All The Time You Need (10 page)

With her hands clenched around the edge of the saddle like her life depended on it, she swung her leg over and began to lower herself. Large, strong hands clamped around her waist to take her weight before her feet could touch the ground. She knew it was him without turning to look.

“I have to go inside,” she said, hoping he’d be willing to allow her to do just that.

Without a word, Alex pulled a key from the sporran he wore around his waist and opened the gate wide for her to enter.

It was the same, but different, too. Different in a way she could hardly let herself begin to understand. Her shoes were there, lying at the base of the stone bench, exactly where she’d dropped them when she’d fallen. Though her bag appeared to be missing, the bench was the same. Even the initials carved into the stone were exactly as they had been when she’d first entered. Like her purse, the stone heart had gone missing.

She ran her finger inside the heart-shaped hole before climbing up onto the bench.

“Have a care,” Alex cautioned, but she waved away his outstretched hand.

The branch was within her reach as soon as she stepped up onto the arm of the bench. She felt all around in the crook where the branches joined together, but found nothing other than dirt and leaf debris.

It was all the same as it had been when she’d first entered, only different. Newer. Younger, as if it hadn’t yet weathered the centuries of neglect. Even the tree was smaller than before.

When she turned to climb down, Alex was there, concern reflected in his expression as he took her hand and lifted her back down to the ground. He waited silently as she slipped her feet into her shoes, her mind churning all the while.

“Satisfied now?” he asked quietly, his gaze holding no sign of accusation.

“Not yet.” It all could be a replica. Someone could have moved her shoes here, though why anyone would go to such trouble to fool her was beyond her ability to understand. The missing purse bolstered her hope that her fear was completely off base, but she had to know for sure, and there was only one way she could think of to confirm her bizarre suspicion. “I need to see the cottage. Will you take me there?”

“I know of no cottage, my lady. If I did, I would gladly take you there.”

He held her gaze as he spoke, his eyes filled with honesty and…pity?
Please, not pity.
Coming from him, that could easily be her undoing.

“I know the way. If you’ll allow me to show you?”

“A fine opportunity for a trap,” Finn said from his spot at the open gate. “I could no’ devise a better one myself. If yer determined to do this, at the very least, carry her upon yer mount with you. Brook her no opportunity to escape should an attack come.”

Alex nodded, considering his companion’s advice before turning back to her. “You will consent to this arrangement?”

“I will,” she agreed.

What difference did it make? After all, if she found what she feared at the cottage’s location, it wasn’t like she’d have anywhere to escape to.

She accepted his help up onto the back of the big horse he rode, grateful when he climbed on behind her. His arms on either side of her made the distance to the ground seem somehow less intimidating. As a means of transportation, this was many times better than riding solo on a beast that she’d been sure was only waiting for the perfect opportunity to toss her over his head.

They traveled in silence, the men surrounding them on alert as they made their way through the forest. Annie doubted herself on every turn, more than once questioning the direction she chose. Had it been only this morning when she’d last walked this path? It was familiar, but different. The trees, the foliage, all of it somehow different, as if a landscaper had been here and changed out all the plants for younger ones.

“There should be a clearing where the cottage is, just up ahead,” she murmured, not realizing she spoke aloud until the sound of her own voice startled her.

“Though I hate to disagree with the lady, I have no choice.”

Jamesy shook his head, and she did her best to ignore him, even when he quietly shared with Alex that he’d been through this way with a patrol only yesterday and the trees continued on for a great distance. No clearing and most certainly no cottage.

He had to be wrong. There had to be some mistake.

She ran the denials over and over in her mind, attempting to settle the worry in her heart until, just ahead of them, she spotted something that stopped the denials in their tracks.

“Let me down,” she said, her eyes fixed on the big rock they neared.

Alex drew his horse to a halt and dismounted, reaching up to assist her down. She broke into a run the instant her feet hit the ground, ignoring the sounds of men shouting and drawing their weapons behind her. She came to a stop when she reached the stone outcropping, her stomach somersaulting as she reached out to touch it. A single massive stone that had been weathered by time to look almost as if it had been carved into a stone seat. And there, under her fingers, just as it had been this morning, a rough-hewn double heart chiseled onto it.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, her voice catching. “This is the right place. This is where it’s supposed to be.”

This was the very spot where her grandmother’s cottage had stood only hours ago. Or, more to the point, where it
would
stand in roughly seven hundred years.

She sank to her knees and rested her head against the stone, her eyes drifting up to scan overhead. Not a single vapor trail marked the cloudless blue sky. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? No cigarette butts on the ground, no wrappers or bits of trash blowing in the wind, no hum of cars in the distance. Nothing but the sounds of nature.

Denial pounded at her head, unwilling yet to accept. It had been quiet this morning, too.

Only then it had been a different kind of quiet.

A memory of this morning brought with it a sure way to prove it to herself, one way or another.

Fearing what she’d find almost as much as she feared not knowing the truth, she pushed herself up to her feet and lifted the long skirt she wore to scramble up onto the massive rock, up to the exact spot where she’d stood this morning before she’d set out on her exploration. Reaching its peak, she scanned the distance in all directions, finding not one single sign of man’s hand on the unmarred landscape. No houses, no cars, and not a single trace of the long gray ribbon of highway she’d traveled to reach this place yesterday.

Well, not this exact place. The place this would become centuries from now.

Her hand shook as she lifted her fingers to cover her trembling lips, knowing that the weakness in her stomach was the result of much more than her normal fear of heights.

There was nothing left for her to do but to accept it. She had, by some unbelievable quirk of bizarreness, ended up in the thirteenth century.

“Are you unwell?” Alex stood beside her, scanning the countryside as he placed one hand on her shoulder. “You’ve gone completely pale.”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

Fine, that is, for someone who’d just done the impossible and managed to get herself lost in the wrong century. She tried to climb down, but all her muscles quivered and her legs didn’t seem to have the strength to hold her.

Alex reached for her hand and pulled her toward him. She didn’t have the presence of mind to resist when he slipped one arm around her waist and the other behind her knees, lifting her from her feet as if she were a child. Snuggled against his shoulder, his heart pounding against her chest, she could feel the color he’d claimed she’d lost returning to her face with a vengeance as he stepped back down onto level ground.

“We’ll get you back to Dunellen and have Aggie take another look at you, aye? She’ll ken what to do for whatever it is that ails you,” he said, striding to his horse and climbing up onto his mount without so much as shifting his hold on her.

Annie nodded her reply, though it was clear to her that neither the old healer nor anyone else at the castle could help her with what ailed her. Like Alice, she’d fallen down a rabbit hole and had not a single earthly idea how to find her way back home.

Chapter 6

“I’ve already told you no, haven’t I? Okay then, here it is again: no! How many times do I have to say the same thing over and over again before it finally sinks in with you guys? Nobody put me inside that arbor. I walked in there under my own power, of my own free will. Nobody hit me or forced me to do anything. Nobody else was even anywhere around for miles.”

Annie stared at the expressionless faces of Alex and his two friends and knew they still didn’t believe her. He continued to badger her for the
whole of the truth
, as he called it. As far as she knew, the whole truth was that all of this was some giant cosmic joke, playing out at her expense. He said they wanted the whole truth, but what he didn’t understand was that if she did tell him what she believed to be the whole of the truth, none of them would believe her anyway. They’d probably believe her even less than they did now. They’d think for sure she was crazy.

What did they do with crazy women in the thirteenth century, anyway? Lock them up? Banish them into the wilderness? Maybe it was time for her to discover the answer to that question.

If the whole truth was what they wanted, it wasn’t like she had anything to lose in telling them everything she knew. She was already stranded in the wrong time, so things couldn’t possibly get much worse for her. So what if they didn’t believe her? They already didn’t believe her, so there’d be no change there.

“Fine. You want me to tell you everything about my being here? Okay then, here’s everything I know about my being here. Yesterday morning I woke up in my grandmother’s cottage. After I showered and packed a lunch, I hiked over to the arbor and everything was fine until the earthquake hit. I remember being knocked off my feet and I can only assume I hit my head, because the next thing I knew, Lissa was on the other side of the bars, telling me she was going to get me out of there. Only, and here’s where it gets really weird, when I went inside the arbor, in my time, in the twenty-first century, the gate was rusted and off its hinges, hanging loose. There was physically no way anyone could lock it. And yet, when I woke up, in your time, in the thirteenth century, I was locked inside the arbor. What am I doing here? You tell me. I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t belong in this time. Does any of that make any sense to you yet? Because it doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t understand any of this, so, you tell me how all that happened. You tell me how I got here. Because I sure as hell don’t understand any of it.”

She’d been over every single detail of the prior day a million times in her head. So many times, in fact, she doubted she’d slept for more than half an hour all night long. And even if she went over it a million times more, she was certain it wouldn’t make any more sense to her than it did right now. Somehow she’d managed to bumble her way seven hundred years into the past.

Either that or she was still lying there on the ground, deep in a coma of some sort, with her brain experiencing the most bizarre fantasy world anyone could ever imagine.

“Faeries,” Lissa said, and all three men in the room turned as one to glare at her. “Well, it is them what’s responsible for her being here.”

Annie shrugged, fear and frustration warring to take control. “Considering the totally bizarre path my life has detoured down over the past twenty-four hours, I’d say Lissa’s idea is as good an explanation as anything I can come up with.”

If she could wake up in the thirteenth century, well then, why couldn’t Faeries be responsible? One was as likely as the other. As for the arrogant laird standing toe to toe with her, he could accept her truth or not. At this point, she was beyond caring. She glared up at him, silently daring him to question her again.

“You canna think we’re fools enough to believe a fable such as yer trying to tell us. What kind of men would—”

“We’ve all had quite enough of this for now, Alex,” Lissa interrupted, inserting herself between her brother and Annie. “Let us leave these stubborn men to their own conjectures,” she said, looping her arm through Annie’s. “We’re accomplishing naught here and I have need to show you around the castle before we go in to take our midday meal.”

Annie allowed Lissa to pull her out of the small room and into the hallway, relieved that though Alex scowled as if he might refuse to allow her to leave, he said nothing. In the hallway she realized she was even more relieved to be done with the inquisition she’d just endured. For the first time in over an hour, it was as if the bands that had tightened her chest and restricted her breathing were loosened and she was free to be herself.

Herself in the wrong century, but herself nevertheless.

Her friend’s offer to explore the castle was certainly more appealing than continuing to answer the same question over and over again, as if in one of her answers she was suddenly going to say something new. Besides, if she was going to be stuck in this world, she might as well start to learn more about it. If she was lucky, maybe somewhere along the way she would find a clue as to why she was here and, more important, how she could get back to the time where she belonged.