Page 59 of Time's Fool

“A coin?” she took it gingerly.

He nodded. “From some long-lost age. That’s a dragon on the front. And one better than on the local pub’s sign.”

“And you still have it?” she looked it over. “After all these years?”

“I found it the day before I learned that I’d won a coveted scholarship to Cambridge. That I wasn’t going to be a shoemaker like my father, barely getting by. That I had the chance for something better.

“I’ve kept it with me ever since. Even though t’was good silver, and I in need of it often enough, yet I never sold it. Took it for a good luck charm, and a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“That sometimes, dreams really can come true.”

And this time, he wasn’t looking at the dragons.

Chapter Seventeen

Gillian stared back at him for a moment, her eyes blown wide. And then she blushed, so deeply that her skin almost matched her hair. “You speak prettily, sir.”

“I speak my heart,” he said, and waited, scarcely daring to hope.

Erasmus had said that faint heart never won fair lady, but what did he know? He was a priest! Kit supposed he should have remembered that before he took his advice.

But she did not make him wait for long.

“And mine,” she whispered, and then launched herself at him, kissing him passionately, because this was no meek country lass waiting for her man to make the first move.

Her man, Kit thought wonderingly, as he deepened the kiss. He liked the sound of that. Liked it very much, he thought, as her building enthusiasm pushed him onto his back and almost rolled them off the ledge.

He held on, a pleasing handful above, a dizzying and completely unsurvivable drop below, and wondered how he got into these things. And why he didn’t do them more often. He’d been accused of being a daredevil but had always denied it.

He might have to rethink that.

Might absolutely have to, he thought, as Gillian jerked off his doublet, her fingers fumbling in her enthusiasm, and he worked to get her bodice open. It fastened from the back, which wouldn’t have been a problem except that he needed one hand to hold on. And because the pert miss was squirming about, attacking his chest and lips and neck like a starving vampire. And then playfully biting him right over the jugular, causing Kit to almost jump to the conclusion before they’d finished the introduction.

Or started it, since he still hadn’t gotten the damned laces freed!

And Gillian wasn’t helping. “Oh, you liked that, did you?” she teased, and bit him again.

“I would like to have a moment!” he said, whilst struggling with her kirtle.

When they’d first met, she had worn the front lacing kirtles of the lower classes, who did not have servants to dress them. But her position at court had required a change of clothing, and although the ensemble she wore today was simple enough for a peasant, it laced up the back. It was something that her new maidservant must have helped her with.

And done a damned fine job of it! he thought viciously, just before the laces finally parted.

And she bit him again, harder this time, less a nip or a love bite than a genuine, groan inducing, full body shuddering, almost-dropping-them-into-the-abyss bite. Kit gasped and flipped them over, getting the squirming, impertinent, impossible woman underneath him so that he could guard them both from the ravine with one leg, and brace against the cliff with the opposite hand. It wasn’t the easiest way he’d ever made love, but he’d manage, he decided, and pulled the damned kirtle off.

She laughed up at him, completely unrepentant, as the faint breeze able to reach them here ruffled that glorious hair, and the sunlight gilded her lashes and the brief dusting of freckles over her nose. The tiny curls by her neckline were gilded, too, and her eyes, usually a stormy gray, were almost blue, reflecting the skies.

The skies of a different world, Kit thought dizzily. And yet he cared less about that than about the woman beneath him. Who had finally stopped squirming and was looking at him with her whole heart on her face.

He gazed back, feeling like a foolish boy who had somehow persuaded a milkmaid into a barn and then had no idea how to proceed. Only Kit most definitely had an idea, had entirely too many of them, and yet he acted on none. Just looked at her for a moment, feeling such a combination of emotions that he couldn’t hope to figure them all out.

But he was a gentleman, and did not leave a lady waiting for long. He slowly pulled down her shift, watching first delicate collarbones, then pale shoulders, and finally the tops of her arms emerge. And then he stopped, with her magnificent breasts, hinted at under the fine lawn of the chemise, rising and lowering rapidly and her breath coming quicker in her throat.

It wasn’t merely to increase her desire by making her wait, although it appeared to be having that effect. It was or his own sake, too. He was finding himself strangely flustered, almost reluctant. Not because he didn’t want her, but because of the opposite.

This meant something.

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