Page 9 of All The Time You Need (Magic of Time #1)

“Thank you for believing me, Lissa. Thank you for being my friend.” Annie smiled at the woman sitting next to her on the hearth. “You can’t imagine how much it means to me. There are moments when it’s only your friendship and the thought of finding my way home again that keep me going.”

Lissa looked up from her needlework to return Annie’s smile. “You’ve no need to thank me. The truth is easy enough to believe if you want to.” She dropped her task to her lap and, with her elbows braced against her knees, she rested her chin in her hands as she leaned forward. “But answer for me this, my friend. You told me that yer family has arranged for you to marry a man you’ve no great love for, and running from that marriage was why you ended up here. So, why then are you so anxious to return to yer own time? Do we make you so unhappy here as to drive you back into the arms of the man yer supposed to wed?”

“No!” Annie exclaimed, realizing what an ungrateful whiner she must sound like to her new friend.

Over the past weeks the people in this castle had done nothing but make her feel welcome. Well, most of the people. Their laird, Alex, had avoided her as if she carried some horrible disease. The few times they’d ended up in the same room, he’d almost immediately excused himself.

Not that she minded his leaving whenever she entered a room. His presence always unsettled her in ways she couldn’t begin to explain and didn’t want to explore. He made her feel…well, that was the problem, exactly. He made her feel . His voice, his glance, everything about him made her feel things. Things like heat simmering along her skin, emotions she could barely understand, and a trembling deep inside. Things. Physically unsettling things .

Even thinking about him like this was enough to send a shiver down her spine.

“Then why are you so determined to find yer way back if no’ for the man you doona love?”

Annie breathed in carefully, deeply, struggling to rid herself of Alex’s image hovering in her mind, his dark eyes fixed on her, as they always were when she was around him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never said I didn’t love Peter.”

“No’ with yer words, perhaps,” Lissa answered. “But you told me in so many other ways. You never speak of the man unless yer asked a specific question about him. And when you do answer, there’s no longing in yer voice, no’ even as much as I hear when you speak of the bathing rooms in yer own time with their special rolls of lovely, soft paper. Most of all, I’ve yet to see a single tear shed for yer missing of this Peter of yers. None of that strikes me as the actions of a woman in love.”

Everything Lissa said was true, and every word of it cut like a dull knife. If someone told Annie right now that the wedding had been called off, her only regret would be all the time her mother had put into planning an event that would never take place. Lissa was right. She didn’t love Peter. She never had. She considered him a friend, but that was all. And the thought of spending the rest of her life as his wife made her want to weep with frustration.

And yet, in spite of all that, she didn’t belong here either.

“This isn’t about Peter or my relationship with him. I need to go back because this isn’t my time. With only a little effort, I can imagine a thousand different ways my being here could mess up the whole space-time fabric thingy. I need to go back because I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t belong here.”

“Pfft,” Lissa hissed, dismissing Annie’s reasoning with a wave of her hand. “Have you ever considered that perhaps the time you came from was where you doona belong. The truth of the matter is that the Fae sent you here for a reason and, that being the case, this is exactly where you belong, just as yer grandmother belonged here when she came before you.”

“You’re wrong about that. Nana Ellen didn’t belong here any more than I do. I’m sure that’s why she didn’t stay,” Annie said. “I don’t know why she was here any more than I know why I’m here. But I do know that she returned to her own time. And then she got married and she had a son and grandchildren and she lived out a whole, long life there in the time she was born to. She did all those things in the time and the place where she belonged. I have to do that, too.”

“That may be,” Lissa said, her voice tinged with sorrow. “She may have fully lived out her life in your time. But I’ll never believe my grandda’s Ellen was happy to leave him. I know for a fact that his heart was broken by her going away. And I’d say that bauble you wear around yer neck is proof that yer grandmother dinna want to leave her Aiden, either. What’s more, I’d even be willing to say, that it was her, yer own grandmother Ellen, working with the Fae, that sent you here. The Fae do nothing without good reason, my friend, so that alone is even more proof that yer supposed to be here. You’ve a purpose in this time, Annie. Yer supposed to be here or you wouldn’t be.”

Annie’s hand went to the silver heart pendant hanging around her neck, the metal warm from its contact with her skin. Maybe her grandmother had sent her here. She’d certainly left enough mysterious little clues. And she had to have known that Annie wouldn’t be able to resist trying to track them down. Between that and Syrie’s tantalizing bits and pieces of Ellen’s history, the two of them had all but delivered Annie into that arbor.

But could those two little old ladies actually have had a reason for doing something so unbelievable?

“I just can’t accept that. Yes, I believe that she was here. Yes, I believe that Aiden was very special to her. But, in the end, she still went home.”

Lissa fidgeted with a ribbon that encircled her neck, much as Annie often did with the necklace she wore. “Did you ken that my Grandda made that bauble yer wearing? No? He made it for his Ellen with his own two hands. And if you dinna ken that, then you probably dinna ken that he made one for himself, as well. One that he wore every day of his life, too. It’s true. I ken this to be the truth because he gave the one he wore to me before he died.” Lissa tugged at the ribbon around her neck, lifting from her bodice an almost identical pendant, missing only the crystal heart that hung from the center of Annie’s. “Can you no’ believe now, looking at the two of these, how much they meant to one another?”

“Okay, I accept that they loved each other. But Nana Ellen still went home, so the only thing any of this proves is that you can’t stay where you don’t belong, no matter how much you might want to. The path to here and back home again somehow lies in that arbor. That’s why I have to go back there. I need to thoroughly search the place to find where that path is.”

Lissa began shaking her head before Annie finished speaking. “But yer ignoring the importance of why yer here. Yer grandmother and the Fae went to a great deal of trouble to get you here. You need to think upon what the reason was that you were sent to this place and this time. Otherwise, all their efforts are for naught. And anyway, even if you did have the right of it, Alex willna allow you to go back there. He believes that whoever locked you into the arbor could still be lurking about.”

Frustration welled up inside Annie’s chest at the claim she’d been fighting from the moment of her arrival.

“But there is no one to be lurking around out there. No one locked me into that arbor. I’ve told you all how I got there. Or at least as much as I know about how I got there. Parts of it are, admittedly, more than a little fuzzy, but I do know that no one else was involved.”

Lissa shrugged, picking up her needlework to resume her task. “I’ve told you that I believe what you say. But what I believe has no bearing on what our laird chooses to do. And what our laird chooses to do is law around here. When he says you canna go, you canna go.”

Her friend’s acceptance of her brother’s rule was as frustrating as Alex himself! Surely, after all this time, he should be able to understand that just because her story was totally unreasonable didn’t make it untrue.

A moment of rational thought and even she was forced to accept the absurdity of that idea. If the tables were turned, would she believe him?

Probably not. But that didn’t change what she needed to do.

“I still have to try, Lissa. I have to at least try to convince him. If you’ll keep an eye on your father for me for a little while, I’m going to stop off to speak to your brother when I pick up Alexander’s meal.”

“As you will,” Lissa said, not lifting her gaze from her handwork. “I’m happy to help here. All I ask is that you put as much time into considering why you were sent here in the first place as yer putting into considering how to return to where you came from.”

“Agreed,” Annie said, rising to her feet and making her way out into the hall.

It was easier to agree than to argue with her friend. It was as likely that she had stumbled into whatever thing had sent her through time as it was that she’d been intentionally sent. Regardless of what Lissa believed, sometimes things just happened, for no good reason at all.

Like her having agreed to marry Peter.

She’d known him her whole life and, for her whole life, she’d listened as her mother and father had spoken about how perfect it would be if the two of them grew up and got married and joined the fortunes of their two families. When Peter had asked, she’d said yes, for no better reason than that she knew it was what both their families expected.

It had been a reason, yes. But not a good reason.

Over the course of the past weeks, trapped in a place so far from all that she’d ever known, she’d had time to think about her life. In the process, she’d come to realize that there was nothing worse than marrying someone you didn’t love. When she got back home— if she got back home—she really needed to try to do something about that.

But first, she’d have to find the way to get back home. And in order to do that, she needed to confront the high-and-mighty laird of the MacKillican.