Come Again, My Love (Burns! Mystery 7)

By Erin O'Quinn

The reticent undercover detective Thomas Fitzgerald is already deeply in love...with a man who has just met him in an “alternate reality.” Tight-lipped and uptight as he is, a confession is out of the question. And Burns, not quite the same man he fell in love with, is afraid that his caped hero may misunderstand his own “insta-love.”

How can two stubborn men find that elusive bridge that spans then and now and tomorrow? This is where a kind of time-travel enters the story—a unique wynd connecting past, present and future.

Follow two two modern lovers back to the age of Robert Burns and Poldark as they struggle to reconcile not just the convenient lies of history, but also the truth about their own conflicted relationship.

This full-length novel is a stand-alone. But it's also the culmination of six previous novellas, the Burns! Mysteries.

Please note: the previous title was A Rainbow Bridge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin O'Quinn
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370070053

Erin O'Quinn

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she's met.Erin has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also historical fantasy for all ages.

Book preview

Come Again, My Love

Burns! Mystery 7

Erin O’Quinn

Copyright © 2017 Erin O ’ Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN:

First electronic edition published by New Dawn Press January 2017

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover Design by Erin O’Quinn (Bonita Franks)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author ’ s imagination or are used fictitiously; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

WARNING: This writing contains explicit sexual descriptions and is intended for a mature audience over the age of 18.

Dedication

To the poets and myth makers in my life. But most of all, to Robert Burns, one of the immortals .

And I will come again, my Luve,

Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

From A Red, Red Rose

Introduction

A tight-lipped Police Scotland cop and a reclusive scholar find an unlikely bridge into another century—the age of Robert Burns. Whether it’s fate or "the gnarled coincidences of the slut called time ," they meet the man who was the inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , waiting for the gallows in Edinburgh’s notorious Old Tolbooth prison in 1788.

Will Deacon Brodie turn out to be a Jekyll, or a Hyde? And who else will Thomas and Burns meet who’ll threaten to warp or even destroy the fiber of their existence?

Follow two lovers through a dark wynd spanning more than two centuries, as they struggle to reconcile not just the convenient lies of history but also the truth about their own conflicted relationship.

Foreword

Sometimes a story burns its way into your gut, and you have to get it out, no matter what. That’s what happened somewhere between the end of one novella and the closing lines of the next.

Even though he died in one sense ( The Unicorn’s Secret) , Burns is still as real as the poetry of his long-ago ancestor Robert Burns. But Thomas the detective has to discover him all over again. And Burns, not quite the same one he lost, needs to find him too. The coming together of two lost lovers is the basis for the sequel, The Burns Enigma.

Now that these men have re-established a kind of bonding, their story is not quite finished. Come Again, My Love is my way of closing the gap. It’s a full novel instead of a novella. The mystery in these pages is a cosmic one, and largely unsolvable. Or read another way, the story could be merely the imaginings of a lonely, flawed dreamer.

Thomas is already deeply in love…with a man who has just met him in this alternate reality. Tight-lipped and uptight as he is, a confession is out of the question. And Burns is uncharacteristically afraid that his caped hero may mistake words of love for his heartfelt gratitude, for saving his arse from certain death.

How can two stubborn men find that elusive bridge that spans then and now and tomorrow? This is where quantum entanglement, a kind of time-travel, enters the story—the bridge that connects past, present and future.

The crime I write about here is based on actual historical events. It’s a true story. Well, it’s as true as an old story can be, having been repeated and embroidered over the centuries. The prisoner Brodie was the basis for Robert Luis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . But that is only one version. Here’s another, just as plausible.

Oh…before you sharp-eyed readers damn me for the Cockney accents of the jailers…I want to suggest the average man’s vocabulary without drowning you in obscure Scottish lingo.

~Erin O’Quinn

November 2016

Thoughts during National Novel Writing Month

Chapter One

______________________

Yesterday and Today

Thomas woke slowly, from a dream of such sweetness he smiled. A young boy, squatting on a low bridge, was playing with model airplanes. One was floating near the edge of the slow, shallow river. Another, tied with a grubby string, lay abandoned in the mud. He imagined that one, caked with dried clay, was his prize. He’d shot it down, and he would claim right of ownership later. For now, the lad squinted up through the canopy of rowan leaves, grinning at a figure who was standing near. Look, Uncle Sean…

A familiar hand tousled his blond hair, and his slow, warm voice blended with the cries of ravens feasting on blood-red rowan berries. Good boy, Thomas. I’m glad you like them.

He lay cradling his bed mate, whose soft breath fanned his cheek, and when he remembered the reality he stopped breathing for several heartbeats.

The man hurt the boy.

He felt a tear begin but blinked to clear his eyes and his mind. The past is just that, Thomas. Let it be. It can never return.

He drew Burns closer, into his skin, and exhaled. Burns had helped him escape the manacles of the past. Maybe that’s why his vision of an old hurt was now a sweet-sad memory, nothing more.

I love you, he whispered into the man’s soft mustache, knowing he would not hear it. There’d be time enough for vows, if their strange pairing had any meaning at all in this new crazy-ass world, where yesterday and today had become a whole new twisted reality.

Only a few days ago, he’d awakened on the slab of an infirmary bed, his face ravaged by tears and his heart empty of all emotions except grief. His mate, his beloved, his husband-to-be was dead. He’d tried to follow him to the pit of a grave-site along the Antonine Wall near Stirling. But when he opened his eyes he was lying drugged somewhere in Dundee.

A car crash, they said. What he needed was rest, they said.

Even now, the rational side of his cop-trained mind told him the Burns he knew was not dead, because the man had never existed. And those ten months of rapture and love and wonder had been merely seven hours under the influence of some vile pain med injected into his aching body.

So how could he explain Burns lying here next to him, the lump of his cock ready to stroke or be stroked, even in sleep? Why was he here, in Burns’ old Victorian brownstone, a place he’d already visited in his fantasy? And if his phantom lover had never existed, how in hell could he possess those gray-and-ebony eyes, the deep dimples, the voice, the very intonation, of Burns his spontaneous poet?

Being a trained investigator, Thomas had been trying to divorce his strong emotion from the dry facts.

He’d met Burns on February Third, 2014. They’d become lovers through ten months of passion, interrupted by long spells of separation, until Hogmanay evening…New Year’s Eve…when Burns had walked into the high winds somewhere near Stirling Castle.

Blindly following his lover into the night, he’d collided with an oncoming car. His entire world had narrowed to a pinpoint of blackness and pain, and then oblivion.

And when Thomas had opened his eyes, it was just after midnight February Fourth, 2014, his mind brimming with a million memories of what had never been.

He’d tracked down this man named Burns by means of a business card, one the original scholar had given him—but something this reclusive man had emphatically not—and he’d met him two days ago.

What the bloody hell? What had become of ten long months?

More important, how could the man in his arms be the same as the man in his heart? That man who’d just met him, who had no reason to feel the stab of love that often choked off his very breath—how could he possibly expect Burns to return any more than the ache of arousal?

Thomas thought back to yesterday, when Burns had gripped the flesh of his buttocks and whispered a line of love poetry.

" And I will come again, my Luve,

Tho’ it were ten thousand mile ."

Thomas Fitzgerald was a detective, not a dreamer. He put facts together, and he was good enough at his job to earn the respect of his superior. He knew well enough that Burns’ murmurings of love were born of a swollen cock and years of abstinence.

He was also pretty sure his newfound mate was giving too much credit to Thomas for escaping certain death. The cockamamie bastard who’d tried to hurt him would never again walk out of prison, after Burns had faced him like a mighty warrior. So if his man whispered love words, they were no doubt part of a misplaced rush of gratitude.

Burns stirred in his arms.

Thomas Fitzgerald.

The burr of his voice, fuzzed with sleep, was enough to send an immediate message to a cock still starved for satisfaction.

Sleep now. You’ve been through a lot. My Luve, my Bobbie Burns.

Burns’ mouth sought his ear. And you have not? The adventure has roused my blood, Thomas. I need you.

Here in the darkness of the room, lit only by moon-glow on the high ceiling, he felt emboldened. This Burns pretended to be no poet, but every word he uttered seemed to Thomas to hold a lyrical cadence and the sensuous promise of reaching some impossible heaven.

Tell me…tell me more.

I’ve lived long enough without you, lad. I need to cross over.

Over what, Burns?

He fully expected his poet to talk about the Rainbow Bridge, the link between the Norse gods and the realm of mortals.

Over your ass. Over your deepest love spot.

Their tongues met, and Thomas felt the thrust of a too-large weapon. The man’s cock, the mythic horn, stabbed his thighs and burned his groin.

What, ah God…what spot is that?

And then his lover was biting his mouth, drawing blood.

Och, love spot, damn ye, Thomas. Turn over.

Burns had no way to know, the word love in his poet’s mouth was sweet and sexy, the one dream he desperately needed to hold onto, in case he awoke again alone.

Say it again…

Then let me tell you secrets while my cock strikes deep.

He turned onto his stomach, welcomed Burns riding his back like a jockey wedded to his horse.

Like hooves to a racehorse, Thomas Fitzgerald.

Hearing those words, his rectum flared and caught hold.

You remembered.

The voice in his ear was laced with frantic need.

I never forget words of love. Squeeze tighter, tighter, I want to blow my cum up inside you. I want to love your impossibly tight ass.

As if the words were not enough, the strokes on his sweet spot…his love-starved prostate…made him gasp and clutch the covers.

Forever, forever, please Bobbie Burns…

Aye, forever. Let my cock love you.

They came together, in a welling of inarticulate howls and a ballet of arching bodies.

He lay gasping into the bed linens, desperate to tell his poet, I love you, Bobbie Burns.

Thomas, Thomas, don’t ever let me go.

Chapter Two

______________________

A Rising of Blood

Burns could see Thomas’ long outline in the moonlight playing across the bed, now that the mad shadows had shifted and his lover had drifted into sleep. A setting of moon, a rising of blood. This man has sunk to the deep marrow of my hollow soul.

They had known each other only a few days. Correction. He had known Thomas less than 48 hours, but the melancholy Irishman seemed to know him inside and out. Claimed to have known him…intimately…for ten months.

It wasn’t so hard for Burns to conceive an alternate reality. Time, after all, was a form of energy. As such, it had a kind of flow and substance even in its fluid state. So it was entirely logical that Thomas had met him, had worked with him, had made long love to him; while he, blithering fool of a half-arsed scholar, had bent over his worktable in some bloodless pursuit of restoration, oblivious to the sensuous Thomas Fitzgerald.

It made sense, in a crazy way. This man’s voice was one he’d heard echoing through his mind and his heart for more than a dozen years—since he himself was sixteen, and Thomas only twelve, even before the lad had run away from his home somewhere in Ireland.

The warmth of his voice…the hesitation…the lilt, sweet as a harp… Yes, he knew Thomas at some level he didn’t even try to understand.

What he shied from revealing to his lover was something alien to him. A raw emotion rose in his throat to choke him whenever Thomas leveled those Nordic-blue eyes at him and looked straight into the shivering shell of a human being.

He did not deserve this man. Thomas really was a caped hero to him, even though the shy man had insisted the real hero was Burns. The blunt cop had come into his life at the precise moment when an old enemy was polishing his blade to run him through and leave him lifeless. If Thomas had not forced their meeting, Burns had no doubt the Edinburgh CID boys would have found his corpse yesterday—the day after his 30th birthday and the anniversary of a brutal rapist’s release from prison.

Thomas had won his heart almost from the beginning, in an instant of mutual joy on a rainbow coverlet, in a gray flat in Dundee. A stranger in a hood had descended like a winged Gabriel to save him. Of that he had no doubt whatsoever. Was it somehow meant to be? The rational side of his brain rejected that notion, but the mythic fabric of his being embraced the idea.

He knew, with the certainty born of a rational mind, that he was not a poet. No matter that Scotland’s most beloved bard was his ancestor…no matter that his father had recited Robert Burns even while dangling a wee bairn on his knee…no matter that this angel of a Nordic warrior called him Bobbie Burns. Och, aye, he had a certain ear for the music in a name, for the cadence that lay between a thought and a deed. For the way my soul shivers when I touch his man, even with my eyes…

No, he was not a poet. But Thomas would not let go of the idea, for some reason. What had really happened between them, in the yawning hiatus that lay like a chasm between then and now? Would Thomas ever confess it…or would he need to resort to the damned truth just to hear his lover blurt out a secret?

Burns longed to reach out and stroke his lover’s skin, to join flesh with him again in a different way. Together, he thought they could become that rainbow bridge between Midgard and Asgard. A melding of the real and the fantastic, of yesterday and today and tomorrow.

He stretched out his hand, and then he withdrew it. Nae. Let him sleep.

He collapsed back onto the bed and glared at the ceiling, cursing his cowardice. Being smitten with his angel was an emotion he could not admit. Not for a very long time. Because a confession of love might seem to Thomas like pitiful obligation…like misplaced gratitude. Or even a kind of shallow infatuation. Thomas would not believe him, and why should he? It seemed too easy. And too soon.

Besides, he’d given up on the concept of love before he was even mature enough to understand it. That childish notion had fled in the hours after a former friend had left him splayed and bleeding on a basement floor, a damaged poppet. Now, he prided himself on being a rational introvert who just happened to have a love-struck poet as a forebear.

Unlike the original Robert Burns, who seemed to swive anything in skirts and leave behind scores of children and endless love poems, he himself was emphatically gay. Even a vicious rape could not change that. It had simply changed the trajectory of his private pursuits.

His history as a lover was sketchy at best. He’d vowed early on that he’d be the penetrator, the alpha, the dom…whatever the current expression was for a man who refused to be the target of a savage prick. If there was to be a top and a bottom—like facets of a queer quark—then he would by-god be the top.

He’d been,