Page 27 of All The Time You Need (Magic of Time #1)

“Go away!” Alex roared in response to the knock at his door, hurling an empty tankard toward the offending noise to punctuate his demand for isolation.

Three days had passed since Annie had left him. Three of the longest, most miserable days of his life.

He’d spent the first determined to stop that which had already happened, tearing apart the arbor, looking for any sign that his Annie wasn’t really gone. He’d spent the second and third here, staring into the cold, empty fireplace in his bedchamber. Their bedchamber only three short days ago.

Another knock.

This time he chose to ignore it.

He didn’t want their food. He didn’t want their drink. He certainly didn’t want their company. The only thing he wanted from anybody was to be left alone. Alone with his memories of the woman he’d loved and lost.

If only he hadn’t been so arrogantly sure of himself. If only he’d listened and understood. Three little words. It was all she had wanted from him. Three little words that, in his arrogance, he’d not given her.

I love you.

She’d said the words to him. She’d asked for them in return. And he, great worthless fool that he was, hadn’t been smart enough to understand that those three little words were all that stood between happiness and utter despair.

I love you.

He understood now. He’d gladly shout those words from the mountain-top or the town square in Inverness at high noon on market day if it would bring his Annie back to him. But he was too late. It was beyond his loudest battle cry to reach her ears where she’d gone. Nothing he could do or say could bring her back to him—back from seven hundred years into the future, where the Faeries had taken her.

“I love you,” he whispered into the gloom, and reached for his tankard of ale.

The same tankard that he’d emptied hours earlier. The same tankard he’d pitched across the room. He turned his eyes in that direction in time to see the door open a crack and his sister’s head pop inside, followed by the whole annoying rest of her.

“Good,” she said, a wide smile creasing her face. “I was hoping I’d waited long enough that you were out of things to throw my direction.”

“Go away, Lissa,” he said quietly, suddenly too tired to summon his anger. “I just want to be left alone.”

“Of course you do,” she said, hurrying to where he sat and plopping herself on the hearth next to him. “You want to wallow in yer misery, beating yerself about the head for not telling our Annie that you love her. Am I close to the truth of what yer doing in here?”

He mustered enough energy to glare at his sister. It was the best he could manage right now.

“From the look upon yer face, it appears that I do have the right of it.” She patted his back as she might one of the goats in the stables. “But you’ve no need to continue to fash yerself over the mess you’ve made of things, dear brother. I ken what it is you need to do to set things to rights.”

“If you know so much, why dinna you share this earlier?”

For that matter, why hadn’t she thought to point out to him at some point over the past few weeks that a simple I love you would have prevented all his problems?

Lissa shrugged. “Simple enough, that answer. In wasting all my energy being angry with you for driving Annie away, I forgot the one part of Grandda’s story that might be of use to you now.”

Alex fought to tamp down a growing sense of hope. His Grandda’s stories had been just that—stories. Hadn’t they? And yet Annie had come to him just as his Grandda’s love had in those stories. She’d left him in the same way, too.

Hope bloomed, beyond his ability to rein it in.

“I’m willing to try anything. Tell me what to do.”

“It’s the hearts Grandda carved. We’ve both seen them, so you ken them to be real enough, aye? They were still there in Ellen’s time. They had to be in order for her to have gotten the metal heart that Grandda made for her. And we ken that Ellen got it because Annie wore it on a chain around her neck. Just like I wear the one Grandda made for himself on a ribbon around my own neck.”

He’d long known that Lissa wore a trinket of some sort around her neck. He’d seen the ends of the ribbon but had never questioned what lay beneath his sister’s bodice at the ribbon’s end. When she lifted it out for his inspection, his breath caught in his throat.

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.