Page 8 of Boundless Magic

A quicksilver grin flashed, but he didn’t comment.

As they reached his clone, the man gave them a bored look.

“Isis having none of it, girl?” he asked, choosing to ignore Uncle Alastair.

“Apparently. What do you know?”

“She’s capricious at best. Little spitfire when riled?—”

“Not of her! About this portal thing,” she snapped.

“Same ol’ Tums,” he said with a smirk that Autumn wanted to slap off his face. “Impatient as always, aren’t ya, girl?”

“My children are wandering around your world, unattended and probably scared out of their fucking minds, dude. So yeah, you can say I’m impatient.”

LJ sobered and cast a fleeting glance at Alastair’s stony countenance before addressing her. “Sorry, honey. Let’s get to Thorne Manor and find a spell to reverse this, okay?”

“I don’t live at Thorne Manor. The spell that was used was from theBook of?—”

“It was from a book her husband’s family possesses,” Alastair cut in smoothly. Gesturing toward the path to the Carlyle estate, he said, “After you.”

“If you’re this uptight in your world, I wonder what my Angelica is like.”

“Angelica?” Autumn and Alastair asked simultaneously.

“My wife.”

She shared a look with her uncle, feeling like her surprise must’ve shot her brows right off her face. “Did you ever meet anyone named Angelica?”

With a frown and a shake of his head, he gave his rugged twin a small shove in the direction they were to walk.

“What the hell is this, then? Who did you marry, if not Angelica? Thornes only love once,” LJ demanded with a scowl, refusing to budge an inch.

“Her name’s Aurora Fennell. She’s my mother,” Autumn said despite her uncle’s warning look. “Surely, you’ve met her?”

“Can’t say I did, hon.” LJ shrugged and moved toward her home.

“What about when you returned from the war?” she asked, somewhat desperately. If he’d never hooked up with her mother, two of her sisters were never born.

“Vietnam,” Alastair added when the guy still appeared confused.

“No Vietnam war in my time,” LJ replied with the standard Thorne shrug. If his appearance didn’t already label him one of their own, his mannerisms certainly did.

His answer cleared up why he’d never met her mother in London, but it made no sense why he hadn’t met her later, when she married Preston. If she even did. But she had to, right? Especially if there was a second Autumn.

Her head hurt from trying to figure it out.

“What about Preston?” Alastair asked the question she’d been wondering.

“My brother left home to backpack Europe after college. We didn’t know about you girls until after word reached us that he and his wife died in that plane crash.”

Autumn jerked to a halt. “Wait! What? What plane crash? Are you saying my parents are dead?”

Grief flashed briefly across LJ’s visage. “I’m sorry, hon.”

“But—”

“Let it go, child,” Alastair said with surprising tenderness. “You’ll only give yourself a headache, and there’s no changing the past in his world.”

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