My True Love by Karen Ranney Page B

could not touch him, absorb the heat of him.
    Long moments later, he lifted his head, ended the kiss. She blinked open her eyes, a sound of protest on her lips.
    His face was burnished in the soft shadows of the morning storm, his breath as rapid as hers. Realization of where they were seeped into her passion-drugged mind. They knelt together on the sodden ground beneath a gentle rain. In the north the sky was clearing, and a patch of blue indicated that nature was done with its tantrum.
    She should have stood and walked away. Or protested the kiss. Said a word that lightened the moment. Any one of several dozen things. Instead, she stared at him, her breath still caught in her chest, her blood racing hot through her body.
    His fingers reached out and pressed against her bottom lip. The very tip of her tongue touched it.
    “Who are you?” he asked, his voice hoarse with desire.
    A dreamer . Words she didn’t speak.
    But he did not seem to expect her to answer. He stood and held out his hand. Anne rose reluctantly, placed her own atop it. Kiss me again . Not a maidenly thought. Yet she wanted another kiss or a hundred of them. She wanted him to lead her to that place his kiss had lured her, where all she could feel was the touch of his lips and her own response.
    She arranged her sodden skirts around her, sluiced her hands over her face, drying it as well as she was able. Stephen did the same, the moment freed from its awkwardness by their similar gestures.
    The sun began to shine as if in apology for what the storm had caused. Not brightly, but with a watery gleam that illuminated the scene of destruction. She looked around them. The lightning had come dangerously close. The tower that had stood there a moment ago was only a mounded pile of stone and brick now.
    She was stunned at how close they had come to being killed.
    “Too close,” Stephen said from behind her. An echo of her thought.
    She nodded.
    A glint among the bricks caught her attention. Something glittered in the gray morning. She picked her way through the debris, reached down, and retrieved it from beneath a crumbled bit of stone. It was a coffer, its rounded wooden lid elaborately carved. A gold adornment in the center of it was what she’d seen shining.
    “What is it?” she asked, holding it up for him to see. It was surprisingly heavy. She handed it to him when he joined her.
    There was no lock, just a simple latch, which he pried up with his finger. Age had made it difficult to move, not intention. The leather hinges gave way and crumbled as Stephen raised the lid. Inside was a wooden block darkened with water and age. He lifted it up and out of the coffer. Not a wooden block at all, but two flat pieces of wood holding at least a hundred pages of parchment tightly pressed together.
    The first page was brown and crumbled. The latter half of the book had suffered water damage a long time ago. It was no longer legible. The ink looked to have remained stable, but the parchment had hardened into a black sludge. The first page, however, was as white as the day it had been prepared.
    “Do you read Latin?” he asked.
    Anne shook her head.
    He scanned to the bottom of the first page, then glanced at her, a half smile curving his lips. “It’s a codex written by my ancestress. She was rumored to have been a scribe.”
    She watched as his hands closed the rounded top of the coffer. His fingers traced the intricate carvings of the wood, the detail of the gold medallion. Even the hinges, little more than crumbling leather, were touched gently.
    “It must be more than four hundred years old.”
    She stretched out her fingers and touched the coffer in awe.
    He frowned, studied the rubble, then bent and removed a few more stones. “It shouldn’t have been here,” he said. “Only armament was stored in the tower, but even so it hadn’t been used for years.”
    “Unless it was placed there on purpose,” she said.
    He glanced at her, surprised.
    “Perhaps