Before the Fire Page 21

  “For what?”

  “For forgiving me, despite everything.”

  George smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  “Oh and one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  James flushed on his feet. His cheeks were stained crimson. “Please do extend my apologies to your lady wife on my behalf.”

  George crossed his arms over his chest and considered the viscount in silence for a long moment. His old friend no longer carried that vindictive, calculating look about him. “I tell you what. Why don’t you extend them to her yourself?”

  James’ forehead wrinkled, not understanding. “And how do I set out to do that? You just informed me that the deuce of you are leaving for Blackmore on the morrow.”

  George chuckled, his good humor toward Lord Freemont at long last restored. “We are throwing an end of summer party in the country the first week of harvest.” He patted his old friend robustly on the back. “Be there.”

  Astonished and humbled by the earl’s generosity, James gave his agreement. “I shouldn’t miss it for all the world.”

  George inclined his head as he shrugged himself into his greatcoat. “May the goddesses bless you, James.”

  James’ face scrunched up ridiculously. “Eh?”

  George grinned, as surprised by the thoughtlessly uttered sentiment as the viscount was. “It’s the way people say good-bye in my wife’s homeland. I fear I’m catching her fever from hearing her say it too often.”

  James chuckled bemusedly. “Then may the goddesses bless you as well.”

  Chapter 30

  “Mother Julia and Father Chester will be joining us at Blackmore next week.” Kane directed her words toward Melea, who was seated next to her, but was responded to by her husband.

  “I thought they were travelling only a day behind us?”

  “The viscountess changed her mind. She decided to stay behind another three days to have gowns made for myself, Melea, and her.” Kane fanned herself with yet another French lace contraption bought while shopping in London with her mother-in-law. “She wants us to look our best for that party we’re hosting.”

  The Blackmore travelling coach rambled along the country roads, carrying their party of four. Alex had decided, after kissing Melea in the royal gardens no doubt, that he desired to tag along with the Blackmores and the Warrior Woman. Indeed, he had informed them that he wouldn’t let his little shrew escape him so easily again.

  Said shrew was even now whipping the fan Lady Julia had gifted her with violently around her face. “By the zilch’s one eye,” Melea complained for at least the eleventh time in as many minutes, “it’s hotter than a bubbling sun spot in here.”

  Alex grinned at the woman sitting directly across from him in the carriage. “You’ve said that already, my little harridan.”

  Melea scowled at the exasperating marquess. “I have no clue what a harridan is, but I suspect I wouldn’t care for the answer very much.”

  “A harridan,” George informed her, very much looking forward to her reaction, “is a scolding, vicious woman.”

  The Warrior Woman didn’t disappoint him. She raised her fan and thumped a speechless marquess over the head.

  “Ouch!” he bellowed, rubbing himself where a knot was sure to form. “What possessed you to do that?”

  “I was showing you vicious!”

  “Now I know why I called y—”

  “Enough.” Kane rebuked them as she slashed her hand through the air. “You two have been bickering for the past three days. I can’t bear it a moment longer!” She impaled them both with her heated blue gaze.

  Alex and Melea harrumphed, both of them properly chastised.

  George grinned.

  “And you!” Kane challenged, shaking her finger ominously at her husband.

  “Me?” he asked with affronted innocence, pointing his hand in the vicinity of his chest.

  “Yes, you,” she spat out indignantly. “You’ve been coaxing them to battle since the morning we first entered this hellish contraption. You will stop it this instant!”

  George crossed his arms over his chest formidably and scowled at his own shrew. “Who’s going to make me?”

  Kane gasped with outrage, realizing he referred to her inability to spar because of her pregnancy. She wielded her fan like a laser-c and thumped her impossible husband over the head with it. “I am!” she shrieked.

  “Yeeow!” he wailed when the wooden part of the damned French contraption made contact with his skull.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” Alex mumbled, still frowning at Melea and rubbing his head.

  “Deserved it, didn’t he?” Melea inquired of Kane. Whether she referred to Alex or to George, no one was certain.

  “Madam,” George gritted out, the vein at his temple ticking, “you will never strike your lord husband aga—”

  He bellowed his outrage when the fan again came down over his person. “Have you the need of a good spanking?” he shouted, tearing the makeshift weapon from her grasp.

  “A spanking?” Kane screeched. “A spanking?” Her face red with rage, she reached to the floor of the carriage, pulled off her shoe, and thumped her dastardly husband over the head again. “Try and die!”

  The vein at George’s temple threatened to tick right out of his skin. His face was mottled purple with fury aimed lethally at his wife.

  Alex studied his shoes, trying desperately not to laugh.

  Melea, never known for her subtle ways, laughed outright.

  “That’s it!” the earl wailed with the considerable indignation a man of his station could readily summon. “The deuce of you have pushed me too far!” He pointed his finger ominously at the women. “You are both being sent to your bedchambers without supper this eve!”

  The women gasped, neither of them able to believe he was inflicting a child’s punishment on them. “Like hell we will!” Kane shouted back. “I’m pregnant, remember!”

  George shook his finger at his recalcitrant wife, stammering for another way to punish her. “Fine! Then to your bedchamber with supper!”

  “I am not a child!”

  “I cannot tell as much!”

  Kane stood up and pounded on the top of the carriage, ordering the driver to bring the hell-box on wheels to a halt.

  “People, people,” Alex chided, raising his voice to be heard above the din, “I believe we should all get some air and use the time to calm ourselves.”

  For once Melea agreed with him. “He’s right. Between the heat and the bumping up and down from the pits in the road, it’s obvious that this never ending journey is getting to all of us.”

  George calmed down a great deal at Melea’s insight. It was true. The heat was very unbearable. Kane, while somewhat calmer, was still fuming. When a footman at last opened up the carriage door, she alighted from the inside, but spun around to confront her husband once again. “I cannot believe you threatened me with those ridiculous punishments,” she gritted out.

  The earl lifted a negligent brow. “I believe when one behaves as a child by thumping their husbands over the head with inanimate objects, one deserves a like reprimand.”

  “Oh?” Kane mocked him, her hands perched on her hips. “And it was so very grown up of you to start fights between Melea and Alex these past three days until they bickered enough to drive me to the brink of insanity?”

  George grimaced, not caring o’er much for having the tables of reason turned on him. He glowered at his wife, refusing to back down.

  “Fine!” she huffed, her feelings genuinely hurt by what she perceived to be a trivialization of her emotions. “See no error in your ways – as usual.” She drew her chin up haughtily. “I’m going for a walk, you…you…frit-foo!” She turned on her heel and stalked off.

  George turned to Melea. “What the devil is a frit-foo?”

  Melea blushed, averting her gaze to the carriage floor.

  George set his teeth to seething. “I repeat, what is a frit-foo?”
>
  Melea shrugged her shoulders as she darted her eyes back toward the earl. “It’s a type of animal found on planet Frebula.”

  “And?” George bellowed.

  She flushed. “It has a man’s part where its forehead should be.”

  The bellowing wail of George William Frederick Alexander Wyndom, the ninth Earl of Blackmore and heir apparent to the Duke of Browning, could be heard from as far away as the eye could see. Melea and Alex clapped hands over their ears, both afraid they’d suffered hearing losses. They then proceeded to follow on George’s heel as he jumped from the carriage and stomped off toward his wife.

  Kane stood her ground, chin defiantly arched, as she watched her frit-foo of a husband hound toward her. He looked magnificent when outraged, she thought grouchily. For some reason, that fact only further annoyed her. “I will not apologize!” she informed him forebodingly as he reached her side and towered over her.

  “Will the deuce of you stop this!” Alex shouted as he and Melea joined them.

  “Really,” Melea lectured, “this goes too far!”

  George spared a moment to shoot them both a warning glance. “When she apologizes,” he announced as calmly as possible, his jaw rigid, “this will be over.”

  Kane rolled her eyes to the galaxies. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Oh really?” George replied icily. “Mayhap you still need that spanking, hm?”

  Kane shook her head out of both irritation and disbelief. “I can’t believe you,” she mumbled, her gaze drifting to the ground. She looked back up at her husband and shook a finger at him. “I think that you—”

  She stopped. Eyes wide, she shot her gaze back toward the ground. “By the goddesses,” she reverently breathed.

  “Kane, what is it?” George demanded. He feared that all the fighting had made her take ill. “I’m sorry, my love, for everything. I should never have goaded our friends to fighting as a way to pass the time.”

  Alex crossed his arms over his chest and scowled. He’d had no idea his actions had been so manipulated.

  Oblivious to anything but Kane, George grabbed his wife’s chin and tilted her face up for his perusal. “Are you alright?”

  There were tears in her eyes. George didn’t know what to make of that. And then she began laughing—joyously, triumphantly—and he truly didn’t know what to make of that. “What the devil is so funny?” he asked, his hand dropping back to his side.

  Kane threw her arms up to the heavens and laughed as she twirled herself around and around in a dizzying circle.

  Alex and Melea eyed her curiously. Pregnancy must be making her daft. “Uh, Kane dear,” Melea sputtered, “what precisely are you doing?”

  Kane smiled brilliantly at her puzzled audience. She waved her hands around her, encompassing the field in which they all stood. “Look around you, Melea!” she shouted exuberantly. “Look around you and tell me what you see!”

  Melea did—and she gasped as recognition struck. “By Jupiter’s moons,” she muttered, awed in spite of herself.

  George placed his fists indignantly on his hips, the muscles in his bicepts flexing visibly beneath his waistcoat. “Will someone please tell me just what in the bloody hell is going on?”

  “Really,” Alex seconded. “The deuce of you are behaving a trite bizarre.”

  Kane plucked a single flower from the grass she stood upon. She lifted it to meet her husband’s attention, and smiled warmly up to him. “This,” she informed him, “is the kabitross.”

  Alex and George looked to the flower and then to each other. “The dandelion?” they screeched in unison.

  “Is that what you call it?” Kane asked.

  “Yes,” they responded as one.

  “Dandelion,” Alex announced, “comes from the Old French word ‘dentdelion’, or ‘lion’s tooth’.”

  She grinned. “My people do not know what lions are. Therefore, to us, it will always be the kabitross.”

  George found his humor for the first time in many minutes. He smiled at his wife. “You mean to tell me this really is what you’ve been searching for all this time? This bloody troublesome weed?”

  She nodded vigorously.

  George threw his head back and laughed.

  * * * * *

  Kane and Melea outlined their plans all the way back to Blackmore. Having been assured by both the earl and the marquess that kabitross plants would be in full bloom and therefore readily found all over the countryside this time of the year, the women’s new mission was to collect as many of the lifesaving beauties as possible. Specifically, the fragile, billowy heads of the flowers needed to be retained.

  Kane rolled the stem of the kabitross back and forth between her palms as she considered it. She shoved the flower toward George and Alex, pointing out the part of it that was so crucial to saving her people from BV-5.

  Sitting side by side in the Blackmore travelling coach, the gentlemen leaned in closer to get a better look. “Do you see how wispy the head is?” she asked. They nodded. “The head contains the flower’s life-giving seeds, which is why it reproduces in your land so quickly. The seeds are carried by the winds and transported all over the countryside, making the fragile bloom thrive.”

  “What is it about the seeds that makes them able to cure this disease you have spoken of?” Alex asked, genuinely intrigued.

  “I never realized a bloody seed could wield so much power,” George muttered.

  Kane grinned. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “To answer your question,” Melea cut in, directing her gaze toward Alex, “Kane told me that the seeds contain potent healers. Healers, unfortunate as it is, that machines were not sophisticated enough to read until well after this dandelion, this kabitross, was rendered extinct by the last two world wars.”

  George shook his head in resignation. “A pity, that.”

  “Yes.” Kane sighed her despair. She directed her gaze toward George and Alex. “What the two of you take for granted, assuming it will always be, our people live without, never realizing fully what they’ve lost.”

  “Neptune-cursed wars,” Melea muttered. Her expression turned thoughtful. “It’s why I became a fighter. I stamp out any signs of power hungry men with designs on galactic domination before they gather a following of disciples large enough to see it through.”

  George and Alex flushed at that. Her remark hit too close to home as both their thoughts turned to England’s never ending trouble with its colonies. “I see nothing wrong with Britain conquering the world,” Alex sputtered, his chin jutted out and tilted up. “Indeed, our way of life is superior.”

  Kane shook her head morosely. “If you saw the earth Melea and I herald from, the earth that resulted from that very logic, you wouldn’t agree with that statement, Alex. You would no longer think it was worth the price that will be paid by your progeny.”

  A sense of foreboding stole over George. “What do you mean?” he asked hesitantly.

  Kane and Melea looked to each other. At Melea’s shrug, Kane told the gentlemen everything there was to know. She pointed to the countryside out the carriage window. “Do you see those trees out there? Do you see the animals, the grasses, the flowers? Do you see the glory of nature?”

  They muttered something unintelligible.

  Kane sighed. “A few hundred years from now devastating wars will come. Wars that result from your way of thinking,” she added, frowning at Alex.

  He squirmed in his seat.

  “What is the result?” George asked quietly.

  “It’s gone,” Kane stated without inflection. She waved a meaningful hand toward the world outside the carriage. “All of it. Gone.”

  Alex stilled. “All of it?”

  “Yes.”

  A charged silence engulfed the Blackmore coach. The earl and the marquess appeared to be lost in their own thoughts. George ran a beleaguered hand tersely through his hair. “Is there a way to stop this?” he asked hopefully.

  Sadly, Kane s
hook her head no. “The people of our worlds have two disparate life views, George. The ways of this world will not be altered merely by what we in this carriage believe.”

  “What do you mean?” Alex questioned her despairingly. “What is this notion of life views?”

  Melea shrugged her shoulders. “The people of your world have times of peace that they might gather the resources needed to plunge back into war. The people of our time go to war only that they might have peace.” She smiled humorlessly. “Those two life views can never be reconciled.”

  As ominous a prediction as the Warrior Woman’s insight was, both men understood her point as valid. George breathed in deeply as he studied his wife’s profile. “When you told me you needed to come to this time because the kab—that is to say the dandelion—was extinct in yours, I had no notion everything had suffered a similar fate.”

  Kane snorted. “The state of affairs is so bad in 2429 that people are forced to dwell within colonies made up of synthetic biospheres.”

  “Trees are imported from earth-like planets to keep us from being completely dependent upon machines to breathe,” Melea expounded.

  “Why we bother is beyond me,” Kane muttered. “It’s not like we could continue on without the machines. Although the trees help somewhat, we need the machines to protect us from the sun’s—” She noted the looks of increasing horror on the gentlemen’s faces and drew her ranting to a halt. “Never mind.”

  George released the breath he’d been holding for the past minute. “I thank-you, my dear. My gentleman’s constitution can take but so much at one telling.” He rapped his fingertips on the empty cushion seat between Alex and him. “You can tell me some more ghastly stories when I’ve recovered fully from this one.”

  The carriage rambled along the country roads for another two hours before it finally drew to a halt in front of the Blackmore mansion. Kane and Melea alighted from the coach, ear-to-ear grins enveloping their faces as they breathed in the fresh country air.

  George and Alex watched their women, shamefaced that they’d never taken the time to do the same. They looked at each other knowingly. Then they breathed.