Kim Harrison - Hotter Than Hell

“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.”