic, and pulled it above his hips. Once his cock was free she stroked him slowly from his balls to the throbbing tip. Ginger loved the heat of him, the weight and thickness, the velvet over steel feel of him in her hand.

But she wanted him inside her even more.

She backed up a few steps to the edge of pool, pulling him with her.

When they reached the side of the bath, he cupped her ass and lifted her onto the mosaic edge. She leaned backwards on her arms and spread her legs.

He filled her in one hard thrust.

Then both of them forgot everything else.

He collapsed on top of her for a long time afterwards, unwilling to move away from her warmth. He reveled in the feel of her soft breasts and the scent of her skin. He didn’t know why, but the sound of her heartbeat against his ear made him feel like he was home.

Then she laughed and the sound brought Bern back into the here and now. He lifted his head to look at her.

“What?”

“Lord Ched sent me in here with you to make Morga jealous.” She grinned at him. “She’d really be jealous if she knew what we’ve been doing.”

“What’s with the chieftain wanting me to marry his daughter?” Bern asked.

“I suppose that’s my fault. It’s a local custom. He needs somebody to rally the troops,” she answered. “He’s looking for a warrior to replace the Year King, and I saw you in the well when he asked who could lead his army. So—”

“I think we’ve both been in the past too long,” he said. “Because what you just said seems to make sense to you, and it almost makes sense to me.”

Tears suddenly welled in her big blue eyes. “You’re really from my time.” The relief in her voice bordered on worship.

He kissed her cheeks, tasting the salt from her tears.

“Happy to be of service,” he said.

“You’re not from my team,” she said. “I would have remembered you. How do you know my name? What are you doing here?”

He should have explained all that to her already. He should have gotten a debriefing from her. Duty should have come before sex.

But he found it difficult to regret the last few moments.

“You couldn’t tell what I was doing? I guess I’ll just have to do it again…” He kissed her again. “I can’t seem to stop wanting you.”

“In the vision, maybe I communicated my lust through the psychic link with you,” she explained. “My gift is for scrying with water energy.”

“Right,” he answered. He knew that about her. He’d read it in the file. It hadn’t been something he’d been happy about.

Frankly, he wasn’t all that comfortable with a scientific/military Project that used psychics, despite the fact that he was a bit of a psychic himself. He was a soldier first, and the mission certainly needed soldiers. But the nature of time travel had required psychics for the Project to be successful. No matter how much data time travelers collected on jaunts into the past, it was only the travelers with psychic gifts who were able to remember their actual experiences from the journey. So, Project teams took back all sorts of recording equipment. But they also took along a psychic to serve as a living, subjective memory of the events from their voyages into the past.

Psychics also came along to study the energy nexuses, the doors, as it were, where time travelers could enter and leave the eras they were visiting. The scientists in charge of the TTP didn’t always feel comfortable with all this use of psychic talent, it just wasn’t scientific enough for them, but the people in charge of funding the project insisted on using every available research tool. Besides, as far as anyone could explain the process of time travel, it still seemed a hell of a lot more like magic than it did science.

“We ought to put on our game faces and get down to business,” he said. He got up and adjusted his tunic, then helped Ginger to her feet. The woman looked good naked.

“Sorry about soaking your dress.” He reached down, grabbed, and offered her the mass of wet wool.

“It needed a spring wash anyway,” she answered. She picked up the sodden lump of cloth and began wringing it out into the bath water. “Give me a hand,” she said, and together they managed to wind the dress tight enough to squeeze out most of the water. The whole time they worked Bern tried to keep his eyes off her. He couldn’t.

“You’ve got great tits,” he told her. They were large and round and just as pale as the rest of her, but for the lovely dark circles of her nipples. Nipples that grew peaked and hard when she noticed him looking at her. He grinned as a flush spread across her chest and throat. It wasn’t only a smile that rose as he watched her.

“Ginger White, you may be the death of me,” he said.

She snatched her dress out of his hands. “I think maybe you better help me on with this.”

“Pity. I like this view so much better.” He stepped close and ran his hands over her in the pretext of helping her maneuver the wet dress. She was cool to the touch, but she went warm where he touched.

“You feel like satin,” he told her.

“Back off, soldier,” she said. He did.

When she was finally dressed, she seemed to remember what was at stake here. She had more questions for him than he could answer. “Is your name really Bern? When are you from? Do you know what happened to the rest of my team? How did you find me? Where’s the nexus? When can we go home?”

Bern held up his hands to halt her rush of words. “I’ll answer yours if you’ll answer mine.” He spotted a stone bench against the wall and led her over to it.

They sat together in the warm air of the bath, and he tried to sum up what he knew. “My team was sent out six months after yours. Our mission was specifically to search for your team—not a single member made it back. When we came in through the Tintagel nexus, it crashed behind us. We couldn’t get back.”

“So now your team is missing as well?”

He nodded. “At least my team all came through together. It didn’t look like your team made it here intact. The theory is that some kind of hiccup in the time/dimensional energy field scattered your team in transit—”

“I noticed. So we all came through at different nexus points?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I’m no physicist, but I managed to figure that out on my own.” She gave his hands a sympathetic squeeze. “So your team’s as lost here as we are.”

“Yeah. But we still had our mission. Along with hunting for you people we’ve been searching for a working exit point. No luck yet with that. It hasn’t been easy, since the energy hiccup shorted out most of your team’s ID transponders. So far you’re only the second team member we’ve found alive.”

“Who else have you found?”

“Sergeant Kaye.”

“Thank goodness! I’ve been so worried about him.” Then she blanched. “You’ve found others—dead?”

“Yeah. Sorry. We found Dr. Bohrs’s grave outside a village near Aqua Sulus. Gwayne had been enslaved on a Saxon farmstead on the coast. We got him out of the place alive, but he caught an arrow in the throat when we ran into a raiding party the next day.”

“Damned Saxon invaders,” she muttered.

“You’ve been hanging with the indigenous folks too long. Remember, the Saxons are
supposed
to take over the island after the Romans left.”

“Yes, but not like this. The incursion seems to be happening far quicker than the archeology I’ve seen would indicate. The Roman influences that overlaid the Celtic base culture should have time to fade. If the Saxons aren’t halted soon, the world we come from won’t get a chance to develop. I’ve been starting to believe that maybe I’d transported into one of those alternate worlds the theorists worry about.”

“I didn’t think you were your team historian.”

“They brought me along for my visions. History’s just a hobby. I’m an Anglophile.”

“Me, I go where I’m sent and do what I’m told to do. Speaking of that, how did you end up as the local priestess?”

She glanced down sheepishly, before looking him in the eye again. “I know direct involvement with the locals is against the rules, but I was stuck here and I wanted to survive. I’m lucky that the holy spring’s point of origin is in the woods behind the shrine and that’s the nexus where I came through. The Romans channeled the spring into the sanctuary pool when they built the villa. So it was easier for the inhabitants to believe that I was the only survivor of a band of pilgrims attacked by bandits when I wandered bloody and burned out of the woods than it would have been if I’d appeared out of a blaze of light in the fountain.”

“So, you decided to save yourself instead of searching for the rest of your team?”

She pulled her hands from his. “How would I look for the others? I don’t have any computer equipment. I’m too high level on the psi chart for any implant but the wrist chip.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“I’ve tried scrying to hunt for them, but I’ve never seen them, much less their locations.”

“Makes sense. Seers don’t see things connected with themselves.”

“At least not often. I thought about striking out on my own to hunt for them after the locals nursed me back to health, but it was the dead of winter. This isn’t the best of times for a woman to play tourist, between the bandits and barbarians massing outside Lord Ched’s rather flimsy walls. Since this was the only safe place I knew about, I set about proving my usefulness so I could stay. The sanctuary hadn’t had a resident seer for a long time. I used my scrying abilities and got the job. Having a real fortune teller at the holy spring increases the prestige and fame of the place. Which means a larger gathering of pilgrims bringing rich offerings for the goddess, and greater wealth for Lord Ched, at this year’s fertility festival. Unfortunately, he’s decided that the fertility part of the festivities needs a bit of rearranging, and that’s where you come in.”

Bern thought about what he knew of the local customs, politics, and religious practices, and concluded, “The chieftain wants a warrior to challenge the Year King at tonight’s ceremony.”

She nodded.

He grimaced. “Ah, crap, he wants me to kill some kid for the right to screw his daughter.”

“Exactly. And become the local war leader. He wants you to stop the Saxons.” Ginger cleared her throat. “This is my fault, really—I told him I saw you in the water when he asked who would be the next Year King.”

Bern shot to his feet. “Oh, for crying out loud, woman!”

She jumped up to face him. “Hey, I just report what the water shows me. How was I supposed to know you were a time traveler sent to rescue me?”

“You couldn’t lie sometimes?”

“It’s not like I knew who you were when I saw you. It’s not my fault the water says you’re fated to be king! And sleep with Morga,” she added.

He heard the jealousy in her voice, and he liked it. He noticed that they’d moved close together while they argued, and that arguing with her was arousing him all over again. The attraction between them was strong and hot, and driving him crazy. Being crazy was no way to run an op. Knowing that didn’t stop him from putting his hands on her hips.

“There you are!” Lord Ched’s voice boomed out behind them before he could pull Ginger into his arms.

They turned to face the chieftain, and the trio of men that followed him into the bathhouse. Ched had a smile plastered on his face, but there was anger in his eyes. His hand was on the pommel of a dagger on his belt. Bern had been prepared to tell the man he had no interest in his game of kings and priestesses, but decided this might not be the right time to assert his opinion.

“What’s wrong?” he asked instead. He put his arm protectively around Ginger’s shoulders. He was aware of the way she leaned into him all down the length of his body.

“You’re a clever one,” Ched said, nodding approvingly.

“I know trouble when I see it. And it’s in your eyes right now.”