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He taught me to go slow, to let our rising passion build, to take time to know his body as he had mine. To listen for his little tells, and he had many of them: a catch in his breath when my teeth grazed him; an audible swallow when I licked along his length; and all over shudder when I swallowed him down.

But he didn’t want to finish that way, and neither did I. That was for when you had days, weeks, months to luxuriate in your lover’s arms; we had this one day, assuming Morgan didn’t show up to finish the job. I was greedy and wanted everything, an entire lifetime in an afternoon, which was stupid and I knew it.

But if an afternoon is all you have . . .

He noticed my agitation, but instead of telling me to calm down, he met my pain with passion, my selfishness with generosity, and my fear with love. Or so it seemed to me. I didn’t know love, had never experienced it, had no idea if this was how it felt.

But his groan when our bodies merged was the prettiest thing I’d ever heard, and the way he looked at me . . .

I will remember this, I thought. It didn’t matter how long the time, or what might be done to tamper with my already shredded memory. I might forget the world, but this, this I would remember.

It was perfect, it lasted forever, and it was still over all too soon.

“You were right,” I told him, when I could speak again.

“About what?” he asked, and I was pleased to see that it took him two tries to get the words out.

“I did notice the difference!”

* * *

“What if they don’t come for us?” I asked, sometime later.

Louis-Cesare and I were lying on the riverbank, not still but again. We’d had a bath, and several more sessions with the optional activates I had originally spurned. We had been very lucky not to shock any passing fishermen. But the sun was starting to slide toward the horizon, and the day was ending, whether we willed it or no.

Louis-Cesare had been gazing up at the sky as if lost in thought, but now those extraordinary eyes met mine. He didn’t ask who I meant. “They will. Rhea and Hilde are both highly skilled.”

“A fact that matters not if Morgan succeeds in her quest,” I pointed out. “She could obliterate the future, and perhaps neither of them will ever be born.

“Perhaps you will not be.”

It was a thought that had really started to bother me. He had told me a little about himself, in between bouts, and it was not encouraging. He was younger than me, younger than this. Younger even than the time we’d just left.

He wouldn’t be born until the 1630s, meaning that if Morgan succeeded in whatever she was doing . . .

He frowned, watching me. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know.” I got up, found my ruined dress, and shrugged it back on. I’d never wanted to do anything less, although not because of the state of it. I had seen worse. But because putting it on meant that we were going back soon and I didn’t want to go back.

Frankly, I would have been happy to stay here with him. Not for a day, but forever. I had nothing in Italy, except a bad room above a terrible tavern, a profession that frequently threatened my life, and a father who forgot about my existence until it was convenient. If I never saw that place again, I wouldn’t spill any tears over it.

I let myself think for a moment, looking out over the river and the golden fields beyond, where the wheat was beginning to ripen. The sky was very blue, the forest was very green, and there were flowers, in little pink clusters, in the grass. It was as pretty a picture as anyone could hope for.

I could be happy here.

Or perhaps not, with my head splitting open every time something struck me as familiar. But we could go somewhere else, anywhere else! I had traveled widely, and knew a dozen countries well. We could be happy . . .

Except that we couldn’t, I couldn’t, not while waiting for the day when he disappeared like smoke.

“Dory?”

His voice called me back from my reverie. “Nothing,” I said. “I am in a strange humor today. Alive, dead, alive again, and soon possibly dead once more. . .”

“You will not be affected,” he assured me. “Even in this scenario you hypothesize—”

I had leaves and sticks and tiny flower petals in my hair. I had been trying to comb them out with my fingers, but at that I turned to look at him. He made a pretty picture, sprawled in the grass, but I couldn’t appreciate it.

“I will be affected if you are affected,” I pointed out. “And that is assuming she does not come for me—”