Page 24 of All The Time You Need (Magic of Time #1)
Annie entered the arbor and shut the gate behind her, leaving the key in the lock. They should be able to find it there later. Lissa would know where to look for it. Annie had left it exactly where she’d told her friend she would.
She set the small lantern she’d carried on the ground next to the big stone bench and reached into her bag, wrapping her fingers around the smooth, heart-shaped stone. Too bad her own heart wasn’t as hard as this one. Maybe then this wouldn’t all be hurting so badly.
Alex hadn’t responded when she’d said goodbye. In his defense, he’d had no way of knowing that her goodbye was a final one. But then, he wouldn’t really have cared anyway. With her gone, he could get on with his life and do the things he’d always dreamed of doing.
That was good advice for her, too. Annie needed to get on with her life.
She stared down at the stone in her hand. Her heart may not be as hard as this, but her backbone needed to be. She couldn’t allow herself to think about Alex right now. She had no more room in her heart for fairness and reason than she did for regret. Sorrow filled every corner of both her heart and her mind.
Clutching the stone tightly in her hand, she knelt beside the bench, her eyes fixed on the initials carved on either side of the dark opening.
She couldn’t rob Alex of his dreams and she couldn’t stay here with a man who didn’t love her. This was her moment to prove what she was made of. Yes, she was running away one more time, but this time she’d at least tried to confront the situation first. What she did next would be for the best for everyone.
A vision of her grandmother kneeling before the bench as she did now fluttered into her mind as she fit the stone into the hole, but she had only a moment to wonder whether Nana Ellen had felt a misery like hers when she’d left this place and her Aiden behind.
Immediately, the winds rose around her, whipping her hair against her face, and a familiar buzzing filled her ears. This time, when the tiny, colored shards of light surrounded her, she knew it wasn’t insects at all, but the force of the Magic that buffeted her. As she fell into the endless black chasm of oblivion that would deliver her back to her own time, the face in her memory was no longer her grandmother’s.
“Alex,” she murmured with her last breath in his world.
Alex, her forever love. Forever lost to her now.
* * *
The first rays of the morning sun peeked through the shutters and played across the foot of the bed where Alex lay. He blinked his eyes slowly before he stretched and turned to his side, anticipating the moment when his wife would awake in his arms.
Only Annie wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was as cold as it was empty, indicating that wherever she’d gone, she’d gone there quite some time ago.
He remembered her leaving on some errand, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember her returning.
Cursing his exhaustion of the night before, Alex rolled from their bed and hastily dressed. No doubt Annie would be waiting for him to join her for the morning meal, a lovely smile lifting her lips when their eyes met across the room. A smile made all the more special in that it was meant for him and him alone.
With a smile of his own already on his face, Alex headed downstairs.
A quick glance around the great hall left him disappointed yet again. No Annie, no warm welcome meant only for him.
No Annie, perhaps, but his sister sat alone in one corner, toying with a full trencher in front of her. The two women were never far apart. If Annie wasn’t here, Lissa would surely know where he could find his wife.
As he approached Lissa, she looked up at him, her eyes red and swollen as if from crying, and a trickle of concern took root in his heart. Of all the things his twin might be, a crier was not one of them. In truth, he wasn’t sure he could remember the last time she’d behaved as such.
“Where is my wife?” he asked, dispensing with any greeting.
“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.