Page 15 of So Close To Heaven (Far From Home #11)

“How was your day?” she asked finally after a long moment. Her cheeks pinkened for how lame and unnatural that sounded.

He turned his face slightly toward her, brows lowered.

“Anything found?” she pressed. “English soldiers... or the nuns who lived here?”

He shook his head once. “Naught. Nae English, nae sisters. The rain had washed any trail we might have followed.” His voice was rough, his disappointment obvious.

She bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”

He grunted in reply, gaze fixed on the horizon.

Clinging to the logic that since he hadn’t risen and walked away, that some part of him was choosing to stay, to engage or be engaged, Ivy asked next, “How long do you think we’ll stay here? At the priory, I mean, not the loch.”

With his hands set into the sand behind him, he lifted and dropped his shoulders negligently. “I dinna ken. We’ll head out again on the morrow for another search, I expect. But if we find naught, there’s little reason to bide here.”

Eyes on her chore, swishing the scrubbed linen in the water in front of her knees, Ivy then asked, “Do you...have other things you should be doing?”

He watched her thoughtfully while he answered. “Aye, lass. So long as even one English banner flies on Scots soil, there’ll always be something I should be doing.”

A patriot, through and through, she supposed, something she might have guessed about him even as soon as within hours of meeting him.

Ivy wrung the linen hard, watching the water bead and drip from her hands. She tried to focus only on that, but her brain was screaming inside her, Tell him! Ask him for help!

Predictably, her thoughts circled back, again and again, to her inexplicable, improbable predicament.

She bit her lip. Did she need to tell him?

Maybe not. Maybe she could just keep her head down, keep pretending she belonged here until she figured something out.

Yet the thought of one day being left behind by him and his army made her throat tighten.

She was scared enough as it was, but alone?

Completely alone? She wasn’t sure she could handle that.

She was going to have a baby. She certainly couldn’t do that alone.

Her gaze slid toward him. Alaric sat solid and silent at her side, his arms braced behind him, the sun catching in his golden-brown eyes as he stared across the loch.

Strong. Capable. Steady in a way that hadn’t ever come easily to her.

If anyone could help her make sense of this, surely it was him.

But what if he thought she was insane? What if he told the others? She’d seen how quickly suspicion flared here, had suffered plenty of those stares. If she said the wrong thing—Christ! Was losing her life a possible outcome?

Her stomach fluttered, a sharp, urgent twist. Because of the baby, she really believed she had no other choice but to confide in him.

“I ken it’s dead already,” he said, startling her out of her tortured reverie.

Ivy snapped her gaze to him. “What?”

He lifted one hand out of the sand and pointed to the linen strip she’d been wringing out. “?Tis dead, lass. Has nae more life in it.”

“Oh,” she sighed and breathed a laugh. “Right.”

Still, her hands twisted, even as she lowered the tightly wound linen to her lap. The words crowded at the back of her throat, wild and impossible, but they wouldn’t leave her in peace. She simply had no choice. She had to say them.

“Alaric—um, sir?” she began, her voice catching. “Can I tell you something?”

He fixed his gaze on her, his golden-brown eyes fastening on her with that heavy, unwavering weight that made her insides squirm. “Aye.”

She swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. “I’m not... I’m not from here. Not just not from here here, like this place, but—” She gave a shaky laugh. “God, this sounds crazy. It is crazy. But I don’t belong in the year 1305.”

His brow furrowed, but he said nothing, waiting.

“I—” She broke off, squeezing the previously brutalized linen, then blurted in a rush, “I come from the future.”

For a heartbeat, silence. Then his brows drew together, the lines of his face darkening in confusion.

Silence stretched, heavy and unyielding. Ivy’s pulse pounded in her ears.

When he didn’t immediately reply, Ivy let out a nervous laugh, and wet her lips, babbling to fill the silence.

“You probably think I’m insane. Honestly, I don’t know that I haven’t lost my marbles.

But it’s true. I swear. I was hiking in the twenty-first century and— bam , I don’t know what happened—but suddenly I was here.

Well, not here here, but—” She gestured helplessly at the loch. “here, in the fourteenth-century.”

“Ye come from the future?” He repeated, his voice low and crisp.

“Yes,” she whispered. “From centuries ahead. I didn’t mean to...to travel through time. I don’t even understand how it happened. But I’m not lying to you—seriously, you can’t make this up.”

His mouth opened, closed. He snarled, like literally snarled.

“Ye claim to be a spirit? A seer?”

“What? No. No, no, just—just a woman. A normal person, I swear. Just...me. Only,” she went on, shrugging helplessly, “only I was born seven hundred years from now.”

His jaw tightened, disbelief hardening into something harsher. “Ye take me for a fool?”

Despite the way her stomach twisted, anxious over his dark and angry reaction, Ivy was quick to refute this. “I’m not toying with you,” she said quickly. “I know it sounds insane, but—”

“Mad, aye.” His voice quickened, sharp as a blade. “Or wicked. Which is it? Do ye mean to vex me wi’ this nonsense, or confess ye’re some witch come among us?”

“No!” Her voice cracked with desperation.

Tears pooled in her eyes. “I swear to you, I’m telling the truth!

I only told you because I’m afraid.” She laid her hand and forearm over her stomach.

“I’m going to have a baby, and I don’t know what to do about that, and I’m scared.

I thought—” she stopped talking, made very afraid by the thunder in his expression, the anger that boiled where confusion had been.

He snatched up his boots and rose in one swift movement.

“I’ll hear nae more of this,” he growled. “Keep yer lies, woman. I’ll nae be made sport of.”

And with that, he strode away, boots in hand, leaving Ivy staring after him, the summer air suddenly colder for his absence.

Great. What now? she wondered.