“Perfect,” she muttered before she reached for her mug and downed a deep swallow, waiting for the dark liquid to wash over her throat. If they liked her, she didn’t like them. If she liked them, they wanted something from her. “All right, fine, I’ll bite. What exactly do you want from me?” Must be a doozy of a request considering he’d gone to all the trouble to hunt her down.
“I want to go home.”
“Pardon me?”Home? She looked up in surprise, meeting his gaze this time. “What do you mean, you want to go home? Go. I’m not stopping you. I didn’t make you come here in the first place.”
“But that’s exactly what you did. You and yer wishing.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she denied, even as the warmth of guilt heated her neck and face. How could he possibly know she suffered from some massively stupid infatuation over him? That he’d haunted her dreams since the day they’d met?
“It’s no ridiculous at all. It’s the Magic.”
Magic? Her heart pounded so hard she thought everyone in the noisy bar must be hearing it by now. Was this his way of telling her he’d come to find her because he felt the same bizarre attraction she did?
“So what does that mean? Magic. That you like me? Is that why you hunted me down? Because you like me?”
He sat back in his seat, his expression what she might expect from someone who’d just discovered his dining partner had an extra foot growing out the side of her head, toes wiggling.
“I like you well enough, lass, but that’s neither here nor there. We’ve a need to discuss why you summoned me and, more important, how yer to send me home.”
Again with sending him home. Abby carefully placed her fork across her plate and slowly steepled her hands in front of her, struggling to find some appropriately clever and witty retort. She had nothing.
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
When Colin leaned forward, his eyes glinted with something that looked remarkably like anger. Abby fought down the urge to back away from him.
“No? So what yer telling me is that you’ve no idea that you used the Faerie Magic to wish me here, to yer time. Seven hundred years into the future you drag me. And though I’ve no way back to my own time but to fulfill some purpose of yers that brought me here, youwillna even disclose to me what that purpose is so that I might complete yer blighted task and get back to my own life. It’s no even of any consequence to you that the lives of my kinsmen depend on my returning. That’s what yer saying, is it?”
“Seven hundred . . .” Abby paused, staring at the man sitting across from her. He was kidding, right? He had to be kidding.
But no, there was nothing in his expression, nothing in his serious blue eyes, that said anything even close tokidding. This man believed the giant, steaming pile of BS he was spewing.
“Okay. That’s it. Done.” She stood, catching up her handbag and slinging its strap across her chest. “Don’t bother to ask me to dinner again, okay? And you know what else? Since you ruined my meal, thank you very much, you can just pay for it. And make sure you leave Mrs. Duncan a good tip while you’re at it, too. I am out of here.”
She didn’t bother to wait for his response, pushing her way past the men lined up at the bar. The air in here had grown too thin, the walls somehow moving in closer to one another, making her feel trapped and just a bit woozy.
Outside, breathing in the clear evening air, she stopped, looking first toward the bed-and-breakfast and then to her right, off toward the empty tree-lined road that led outside the village and beyond.
She needed some time to think. Some time to regroup. Some time to decide whether she wanted to scream in anger or cry with disappointment.
At the B and B she could escape to the relative privacyof her room to deal with all this, but more than likely Jonathan waited there, and of all the things she was in no mood for, he was at the top of the list.
No, he’d just dropped to number two on the list.
Besides, number one on the list might very well come hunting her with more of his send-me-home drivel, and if he did, the B and B would be the most logical place for him to look.
That made the decision easy enough.
Turning to her right, she adjusted her purse strap high up on her shoulder and headed out, her pace picking up as she approached the edge of the village limits.
Damn it!Of all the times she’d imagined seeing Colin MacAlister again, of all the times she’d dreamed of him, not one of them had turned out even remotely like the last few minutes.Damn it all to hell!
At what point had she made the fateful leap that had sent her hurtling into bizarro world? Instead of simply picking guys to like who didn’t like her back, now she was picking men who apparently needed heavy medication simply to function in normal society.
Medication that Colin apparently had been skipping lately.
For the past few months she’d allowed her imagination free rein, skipping along blindly without a protest as she’d almost convinced herself the hunky Highlander was actually The One, for no better reasons than because he’d haunted her dreams and got her totally hot just thinking about him.
And look what she’d gotten out of indulging in that little fantasy.
