Read Time After Time (Cora's Bond) Online
Authors: V. M. Black
Time After Time (Cora's Bond) (13 page)
“I have acceptances from University of Maryland and Georgetown,” I said. “UMD’s supposed to be a bit better, but I guess I’ll tour Georgetown after spring break and talk to the professors there before I choose.”
“Cora,” Dorian began, but then he stopped himself. He gave a chuckle—not a knowing one, not the usual one, thick with sexual intent, but a short, self-effacing laugh. “I don’t know whether to say thank you or I’m sorry.”
“You’re not forcing me,” I said. “As you said, it’s my choice now what I do with my life...within limitations, and most of those limitations weren’t put into place by you. We have to face reality as it actually is, as you’ve said so many times, not as it might be or I’d like it to be. So that means that I’m not going to University of Chicago.”
I glanced over at my phone, which was playing the theme for our first dance. “I haven’t even fully decided that I’ll be going anywhere. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, to be honest.”
Dorian stood up and crossed over to my side. “You’re going to be with me. Isn’t that enough?”
I tilted my head to look up at him. “You are the most insufferably arrogant man that I’ve ever met.”
“That’s not a no.” He extended a hand to me, and warily, I took it. He pulled me to my feet, and somehow in the same motion, his grip transformed into a dance hold, and he began to maneuver me across the rug.
“Oh, Dorian, I can’t,” I said, stumbling over my own feet.
He stopped, but he didn’t loosen his grip. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
I licked my lips nervously. I didn’t trust him. Not entirely. I knew what was inside him—and what was inside me.
As if he read my mind, he said, “For just this. One dance. Will you trust me? Will you let me in?”
“And change things,” I said.
His arms tightened around me. “Only for the time that our fingers touch. And then—it will be gone. Like mist in the midday sun. Or you could spend the next week taking dancing lessons. Up to you.”
I wondered what part of him was posing that question—the dark part or the light. But it was so easy, too easy to surrender. I knew that he didn’t have to ask and yet he was anyway, and he was also giving me an opportunity to opt out of a week of dance lessons, which, knowing my two left feet, probably wouldn’t do much good anyway....
“All right,” I said. “You can show me. This once.”
“Once now, and once again on our wedding day,” he corrected.
“Fine, on our wedding day,” I agreed. I could feel the power of him around my mind, like a strong hand cradling the most fragile egg.
“Then just...trust,” he said.
And with that, his power washed over me, lightening me somehow and flowing down to my feet. He stepped with the music, and I moved with him, my body attuned perfectly to his.
Once before he had done this for me—or rather to me, against my will. But this time, my agreement made his power in harmony with my will, and only the faintest flutters of unease ran through me, which were easily borne away on the surge of the music.
I floated across the room in Dorian’s arms as if I’d been made for them, our feet stepping in perfect time until the very last note, at which he spun me out softly and then back in, to his arms.
“Let go, and it will be broken,” he said softly, bending to my ear.
I didn’t want to. Instead, I wanted to explore all the other things that Dorian could do with this rhythm that he had created between us.
Just then, my phone rang, cutting through the music. I stepped away from Dorian, and the spell was instantly broken.
“Sorry,” I said as I grabbed for my phone.
It wasn’t Lisette but Christina. I frowned at the phone and hit the button to answer it. “Yes?” I asked.
“Hey, Cora,” she said. “I was just wondering if you might have picked up that bamboo bracelet I was wearing.”
Dorian’s eyebrows shot up, and in his gaze I read his unspoken question:
You answered the phone for this?
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” I said, waving him off.
“Damn. I was just hoping.... Well, I borrowed it from Lisette, actually, because it went really well with those shoes that I was wearing. And I remember taking it off at the table at the last club, and I hoped that one of you had picked it up because I called the club and they said they didn’t find it.”
“Did you ask everyone else?” I suggested.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “I did ask everyone else except those girls I didn’t really know. And Lisette, of course. Because I didn’t want to tell her I’d lost it if I could find it first.”
“Well, maybe you should ask her,” I said.
Christina sighed. “God, I screwed up. Okay. Put her on.”
I froze. “What did you say?”
“Put her on,” Christina repeated, more slowly this time. “I don’t know why you just invited her back to Dorian’s place with those other girls. The rest of your old friends would have liked to join the after party, too, you know. But I guess she’s your best friend, so I kind of understand—”
“But she’s not here,” I said. “Nobody’s here. I mean, nobody you’ve met except for Dorian and me.”
“But you texted us all,” Christina said. “You wrote, ‘We’re going now.’ And Sarah and Hannah said that they saw you and all your new friends head for the door.”
“They were going home,” I said. “In their own cars. When I left, Lisette was with you. I waved to her. She was standing there, talking to a curly-haired guy—”
Suddenly, my brain caught up with the words that I was saying, and I said, “Got to go. I’ll call you, okay?” I tapped to disconnect the phone and then jumped to the pictures that I’d stored on it.
Party, party, party, party. I paged through them frantically. And then I found it, and I stopped and stared: a picture of a guy with light brown curly hair. Except that he wasn’t talking with Lisette. He was shoving a piece of paper under my windshield wiper.
And with that, the whole world dropped from under my feet.
“What is it?” Dorian demanded. “What’s happening?”
I held the phone up, and he stared at it uncomprehendingly.
“It’s the Kyrioi,” I said. “They have Lisette.”
Cora’s Bond – Book 6
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I live near Washington, D.C., with my family—the usual husband and kids contingent, with extended relatives who pop in and out of the house from time to time. A proud geek, I love fantasy, romance, science fiction, and historical fiction. I’m a compulsive dreamer, and I feel spoiled to be able to be able to make a career out of imagining things!