Timeless Desire

by Cready, Gwyn

  PRAISE FOR GWYN CREADY’S NOVELS:

  Tumbling Through Time

  “Fun and sexy . . . a reading adventure you don’t want to miss.”

  —Janet Evanovich, New York Times #1 Bestselling Author

  “A joy. Cready is an author worth watching.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A wild ride.”

  —Winter Haven News Chief

  Seducing Mr. Darcy (2009 RITA Award Winner—Best Paranormal)

  “Sexy fun.”

  —BookPage

  “Time travel has never been so much fun.”

  —SingleTitles

  “Rip its sexy, white shirt off and have your way with it.”

  —DarcyWarsBlog

  Flirting with Forever

  “Entertaining and lively . . . a compelling romance that will leave readers breathless.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Take a wonderful jaunt through time with some likeable characters and excellent humor.”

  —Romantic Times, 4 1/2 stars

  Aching for Always

  “Passionate, suspenseful, adventurous and highly entertaining.”

  —Romantic Times, 4 1/2 stars

  “Gwyn Cready is the master of time travel romance.”

  —Royal Reviews

  A Novel Seduction

  “Delightfully original . . . an absolute crowd-pleaser.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Sexy second-chance romance.”

  —Romantic Times, 4 stars

  “Cready’s writing is romantic and wickedly witty.”

  —Rachel Gibson, New York Times Bestselling Author

  TIMELESS DESIRE

  An Outlander Love Story

  Gwyn Cready

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  TIMELESS DESIRE

  An Outlander Love Story

  Astor + Blue Editions LLC

  Copyright © 2012 by Gwyn Cready

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by:

  Astor + Blue Editions, LLC

  New York, NY 10003

  www.astorblue.com

  Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  Cready, Gwyn. Timeless Desire—1st ed.

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-29-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-27-8 (epub)

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-28-5 (epdf)

  1. Paranormal Romance—Fiction 2. Widowed Librarian discovers a magic Portal—Fiction 3. Romantic Intrigue—Fiction 4. Scottish Historical Romance—Fiction 5. Time travel—Fiction 6. Carnegie (Pennsylvania), Cumbria (England), Dumfries and Galloway (Scotland), Scotland and England Borders—Fiction 7. American Romance Story I. Title

  Book Design: Bookmasters

  Jacket Cover Design: Danielle Fiorella

  This is for the devilish, determined, and deeply vexing boy who, as if by some other worldly magic, grew into one of the most hardworking, steadfast, and honorable men I know. Wyatt, I couldn’t be prouder.

  ONE

  Andrew Carnegie Library, Carnegie, Pennsylvania Friday, July 27, 7:15 p.m.

  “I just think librarians are the glue that helps stick a community together,” Marie said, clasping a hand over her heart as she said it. “We’re on the battle lines of community involvement.”

  “Really? That’s what you think?” Panna gave her fellow librarian an amused look and handed the young patron standing before them his copy of Animal Farm: The Graphic Novel, now gum-free. “Well, I don’t know about battle lines, but sticky certainly seems to be a part of it.”

  Panna’s eyes went automatically to the always dashing Colonel John Bridgewater, Viscount Adderly, or a least a marble facsimile of him, standing heroically astride the statue base, sword at his side, ready to charge into the Battle of Ramillies. It did seem rather odd to have a larger-than-life statue of an eighteenth-century British war hero in a small-town library in western Pennsylvania. One might expect Andrew Carnegie or, more likely, Mike Ditka or Honus Wagner, both of whom had been born in Carnegie and were more in keeping with Pittsburgh’s sport-loving, blue-collar sensibilities. But one of Bridgewater’s descendants had been a huge donor at the library’s founding a hundred years earlier, and the statue had been his stipulation. Bridgewater, with chiseled profile, shoulder-length waves and closely fitting breeks, had for Panna always called to mind a slightly more battle-tested d’Artagnan, that handsome, brave hero of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, one of her favorite books. But there was something so magically lifelike about the man—as if he might jump off his pedestal at any moment and pull her roughly into his arms, damning the eyes of anyone who might object to a good-bye kiss in the middle of the periodical section. Suffice it to say, Bridgewater had loomed large over Panna’s daydreams as well as her seat at the circulation desk, especially in the last two years.

  Marie, who had caught the direction of her coworker’s gaze, said, “Have you ever noticed that from just the right angle, it looks like he’s carrying a rolled-up stack of interlibrary loan requests in his pants?”

  “Marie!”

  “Oh, right. Tell me that isn’t why you always pick this seat.”

  Marie was a petite brunette in the second year of a master’s program in library science who still got misty-eyed at the idea of municipal services. Panna, on the other hand, had been working the stacks for eleven years, six as head librarian, and was able to boil her learning about librarianship into two golden rules: First, in a world where your job is interacting with the public, you get back what you give. And second, avoid Friday-night shifts at all costs.

  She looked around suddenly. “Oh, boy. I don’t see Mr. Albert anymore.”

  “Yikes!” Marie flipped up the swinging counter on the circulation desk and tore off.

  Mr. Albert read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New York Times and the Washington Post at the library every day. He also liked to take pictures of women’s feet.

  Panna turned to the next patron in line, a lovely regular in her late seventies named Mrs. Olinsky, who had been trying to set Panna up with her youngest son for months.

  Panna gave the elder woman an inquisitive frown. “You don’t seem to have any books to check out.”

  “My son’s outside in his Mercedes and wonders if you could come out to give him a recommendation on a book. It’s a new Mercedes.”

  “Mrs. Olinsky, we’ve talked about this before.”

  Mrs. Olinsky’s shoulders sagged. “I know, I know. No dating yet. But don’t wait too long. A nice young woman like you shouldn’t be alone.”

  No, she probably shouldn’t. Thirty-four was still young. But since Charlie’s agonizingly slow death two years earlier, she felt about as old as Mrs. Olinsky. Panna’s heart had gone into a hibernation from which it felt like it would never awake. The world of dating seemed about as far away as the Battle of Ramillies and about as much fun, which was why she wasn’t looking forward to the blind date Marie had set up for her that night.

  Marie bounded back behind the large, U-shaped circulation desk, waving a camera. “Found him. I told him we’d put this away until he was on his way out.”

  Mrs. Olinsky pointed to the window. “Oh, look! There’s George. Isn’t he handsome?”

  Panna gave the woman a firm look. “If he really needs a recommendation, you can tell him I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Mrs. Olinsky cast her eyes downward. “I guess he’ll be all right on his own.”

  When Mrs. Olinsky disappeared, Marie grinned. “Still working on you, isn�
��t she?”

  “Oh, yes. But so far not succeeding.”

  “She doesn’t have the determination I do. To scale the Panna Kennedy castle wall, one needs tenacity, innovation, and a carefully crafted—oh, Panna, what is it?”

  An uninvited tear had striped Panna’s cheek, and she swiped at it in irritation. “It’s the dinner tonight. I just . . . I know I should do it. I know I should. And I will. It’s just I feel like it’s going to be awful and hard . . . and wrong. I’m sorry.”

  Marie put her arm around Panna’s shoulders and squeezed. “Hey, it’s fajitas with me and Kyle and Kyle’s cousin, Steve, not two hours at the Quality Inn.”

  Panna snorted through her sadness. “I know. And I want to do it. I swear.”

  “Oh, yeah, I can tell.” Marie gave her a gentle smile. “Charlie was a pretty great guy, wasn’t he?”

  “The best.” Their life had been perfect: They were working at jobs that made them happy, reading and cooking, traveling when they could afford it. They had even been trying to conceive before he became ill. Her hand went to her stomach unconsciously, feeling the emptiness there. So many dreams she’d said good-bye to . . .

  Widowhood sucked. There was no other word for it. During the first year, Panna felt like she’d been laid out on a rack and gutted. She had gone through the motions of living but could barely remember any of it. That time stood as a wrenching, painful blur in her head that she prayed would never reemerge with any clarity.

  In the last year, however, she had begun to find some degree of normalcy, and she clung to her solitary routine like a nautilus to its shell, ready to withdraw into her nacreous walls at a moment’s notice if the need arose.

  However, what gnawed at her most, even more than the coldness in her chest, were that words like “routine,” “solitary,” and “withdraw” had never applied to the old Panna. She and Charlie had always been risk takers, climbing rocks, trekking through Nepal, even skydiving on their honeymoon. But losing Charlie had made her lose her nerve, and she hated how she’d changed.

  Panna’s cell phone began to buzz. It was Jerry Sussman, the attorney for the town. She walked away from the desk. “Jerry, hi. What’s up?”

  “Sorry to call so late. I just got word from my contact in the state budget office. Nineteen percent reduction in funding.”

  “What?” She hurried into the soaring entry hall and stopped next to one of the curving stairways that stood on either end of the space. “That’s . . . that’s twice what we were thinking for a worst-case scenario.”

  “It’s bad.”

  “Nineteen percent. There are only six of us here. That means we cut evening hours and at least one position. Damn it.” She kicked the ancient little half-sized door on the storage room under the stairs and the knob rattled. This place was like a home to her, and the people who worked here were like her family—especially now. She didn’t know how she’d have survived without it. “Thanks, Jerry. I appreciate the heads-up.”

  “Sorry it wasn’t better news.”

  She said good-bye and hung up, shaking with the rush of emotion. This place was a landmark, she thought, gazing at the tiled Greek key design in the floor, a memorial to a time when people revered places like libraries. She swiped at a spot on the intricate wrought-iron banister with the elbow of her sweater.

  She wondered if they’d be returning to the time before Andrew Carnegie taught America that libraries were worth investing in, back to a time when people had to pay subscriptions to belong to a library, and only the well-to-do could afford to have access to them.

  Oh, John Bridgewater, why can’t you be at the forefront of this battle? We could use a little of your mighty sword. Or, at the very least, why can’t your descendant be around today to astonish us with his amazing generosity?

  She stopped. His generosity. According to the town’s history, the viscount’s descendant had written a large check to the library’s building fund back at the turn of the century. He had also donated a bunch of books, most of which had either been lost to old age or sold. But he had also donated some objets d’art—at least, that’s what the agreement had said the one time Panna had looked at it.

  One piece, she knew, was a piece of pewter tableware called a nef that sat on the mantelpiece over the library’s hearth, just under the dour portrait of Andrew Carnegie. The nef had been fashioned to resemble a three-masted sailing ship, with a conch shell as the ship’s body and decks that held the salt, pepper, and whatever other spices people in the eighteenth century thought to season their food with. It was extraordinarily gaudy and preternaturally ugly, and it frequently caused young children to laugh out loud just at the sight of it. But what—and where—were the other objets?

  She’d never seen them. Maybe they’d been sold along with the books. The problem was that Panna had never had any dealing with the Bridgewater stuff, though she remembered Barb, the head librarian before her, making occasional reference to it. She remembered the agreement had been negotiated by Clementina Martindale, first librarian in the place when it opened in 1901. She also remembered there had been a rumor that Clementina had had a torrid affair with Bridgewater’s wealthy descendent, and inasmuch as Panna felt that the moral rectitude of any librarian reflected on her, she’d made it a point to push that rumor out of her head.

  Panna combed her brain for anything else she could remember Barb telling her.

  Last donated books sold or thrown away in the sixties. The statue repaired when a workman carrying a two-by-four damaged it. Newspaper clippings and other stuff related to the Bridgewater gift stowed safely in storage room.

  Stowed in storage room?

  Panna took a mental walk through the library, from the Grand Army of the Republic meeting room upstairs, through the director’s office, around the stacks on the main floor and even into the occasionally flooded basement. There was no nook or cranny she hadn’t thoroughly examined during her tenure here. And “stowed” was such an unusual word. Not “stored.” Barb had definitely said “stowed,” which to Panna implied lowness, the sort of place where bending would be required to reach it.

  Her eyes lit on the half door to the storage room under the stairs. It was triangular in shape and a little under five feet tall, with an ancient glass knob. She’d never opened the door. Had never even seen it open. In fact, the door had been painted so many times that there wasn’t even a line separating it from the frame anymore.

  Panna dug in her pocket and found her ring of keys. There were only three really old keys left. The rest of the locks had been replaced. She tried the first. No luck. The second wouldn’t even go in. The third one, however, fit perfectly. She turned it, and the dead bolt slid open with a satisfying click.

  She grabbed the knob and turned, but the door was so tight, it wouldn’t open. She pulled harder, anchoring her feet. Knowing her luck, the door would fly open and she’d be flung across the entry hall. Finally, she put her foot on the frame and jerked. The door came open. Inside, the space was pitch black. Not just dark, but absolute nothingness—full light until the edge of the threshold, then a black plane that might have been a wall had she not known no wall was there. Her hairs stood on end. At the same moment something bumped the door, and she fell a step forward before catching her balance.

  “I’m so sorry,” the patron said. “I wasn’t expecting that door to be open.”

  Panna could barely spare the man a response. What she had seen in that brief instant was too amazing to contemplate. On the other side of that black void was a room far larger than the space would permit. It had been the altar of a beautiful small chapel with a vaulted ceiling and a carved wood altarpiece bathed in sunlight.

  Her heart raced as she tried to make sense of it. How could a chapel occupy a space under a staircase no larger than a powder room? How could a well-lit room be invisible through a pane of blackness?

  No explanation came to her. None was possible.

  She wondered if the ibuprofen she’d taken earlier
had been spiked. She’d never heard of a drug that did this, but something had to be making it happen.

  Another patron walked by as Panna held the door, and she looked at him as if to say, “Can you believe what you and I are seeing?” But the man only nodded pleasantly and kept walking. It was as if all the rules that applied in the physical world were gone, and she was the only one who could see it.

  Panna put her hand into the space again cautiously, watching it disappear through the plane of black, and experienced a rush of adrenaline she hadn’t felt in a long time. She and Charlie used to spelunk. The darker the passageway, the more excited they had gotten. She knew she should be scared, and slam the door and report this to someone, though she had no idea what she’d say. But she also knew there was more than that keeping her from fleeing.

  Librarians were born curious. If they weren’t, they didn’t make it in this field. Part of her was freaked out, no question. But another part—a more primitive part—was deeply curious about what was behind the door, what it all meant. Her unconscious mind knew what she was going to do even if her conscious mind hadn’t quite caught up. She could already feel the tingle running up and down her spine.

  The hall had emptied, and she reopened the door. The void was blacker than anything she’d seen, blacker than black velvet. Teetering on the edge of a thrilling fear, she thrust her entire arm into it.

  Gone from sight. Just like that. Her upper arm looked like the Venus de Milo’s where the demarcation between visible and invisible lay.

  She bent and slowly let her head tilt into the void. . . .

  The minute her eyes entered, she gasped. The chapel was beautiful. To the right of the altar stood a tomb, made entirely of marble, with the prone form of a woman clasping lilies of the valley carved into the lid. Tapestries hung on the wall behind her.