Swept Away (26 page)

Now if it could just last once they got back home…

She turned to Greta who was dressed in a habit that fit her for the first time since Ella had known her.

“I have something for you, Greta,” Ella said. She pulled a paper bag out of her mail pouch that was slung over the lower rung of her dining room chair and handed it to Greta.

Greta touched the paper tenderly. “It is from your time,” she said.

“It is. And it's a miracle it's still in one piece but then, I'd say we pretty much got the whole miracle thing nailed. Anyway, I knew this belonged to you.”

Greta gingerly pulled a souvenir mug out of the bag. It was a simple white ceramic mug with a slender handle and the year 2012 painted on the front. The illustration under the date showed the American flag and the German tricolor, their staffs intertwined to show solidarity.

“I used to keep my pens in it on my desk,” Ella said. “Better keep it hidden, tho.' I don't want your feet getting scorched because you have a coffee mug in your kitchen dated six hundred years in the future.”

Greta held the mug in both hands, her eyes misting with emotion. “Thank you, Ella,” she said. “You have truly brought peace to both my worlds.”

Ella jumped up and hugged her. “And you, mine, Mother,” she whispered. “And you mine.”

T
he next morning
, Rowan and Ella said their final goodbyes and left Greta at the castle. They walked, holding hands, to the site of the convent garden where they would seek out the portal to return them to their time.

Ella turned and looked back at Heidelberg Castle.

“You know, Rowan?” she said. “What we did here? It was the best thing I've ever done.”

Rowan lifted a curl of her hair and pulled it away from her face. He held her chin in his fingers and kissed her on the lips.

“Come on, beautiful,” he said. “We need to leave before something else happens. I don't know how all this ends up but I'm pretty sure the tide swings back the other way before too long.”

“What do you mean?” Ella frowned and turned to look at the outline of the castle against the blue sky.

“You do know we can't solve all of history's problems, right?” He looked around the garden and the street that led to it. “But for this brief shining moment in time…everything is fine. I don't think we can really hope for more than that.”

She reached for his hand. “Husband, you are a very wise man.”

He grinned and leaned in to kiss her again. “God, I'm going to miss this shit back home in Dothan,” he said.

T
his time
when she made the trip, Ella hugged Rowan tightly and forced herself to remember her fear and anguish during those twelve hours when he was held captive in the castle. She let the terror and the agony as well as the certainty of her love for him wash over her and become her whole world. It was enough.

They were back.

Ella looked around at her surroundings. She felt flushed with relief that they had, in fact, made it back but the sensation was tinged with sadness that her dear friend was now several lifetimes away. She looked over at the little graveyard which she knew contained the graves of generations of the Sisters of Mercy. She couldn't bear to see if Greta's name was inscribed on one of the ancient, worn tombstones.

“Don't you think it's weird that people walking by don't give us a second look, the way we're dressed?” Rowan said. He grabbed her hand to lead her away from the spot that used to be the little convent garden but was now just an empty lot on a vacant side street. It was late afternoon and Rowan didn't appear to be interested in reflecting on where they had come from or whom they had left behind. He was hungry.

“For that, I guess we can be grateful,” Ella said as she hurried behind him on the sidewalk. Their wallets and bankcards had burned in the convent fire so Rowan stopped at a supermarket and used the phone to call his office to have three hundred Euros wired to him and two one-way flights booked to the States for the next day.

“I could murder a cheeseburger,” he said.

Ella looked at the modern city streets and marveled that she and Rowan really were back.
Life during this time is so easy
, she thought, as they passed the grocery stores and restaurants, the dress shops and druggists.
Was she just imagining it, or had Rowan disconnected the minute they got back?

“I feel out of place here, don't you?” she said as she struggled to keep up with his long strides. “I mean, do you know what I mean?”

“Not really. Why don't you give yourself some time to re-enter the modern age? Meanwhile, how ‘bout focusing on getting your man something to damn eat?”

Ella looked at him and forced herself to smile. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “I could eat, too.”

She took his arm and continued in the direction of her apartment and a huge plate of
wienerschnitzel
and
pommes frites
. She kept smiling so as not to give away the fact that she had noticed he said
your man
and not
your
husband
.

T
he apartment looked exactly
as Rowan had left it. Ella dropped her bag in the foyer, then went and collapsed on the couch. He stood in the foyer and frowned at the dropped bag. It suddenly occurred to him that he really didn't have the first idea of what living with Ella was like.

“I'm dying for a hot shower,” she said, and began to pull off her jacket.

“If we clean up first, we run the risk of my passing out from lack of food.”

“No, problem. The shower will be here when we get back.” She stood in the living room watching him. “It's so different here, isn't it?” she said.

“Yeah,
good
different,” he said. “Grab some money and let's hit that place downstairs.”

Was he imagining things or were things weird between them?

“They only serve tourist food,” Ella said.

“I would have thought you'd have had your fill of eating like a native,” he said.

He thought she gave him a strange look as she went to find some Euros in one of the kitchen drawers.

Dinner was basic but exquisite. They ate in a restaurant around the corner from her apartment. It served largely tourist fare and Ella had stopped eating there after her third meal in Germany. But Rowan was not yet tired of meat and potatoes—especially after ten days of eating mush, mutton and moldy bread. Ella watched him with fascination as he ate a huge plate of
wienerschnitzel
and downed two beers. She was so used to looking over her shoulder, it took her until dessert before she could relax. Two large glasses of
gewürztraminer
also helped.

“Great to be back, huh?” she said. They had spoken little at dinner, which surprised her. In 1620, when she had allowed herself to fantasize about being back in 2012 with Rowan and not having to worry about being cold, hungry, or burned at the stake, she always imagined herself deliriously happy. She imagined that the comforts of life—and Rowan—were all she would need to be happy. It didn't bode well that their first day back in 2012 was a fairly awkward one.

She watched Rowan signal for the bill and felt a wave of anxiety. Things were different.
He
was different.

“Now what?” she asked, trying to sound light.

“Well, the money should be here by morning. I had them book the first flights out but that's not until tomorrow afternoon.”

“I forgot to ask,” she said. “Where are we flying to?”

He looked at her with surprise. “Well, Dothan. Of course.”

Ella felt a chill of excitement in the pit of her stomach. “Oh,” she said. “I didn't know they had an international airport.”

“They don't,” he said. “We fly into Atlanta first.”

“Oh, okay.”

“You okay, Ella?” He leaned over to touch her hand for the first time since they had returned to the future. “I just assumed by all the major ass-kicking you did in 1620 that you wouldn't get rattled by a little thing like re-entering the twenty-first century.”

Ella took in a big breath. “I miss Greta,” she said.

The waiter came with the check and Rowan paid. They walked outside into the cold night air.

“We didn't have Thanksgiving,” Ella said.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” Rowan said. “About the time I was picking the millipedes out of my oatmeal.”

“There were no millipedes in your oatmeal.”

“Just being colorful, darlin'.” He put his arm around her and they walked down the dark street.

As they entered her apartment building, Ella knew she should be thinking of the steaming hot shower or the three hundred thread count sheets and goose down pillow she would sink into tonight. She knew she should be anticipating the endless café mochas that would be a part of her life from now on. But all she could think of was,
Am I still married? Am I still Mrs. Rowan Pierce?
When she knew, almost certainly, that that was not possible.

Rowan turned on the computer in the living room as soon as they were in the apartment.

“Really, Rowan?” she asked, standing alone in the foyer.

“Babe, just give me a minute, okay? I've only got about a million emails to take a look at. I won't be long. Why don't you take your shower?”

There was a time not long ago when he would have found it unthinkable the idea of her taking a steaming hot shower alone.

“Good idea,” she said.

After the longest shower of her life, Ella wrapped herself up in her fluffiest towel and returned to the living room. Rowan was still on the computer.

“Going, going…” she said as she came up behind him and kissed his ear.

“Gone,” he said, still utterly focused on the computer screen. “Nice bath, babe?”

“Lovely. Missed you, though.”

“Okay,” he said, obviously not listening to her.

“Everything okay at home?”

“Just a lot going on since I've been away,” he said. “Marshal shit.”

She felt her throat tighten.
How was all this going to end?
she wondered, as she walked slowly into the bedroom.

She pulled back the duvet on her bed, crawled in and switched the light off. As soon as she did, her sadness gave way to intense exhaustion. She was asleep within seconds. She didn't hear the shower go on or the sound of footsteps minutes later at her side of the bed. She was awakened by the feel of Rowan's rough beard against her cheek and the faint scent of the beer he'd had for dinner on his breath.

“You're not going to believe this,” he said, leaning over her in bed. “You know how your grandmother was married to the Nazi and all?”

“Could hardly forget it,” she murmured, forcing herself to try to awaken more fully.

“Didn't you say your Aunt Erica mentioned she had an older sister besides your mom?”

Ella yawned. “She probably meant an older cousin or something. There were just the three kids. Erica, my mom and the boy, Hans.”

“Maybe not.”

Ella sat up in bed. She was fully awake now.

“Turns out your grandmother was married
before
she met the dirtbag,” Rowan said. “I found out her first husband, Johann Reicht, died in 1934.”

“That's what you were doing on the computer?”

“That and some other stuff.”

“My grandmother was married before she married Rudolph Vogel? And had a kid with her first husband?”

“A daughter, yeah.”

“So Erica was remembering correctly. It
was
a sister. What was her name?”

“I don't know. It doesn't say.”

“Well, when was she born?”

“It doesn't say that either.”

“Well, what
does
it say?”

“Just the date she disappeared.”

Ella looked him, the truth dawning on her. “Rowan.”

“Yeah, I know, babe.”

“Oh, my God.”

“If it really is her, what would that make her?”

“My half-aunt.”

“Pretty cool.”

A few minutes later, he slid into bed next to her, pulling her against him. She turned in his arms until they were facing each other. The day had been long and hard, full of exciting revelations, disappointments and loss. Ella nearly trembled at his touch.

“I love you, Rowan,” she said. He slid his strong, warm hands down her back, then cupped her bottom and pulled her to him.

“I love you, too, Ella,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “As a wife does,” she whispered.

“I should certainly hope so,” he said, kissing her lips gently and then with urgency. His hands gripped her short hair and pulled her head back. He kissed her throat and took one of her breasts in his hand while he lowered his mouth to the other.

She moaned and reached for his engorged cock pressing insistently at her stomach. But he pulled away.

“Oh, no you don't. Not this time, wife,” Rowan said in a hoarse whisper. “This time we do it slow and for as long as we want.”

Ella closed her eyes and released him. “Take me, then” she whispered. “On your terms, in your own time.”

He groaned and then eased on top of her, straddling her, his cock probing insistently between her legs. “You always manage to say the one thing to get me going,” he said leaning over her to gently kiss her face and ease into her. “Despite all my good intentions.”

Both of them moaned as he slid a hand under her bottom to tilt her pelvis toward him. “A little deeper, baby,” he said. “Just like that.”

Ella grabbed his shoulders from where she lay under him when the first wave hit her like an explosion at her epicenter. The feel of him driving into her, pinning her to the bed, his very maleness, his unique mastery of her, brought her to heights of sensation she had never experienced before.

“Oh, Rowan…” she gasped. “I'm coming…oh my God!” She wrapped her legs around his lower back and hung on as the waves of delicious pleasure radiated out and up through every point in her body. It seemed to go on endlessly as he drove relentlessly into her and she clung to him in a crescendo of intense, mindless delight.

When she finally hit her peak—an endless pitch perfect escalation of pleasure that emanated in exquisite, satisfying bursts from her very core, she cried out and heard him answer with a roar of dominion and triumph before he collapsed next to her on the bed.

Twenty minutes later she could hear a faint snore coming from him. She could see by the bedside clock that it was a little past two in the morning. She moved beneath his arm and repositioned herself to spoon with him.

She wondered for a moment what Greta would be doing. She wondered if it was worth the risk to ever go back to 1620 and visit her. She shook that idea off as mad, and knew that's how Rowan would see it. She reached behind her and took his hand in hers.

“I was worried,” she whispered. “I couldn't imagine what you were doing on the computer that was so important.”

In the silence that followed, she realized that he wasn't snoring any more.

“I wanted to check out my hunch about Greta,” Rowan said softly, his breath tickling the back of her neck, “but I also wanted to get things set up for us back home. I'd like my folks to be there this time and I'd like for it to be in a church.”

Ella twisted around in his arms until she was facing him.

“You…you were arranging for us to be married?”

“Well, doing some research anyway,” he said sleepily. “Don't worry, I haven't booked anything. I figure since we're no longer married, you'll fly home as Ella Stevens, but I went ahead and made the appointment for a new passport as Ella Pierce so we can take a trip at Christmas if you want.” He kissed her and tightened his embrace. “Unless you want to keep your maiden name?”

She shook her head, fighting to keep the tears back.

“Yeah,
Ella Pierce
has a nice ring to it. And speaking of that, I also emailed a buddy of mine who knows someone who knows someone. But we can pick that out together.”

“What about the whole bad seed thing? Would you ever want to have kids with me?”

“Are you kidding? I'm counting on it. Between the two of us, I figure we have some pretty kick-ass DNA.”

Ella wrapped her arms around Rowan's neck and kissed him hard. She pulled back to look at him, almost as if to convince herself that he was real.