“Gone,” she responded, anger coloring her voice. “Not that you care.”
“Of course I care.” He frowned down at his sister, marveling at just how obstinately dense she could be sometimes. “She’s my wife. And what do you mean by gone? Gone where, exactly?”
“She’s gone. As in gone home to her own time, so that you can get on with your life, you great selfish oaf,” Lissa said, fresh tears threatening in her eyes. “And if you cared so much, why didn’t you tell her you cared? Why didn’t you tell her you loved her, even if you’d had to lie about it? ”
“Gone home,” Alex repeated, not daring to understand what his sister’s words meant.
The idea was something he simply couldn’t accept. Home was much too far for Annie to have gone. Home was somewhere he couldn’t get to. Somewhere seven hundred years in the future.
“Gone home,” Lissa confirmed. “So that you could get back to the life you really wanted, riding around the countryside, waving yer sword and likely getting yerself killed in the process. She’s left us because she wanted you to be happy.”
“That’s a ridiculous idea. Why would she do such a thing? How could she ever have thought her leaving would make me happy?”
“Ridiculous idea, is it? I hardly think so. No’ after she heard Jamesy and Finn talking about how your whole precious life was ruined because of her. How you’d had to give up all your fancy dreams of fighting the English. Once you confirmed that for her, she decided the only thing for her to do was to go away. She did it for you. She left because she loves you too much to take your dreams away from you.”
“But that’s not how I feel,” Alex protested. “Not at all.”
“No? Then how could you no’ even have the common decency to tell our Annie that she was wrong? How could you no’ have the good sense to tell her the truth of how you do feel? How could you no’ even give her the tiniest crumb of hope by even once telling her that you loved her? No.” Lissa rose to her feet, tears gone, anger shining in their place. “You, pitiful excuse for a husband that you are, you drove our Annie away. And now, thanks to you, I’ve lost the sister of my heart. This is no’ something I’ll easily forgive, brother, and it’s something I’ll likely never forget. Of that you can be sure.”
Alex grabbed his sister’s arm as she tried to flounce away. Though she could be fierce when she wanted, this was one time her size worked against her.
“When did she go?”
“Sometime before dawn,” Lissa answered, all the while struggling to pull her arm from his grip.
“But how? I thought she was unable to reverse the…the process? That she had no choice but to remain here because she was missing a heart or some such nonsense.”
The last time Annie had tried to go back to her own time, he’d found her weeping in the arbor, claiming that she couldn’t return to her own time because the heart she needed was missing.
“It’s no’ nonsense at all,” Lissa snapped back at him. “And if you’d ever once had the brains to listen to any of our grandda’s stories, you’d realize it was the stone heart she sought. The one that fit into the back of the bench. And yes, it was missing. It was missing because I had it. I found it the first day she arrived, and, unlike you, I had listened and believed the stories Grandda told us of his life. I recognized the stone and so I put it away for safekeeping. I dinna want Annie to go. But seeing how she hurt, seeing how loving you had hurt her, I had no choice but to let her leave this place.”
This couldn’t be happening. How could she not know how he felt about her? He’d told her, hadn’t he? Not in so many words, perhaps, but surely by his actions she’d known. His mind raced over the past day—how sad she’d seemed in the garden, their discussion about what he’d planned to do before they’d married, her having asked him if he loved her.
What a fool he’d been! He’d said all the wrong things.
He couldn’t lose Annie. He had to find a way to stop her. The arbor! Maybe it wasn’t too late to catch her if he hurried.
Dropping Lissa’s arm, he turned and sprinted toward the door.
“Where do you think yer going?” she called after him.
“The arbor. I have to get there before she leaves.”
“Yer already too late.”
His sister’s parting words rang in his ears, but he ignored them. She had to be wrong. It couldn’t be too late.
He should have known. He should have realized the very instant that he’d chosen to believe Annie’s story of having come from another time. It was all too true that, if the Fae had sent her, they could just as easily take her away. And it now appeared as if that was exactly what they had done.
Chapter 23
As if awakening from a long sleep, Annie opened her eyes to find herself crumpled on the ground beside the large stone bench. The arbor around her was just as she’d first seen it, a tangled, overgrown garden, complete with the rusted iron gate hanging askew from the stone wall.
By all signs, she’d been successful in her attempt to return to her own time.
Once again, she’d run away from her problems, leaving everything that threatened her far behind.
She laughed out loud, a harsh, biting sound, filled with a million emotions, none of them joy or happiness. Yes, once again she’d run away. But this time, it wasn’t for her benefit that she’d run. This time she’d left a huge piece of herself behind. The aching, gaping hole she felt where her heart should be was still with the man who was no more than a memory now, dead for more than seven centuries.
A sob shook her body at the thought. All this misery she’d caused herself by coming to Scotland to escape her commitment to marry Peter, and what had she actually accomplished? Nothing. Now she’d escaped the problems confronting her in the past, but in the process, all she’d managed to do was return to the problems that had sent her to the past in the first place. Dealing with life in the manner she had since childhood had finally caught up with her. After a lifetime of running away from anything that threatened her happiness, she had finally come full circle, and she didn’t much care for where it had brought her.
“Maybe it’s time to grow up and start facing life like an adult,” she muttered, rising to her feet.
With a shaking hand, she retrieved the stone heart from its hole in the bench and dropped it into her bag. That was one talisman that was much too dangerous to simply leave lying around where anyone could stumble on it.
As she left the arbor, she averted her gaze from the direction of the castle that would be little more than crumbled ruins here in this time. She couldn’t bear to think of all those she’d left behind. Instead, she concentrated on her feet, on placing one in front of the other, moving forward toward Bield Cottage.
The sun shone brightly by the time she came out of the trees and into the familiar clearing. Ahead of her, the big rock stood just as it had for so many centuries. She allowed her fingers to trace the heart-shaped carving on its surface for only a moment before she continued on, passing the rental car she’d left parked in the driveway, and finally coming to a stop as she spotted her missing suitcase sitting just beside the front door. Apparently the airline had delivered it to her just as they’d promised.
If she’d needed proof that she was back in her own time, she had it now. And with that proof came the realization that she had some big decisions to make. Her life would never be as it had been before she’d gone back in time. Though the only true love she would ever have was behind her now, with its loss, she’d learned a valuable lesson. For the first time in her life, she’d actually experienced life. She knew the feel of true love and the burden of true loss. She was done with living her life as others plotted it. Done with doing whatever others expected of her. Whatever life held in store for her now, she would never settle for a pale version of what she’d experienced at Dunellen.
Inside the cottage, she headed straight for the shower and allowed herself the luxury of a good cry under the pelting almost-hot water. She dr
ied off and wrapped herself in a thick towel before opening her suitcase to find nothing there that suited her. She once again dug through the piles of her grandmother’s clothing, choosing another of the long skirts her grandmother had favored over the jeans she’d brought along with her.
In the kitchen, she rummaged through the cupboards and pulled out a loaf of bread. The evenly sliced pieces were still soft, and the cheese she pulled out of the refrigerator was fresh. That had to mean that, somehow, time here had passed at a different rate than where she’d been.
Her phone, once she’d retrieved it from the desk drawer where she’d left it, confirmed that theory. Although she’d lived through months in the past, only two days had elapsed in her own time.
It was just as well. She still had time to deal with the changes she needed to make in order to get on with her life.
After eating, she pulled the itinerary she’d printed from the desk drawer and dialed the airline’s customer service number. There was no point in delaying. She needed to face up to the issues confronting her in this time, beginning with Peter and her family. And after that?
After that, she’d come back here, to Bield Cottage. It was as close as she could get to the place where she felt she truly belonged. And who could say? Maybe she’d even look into rebuilding the keep at Dunellen. After all, the entire rest of her life spread out before her. Now that she was taking control of that life, she certainly had all the time she needed to spend on doing whatever she wanted.
Whatever she wanted—as long as what she wanted wasn’t being with her one and only love.
Chapter 24
“That’s a new look for you, isn’t it?” Peter Gordon dropped a perfunctory kiss on Annie’s cheek as he took her suitcase from her hand and turned toward the big exit doors. “I didn’t think you liked changes.”
Annie smiled to herself. Peter was about to learn that the clothing she wore was only an outward manifestation of the changes Annie had embraced.
“And speaking of that, I’m surprised that you cut your trip short. Maybe on the way to your house you can tell me about that, as well as explaining to me the mystery of why I couldn’t just send a car to pick you up and take you home.”
There it was, the irritation Annie had expected to be just below the surface of Peter’s always-calm exterior.
“Sorry to tear you away from your preferred mistress,” she said.
“Ann!” he exclaimed, sounding truly offended. “What an outrageous thing for you to say. You know perfectly well there is no other woman in my life.”
Yes, she did know. And, lucky for Peter, by the time they reached her parents’ home, there was going to be one less.
She stayed quiet as he helped her into the car and loaded in her suitcase. He slid into the driver’s seat and put the key into the ignition, but didn’t start the engine. When he turned toward her, the expression he wore signaled that the conversation they were about to have was going to go a lot more easily than she had worried it might.
“Look, Ann, I don’t know what you expect from me, but you need to understand that I can’t always drop everything at a moment’s notice to cater to your every whim. We’re in the middle of some delicate negotiations to obtain mineral rights to the property we’re taking on. I should be at the office right now to make sure that no vital details end up falling in the cracks. It’s offensive that you would assume I’m interested in someone else just because I’m irritated that I had to leave what I was supposed to be doing to come get you. This is about responsibility, not about some other woman.”
“I know that, Peter,” she said, laying a hand on his forearm and withdrawing the hand when the skin beneath her touch flinched. “Don’t be offended. It was your work I was referring to as your preferred mistress, not some rival female.”
“Oh,” he replied, blinking at her a few times before reaching to turn on the ignition.
Annie placed her hand over his, stopping him. This was as good a place as any to level with the man she was supposed to marry in a month.
“Let me ask you something, and, before you say anything, I need you to be absolutely honest in your answer. Do you really want to marry me, Peter? Do you love me?”
A new round of blinking ensued, as if his brain fought to interpret the words she’d used.
“I don’t understand, Ann. I asked you to be my wife, didn’t I?”
The similarity between his response to the same question she’d asked Alex only days before took her breath away for an instant, reminding her of the heavy, empty hole in her heart.
“That’s not an answer.”
Another series of blinks, followed by a heavy sigh. “Then I give up, Ann. What is it that you want me to say?”
With a vision of Alex swimming just behind her eyes, and a pain that felt as fresh as it had when she’d placed the stone heart into the bench, she had no desire to drag out this conversation. It was always best to rip the bandage off quickly. Less pain all around that way.
“Let me make this easy for you by turning the questions around as if you’d asked them of me. Do I really want to marry you? Do I love you? No, I really don’t. I came home early to call off the wedding.”
Annie let her hand slip away from Peter’s, and he started the engine, maneuvering the car from the parking garage and onto the highway in complete silence.
They were within minutes of Annie’s home before he finally spoke.
“Oh, man, Ann, your mother is going to be so pissed.”
That thought had crossed Annie’s mind more than once in the last day and a half.
“Why do you think I wanted you to pick me up at that airport? I wanted you there as backup when I told her.” She might not love Peter, but she did consider him a friend. “And then we have to break the news to your mother, too.”
The glare he sent her direction told her he hadn’t considered that prospect yet.
“From all the cars up there, it looks like the whole damn family is here,” he muttered as he turned the car into the long drive leading up to Annie’s house. “Aw, Christ. There’s my mom’s car.”
Probably wouldn’t be the best time to confess to him that she’d called home and asked her brother to have everyone waiting when she returned. But, in line with her new pull-the-bandage-off-quickly plan of action, breaking the news to everyone at once was the best she could think to do. This would all be over soon.
“Wait a second,” she said as Peter opened his door to get out.
She reached into her purse, pulled out the engagement ring Peter had given her and handed it back to him. Finding it in the bag Lissa had given her had only confirmed that she was doing the right thing.
Peter stared at the ring for a moment before taking it and slipping it into his pocket.
By the time it occurred to Annie that she hadn’t even asked him how he felt about her decision, they were walking through the front door and she was swarmed by both their mothers.
“I’m so pleased that you finally came to your good senses and came home to help get ready for the big day,” her mother said, her expression conveying all the self-assured victory she worked so hard to keep out of her voice.
“She’s come to her senses, all right,” Peter said from behind her. “And thank God one of us did.”
Maybe he wasn’t too upset with her after all.
“Your timing is just right,” her mother continued. “We were planning to get together this week anyway, to make final adjustments to the candle and flower arrangements.”
“Beth and I still have some issues with one another about which family members are doing what,” Peter’s mom added, her laugh seeming almost an afterthought.
With a glance back to Peter, Annie faced her family and prepared to give them the news. Her brother leaned against the wall near the passageway to the kitchen, apparently planning a quick exit if necessary. Both Peter’s sisters waited on the sofa, looking uncomfortable and bored. Even Annie’s quiet cousin Emily had been drawn int
o the process, though she apparently tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, huddled on the window seat, clutching a big pillow in front of her like a shield.
Annie drew in a deep breath and exhaled, straightening her back and pasting a smile on her face. “I decided—”
“We decided,” Peter interrupted, stepping up beside her and placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Right,” she said, giving her ex-fiancé a grateful smile. “We decided that marriage isn’t the right thing for us. I’m really sorry for all the trouble you’ve all gone to, but the wedding is off.”
Her family’s response was pretty much exactly what Annie had expected. A laughing dismissal of their ridiculous case of nerves followed by lots of shouting and tears from both the mothers when they realized she was serious and that there was no changing her mind. All followed by threats of how their fathers would react when they got here.
None of it mattered now. Annie had done what she’d come to do, and now all she wanted was to escape to her room and sleep.
Ignoring the high-pitched cacophony behind her, she headed up the stairs and down the hall to the room she’d called her own her whole life. Inside, she closed the door and leaned against it, eyes closed, waiting for the solace she’d always felt here to fill her. When it didn’t come, she crossed to her bed and sat down on the edge.
How silly of her. Of course there was no relief, no solace here for her now. She’d put away her childhood when she’d decided it was time to deal with the world as any adult should. This place wasn’t home anymore. Home was over four thousand miles away.
And she couldn’t wait to go back.
A timid knock at the door brought her to her feet. She ignored her first instinct–to run–and prepared herself for whatever she was about to confront.
“Come in.”
The door opened and her cousin Emily peeked her head inside.
“I thought I’d see how you’re doing after…well, after all that down there.” Emily nodded toward the door as if that explained what she meant. “Believe me, I know what you’re going through. I just thought you might need someone to talk to.”
All The Time You Need Page 23
