Taken by Angeline Fortin (great books of all time TXT) 📗

hae been caught beneath some of the supplies stacked behind yer tent.”  He flashed her a wink and smiled knowingly.

“Must have been,” Scarlett responded weakly, shifting in the awkward saddle and it wasn’t only because she found it so uncomfortable. She was still tender from the previous night.  That second bout might have been just one too many.  She wasn’t used to it.

Their lovemaking, as hasty as it had been, had been explosive.  There was something appealing about being utterly ravished.  She had never felt such urgency in her life, had never known that desire could be so intense, all consuming.  He had taken her to a plane of rapture she hadn’t even known existed.

No, he had propelled her there, ratcheting up her desires to match his as if he would accept nothing less.  It was a far cry from her experience with her former partners who had both worried so much about whether or not they were pleasing her that they’d forgotten to actually do it.

One of them had spent so much time asking her over and over ‘Do you like that?  Do you like that?’ that she’d nodded just to hurry him along because it had been so distracting.  She’d had to take charge of the progress just to see it through.

And in the end, she had been nothing but a conquest for them.  Bragging rights to Scarlett Thomas’ bed.  It was why she had never taken another lover.

And now she had taken Laird Hepburn.  A man who was desperate to have her.  Just her.  Scarlett.  Yet even in that impassioned haste, he had seen to it that she found her own pleasure in the moment before he found his own satisfaction.

Scarlett squirmed in the saddle, memories of magnificent his body against hers renewing the tension between her thighs.

Even a minute on horseback was a burden but she was only making it worse thinking like that.

“Are ye looking for someone?” Rhys continued.  “Laird, perhaps?”

With a blush, Scarlett returned her focus to her traveling companions.  No, she hadn’t been searching the crowd for Laird, but she had been absently scanning the amassed troops hoping to spot the elusive Donell. What if the peculiar old Scotsman was really the source of her predicament, as he implied?

Of course, he had to be.  What else would he be doing here as well?  Did that mean that Laird and his sword weren’t the key to her way back home after all?  That she didn’t need to stay close to him?

That she didn’t need him at all?

No, some instinct told her that her future – and with it, her return to her own time and place – was linked directly to Laird.  While it might be against her best interests to travel with Laird and leave Dunskirk and Donell behind, she somehow knew Donell would be back around when it suited him to be and not a moment before.

“No, I wasn’t looking for anyone,” she lied.  “I was just thinking what a tedious day it’s going to be.”

“Perhaps we can pass the time with a story,” Aleizia suggested.

“Aye, a story would be just the thing,” Rhys agreed, though his curious smile told her that he knew she was lying.

“Do you know a good one?” she asked and smiled when he chuckled.

“Mayhap.  Mayhap.”  Rhys looked up thoughtfully.  “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale perhaps?”

Chaucer.  “Heard it.  What else do you have?”

“The Treatise on the Reformation?”

Aleizia shook her head vehemently and Scarlett wrinkled her nose playfully.  “Sounds a little dry for a road trip and I don’t dare doze off on this beast.  Nothing else?”

Rhys laughed.  “There are some old poems and a bard’s tale or two I might relate, but truth I’d rather hear another of your stories.  They are unlike any I’ve ever heard before.  I love this…  What did you call it?  Musical theater?”

“Of course you do,” she said with a smile.  “But I’m not about to sing out here with all these people around.”

“Such a great misfortune,” Aleizia said sadly.

“For me as well,” Rhys teased, laying a hand over his heart.  “Have you no other tales?”

“How about the tales of Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men who robbed from the rich to give to the poor when Prince John ruled England when Richard the Lionheart departed on the Crusades?”

Rhys’ eyes widened.  “I believe I might hae heard tell of such a tale before.  That might verra well be the first time ye’ve spoken of anything I might find familiar.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Scarlett joked, then an idea came to her and she pulled out her purse and dug inside for her paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice.  She had brought it along to read on the plane but had almost forgotten about it.  “How about this?”

“What is that?” he asked, taking the dog-eared old thing from her and studying it curiously.

“It’s a book,” Scarlett said, resisting the urge to add a ‘Duh’.  “You do have books, don’t you?”

“Aye, we hae books.  Large, heavy tomes for the most part.”  Rhys smoothed a palm over the cover before running the pad of his thumb down the even, laser-cut edge as Aleizia looked on curiously.  “It’s so… tiny.  The color on the cover… the pages are…”  Rhys shook his head as he trailed off.

“Let me see it.”

Scarlett looked up in surprise to see that Laird had fallen in between her and Aleizia.  Rhys leaned across her and handed him the novel.  Like Rhys, he examined it with some awe before opening it reverently and running a finger over the typeface print.  “I’ve ne’er seen such uniform script.  ‘Tis so small, yet there is so much space left blank at the sides.”

“It’s the margin.”

“’Tis a waste of fine paper,” he said, rubbing a single page between two fingers. “’Tis verra fine, true.  I’ve ne’er seen the like.  Where did ye get it?”

The bookstore.  How Laird would glaze over with awe and wonder if she told him the tale of huge bookstores, mapped