Bannockburn Binding (Beloved Bloody Time) by Tracy Cooper-Posey Read Free Book Online Page A

truth do? Then she looked properly into Rob’s eyes and knew she couldn’t lie. “Yes,” she replied, without further thought.
    “That’s also why ye told me about Christian, yes?”
    She took a deep breath and nodded.
    “Why did ye tell me to call you Tally, hmm?”
    Tally thought of and rapidly discarded a dozen different explanations and outright lies. Then she simply settled for the truth again. “I like you,” she told him. “I want you to use my real name. The one everyone else uses when I’m at home.”
    “The one Christian uses when he is not angry with ye.”
    “Yes.”
    Rob smiled and lifted her as he rose to sit on his heels, keeping himself inside her the whole time. Talley ended up straddling his lap once more, but this time the position was much more erotic and intimate. She gasped, gripping Rob’s shoulders as his cock pushed so deeply inside her it pressed up against her cervix. Tally rested her head against Rob’s shoulder, her pussy clamping around his shaft as her body roused once more.
    “There is truth between us of a sort, then,” Rob said, lifting her chin and looking her in the eye. “Good.” He kissed her. “The rest can come when it will.” He gripped her waist and lifted her, so he could thrust himself back inside her.
    Fright tore through Tally as she processed his calm, utterly assured statement. There could be no further truth from her. The danger to Rob, to this world, was too awful to even consider telling him even a small portion of the real truth about herself.
    But the sensuality of the moment caught up with her and swept away her fright, overwhelming her with need and the intoxicating pleasure of being taken by this odd anomaly of a man from so far in the past her peers called it ancient history.

Chapter Four
     
    Charbonneau settled himself on the cramped seat and followed Justin’s motions as the agent buckled himself into the complicated x-style belting.
    “It always seems like overkill here on Earth,” Justin said. “But you’ll be glad you have them when we leave the atmosphere.”
    “The shuttle doesn’t have artificial gravity?” Charbonneau asked, surprised. Artificial gravity, one of the nicer side benefits of FTL flight, had long ago become economical, even planet-side.
    “It’s too difficult to maintain gravity against the surges…you’ll see. I’m surprised this is your first beanstalk trip.”
    “I just never got around to it.” Charbonneau shrugged, an abbreviated movement under the harness. He looked around the shuttle. He was familiar with the mechanics and theory of the beanstalk from media coverage when it had first been built and installed, about twenty years ago. Justin had been more informative on their journey across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the station where the beanstalk was rooted.
    The cabin was vaguely crescent-shaped, matching the rest of the vehicle. The inner curve of the crescent was where the magnetic and physical pincers grabbed the polymer and steel-fibre banister of the bean stalk. The stalk was four metres in diameter and carried another shuttle on the other side.
    That shuttle was at Halfway Station, outside Earth’s atmosphere, at the other end of the stalk. At mid-point along the stalk the two shuttles would pass each other. That would take place sometime after they left the atmosphere, because there was more of the stalk floating weightless in space than there was trailing down to the Earth’s surface.
    “I understand the physics that holds this thing up,” Charbonneau said quietly, for other passengers were settling in on either side of them, lining the inner curve of the cabin, facing the windows. “But I confess that the idea of nothing but thin air holding up a very heavy, very large cable seems to smack of heresy and witchcraft.”
    “There is no air in space,” Justin pointed out. “So, technically, nothing but dust particles and atomic matter is doing the work. And not much of that,