Chapter 8
EIGHT
I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke up suddenly on the small bed in the cottage’s tiny room under the eaves. It was dark, and the cottage was silent.
William was gone.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes and trying to dispel the troubled half dreams that still floated in front of my eyes.
I’d been dreaming of running. Running away from something terrible behind me: Smoke.
Cries. Shouting. But, already, as my eyes focused on the room in front of me, I lost the details. Only the feeling of terror remained.
I heard a faint noise, downstairs, a creak, and then the sound of a door closing quietly. I got up, pulled on my clothes quickly and padded down the stairs.
Opening the cottage front door, I saw that it had been left on the latch. I walked out into the night, only to see William on the other side of the garden gate, striding purposefully away from the cottage.
‘William!’ I ran after him, but his legs were much longer than mine and it was difficult to keep up. ‘Where are you going?’ I panted, following him as he strode up the lane that Yew Tree Cottage sat on.
‘Leave me alone,’ he grumbled over his shoulder. ‘I want to be alone.’
‘No. We need to talk.’ Valiantly, I kept up with him, though my long skirt and petticoats impeded me. Damn long skirts, I thought. I missed jeans. I missed the freedom of comfortable clothes.
‘Do we?’ He cast a glance down at me. ‘What more can you have to say? Although, I forget that Miss Tegan Penrose always has more to say.’
‘Yes. I think we need to talk more. A lot more,’ I said.
I needed to make him understand where we were.
I needed to teach him what I knew about time travel, and get him to help me think of a way we could get home.
Our respective homes, perhaps, though the thought of losing him again tugged painfully at my heart.
‘You think entirely too much for a woman,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose I will have to get used to that.’
His comment made me hope that he wasn’t leaving forever; that he had just needed some space. Cautious relief flooded through me.
The lane that led to Yew Tree Cottage met a slightly bigger country road at its bottom; it hadn’t changed too much in my time, apart from being tarmac rather than dirt.
In my time, that small road led through St Nantes, down past Cullens’ farm, some other cottages and a small post office and village shop. I wondered what was on that road now.
However, instead of turning right, William turned left, onto the fields behind the house. A couple of wild ponies grazed at the far edge, ignoring us.
‘Where are we going? You should be inside, with your injury,’ I said, half-running to keep up with him.
‘Tegan. Don’t fuss. The dressing is good.’
He did seem to be walking easier, and Nancy had given him an herbal tea of some kind to drink that she said would take the pain away.
We were walking along the dirt track at the edge of a field, and on the brow of the hill I could see a small building.
‘What is that?’ I squinted. The field we were walking in was full of head-high corn stalks; we could have got lost in it.
‘Somewhere I used to go,’ he said, shortly.
We reached the brow of the hill and William went to the building. It was a small stone hut with a thatched roof, but it had glass windows and looked well-kept. It wasn’t a cow byre or a hay store; in my time, it hadn’t been there. But, in 1867, it was.
He opened the door and went inside. I followed, stubbornly. We were going to have a conversation, even if I had to punch him on his injured flesh to make him listen to me.
I wondered who owned the little hut. William had a gift for acting as if he owned everything he touched; in his own time, as Lord of Trevarron, he did.
Here, in this time, he owned nothing, but he still acted like he did.
The blood of the aristocrat flowed in his veins; his natural entitlement ran deep.
However, I’d never known the privileges of the aristocracy, so I knew that what we were doing was breaking and entering.
William shut the door behind me, frowning.
‘Looks like the gamekeepers still use it,’ he said, his tone still gruff. He struck a match and lit an oil lamp on the table. A warm glow suffused the room.
Inside the hut, it was surprisingly cosy. There was a good-sized bed pushed up against the far wall, covered in blankets, a stone fireplace, a couple of buckets by the door and a stack of dry firewood. There was also a small table and chair, and a basket containing some apples.
‘Oh!’ I exclaimed in surprise. I hugged myself to keep warm; it was a mild night, but it was still chilly inside the stone hut. ‘What will we do if they come back? We shouldn’t be here,’ I said.
‘I didn’t ask you to be here. You followed me.’ He fixed me with a baleful glare.
‘We need to talk, and you can run away as much as you like, but that doesn’t change the fact we need to be adults about this.
I thought you were leaving me, just then.
You terrified me. It was hard enough to lose you the first time,’ I argued, my hands on my hips.
Despite his size and ability to win any physical fight he entered, I had never been afraid of him.
I knew that, of the two of us, I was better educated, more strategic, and I knew what had happened in the hundreds of years of human history between his time and mine.
I had that advantage. And, as William had correctly observed more than once, I was wilful and stubborn. As was he.
‘Are you suggesting that I am a coward?’ he roared, suddenly, taking me by surprise. ‘How dare you? I have never run away from anything in my life!’
‘You are the last person I would call a coward. But, yes, I do think that you ran away to this little hut because you didn’t want to talk to me.
Because you feel lost and humiliated and angry, and you don’t know what to do.
Tell me I’m wrong,’ I challenged him, staring up defiantly into his deep brown eyes.
There was something indescribable about being close to William; it made me feel as if I’d dissolved into a delicious, sweet syrup of longing. I knew that I would feel warm, safe, held and protected in his arms. Even though we were arguing, I couldn’t deny that I was deeply and primally aroused.
It was partly his physicality. William was tall, about six feet two or three, and heavily muscled.
On the occasions I had seen him naked before, I had marvelled at the somehow graceful beauty of his long, muscular legs, the width of his chest and shoulders and the sculpted muscle of his forearms. But it was something else, too, and William was wrong when he assumed that, without the title of his lordship, I would stop being attracted to him.
Because the truth was that William possessed a deep, wild power in him that I knew came partly from the demons that still besieged his soul.
He still felt the guilt over his involvement in his wife Elspeth’s death, even though he wasn’t to blame.
And I knew that he felt guilty about leaving Edith and his brother, Charles, in the custody of their abusive father when he went away to the Navy; he would never forgive himself for that, and there was a depth of passion in his lovemaking that belied any peace that he might have found.
William was a bad boy. I couldn’t resist him. Even now, when he was being rude.
‘You have such confidence in your opinions and thoughts, Tegan. I wonder if anyone has ever persuaded you that you were wrong?’ He lowered his voice, but I could still see the anger flickering in his eyes.
‘You certainly haven’t,’ I shot back, unable to help myself.
However, I was painfully aware of the fact that, in private, William De Vere Trevarron knew exactly what to say and do to make me a quivering mess.
We both knew that, when the bedroom door closed, William could persuade me that black was white and I would have no argument whatsoever.
There was a deep emotional connection between us.
I had felt it the moment we’d met. Somehow, we both knew that we had been linked through time.
We had dreamed of each other our whole lives, and when we met, it was as if two puzzle pieces slotted together.
With him, I felt complete in a way I never had before.
Every time I was in his arms, I knew deep in my soul that every day I had spent without him had been filling in time. Every one of those days, I had been half-alive; I mourned my own ignorance of him. I mourned the days that had passed in my life, not knowing the ecstasy of being with him.
‘You are a scold. A caustic harpy,’ he muttered, stalking towards me with fury in his eyes. He grabbed my arm and drew me to him. Without warning, he bruised my lips with his kiss. ‘And yet, I find that I cannot draw myself away from you.’
His touch sent shock waves of electricity through my body, from my head to my toes.
When he touched me, I felt as though I was plugged into a circuit of honey-sweet lassitude that suffused me with pleasure.
All thought except pleasure turned off; all I wanted was the taste of his lips, his touch, his skin on mine, his smell.
I wanted the pleasure I knew he could give me, and I wanted, in the core of my being, to please him.
William turned me into an animal whenever we were alone; I was savage in my pursuit of pleasure, and he gave everything of himself, dedicated to giving me what I needed.
Now, as he kissed me hungrily, I returned his passion.
‘I thought you were angry with me.’ I drew back.
‘I was angry. I am angry,’ he growled. ‘But I still want you. Urgently.’
‘I thought you hated me.’ I resisted the pressure to be in his arms. I was angry with him now, too. He had insulted me. ‘Why would you want to kiss a scold and a harpy?’ He had called me a harlot, before, when we were making love, but that was different.