“Yes, yes, and no, but came close once,” he replied, hoping she might laugh that laugh again even though it killed him, and sure enough, she did, and sure enough, he had to close his eyes again and wonder if anyone had ever died from wanting someone like this.
She shifted against the sheets again, still far enough away that even if he stretched out his arm, he wasn’t sure he would’ve been able to touch her.
That was still too close.
“If I had to break my rule about sleeping with clients, I’m glad it was with you,” she said, and now Bowen flipped over to his side, facing her even though he couldn’t see her.
“This doesn’t count,” he told her. “Just sleeping, innit? Letter of the law may be broken, but not the spirit.”
He could imagine her raising her eyebrows at him as she replied, “I must be rubbing off on you if you’re so quick to look for moral loopholes, Bowen.”
It was the dark, and the closeness of her without having to look at her, and the insanity of this whole mess they were in, that made him say it.
That and his stupid heart, and his even stupider cock.
“I’m not having us break that rule on a technicality, Tamsyn,” he told her, his voice rough. “When we break it, it’ll be the real thing, cariad.”
My love, he’d called her, because she was, fuck him and Saint Bugi and all his parts, but she was.
But Tamsyn didn’t speak Welsh, so it was another word she picked up on.
“‘When’?” she echoed, sounding breathless, and Bowen thought about playing it off as a mistake, turning it into the kind of teasing flirt Rhys always seemed to be so good at.
But Bowen had never been good at that kind of thing, so all he could do was tell her the truth.
“I think about you all the fucking time,” Bowen heard himself say. “Every bloody day, Tamsyn. Your hair. Your skin. The way you laugh. Especially when you’re laughing at me.”
She gave another one of those breathless sounds, but her voice was wry when she replied, “I do that a lot.”
“You do, and it drives me mad in the best way,” he told her. “Just like it drives me mad that I used to go days—hell, weeks—without talking to another living soul, and now if I don’t talk to you, the day never feels quite right. And . . .” Blowing out a breath, he turned and stared up into the blackness. “Dunno. For me, that feels like a when and not an if, but maybe it doesn’t for you, in which case I’m a sad and delusional bastard, and you’re welcome to say so.”
Another laugh, softer this time, and then he felt her moving across the mattress, her hand tentatively resting on his chest.
Just that one touch nearly burned him, and it was dark, he was a muddle of a million feelings, and he couldn’t help but lift that hand from his chest, kissing one fingertip.
Tamsyn sucked in a breath, and Bowen kissed another finger, then another, slowing making his way down to the pad of her pinkie, hearing her breathing get quicker, her legs moving restlessly against the sheets.
“You’re not a sad bastard,” she murmured as he laid her hand back on his chest. “I think about you all the time, too. I can’t see one interesting thing—not a book or a sunset or a fucking tree or some kind of weird crystal—without being like, ‘I should show this to Bowen,’ and . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she sighed, pulling her hand back. “But I’m serious about not getting involved with anyone I work with. Even incredibly hot men with whom I’ve somehow magically time traveled.”
“I take it there’s a story there,” he said, and he felt rather than heard her turn her head to look at him.
“No story,” she said. “Just self-preservation. I love this job. Or . . . I love parts of it. Never wanted anything to fuck that up for me.”
The sheets rustled again as she turned more fully toward him.
“But I take it there’s a story with Carys and this dead fiancé of hers. Every time anyone mentioned his name, you looked like you were chewing glass.”
The reminder of Carys—of Declan—was what he needed. A metaphorical bucket of ice water before the warm, intimate darkness of this bed made him lose his head altogether. Until Declan was released from the spell that held him in this strange place between life and death, Bowen had no right to be lying here next to a beautiful woman, telling her the kinds of things that became promises in the right light.
“There is,” he told Tamsyn now. “But it’s . . . it’s not a story I can tell. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” she confirmed, and then sighed.
He sensed her turn again, was fairly certain she was staring up at the canopy, too.
“It sucks,” she said. “Being virtuous. Having . . . a code or whatever. Rules. Especially when you’re over there, looking like that—not that I can see you, but I see you with my eyes closed every night anyway.”
Christ.
Now it was Bowen closing his eyes, and this time, he couldn’t bite back the smallest groan.
“Don’t fuckin’ say things like that,” he practically growled. “Don’t tell me you think about me at night.”
“But I do,” she said, her voice low, and it was the darkness again, the way it pulled things out of him, its very own kind of spell.
“And what do you do, Tamsyn?” he asked, his voice not even sounding like his own, his accent thickening, the words rumbling in his chest. “What do you do when you think about me?”
There was a heartbeat, then another. Five in all passed, and Bowen counted every one until her voice drifted out of the gloom.
“Should I show you?”
Chapter 13
Tamsyn lay there in the pitch black, the only sounds her heartbeat in her ears and Bowen’s rough breathing, and wondered if insanity was a symptom of time travel.
Felt like it must be, but maybe it was just the weirdness of the night, the coziness of the bed, the darkness all around them, and those things Bowen had said—those simple, matter-of-fact, absolutely devastatingly perfect things—that had her already sliding her nightgown up her legs, even as Bowen said, “How can you show me when I can’t see you?” his voice gruff, but still somehow gentle. The heat of his body next to her . . .
Once again, a holiday temptation was presenting itself, and once again, Tamsyn found she just couldn’t turn it down.
