Chapter Seventeen #3
“Forget it.” She rubbed impatiently at her nose. “Obviously I don’t need any explanation. You’ve made yourself perfectly clear and thank you.” She put more distance between them, backing further away.
Bram’s jaw worked silently, his fists drawn tight at his sides under storm-dark skies. “Go, Anastasia,” he said, voice low and jagged as the thunder. “If this is the road back to your own place, then take it. Go home. Ye dinna belong here.”
The words hung between them, and for one unbearable moment she simply looked at him, wearing the particular stillness of a person absorbing a blow they hadn’t seen coming.
“Fine.” She lifted her chin in that brave gesture he knew so well. “Fine. I will.”
She turned away from him at once and strode past the horse, her steps quick and determined, anger lending strength to a heart he imagined he might have just broken.
Bram’s lip curled and he pressed his tongue flat against the roof of his mouth to keep from calling out after her.
He stood unmoving, watching her go until the darkness began to swallow her slight figure, hating himself with a completeness he’d never before thought possible.
***
Anna didn’t know where she was going, except away from him.
While the wind swirled around her and the strange heaviness persisted all about and within her, she marched away, her entire face twisted with the herculean effort needed to keep herself from sobbing outright. Still, her vision was blurred by tears as she stomped through the woods.
I’m an idiot was the refrain that kept circling round her brain, and it was accompanied by all the stomach-churning embarrassment that normally accompanied such acute humiliation.
Faced with the impossible opportunity she’d spent the last week longing for—the chance to return home—she hadn’t thought first of her parents or Mallory, or her little townhouse, or the third-graders who would soon be wondering why Mrs. Ellis hadn’t returned to school, not one thing she loved in the twenty-first century.
In that first blinding instant of panic, she’d thought only of Bram.
Her first, desperate instinct had been that she didn’t want to leave him, that she couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing him again.
She couldn’t imagine a more humiliating realization.
And for what? For a man who, after a kiss she’d foolishly believed was extraordinary, had calmly informed her he’d kissed many women before.
The truth settled over her with a cold finality: she was simply one of dozens, entirely forgettable, and the connection she’d felt had existed only in her own imagination.
Holy sheesh, as if it wasn’t bad enough to have her heart broken in the twenty-first century, some twist of wicked fate had sent her to the fourteenth century to break her heart here as well.
She pressed her fingers against her sternum, as though she could hold the ache in place and stop it spreading.
Honestly, it would almost have been funny if it didn’t hurt quite so much.
What is wrong with me? I’ve known him barely more than a week. My parents have loved me my entire life.
She understood well enough that emotions rarely obeyed logic, but that only forced her to confront an even more unsettling possibility—that somewhere over the course of the past week, her heart might have jumped ahead of her brain.
Great.
She had no notion how far she’d wandered, perhaps fifty yards or so, before the trees opened into a small clearing.
There she stopped, tipped her face toward the starlit sky, and simply waited, convinced that whatever impossible force had stolen her from York was about to return her there again.
The wind continued to build until she had to widen her stance to keep from being shoved sideways, her hair whipping wildly about her face.
Closing her eyes, she willed it to happen.
Do it, she pleaded silently. Please! Don’t leave me here now.
After another moment she spread her arms, surrendering herself completely to whatever came next.
The seconds stretched into minutes before she slowly lowered her arms again and opened her eyes.
The wind died back as though it had simply lost interest. The pressure in her ears released, the ground stopped its faint trembling, and the air settled into the ordinary stillness of a field in the early morning.
Nothing happened.
Around her, the ordinary sounds of the night cautiously returned—the endless chorus of crickets, the rustling of some unseen creature in the underbrush, the whisper of leaves overhead.
Bewildered, she turned slowly in a circle. Had she misunderstood what she’d felt? Had whatever had carried her across seven centuries simply... changed its mind?
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered aloud. Wonderful. As if the fourteenth century hadn’t already found enough ways to humiliate her.
She stood there another minute or two, waiting for something—anything—to happen, until at last she was forced to accept that she wasn’t going anywhere.
“So now what?” she whispered into the darkness.
The answer came almost immediately, and she hated it—she would have to go back.
The very thought of returning to Bram—to the man who had just informed her she meant no more to him than any other woman he’d ever kissed—filled her with fresh humiliation.
Five minutes ago, she’d believed she was about to never see him again.
Now fate, in what felt like a particularly cruel joke, had apparently decided it wasn’t done with her yet.
It took Anna several minutes to make herself turn around, and she startled, finding Bram at the edge of the clearing, watching her.
He was perhaps twenty yards away, a tall, motionless silhouette against the darker forest. How long had he been there?
Long enough to have watched her stand beneath the stars, arms spread wide, begging an invisible force to take her home?
Long enough to see it fail? A hot flush crept up her neck, the shame so acute it felt physical.
Anna searched his face, though the darkness and the distance between them revealed little.
His expression was as unreadable as ever, his gaze fixed steadily upon her, and she wondered whether he had followed because he feared something might happen to her in the woods or because some part of him had been unable to simply stand there and watch her disappear.
She wasn’t foolish enough to ask.
Neither of them moved for several seconds.
“It didn’t work,” she said finally, and hated the smallness of her voice. “Nothing happened.”
He regarded her in silence, inclining his head slightly. At length he said, “Then ye are bound for Craig na Coille.”
Anna gave a sharp, shaky nod. “But don’t think it’s because I want to go with you,” she managed, her voice tight. “It’s just... I have nowhere else to go.”
Bram studied her for a moment before giving a single, almost imperceptible nod. “Aye.”
She was convinced she absolutely did not see any softening in his hard gaze.