She nodded toward the small fireplace where the logs were merely glowing, and Bowen got out of the bed, crossing the slightly threadbare carpet to stand in front of the embers. With a wave of his fingers, he muttered the words that should have made the flames leap up instantly, but they stayed stubbornly smoldering, and he frowned, flexing his fingers again.
“Still no magic?” Tamsyn asked, and Bowen glanced over his shoulder to see her sitting on the edge of the bed, her makeup-free face and all that long loose hair making her look younger, less . . . intimidating.
Which was actually more intimidating for some reason, so Bowen turned back to the fireplace, ignoring the growing tightness in both his chest and his pajama pants, and picked up the brass poker.
As he nudged at the sad excuse for a fire, he said, “I haven’t done much research on the effects of time travel and magic. It’s an elemental thing, magic. Wild and strange. I used to think it was more like science. That’s how I treated it, at least. Hypothesize, experiment. Record findings, look for patterns. Try to suss out . . . I don’t know, rules, I s’ppose. Like if you could just figure out how it all worked, you could control it. But it doesn’t work like that. Read once that magic was like a naked blade. You can hold it, but you damn well better be careful with it, and even if you are, you are probably still going to bleed.”
Pausing, Bowen huffed out a breath, shaking his head at himself.
“I know, this kind of thing isn’t all that interesting,” he said, turning back around.
He expected to see Tamsyn watching him with one of those wry smirks and a smart comment just waiting on those pretty lips. Instead, she was sitting in the middle of that giant bed with its paisley coverlet, her knees pulled up under that tent of a gown, arms wrapped around them.
“Actually, that is interesting,” she told him, cocking her head to one side. “Maybe just because we’re in a castle at night, and there’s a fire, and this seems like the kind of place where you should talk about magic, but that was almost like . . .”
She thought it over for a second, and Bowen fought a damn near desperate urge to run the back of his hand down that long fall of brown hair.
“A bedtime story,” Tamsyn finally decided, then laughed a little, scooting farther up in the bed. “Speaking of, time travel is exhausting, and we have an awful lot to figure out tomorrow. I’m hitting the . . . I don’t even want to say ‘hay,’ because I feel there’s a non-zero chance this thing might actually have hay in it?”
Tamsyn patted the mattress suspiciously, and Bowen huffed out a laugh as he abandoned the fire and crossed to the bed.
“More likely about two centuries of feathers,” he told her, reaching down for one of the extra blankets before scooping up a pillow. “Still, you’ll be comfortable enough.”
Tamsyn had been sliding under the covers, and now she stopped, the duvet still in one hand as she looked over at him. “Don’t you mean we’ll be comfortable?”
Again, Bowen was thankful for his beard, shorter as it was, and the dim light of the room as a red flush spread up his neck. “I was, uh, just gonna sleep on the sofa over there. Or settee. Whatever you call it.”
He gestured to the little seat beneath the window. It was covered in navy and gold stripes with a high curving back and rolled arms, and while Bowen wasn’t as tall as his brothers, he was fairly sure his legs would have to hang over one of those arms.
Tamsyn sat up now, frowning at the sofa before looking back at him. “Okay, no. You’re not spending all night curled up in that thing like a sad urchin. This bed is massive, and we’re both adults. I think we can handle sleeping next to each other for a night or two, don’t you?”
Bowen did not.
In fact, the idea of sleeping next to her, even with the mattress equivalent of the English Channel between then, still had him hard almost immediately, his mind suddenly flooded with images of sliding those yards of snow-white fabric up her legs, slipping his hand between them, burying his nose in that space between her shoulder and her neck, and just inhaling her . . .
“Bowen?” Tamsyn said, still frowning. “Do you want to go down to the kitchen?” she asked, and the change of subject had him blinking and stuttering out, “K-kitchen?”
She nodded. “You just looked like you were starving all of a sudden.”
Bloody fucking hell.
Clearing his throat and shaking his head, Bowen reached for another pillow. “No, I’m fine,” he replied, and nodded at the sofa. “And I’ll be fine over there.”
“No, you won’t,” Tamsyn said firmly, tossing the covers back and giving the absolute acre of mattress a pointed look. “Stop doing whatever this idea of chivalry is and get in the bed, Bowen.”
She was right, he knew. The bed was indeed massive, there was no way he was sleeping on that sofa, and the best thing either of them could be was well rested because they were going to need to be sharp if they wanted to figure out a way out of this.
And for fuck’s sake, he could handle sleeping next to a woman without wanting to ravish her. He was a grown man fully in control of his body and his thoughts.
With that, Bowen let himself slide into the bed. The mattress was cold and a little lumpy, but the sheets were soft with decades of washing and carried the faint scent of the outdoors on them.
Tamsyn was still sitting up, tugging the extra blanket he’d dropped on the duvet up to wrap around her shoulders. “Can you freeze to death inside?” she asked him, then held up a hand. “Never mind. It’s bedtime, and I don’t need twelve examples of when that did happen to people.”
Chuckling, Bowen got back up and went to one of the massive posts at the foot of the bed. “I can only think of five examples offhand, actually,” he told her, then tugged at the velvet cord holding the bed curtain in place.
It gave a soft whoosh as it gave way, and Bowen tugged until the panel of fabric made a deep blue wall on his side of the bed. He went around to the other three posts, doing the same, as Tamsyn said, her voice muffled behind the curtains, “And this helps how?”
“Keeps the heat in,” he told her, pulling back the velvet on his side and sliding into bed.
The curtain swung into place, leaving them in near total darkness, the only light the dim glow of the embers that occasionally showed through the spaces between the curtains.
It was immediately easier, lying next to her when he couldn’t see her. In fact, in the dark, Bowen could almost pretend that he was alone.
That’s what he’d do. Lord knew he had plenty of experience with sleeping alone, so he lay on his back, his body still, and closed his eyes.
Right.
Just like back at the cabin. Just him and his bed—cot, really—and no one else for miles and miles—
Tamsyn gave the softest of sighs, and Bowen’s eyes shot open, his body immediately aware of her.
The rustle of her nightgown against the sheets, the warmth of her body, the faint smell of woodsmoke that still clung to her hair mingling with the softer, but no less potent, jasmine scent of the soap she must have used in her bath.
“See?” she asked him, her voice drifting through the darkness. “Isn’t this nicer than folding yourself in a pretzel on that couch? I bet no one’s ever sat on that thing, much less slept on it.”
“I’ve slept on worse,” he said, his voice gruff, and she gave one of those low laughs that made him squeeze his eyes tightly shut so that he wouldn’t moan.
“Oh, I have no doubt,” she said, and he could feel the mattress dip slightly as she turned over, facing him now from the sound of her voice. “You’ve probably slept . . . I don’t know. On the side of an active volcano. Or in some haunted lighthouse in the North Sea. On top of a bear on a glacier.”
