All The Time You Need (33 page)

How many times had he seen the twin of this trinket dangling against his Annie’s soft skin as she’d lain beneath him wearing nothing else?

“The one she wore was adorned with a fancy-cut jewel that caught every shard of light.”

Lissa shrugged and tucked the metal heart back beneath the neckline of her shift. “So it did. But it was the same heart, nonetheless. And she told me herself that it had belonged to her grandmother, Ellen, given to the woman by someone named Aiden. Do you not see what this means, Alex?”

In the story Grandda Aiden had told, he’d fashioned the small hearts with his own two hands, one to keep as a reminder of his beloved Ellen, and one for her. He claimed that he’d placed hers into the stone seat in the arbor and carved a message upon the big rock she’d favored while she was here. When he’d gone back to check the arbor a few days later, the trinket was gone and he’d known in his soul that his Ellen had gotten his gift.

“Yer saying I have a way to send a message to her.”

“That I am. It may not be too late to tell her how you really feel. You’ve but to believe and take action.”

Believe and take action. Toss sanity to the wind and plunge ahead as if every Faerie story he’d ever heard was true?

“The devil take it,” he muttered at last, rising to his feet.

Sitting here feeling sorry for himself certainly wasn’t going to bring his Annie back. Why not go all in? After all, with Annie gone, it was as if he’d lost his heart, his will, his reason to go on. He had nothing left to lose.

Chapter 26

Almost home.

The words rang in Annie’s head, weaving a cocoon of happiness around her heart as she sank into the back seat of the big black taxi. Staying at the airport hotel the first day she’d arrived back in Scotland had been a good decision. Now she was fully rested and ready to begin her new life.

The landscape zipped past her window, and Annie forced herself not to think about the differences between the here and now and the much older version of this place where she really longed to be—the place she truly considered home.

When at last the driver pulled into the long, graveled drive, she could hardly wait for the car to come to a complete stop before she stepped out to breathe in the fresh air.

The minutiae of beginning her new life felt as though it was taking forever. She waited as patiently as possible for the last of her luggage to be hauled out of the taxi’s big trunk and deposited on the gravel next to where she stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“Will you be needin’ a receipt then, lassie?”

Annie smiled at the winded request and shook her head as she handed over the money for her fare.

“No, thank you,” she said, slipping a few extra bills into the driver’s hand at the last moment.

The elderly man had already done more than enough, navigating the narrow roads on the trip here from the hotel. And then there was the loading and unloading of all her heavy suitcases, not an easy task for a man of his years.

With a word of thanks and a big smile, the driver got back into his car and pulled away, leaving Annie alone at last, standing in front of Bield Cottage.

She was home.

Or, more correctly, she was
almost
home. This place, in this time, would be as close to home as she could get. A vision of Alex danced through her mind, and she did her best to banish it. He was never far from her thoughts, no matter how hard she tried to keep him away, always lurking there in the shadows, just waiting for an opportunity to jump out and send her heart flip-flopping in her chest.

With a sigh, she unlocked the cottage door and began the task of hauling all her luggage into the little house, hoping to get them all inside before the gray sky opened up and dumped rain on them. The first bag she dragged all the way back to the bedroom. The other four she left sitting just inside the door. It wasn’t good enough that she’d spent a fortune to bring all of them with her on the plane. Now she faced putting out her back trying to lift them and drag them back to the bedroom.

“Maybe I’ll just unpack them right here,” she announced to the empty cottage.

But not right now. After all, she had all the time in the world to put her things away. Or not. It really didn’t matter. This was her private retreat, just as the name indicated. She could do whatever she wanted.

“Almost whatever,” she grumbled aloud, heading for the kitchen.

Her whole life was turning into a giant almost. She’d need to make some changes if she was going to have any hope of heading off years of self-pity.

And thinking of changes, she really needed to stop talking to herself. Either that or get a cat so that she’d have an excuse for talking to herself.

“I could become the eccentric old Cat Lady of Bield Cottage,” she said, chuckling as she filled the electric kettle and turned it on. “Or a writer, maybe.” She’d read somewhere that writers often talked out loud to themselves, even when other people were around.

With a cup of freshly brewed tea in her hand, Annie wandered outside and headed straight for the overgrown garden. During her time at Dunellen, she’d grown to love her morning walks in the gardens. Strolling through the fragrant plants had sent up a symphony of aromas, with each different herb joining in as her skirt had brushed against it. The wonderful scents would cling to her clothing, accompanying her through her day like a fragrant sachet.

Those walks were only one little piece of what she missed about the small slice of life she’d enjoyed there. But, just maybe, they were the one little piece she could reclaim in this time.

Could any of Dunellen’s herb beds have survived? She vaguely remembered having seen a tangle of vegetation gone wild that first time she’d made her way through the ruins. Perhaps in a day or two, after she’d settled in, she might be ready to face what was left of Dunellen. A trip to see if any of the original plants had survived the passage of time would be a good diversion. As unlikely as it was, if any had, she could transplant them here to her garden.

“Or I could just clean out this mess and start fresh,” she murmured, stopping to sip from her tea.

That was a much more plausible plan. Tomorrow she would tackle this garden. There was a shed out back. Chances were good that the gardening equipment would be out there. If she couldn’t find what she needed, she’d simply have to go into the village and get whatever she was missing.

Having a plan of action made her feel better. Whether it was the act of laying claim to Bield Cottage as her own or simply knowing that she had something planned to keep her busy, she couldn’t say.

With a lighter heart, she turned from the garden and strolled across the drive, listening to the gravel crunch under her feet. It was so beautiful here, with everything still the lovely green of summer. Once autumn made an appearance, the view should be spectacular.

Annie turned her gaze to the distance, trying to imagine how beautiful it would be in just a few months. Her eye followed the gray ribbon of the highway until it disappeared into the valley below.

The village lay in that direction. From what she’d been told, it wasn’t supposed to be too far. Maybe she could even walk there if it was close enough. If she were on higher ground, she might even be able to see it.

She set her cup on the old wooden bench next to the front door and headed across the drive, out to the big rock at the yard’s boundary. Climbing up on top of that would offer her the view she sought. If she kept her eyes focused on the distance rather than on the height of the rock she climbed, she ought to be able to get to the top, have a quick look around for the village and then scramble back down before her fear of heights overtook her. She’d done it twice before; surely she could manage it one more time.

Several feet away from the rock, something caught her eye. Something completely unexpected.

“What the hell,” she demanded of her empty surroundings, stopping where she was, hands on her hips.

A new line had been scrawled through the original heart that Aiden had so long ago carved there for her grandmother.

That some stranger had trespassed on her property was bad enough. But that they’d had the audacity to deface something so ancient, so special to her, felt like a personal violation. She began walking again, her steps picking up speed until she reached the rock. The vandals had added only a single line to the original carving, leaving her thankful that they hadn’t scrawled dirty words or their own names all over it. And, in spite of her indignation about someone having messed with her grandmother’s rock, she had to give them credit for authenticity. They’d actually carved the jagged line into the stone rather than taking a can of spray paint to it.

“How odd. It looks every bit as old as the original,” she said, marveling at the workmanship as she ran her hand over the carving.

The finger she’d traced along the marks came away damp from the moss growing in the groove. How could that be? She’d been away less than a week and yet this thing looked as weathered as the original carving.

Every bit as weathered and perfectly aligned within the original.

Annie’s breathing sped up, turning shallow as her heart pounded in her chest. She stared at the changes in front of her as her mind struggled to accept the meaning of what she studied. If she were a romantic dreamer, she might be tempted to believe that the line carved in the stone represented a broken heart. But that couldn’t be.

Could it?

Laying her hand flat against the carving, Annie let out a shaky breath and tried to organize her thoughts. There had to be some rational explanation for this, but, for the life of her, she couldn’t come up with one.

“Please don’t let me be like this forever,” she whispered, turning away from the rock to walk slowly back to the cottage.

She prayed that there would come a day when every single thing she saw wouldn’t automatically give her some false hope. She prayed that there would come a day when Alex would be only a fond memory instead of a sharp, stabbing pain ripping through her heart.

After retrieving her cup of tea, she went back into the cottage, sidestepping the suitcases she’d left just inside the door. Once again she chose to ignore them. Unpacking didn’t sound at all like something she wanted to do. It was a mindless task that would give her too much time to think. She needed an activity that would fully occupy her mind.

There were still her grandmother’s missing journals to find.

“Thinking bad,” she announced as she decided what she’d do. “Exploring good.”

She stood in the middle of the living room, trying to decide where to hunt first. If she’d kept a journal for years, where might she put all the older copies?

“In my bedroom, of course.”

That was where she’d always put all the things she’d wanted to keep private. Maybe Nana Ellen had done the same.

Once she reached the bedroom, she went through another moment of trying to put herself in her grandmother’s place to figure out where the journals could be. There were two dressers, but Annie had already been through their drawers in her search for something to wear.

Her eyes lit on the closet, and she knew at once that was the obvious place. She’d been only ten or eleven when she’d been with her Nana Ellen in her big house in Denver and found her grandmother putting keepsakes in a shoebox that she stored in her closet. If that had been her habit back home, there was no reason for it not to have been her habit here, too.

Sure enough, tucked on a top shelf in the closet, Annie found a medium-sized box tied up in yellow ribbon. Yellow, Nana Ellen’s favorite color. With growing excitement, she set the box on the bed and untied the ribbon, carefully lifting the lid. Inside, neatly stacked, were several old leather-bound journals.

Annie’s hands trembled as she lifted the first one to gently thumb through the pages.

“Jackpot,” she whispered, her eyes flitting over the pages filled with her grandmother’s scrawl.

Thankfully, Nana Ellen had dated her entries, making it easy to quickly discover which was the oldest book. Annie kicked off her shoes and climbed up onto the high bed, stuffing both pillows behind her back to get comfortable before she opened the cover and flipped to the first page. There was nothing like starting a story right at the beginning.

To her disappointment, Annie realized after a few moments of reading that the oldest journal didn’t begin at the beginning. It appeared to have been written after Nana Ellen’s encounter with Aiden, picking up as if it were a continuation of the story her grandmother was writing one day at a time. A quick search showed that it was, in fact, the oldest book in the box. With a sigh, she began to read again, coming to a halt when she reached the August 15th entry.

Aug 15 - Each day I visit the rock that bears my beloved’s message and, as Syrie predicted, today I found his gift tucked away in the bench. After adding my own heart to his, I’ve placed it on a chain around my neck, and that is where it will stay for as long as I live. My heart held inside of his. Curse my cowardly soul! Oh, that I couldn’t be clever enough to convince my beloved Aiden to join me here or brave enough to stay in his world with him.