Page 7 of Borrowed Time

And it felt better than I’d thought to get some food in me — no real surprise, considering how by that point, I hadn’t eaten anything for more than a day and a half. It might have been good to have some wine…at least I wouldn’t have to worry about stupid Prohibition here…but I somehow doubted that Emma the healer would have been an advocate for that kind of indulgence so early in my recovery.

We ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Something about the quiet felt overly tense, but I guessed that was just Seth’s worry about our current situation. Yes, he’d had a bit longer to get used to the idea of appearing in a previous century, and yet I knew he wasn’t like me — his talent had nothing to do with manipulating time, so I could see why he might be having some difficulty coming to terms with what had happened to us.

But after I’d eaten most of my chicken and mashed potatoes, and made what I thought was a good stab at the green beans, he finally spoke.

“Are you going to tell me the truth now?”

I blinked. Those blue eyes of his were as clear as ever, but now they were too sharp, focused as lasers.

“Tell you the truth about what?”

His mouth tightened. “Jeremiah Wilcox hinted at a few things. But then he said it was your story to tell and that I should wait until you were well enough to talk. You seem pretty fine now, so I’d appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of not lying anymore.”

There it was. I suppose I’d been fooling myself if I thought this day of reckoning wouldn’t eventually come.

I set down my fork and made myself meet his gaze.

Yes, he was angry. Controlling it well, but….

He has every right to be mad,I told myself.And there really isn’t much point in trying to sidestep the issue any longer, is there?

Not as far as I could tell. Now we were two people out of time, caught far away from everyone and everything we knew, and we needed to be allies.

“My last name really is Rowe,” I said slowly. “But my first name is Devynn, not Deborah.”

Seth stared at me for a moment. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

“Not so strange,” I replied, then lifted my glass so I could have a few swallows of water. With any luck, they would help keep my words from getting stuck in my throat. True, he knew I was from the future…but there was so much more he didn’t know. “It’s not really that common even when I’m from.”

Thick dark lashes almost obscured his eyes as they narrowed. “The middle of the twenty-first century,” he said, repeating what I’d told him after our first fateful kiss.

“Right.”

Silence then, a silence only broken by the sound of more footsteps going past the door.

And maybe the beating of my own heart.

“But there’s more…isn’t there?”

I nodded.

“If you’re from the future, how in the world did Jeremiah Wilcox ever meet your parents?”

Thereby hung a tale. I didn’t want to tell the whole story — that would have taken far too long — but I knew I had to explain enough to make Seth understand.

“My mother suffered a kind of traumatic experience a long time ago, when she was around the same age I am now,” I began. “So she went to the family cabin to be alone in the woods for a while to try to get her head together.”

As soon as those words left my mouth, Seth frowned, and I couldn’t help smiling a little, despite the situation. All during my time in 1926, I’d done my best to avoid using phrases that wouldn’t have been common back then, but I supposed I could be forgiven for being a bit out of it at the moment.

“To try to figure out what she should do next,” I explained. “While she was there, she saw the ghost of my father and was immediately drawn to him, even though she knew he couldn’t be a Wilcox.”

“Wait a minute,” Seth said. His brows were still pulled together, and I could tell he was doing what he could to make sense of the story. “Why would she be surprised that the ghost wasn’t a Wilcox?”

There it was. I knew I couldn’t dance around the issue any longer, not when the truth would have come out soon enough anyway.

“Because the cabin was the one the Wilcoxes built when they first came to Flagstaff in the 1870s,” I said softly. “That’s our family cabin.”

Seth stared at me. He was too tanned to exactly go pale, but it was impossible to ignore the shock in those bright blue eyes.

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