“This is my castle. I own it. I inherited it from my father, your grandfather for whom you are named.” Nikola frowned at his daughter. “Thus the answer to your question is that I am here because I have every right to be here.”
“Your father’s name was Imogen?” I asked Nikola.
He moved the frown over to me. “Of course it wasn’t. Imogen is a female name. My father’s name was Fidele.”
“But you said—”
“Papa, you should not be here. Miss Iolanthe is an unmarried woman in an advanced state of undress, and I will not allow you to take advantage of her,” Imogen interrupted, setting down the stack of clothing on the corner of the bed. “You may leave, and I will attend to her.”
“Woman!” He fairly yelled the word. “I will not be gainsaid in my own home! If I wish to be here, in this room of the castle of which I am the lord and master, so that Io might seduce me again, then here is where I will stand, and there is naught you can say to me to remove me from the premises. Now begone, so that the lady might begin her seduction without an audience.”
Imogen slowly turned to look at me, a speculative glint in her eyes. “You seduced my father?”
“No! I would never! I just happened to jump him once or twice—”
“Three times.”
“Once or three times, not that anyone should be counting.” I shot Nikola a potent glare. “But there was no seduction. It was just…er…how old are you?”
Imogen’s lips pursed for a moment. “Does my age matter?”
“It does if you don’t know about the birds and bees.”
She frowned. “What birds and bees?”
“It’s a euphemism for…eh…men and women. Being together. Intimately.”
“Sexual congress, you mean?” She nodded. “Of course I know about that.”
“You do not!” Nikola roared, pinning her back with a glare that should have ripped her hair right off her head. “You are a young and thoroughly innocent maiden!”
“Yes, of course I am, Papa, but I have eyes. I’ve seen the animals, and the people in town, and that really handsome stableboy with the very large…muscles.” Her gaze dropped demurely, but I didn’t believe for one second that Imogen was as innocent as Nikola believed.
It wasn’t any of my business, however. “The fact is that I did not try to seduce your father, or rather, I did, but I was under the compulsion of the thing he did to brainwash me into thinking I wanted him right at that very second. And I don’t. So it was all a mistake.”
She pursed her lips again. “I see. You find my father handsome.”
Oh, handsome wasn’t the word for what Nikola was. He went far beyond that and hovered over the “devastatingly gorgeous” range. “I don’t see what my opinion of Nikola’s looks matters, but as it happens, yes, I think he’s pretty easy on the eyes.”
Nikola looked pleased.
You’re also arrogant, pushy, and you have so many wrong ideas.
You want me nonetheless. You want me naked on that bed behind you, covered in some form of lemon oil that I’ve not seen before. You want to rub yourself on me.
Dammit, stop reading my smutty thoughts!
They’re about me. I would be remiss in my hostly duties if I did not offer the common courtesy of being interested in what devilish things you wish to do to my man’s body. Next time you wish to have sexual fantasies about me, however, please let me know in advance so that I might enjoy them, too.
“How old are you?”
Imogen’s question took me a bit by surprise. “Er…thirty-something.” I glanced at Nikola. “As long as we’re playing twenty questions, how old are you? Not that I care in any way, shape, or form, because we are not going to have a relationship, despite you offering yourself for seduction, but it will make me feel a lot better about the way you made me jump you if I know you’re not young enough to be emotionally scarred by the circumstances.”
“I was two score when Imogen was born, and that was a little more than a score ago,” he said, his frown growing darker. “Imogen, I have ordered you to leave this chamber. Why have you not done as I have commanded?”“Miss Iolanthe—I’m sorry, but I don’t know your surname—is obviously in need of assistance since you managed to remove almost all of her garments before bringing her home,” Imogen said mildly. “I know my duty, and that is to ensure her safety while she is under our protection.”
“I will see to any protecting that needs to be done,” Nikola said firmly.
“You’re the one I need protecting from,” I said, throwing grammar to the wind. “I’m not afraid to be alone with anyone else, least of all Imogen.”
“There, you see?” Imogen shooed her father toward the door. To my surprise, Nikola allowed himself to be shooed, casting belligerent looks over his shoulder toward me. “I will take care of her, Papa.”
“Unhand me, daughter! I will not be treated in this manner!”
“No, of course you won’t,” Imogen said soothingly, and then more or less shoved Nikola through the door, ignoring his sputters of protest. She closed the door behind him and turned around to face me, a faint smile on her lips fading away to nothing.
“I really don’t need help, but I appreciate the offer,” I said, wondering at the odd look she was giving me. “I hate to give your father the satisfaction of being correct, but I am very tired, and wouldn’t mind a little nap.”
“I have brought you some night things,” she said, moving to the stack of linen on the bed. “And also a gown, because yours was destroyed by Papa. Although I’m not sure I understand why that is so, since he’s normally a very circumspect man. Perhaps you would care to enlighten me?”
I clamped my lips closed on the truth. Although Imogen was certainly old enough to know her father had a sexuality that was normal and natural, I had no idea if eighteenth-century women were copacetic discussing such things, especially when it concerned a parent. So instead I smiled and thanked her when she held out a lacy, frilly nightgown.
“Is it true that you ran into Papa’s carriage horse?” Imogen asked as she puttered around the room, picking up Nikola’s shirt from where I tossed it in order to slip into the nightgown.
“That’s what he says. I don’t remember anything about it. Imogen—” I bit my lip, not sure how to ask her the question I wanted most to ask. “About your father—he has two brothers, doesn’t he?”
“Why do you wish to know that?” Imogen countered, a small frown pulling her brows together.
I took a deep breath and gave up trying to tie all the little ties on the front of the nightgown. “This is going to sound completely crazy, and I don’t blame you one bit if you think I’ve gone insane, but I’m from the future. Your future, that is.”
She just looked at me for a few seconds, then pulled a wide, armless chair over, and sat in it. “I don’t see what that has to do with my family.”
“You’re not going to even question the idea that I am from the future?” I asked, completely surprised by her apparent nonchalance in accepting such a bizarre idea. “If the situation was reversed, I’d totally be calling the local loony bin for you.”
Imogen’s frown increased for a few seconds. “I do not know this loony bin. As for what you claim…” She made a delicate shrug. “I do not believe or discount what you say. I merely am inquiring what that has to do with my father’s family.”
“It matters because we’ve met. Or we will meet. In my time, I met you two days ago, and one of the things you told me was that your father had been killed by his brothers. I just want to know if that’s true.”
“It can hardly be true if my father is alive, which he is.” Imogen’s voice may have been light—and slightly tinged with a mocking tone that I could have done without—but her expression was grave.
“I meant, does he have two brothers?”
“No,” she answered.
I sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what the present-day Imogen had been up to, since she had obviously been lying to me.
“He has two half brothers, younger sons of my grandmother when she married a second time.”
A chill swept over me despite the warmth from the big fire. I shivered and clutched a puffy eiderdown around me. “Half brothers. That’s right, you said half brothers. Those are the dudes.”
She shook her head. “They are not here. They live in a small town to the north. They’ve never gotten along with Papa, so he gave them a small property he owned, where they could be their own masters and not be beholden to him.”
I racked my brain, trying to remember what Imogen had told me about her father’s death. Was there something about the brothers being jealous of him? “Whereabouts do they live, exactly?”
She named a town that I didn’t recognize, adding, “We see them twice a year, once on Papa’s birthday, and the second at the anniversary of my grandmother’s death, but neither event is for some time. Why would my uncles want Papa dead?”
I just looked at her, unsure how to answer. I didn’t want to cause her more pain by admitting her uncles were jealous of Nikola’s luck in being born first, and thereby being the heir to a castle and title, but on the other hand, she deserved to know the truth. Assuming it was the truth. “I’m afraid I don’t know all the details, because when we met—in 2012—you didn’t say much other than the anniversary of your father’s death was coming up, and that he’d been killed in some woods by his two half brothers. I think you said something about them being jealous, but I can’t really remember for sure. So much has happened since then.”
“You said he was killed in a woods? What woods?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. You just said woods, and from what I could tell in the dark coming back here from the town, this whole region is covered in woods. Then there’s the weird woods that held the swirly thing that brought me back in time—Gretl said it was haunted, and that people in the area had avoided it for a long time. But that reputation is understandable given what happened to me there. I don’t know where that is, either, since my memory seems to be incomplete, but I plan on searching for it as soon as I’ve had a little nap. Does your father have a favorite spot in the woods he likes to visit?”