Page 46 of Misadventures with a Time Traveler

“Not as interesting as the woman who just let me…do what I did to her…atop a castle spire.”

“Oh, ‘interesting’ is just where that started, buddy. But as long as we’re back on the subject of interesting…”

I grunt hard. And tense harder. She ignores both.

“Come on, Max. I have to go there, and you know why.”

“Mmmph.” The protest is useless, and I know it. At least the effort makes me feel better.

“You tore out of that gallery like real ghosts jumped out of those paintings at you,” she asserts. “Care to share why?”

I yearn, so ardently, to do just that. To bare my truth just as I have most of my body and soul. But I listen to her voice and the sardonicism that stands for cynicism. For all I know, time travel has already been discovered in this century—but it also could be reason for imprisoning or executing a man. In the time from which I just jumped, mobs were doing the same for flimsier reasons.

“Max?” she persists. “You can tell me, all right? None of this goes past our little salt circle.” But as soon as I avert my gaze, her breath snags. “Were some of those portraits…of your ancestors?”

“No.”

Not my ancestors.

My friends.

Intimates I never had the chance to bid farewell…

“Okay, then. So…what? Throw me a bone here, Hotness.” She shoves away, turning her back on me, her shoulders hunching. “For the love of Christ, Max. Don’t make me start calling the local loony bins, asking if a beautiful man in pirate gear has just escaped and—” She yelps as I grip her waist and yank her backward against me. “Damn it,” she blurts. “What the hell are you—”

“You think I am beautiful?” I growl it into the back of her silken neck. Indulge my senses in a long breath filled with her sweet scent.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Answer me.”

She gasps as I add a gentle bite to the force of my affection. “Holy. Shit.”

“That is not an answer.”

“You…you turn my knees weak.” She sags against me, as if needing to prove it true. I clench my arm to hold her up, relishing the press of her ass on my cock, already throbbing for her again. “Is that what you want to hear, Hotness? You want to know how I’ve never had this crazy kind of connection with anyone else? How you turned me to goo from the second you appeared last night? How you liquefied me again when you walked into the breakfast room this morning? How I’ve wanted to bite the head off every woman you’ve melted today—which, by the way, is nearly every female in this place?” She throws an arm back, again seizing my hair. I groan into her neck, stroking my free hand over her arm. “How I wanted to do exactly this with you?”

I release a rough rumble. “Because you think I am beautiful.”

“Y-Yes.”

“Because you feel connected to me.”

“Yes.”

For a moment, I do not say anything more. The moment in which I weigh the need in her words, the heat through her body…

But most of all, the gift of her spirit.

The bond she has just avowed to me.

I hold her closer before whispering a surrender of my own into her ear. I recognize the extraordinary power I’m about to give her with three terrifying words.

“Then marry me.”

Chapter Seven

Allie