Time Kissed Moments 1 Read online

  Copyright © Tracy Cooper-Posey

  About Time Kissed Moments I

  If you can’t get enough of Brody, Veris and Alexander…

  These three vampires are thousands of years old, yet getting them to open up about their past lives takes just the right combination of events. An evening sitting around talking provides stories and flashes of insight, and a very special moment in all their lives.

  By reader request, find out what happened to Andy, Taylor’s former next door neighbor, the aftermath of the events in Kiss Across Swords, and a rare story from Alexander, who has the tables turned on him.

  A volume of short stories, snippets, and a conversation that wanders through time.

  Warning: This time travel ménage romance anthology features at least two super-hot alpha vampire heroes, multiple sex scenes, including anal sex, MM sexual play, and MMF sex. Do not read this book if frank sexual language and sex scenes offend you.

  The time-space continuum was restored to order at the end of this book. Promise.

  This is a part of the Kiss Across Time paranormal series:

  Kiss Across Time 1.0: Kiss Across Time

  Kiss Across Time 2.0: Kiss Across Swords

  Kiss Across Time 2.5: Time Kissed Moments I*

  Kiss Across Time 3.0: Kiss Across Chains

  Kiss Across Time 4.0: Kiss Across Deserts

  …and more to come!

  The characters and events in this series are interconnected from book to book. Reading the books in order is strongly encouraged.

  *Time Kissed Moments are short stories and novellas featuring the characters and situations featured in the Kiss Across Time series.

  Praise for the Kiss Across Time series

  …and praise for the Kiss Across Time Series:

  [She] has created characters that are engaging, unpredictable, outrageously funny and down-right appealing to readers who will steal their hearts. Shannon for The Romance Studio

  I think you’ll be as entertained and affected by the chemistry between the characters as I was. A fast-moving romance that spanned several lifetimes and included a paranormal aspect that was a fun and totally unexpected surprise. Honeysuckle for Whipped Cream Erotic Romance Reviews

  This was a great story with wonderful and surprising plot twists. The chemistry between the three is tangible. Stacey Krug for Siren Book Reviews

  Paranormal erotic romance doesn’t get any more creative than [this]. Chris for Romance Junkies

  This is a story, and these are characters, that stay with the reader long after the story is finished. Clare for Happily Ever After Reviews

  Not only immensely imaginative, but incredibly ingenious – it’s an unforgettable journey. Chris for Romance Junkies Reviews

  Her ability to create a story that captures readers and characters with depth will keep me coming back for more. Claudia for A Romance Review

  She shows the reader how beautiful and seductive two men can be when they unleash their desires for each other. It’s a romance that has a number of elements, all combined to make a very captivating story. I’m looking forward to reading more in this imaginative series. Leslie for Leslie’s Psyche

  A thrilling exploration of battle, self-loathing, trust, and a soul-shaking love that time cannot erase. Rhonda for Vampire Romance Books

  Time and a Punk or Two

  If Stowe had been allowed to have a driver’s license anymore, it would have told the world he was eighty-six this year, but most of the time he forgot what his age was. Seeing an old man looking back at him in the mirror was a surprise, more often than not. His faculties were still just fine, even if his strength wasn’t quite what it used to be. He only needed glasses for the newspaper and he certainly didn’t need ‘em to know the two punk kids heading for the boarding lounge were trouble.

  Stowe glanced around the lounge. There weren’t too many seats left on account of it being so close to boarding time. There were single seats here and there. Across the aisle, facing him, were two spares together. They were next to the big blond man, whose shoulders would crowd just about anyone who tried to sit next to him, which explained why the seats had gone empty. The man wore a good suit and his hair was short, neat and tidy. He was clean shaven and looked highly respectable—definitely the business class type of traveler—but the kids wouldn’t take the seats near him because street-raised punks were instinctively wary of size.

  That meant they’d pick the two seats next to Stowe, because not only did he look completely harmless in his golf shirt and khakis, but it was highly likely they wouldn’t even see him, except as a blob of humanity that had the seat next to them. Becoming invisible was a phenomenon that had started not long after his sixtieth birthday. Ginny, God rest her soul, said she’d turned invisible before her fiftieth and he hadn’t really believed her until it started happening to him.

  The taller of the two kids bopped over to the seats next to Stowe. He was laughing, his hips jigging in time to whatever music he was listening to under the massive white headphones he was wearing.

  Stowe remembered having a pair of headphones like that in the seventies. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same….

  The kid put his sneakered foot on the front edge of the seat and shoved hard three or four times, like he was testing the seat for worthiness. As the seats were all joined together, four in a row, the heavy thrusting jerked the chair under Stowe’s rear, jogging him enough to dislodge the paperback he had been pretending to read. The woman on the other end of the row picked up her bags and shifted over two seats, settling down between two businessmen who were both reading on their cellphones.

  Everyone in the lounge was watching the kids, now, even though they were all pretending to be doing whatever they had been doing a moment before. Eyes flickered up from magazines and cellphones. Conversation skittered to a halt and gazes shifted toward the aisle. The two kids were the only things of interest happening anywhere nearby and it passed the time until boarding was announced.

  Even the big man with the blue eyes was watching them, his eyes narrowed just a little. One more time, Stowe shook off the uneasy feeling that he should know the guy. At Stowe’s age, faces tended to blur and it wasn’t like he was running a business anymore, when recalling the names that went with faces was critical.

  The second kid, who was wearing bright neon orange sneakers, grabbed hold of the back of one of the three chairs that had now opened up for them and rocked it furiously.

  Stowe closed his book, carefully turning down the page first. But he didn’t pick up his cabin bag. The thirty-year-old that still lived inside him resented the idea of backing off and giving them room. Every time someone did that, like the woman who had just moved seats, it reinforced their egos and inflated their certainty that the world had been made to bend to their specifications.

  The two dropped their backpacks to the floor, several feet away from the seats, instead of neatly next to their toes like everyone else. The backpacks would be in the way when the lineup to pass through the gate formed, but that didn’t seem to occur to them. Probably they just didn’t care.

  They spread themselves across the three seats, with an arm each resting along the back of them and their knees spread as wide as the low crotch of their pants would allow, talking loudly to overcome the noise they were listening to—the stuff they called music that was working hard to damage their hearing. Their language was almost foreign. There was a bit of Spanish and some language Stowe didn’t recognize, but thought might have African roots. Other words were street jargon and everything was spoken with thick accents and the hip-hop cadences that non-white boys seemed to feel was mandatory these days.

  The one with the white headphones wa
s sitting on the seat to Stowe’s right, at a slight angle so the back of his shoulder was facing Stowe. He was rocking backward and forward with the movement of his left arm, which he was using for emphasis as he talked, waving it around.

  The rocking intensified. Stowe could feel his muscles tighten up as he eased to the left, out of the way.

  He realized what he was doing and angrily straightened up from the lean. He was entitled to sit here. He was a paying traveler just like everyone else. He wouldn’t let some kid with too much attitude intimidate him.

  Don’t act from anger, Ratboy. The words had first been spoken to him over seventy years ago, as Nazi bullets sprayed around them, chewing through the sheet iron they were ducked behind. These days, the words echoed in Stowe’s mind as a cool warning, as they had many times in the intervening years. The slight accent, the amusement behind the words, were still as fresh as the day he had first heard Grayson say them.

  Don’t act from anger, Ratboy. It’ll get you killed. Heroes die, thinkers survive.

  That philosophy had got Stowe through three wars and seven decades of everything life had thrown at him.

  So he dumped his anger. He blew it out through his lips and let it go. He deliberately loosened his grip on the paperback and opened it up. He was going to read and wait for the boarding call, then get on the plane for Los Angeles so he could go visit his new great-grandson. No snot-nosed kid who had no idea what it was like to have people trying to shoot him dead was going to change what he did. That was Stowe’s way of bending the world to his needs.

  He could only pretend to read, though. The rocking and hand-waving was distracting and he couldn’t focus on the words. But he kept his gaze on the page.

  Then the kid’s shoulder slammed into his, hard and heavy, shoving him sideways. His seat was the last in the row and there was no arm rest, so Stowe tipped over the edge. His book went tumbling, the pages fanning out with a riffling sound. He heard himself grunt from the impact as he threw out his hands to save himself, except there was nothing there to push against.

  He fell and the heels of his hands slammed into the industrial carpeting. His palms burned, but the impact to his arms and shoulders was worse. He could have taken such a tumble a dozen times over, fifty years ago. In fact, he had. But even though his doctors kept assuring him he was extraordinarily healthy for his age, it was the degeneration from age that he noticed the most. The slowing of reactions. The twinges in his knees and hips and back. The fact that sometimes he just couldn’t move fast even if he wanted to. Long flights of stairs made him sigh.

  And falling scared him.

  There were too many friends he had buried recently who had declined into their graves almost overnight after something as simple as a misstep off a curb. Stowe watched where he put his feet and he always gripped bannisters and railings when they were there. Stairs made him sigh for more reasons than the number of steps in them. It was a long way down to the bottom, most of the time.

  His heart leapt high and hard as he sprawled. He moaned under his breath as his shoulders and back gave out flares of pain. His knees scraped across the carpet and his feet tangled up in his carry-on bag’s strap. He ended up on all fours, like a dog. Panting like one, too. But the humiliation wasn’t nearly as great as the fear.

  What did I break? How bad is it?

  There were murmurs around him and sounds of dismay, but the two punks kept on chattering like monkeys in a tree, completely oblivious.

  Stowe’s fury ignited. He stared at the foreign particles ground into the carpet fibers and smelled the filthy odor rising from it and closed his eyes as his anger leapt higher.

  That black Irish temper of yours will get you into trouble if you don’t learn how to tame it. Grayson’s cool voice in his mind. The same warning he had abided by for decades.

  “Too late,” Stowe whispered. Doggedly, he started the process of getting up off the floor.

  A hand thrust under his arm. “Let me help.” The voice was quiet, but full of the unspoken power of a leader, a man who controlled his whole world and everything in it with ease.

  Stowe glanced up. Blue eyes looked back at him calmly.

  Again, the wash of familiarity.

  Stowe swallowed. “Thank you, that would be helpful.”

  He was lifted to his feet without any need to use his own strength. The big man had power to spare of the physical kind, too. Stowe brushed off his hands and his knees.

  “Is anything burning, or hurting?” the big man asked. “Joints throbbing?”

  Stowe took a quick inventory and shook his head. “My pride, mostly. Are you a doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew a doctor once…he looked a bit like you.” That was a lie. Now he was close up, Stowe could see that the big guy looked a lot like Grayson. But Grayson was long dead. Seventy years dead, his body somewhere in the fields of France, never recovered despite Stowe and three others of his unit turning the area upside down looking for the place where they had been forced to abandon it the week before when the Jerries had herded them north with their tanks.

  But there was another matter to deal with, more important that a resemblance to a man long dead. “Excuse me for just a moment,” Stowe told the big man. “There’s something I gotta do here.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you want to finish this?” Clearly, he knew exactly what Stowe intended to do.

  There was a boatload of reasons why Stowe should just pick up his bag and move somewhere else, including the fact that he thought he might have sprained his wrist when he fell, because now the son-of-a-bitch was on fire and throbbing like crazy. But his temper was still there, still live, still driving him. So because the man had helped him up, Stowe tried to give him a reason that would make sense. “I want them to see me,” he said. Then he tried again. “Just this once, I don’t want to be invisible.”

  He knew that this young, successful man had never dealt with being invisible in his entire life. He wouldn’t understand.

  But amazingly, he seemed to get it. He nodded. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Stowe pulled in a harsh breath in surprise and stared at him hard. That was something Grayson had always said. He had been the unit’s medic, but he was physically stronger than anyone else and whenever things got tight, which was at least twice a day, he would call after them as they headed out, “I’ll be right there!”

  And so he had been, time after time, until the last time when he had stepped into the line of fire and deliberately taken the bullet meant for Stowe.

  Stowe’s heart was climbing, knocking against his chest. He needed to sit down and let it calm. But he wanted to finish this now, so he turned to face the punks.

  There were quite a few people standing up, in a way that told him they had lurched to their feet when he’d fallen and now they were watching to see how things unfolded. Eyes widened as he turned to face the kids and for a brief moment, satisfaction speared him.

  Everyone can see me now.

  Except the two assholes in front of him, who were still jiving in their seats and talking at a million miles an hour.

  Stowe took another deep breath. He was trembling. But he reached out and tapped on the tall kid’s shoulder, to get his attention.

  The kid glanced up, then back to his friend. Stowe was dismissed.

  Now the fury swirled hotter and harder. But before he could do anything except grit his teeth, which were all still his own, the big man reached out and grabbed the kid’s shoulder and hauled him up on to his feet.

  The kid gave out a yell and snatched his headphones off with his free hand. The left hand jerked out from his side and Stowe realized the big man had hold of more than just the kid’s shirt. He was squeezing muscles and tendons together, making them flex. But the way he was holding the kid made it look like he just had a hand on his shoulder, all friendly-like.

  “What the fuck, man!” the kid protested.

  So English was one of his langu
ages, after all.

  His friend bounced onto his feet and pushed his way forward, trying to get in on the action.

  Stowe almost smiled. “You need to sit down and shut up,” he told the second kid.

  The kid’s mouth dropped open. Then he smiled nastily. “Fuck you, old man. I got—”

  But that was all he got out. The big man put his other hand on the second kid’s shoulder and it looked like he pushed him gently into the chair behind him, but the kid slammed down into it hard enough to make his teeth click together.

  The man held up a finger as the kid blinked up at him. “Don’t say a word,” he said softly. Then he looked at Stowe. “You’re up.”

  Stowe studied the kid in front of him. The kid was still full of bravado. He didn’t understand yet. He still couldn’t see Stowe. Not properly. “You owe me an apology,” Stowe told him.

  “Fuck you, you crazy old fart! I didn’t do nothin’ and I’m not about to ‘poligize like some little sissy coz you got your knees dirty.”

  The big man shifted the grip of his hand. The fingers curled around the kid’s throat and the kid’s eyes suddenly got wider as he looked up at the man. “What the…!” But his voice was choked off.

  “No,” the man said patiently. “You don’t get to speak unless you express your full contrition. You’re in a public place, not your basement apartment and you need a lesson in how to behave in public.” The big man smiled and it was a far more dangerous expression than the little punk in the seat next to them had managed. “This is your lesson.”

  The kid’s eyes swiveled back to Stowe.

  “Are you going to apologize?” Stowe asked. “Because he’s not going to let go of your windpipe until you nod to show that you will.”

  The kid’s mouth set in a hard line. He mouthed the words. Fuck you.