Kiss Across Chaos (Kiss Across Time #10) - Tracy Cooper-Posey Page 0,58
bench, where she had dropped it the last time they had moved through space-not-time. Jumps back into the past, these days, meant arriving in clothes belonging to the life which time instantly spun around them when they arrived. Taking a coat with her was a waste of, well, time.
She picked up the coat and shoved her arms into it. She felt sick. Weak.
Aran had followed her into the room. He stood with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his trousers, his gaze bleak.
“Aran—”
He shook his head. “Not now.” The two words were clipped. Precise.
“Then soon. We have to talk soon. Promise me.”
Aran moved over to the hooks next to the front door and took down his overcoat and donned it, then came back to her. “I can’t promise,” he told her. “I don’t know what we’re jumping into. The only thing I know about my parents is that life around them is interesting in the Chinese curse way.” He put his arm around the middle of her back, just barely pulling her up against him. “We’re jumping back into the cauldron,” he finished bleakly and leapt.
Chapter Thirteen
The brightly lit workroom in the basement of the big log house formed around them. The benches on three sides of the neatly painted square in the center of the room—the arrival chamber—were as usual: one scattered with frantic sprays of equipment and bits and pieces of projects; one table with absolutely nothing on it but a computer tower and monitor; the third with some sort of delicate box construction glued and clamped together drying in the middle of the tabletop. Jesse didn’t know which table belonged to any of them, but she suspected the untidy one was Brody’s.
Brody himself stood just outside the square of white paint, which surprised Jesse.
Aran quickly dropped his arm from around her back. “Athair.”
“They’re on the island already,” he told them. “I’m here to tell you to jump straight there. Taylor got antsy about journalists peering in her windows or damaging the place because they couldn’t raise anyone.”
Jesse’s heart sank.
Brody’s gaze shifted to her. “Don’t let them get to you,” he added. “They’re like sharks. If they sense blood in the water they’ll circle for days until you weaken and they can close in.”
And he would know. He’d been the lead singer of a rock band that had been famous for a while, especially in Europe.
“Great way to make her feel confident, Brody,” Aran said.
Brody looked at his son with a steady gaze that was Aran’s, almost exactly. “Jesse already has the steel backbone. She just needs a sit rep, that’s all.”
Aran glared at his father.
Because Brody never aged and because Aran aged too damned fast, the two of them looked more like siblings than father and son. Their jaws were both squared and stiff. They were identical in height and breadth of shoulder. The same dark hair and pale Celtic flesh. Only Aran’s chin was dark with growth, while Brody stayed clean-shaved, most of the time.
“And it’s good to see you, too,” Brody added. He moved toward the swing door of the work room. “I’ve called the others. They’ll be here when you get back.”
“The others” meant everyone else in their extended, unofficial family, including Neven, London and Remi. Alex, Sydney and Rafe, too.
Jesse’s belly clenched even harder. Brody was calling in the big guns. Sydney was Morrigan, Queen of the Americas, and David Pallis’ second in command.
Jeeze louise…
Aran pulled her back against him, his manner almost rough. “I guess we’re jumping again.” He almost growled it.
Before Jesse could catch her breath, he jumped.
The air in the big central room of the house on Martha’s Vineyard was musty but not cold, for the furnace was left running. Snow piled up against the glass doors on the rear of the house, bright white and dazzling in the late afternoon sun. The naked, leafless oaks around the perimeter of the property sent long shadows over the untouched snow.
Only two of the French doors had their blinds raised. It would have been dazzling in the room if all of them had been opened.
“There you are!” Taylor said, hurrying across the room to where Jesse and Aran stood by the fireplace, which was the unofficial arrival point inside the house for any jumpers. Taylor always left the spot in front of the hearth clear of furniture and obstacles, to avoid tripping up arriving jumpers. She crossed the open spot now, with a thick wad of mail in one hand.