Those few hours spent in Nathaniel’s office, looking at his life’s work, had been something she hadn’t expected. He might have been as rich as a more charitable, friendlier version ofScrooge McDuck, but the things he did with his money were truly life changing for those he helped.
If she hadn’t been crazy for him before, she would have fallen in love with him right then.
It had been unsettling in the extreme, though, to come back to her little cottage, park that beautiful black Audi in front, then watch her, ah, friend who wanted to be much more than that tell her good-bye before some mystical time gate sucked him back where she definitely didn’t want him to go.
He’d exacted a promise from her before he left that she would, yes, stay inside, then pulled her door shut from the outside and rushed off presumably to do what he did. She hadn’t watched because, again, she’d promised not to open the door.
Well, not open the door very often, but she had supposed at the time that she was better off not to say as much.
She’d slept, but not much. The jet lag wasn’t as bad, but she supposed that had been because she’d never adjusted to the time change in Manhattan anyway. She’d been up before dawn, taken a little trip into town for groceries, then locked herself in her house to do what she could with what she had to hand. If she’d paced a bit on her porch, well, who could blame her? She had firmly ignored the impulse to go off on a little exploration, which left her feeling very virtuous and trustworthy. She would have preferred sneaky and informed, but things were what they were.
What she had decided, though, was that it was past time to stop tap-dancing around the issue at hand. She needed answers and she knew how to begin to get them. She had found tape in a drawer and started to put together a storyboard.
She’d made illustrations of everything she personally knew about her journey into the past and put those up on the wall in the right order. She’d moved on to Nathaniel’s part in the craziness but quickly realized she only had a very cursory idea of what went on with him. He heard a certain set of numbers, he grabbed his sword and put on a plaid, then he went to do what he had to do.
She did make a note of how long he’d been doing it and she added way off to the right the new fact that 1372 seemed to have affected him adversely.
She also added in the fact that touching that dagger in Edinburgh had somehow subsequently allowed her to popthrough a gate in the forest she definitely hadn’t been able to see in any kind of normal way.
That had been a couple of hours ago. She knew she should have been noticing things beyond what was just there, but in her defense, being tossed in a medieval dungeon had colored her perception of things a bit more than she was comfortable with. Subsequently spending time with her rescuer while he was in a very lovely suit, facing off with her own intimidating father, then having to listen to her former boyfriend blather on about things she couldn’t remember hadn’t helped anything, either.
She jumped a little at the knock on the door, even though she’d heard the car pulling to a stop on the gravel in front of her house. It was a Range Rover, though it could just as easily have been Patrick’s as Nathaniel’s. She’d heard Nathaniel’s be delivered to his house earlier that morning and knew she should have memorized the sound. That she hadn’t was undeniable proof that she was definitely off her game.
She was, however, very happy when she opened the door to find one extremely handsome time traveler standing there in jeans and a black leather jacket.
“Dangerous,” she noted.
“Sleepy,” he said wearily. “Feel like lunch?”
“I’m thinking. I can’t eat while I’m thinking.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I didn’t mean to put you off your food.”
“I wasn’t thinking about you,” she said, then she paused. “Well, Iwasthinking about you, but not in the way you’re thinking I was thinking.”
“You make me dizzy.”
She didn’t want to comment on what he did to her, so she simply stood back and invited him inside.
“What mischief are you combining?” he asked.
She shot him a look before she could stop herself. “What an interesting way of putting that.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it. “Long night in a different language. Never mind anything else,” he added, not quite under his breath.
That man there needed a change. She shut the door behind him. “I imagine so. And I’m just doodling. Want to come and look?”
“Love to,” he said.
“I can make you a sandwich,” she offered. “I ran to Mrs. McCreedy’s this morning and she said you never buy bread but you like it, so she sold me what you’ll eat.”
He stopped in mid-step. “It molds.”
She winced. “I’m sorry. I should have known that.”
He smiled briefly. “I’m tired and talking too much. A sandwich sounds brilliant.” He shrugged out of his coat, draped it over the back of a chair, then walked into her living room.
She followed him. She thought it might be interesting to get his perspective on things given that he likely knew more of the players in the drama than she did.
