Chapter 6: Victory's Sweet Taste
The party downstairs was a living, breathing beast of joy. The air in the great hall, usually so cold and formal, thrummed with the sounds of mismatched music, laughter that was too loud and too real, and the shuffling of feet on the bare floorboards. Someone had found a fiddle. Someone else was banging a spoon on a pot. The smell of roasting pork and cheap whiskey fought with the lingering scent of woodsmoke and old blood.
Marshall stood near the fireplace, a tin cup of something strong in his hand, watching it all. Eli sat in a chair by the fire, a rough blanket around his shoulders, his eyes still wide but now with something like wonder as he watched two young girls attempt a jig. John and Cora were swaying together in a corner, her head on his shoulder, his arms wrapped tight around her. It was fragile, this happiness. He could feel its temporary warmth like a flame in a high wind.
Then he felt a hand slip into his. Eliza’s fingers were cool and sure. She didn’t say a word. She just turned those pale, intense eyes on him, gave his hand a small, deliberate pull, and turned toward the grand staircase.
He followed, the noise of the celebration fading into a buzz behind them. As they climbed the stairs, he caught the looks. John nudged Cora, a slow grin spreading across his face. Cora’s eyes went wide for a second, then she buried her smile in John’s chest, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. Eli saw them too, his young face registering a flash of confusion before Sarah, leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen, caught his eye and gave him a sharp, subtle shake of her head. Her own expression was unreadable, a quiet mask, but her gaze tracked Marshall and Eliza all the way up the stairs. She took a long, slow sip from her own cup, watching until they disappeared into the shadowed upper hall.
Eliza led him not to a guest room, but to the master bedroom. Their bedroom now. She pushed the heavy oak door open. The room was vast, dominated by a monstrous four-poster bed with curtains of dark green velvet. It smelled of lavender, lemon polish, and something deeper, muskier—the ghost of Thornton’s cologne. A single candle burned on the dresser, battling the deep shadows.
She let go of his hand and walked to the center of the room, turning to face him. The laughter from below was a distant murmur. Here, the silence was a thick, expectant thing.
“This is yours now,” she said, her voice low. “Ours.”
He just nodded, feeling oddly out of place in this ornate tomb of a marriage.
She began unbuttoning her dress, her movements not hurried, but deliberate. The practical grey wool she’d worn since the uprising fell away, then the petticoats, then the chemise. She stood before him in the candlelight, pale and sculpted, her skin glowing. There was no shyness in her now. It was a challenge.
“He would come in here,” she said, her voice flat, conversational, as if discussing the weather. “Smelling of bourbon and other women. He’d lay back and say, ‘Do your duty.’ And I would have to climb on top. And I would have to say it.”
She took a step toward him. The air between them crackled.
“I would have to say, ‘Give me your baby.’” The words came out of her like poison she was finally spitting up. “I hated it. I hated the taste of those words. I hated that he made me beg for the thing that would chain me to him forever.”
Another step. She was close enough for him to feel the heat from her skin.
“Give me your baby, Marshall,” she whispered.
This time, the words were completely different. They were an invitation, a claim, a desire. And they paralyzed him.
His brain, usually so full of plans and calculations and timelines, went utterly, white-noise blank. His mouth went dry. He, who had faced down armed men and a time-traveling mercenary without blinking, felt a cold sweat break out on the back of his neck. A child. The permanence of it, the sheer, terrifying reality of creating a life here, in this brutal past… it was a vertigo drop he hadn’t seen coming.
He must have looked stunned, maybe even scared, because a slow, dangerous smile touched Eliza’s lips. She saw it.His nervousness.
“What’s the matter?” she teased, closing the final distance. She placed a hand on his chest, over his heart, which was hammering against his ribs. “Big man with the future gun doesn’t know how to make a baby?”
Her touch was electric, but her words were sparks on tinder. “You scared?” she murmured, her lips almost brushing his. “All that talk of changing the world, and one little request from a woman ties your tongue?”
The teasing cut through the shock. It wasn’t malicious, but it was relentless. It poked at the one part of him that was still a nineteen-year-old kid in over his head. A low heat, different from desire, started to burn in his gut. Annoyance.Frustration. A need to prove her wrong, to silence that knowing smile.
“Stop talking,” he said, his voice rough.
“Make me,” she breathed, her eyes glittering with defiance and a raw, aching want. It wasn’t the passive duty from before. This was a challenge. She wanted him to lose control. She wanted to be ravaged.
The shift was instantaneous. The nervous boy vanished. Something older, darker, and infinitely more possessive took his place. He didn’t kiss her. He grabbed her, his hands rough on her hips, and turned her, pushing her backwards toward the massive bed. She let out a gasp that was half-shock, half-triumph. He walked her into the edge of the high mattress until she bent over it, the velvet cover cool against her stomach.
He didn’t wait. He didn’t ask. He was done with asking. He guided himself into her from behind in one deep, claiming stroke.
Eliza cried out. It wasn’t a sound of pain. It was a shout, raw and loud, that tore through the quiet of the room and probably echoed down the hall. It was a sound of pure, startled sensation, a boundary being vaporized.
And then something else happened. Something she’d never felt, never even imagined. A warm, slick rush flooded between her legs, an involuntary gush of pleasure so intense it made her knees buckle. She moaned, long and low, the shock of her own body’s response leaving her dizzy. Thornton had taken, he had grunted, he had finished. He had never made her cream.
Marshall felt it too, the hot, wet proof of her desire, and it drove him harder. He set a brutal, punishing rhythm, his hips slapping against her skin, the bedposts groaning in protest. One hand gripped her hip, the other fisted in her hair, pulling her head back. He leaned over her, his mouth finding the delicate junction of her neck and shoulder. He didn’t just kiss it. He sucked, hard, pulling the skin between his teeth until he knew it would bruise.
He did it again, an inch lower. And again.
Lost in the sensation, Eliza felt the sharp, blossoming pain on her skin. She flinched, the pleasure momentarily pierced by confusion. “What… what are you doing?” she gasped into the coverlet.
He froze inside her. The rhythm broke. All the nervousness came flooding back in a cold, guilty wave.Shit. He’d forgotten. He’d forgotten where, when, he was. Marks like that… on a white woman… in this time. It was dangerous. Reckless. He’d been an idiot.
He pulled back, releasing her hair. “Sorry,” he muttered, his voice tight with sudden anxiety. “It’s… it’s a thing. From my time. It’s just… a mark. It doesn’t mean anything bad. It’ll fade. I shouldn’t have—”
“Do it again.”
The command was quiet, but absolute. She twisted her head to look at him over her shoulder. Her face was flushed, her lips swollen, her eyes black with want. She held his gaze.
“Do it again,” she repeated, pushing her hips back against him, taking him deep once more. “I want to see it tomorrow. I want to remember where your mouth was.”
The fear melted away, burned up by a fierce, conquering fire. A low groan escaped him. He bowed his head back to her skin, to the reddened patch he’d already made, and sealed his mouth over it again, harder this time, claiming her in the only way he truly could. She arched beneath him, a soft, satisfied sound escaping her as he moved in her again, the rhythm turning deep and possessive, each thrust a promise, each mark on her skin a signature.
Downstairs, the fiddle played on. John whispered something in Cora’s ear that made her swat his arm, laughing. Eli asked Sarah what was so funny, and Sarah just shook her head, a slow, complex smile finally touching her lips as she stared into the depths of her cup, listening to the distant, forgotten creak of the bed above. The party spun on, but in the room that was now theirs, a different, quieter revolution was being sealed, one bruise, one shuddering breath, at a time.