Chapter Sixteen
Three days later, she felt herself becoming simply Anna again, the bold Anastasia who’d kissed Bram having quietly retreated beneath the weight of his continued silence and growing reserve.
The kiss hadn’t been repeated, let alone mentioned.
His touch, whether lifting her onto the horse, helping her dismount at day’s end, or simply encircling her as they rode, had become wholly practical once more.
His hands never strayed or lingered, and neither did his gaze.
Anna could imagine no explanation for the change except regret.
Oh, he remained unfailingly courteous. He made certain she ate before he did, gave her as much as he took of whatever little food he found, and saw each night that she was better sheltered from wind and cold than he was.
He never complained when weariness overtook her and she rested against him as they traveled.
He hadn’t withdrawn his protection, only himself.
Anna had tried to draw him back out. She asked about Scotland, the war, Craig na Coille, his family, even the horse, receiving mostly polite answers that seldom extended beyond a sentence or two.
Eventually she resorted to simply talking about herself, filling long stretches of the journey with stories of home and especially Mallory.
By the end of the second day, Bram knew that her sister was three years older, dark where Anna was fair, possessed fourteen tattoos, two children, a juvenile record she hadn’t added to in a decade, and an unfortunate inability to keep possession of a valid driver’s license.
Anna even confessed that she sometimes envied Mallory’s ability to make a disaster of something and then simply get on with her life instead of worrying endlessly over what everyone thought of her.
At one of their stops, Anna tried her phone again with little expectation of success. She held the button down but the black screen remained stubbornly blank. The battery, which had somehow managed one last resurrection before, was finally and completely dead.
“This,” she announced to Bram, holding it up, “would have been much more impressive if I could actually show you what it does.”
He glanced at the dead phone but said nothing.
Undeterred, Anna explained how she could use it to speak to Mallory from hundreds of miles away, take photographs and videos, read books, listen to music, find directions, send messages almost anywhere in the world, look up information in seconds, check the weather and, with considerable difficulty, tried to explain the internet.
Bram finally responded, but only to wonder why anyone would she would want other people to be able to reach her every hour of the day.
Anna laughed for what felt like the first time in ages, and for a few minutes she thought she’d succeeded.
She told him about airplanes, television, cars and eventually wars that had drawn much of the world into the same conflict.
Bram asked how hundreds of people could possibly be carried through the sky and wanted to know what made a picture move, but each small spark of curiosity faded before she could coax it into a real conversation.
It was only after describing how the future world had put a man on the moon and receiving little more than a thoughtful aye that Anna remembered, with a sinking heart, that he didn’t actually believe her.
Not about the part that mattered, anyway.
For all she knew, he regarded her accounts of 2026 as elaborate tales and merely lacked the cruelty to tell her so.
After a while, she simply stopped trying to engage him.
Her dejection finally forced the question: why was she still with Bram?
Following him at first was pure survival; she’d been terrified and confused, acting on instinct alone.
But now? She was still lost, but she was no longer in shock.
Shouldn’t she question if heading north, farther and farther from York, was the right choice?
Sometime in the last week, without making a conscious decision, her goal had shifted.
She was no longer a lost woman trying to get home, but a woman accompanying Bram MacCailin on his journey.
She could argue that her choices in those first few bewildered days didn’t count, but that was an excuse, and she knew it.
Still, she knew also that some part of her, for reasons that seemed to evolve day by day, kept choosing Bram, choosing to remain with him—and that not all of those reasons had to do with safety and less fear.
The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow: she was an idiot.
The thought, surprisingly, was followed by a flicker of dark humor.
Well, she supposed she could at least take comfort in the fact that she hadn’t repeated her usual mistake.
Bram, at first glance, hadn’t struck her as the sort of man any sensible woman would have chosen.
The first time she’d laid eyes on him he’d been barefoot, dressed in filthy rags, wearing an iron shackle, and looking desperate enough to kill anyone who stood between him and freedom.
Anna sighed. Good grief. That doesn’t actually make me feel any better.
If anything, it suggested her judgment had somehow deteriorated.
Apparently she’d progressed from choosing men who checked all the boxes and seemed a good fit but ultimately disappointed her, to choosing an escaped medieval prisoner running for his life, who in no way would have been able to check any eligible bachelor box but had, in the space of a single kiss, managed to rearrange everything she thought she knew about wanting another person.
By the end of the third day, the dense forests finally gave way to rolling meadows. For the first time since she’d arrived in this century, Anna saw a home.
A small stone farmhouse, nestled among thatched outbuildings and encircled by a timber fence, breathed life into the landscape.
Smoke curled from its chimney, a sign of warmth and people that struck a deep, yearning chord within her.
After a week of seeing this world only as a dangerous wilderness through Bram’s watchful eyes, the sight of something so ordinary felt profound.
It looked peaceful, almost like a historical reenactment farm she could have visited back home.
The illusion was so powerful, so tempting, that she had to remind herself it was real—a home in the year 1305.
They moved on, keeping distance between them and the home, and Anna saw that another house lay beyond the first. Ahead, beyond a low stone wall that marked the far boundary of the second farm, stood an orchard.
Row upon row of fruit trees stretched across a gentle rise, their branches heavy with late-summer apples in shades of green and red beneath the slanting rays of the descending sun.
Fallen fruit lay scattered through the short grass beneath the trees.
Anna’s mouth watered. She’d not realized until then just how weary she’d become of living upon whatever Bram happened to find.
For more than a week they’d survived entirely upon berries gathered from woodland thickets, mushrooms Bram declared safe to eat, and an assortment of roots he’d unearthed with his knife, each one introduced by a Gaelic name that meant absolutely nothing to her.
She’d eaten them because he had, and because she was that hungry, but they had been earthy, fibrous things that filled her stomach only briefly before the persistent ache of hunger quietly returned.
She hadn’t complained of course, partly because she knew there was little point, but mostly because Bram always gave her an equal share, even as she imagined he needed it more than she.
A small stand of trees, perhaps fifty feet in length and little more than a dozen feet deep, provided the only concealment anywhere near the farmstead.
Bram steered the gelding into the thin screen of trunks and undergrowth before drawing gently upon the reins.
It was meager cover at best, but from there was only fifty feet of open ground separating them from the nearest fruit-bearing trees.
“I hope you’re thinking what I’m thinking,” she said, too delighted by the bounty hanging from the branches to maintain the stiff, careful tone she’d adopted most recently in response to his growing reserve.
“Thieving?”
A smile curved her lips. “Oh, actually I was thinking about filling my belly.”
“Which will require thieving.”
“Okay, true,” she acknowledged. “I’ve never stolen anything in my life, but I have to tell you, I’m really not worried about preserving that record right now.” She paused and then added, “Honestly, if that were bread growing on those trees, I might even consider committing armed robbery.”
She thought she heard the faintest hint of amusement in the quiet breath behind her before Bram answered, “I dinna ken it will come to that.” His voice remained low and characteristically even, yet it lacked the flat detachment that had marked nearly every exchange between them since the kiss.
“Let’s abide for a moment, and see what goes on there. ”
***
He reined the gelding into the stand of trees, the concealment offering no relief.
For three days, he had walled off the memory of the lochan, pouring his focus into the ride—the track of the sun, the lay of the land, the constant search for patrols.
But now, waiting for darkness, there was no distraction.
There was only Anastasia. She sat before him, her back a warm, solid press against his chest. A stray strand of her hair, lifted by the breeze, brushed his jaw, and the simple touch was a fresh torment.
She did nothing to invite his notice; she simply existed, and her existence was a greater threat to his control than any English patrol.
He knew with cold certainty that to remain this close to her any longer would be an agony.