Page 54 of Beloved Enemy
Reid approached her, his presence felt even before he spoke.
“Do ye ken where ye need to be?”
Charlotte shook her head. “Nope. But my best guess is to go where I was when I was moved before, which is more than halfway up the mountain.” She turned and found Reid staring upward, into the trees. He wore what could only be described as a look of apprehension, which seemed wholly out of character. She didn’t accuse him outright of being afraid of whatever witchcraft or magic had moved her in the first place, but she did let him off the hook by not mentioning it. “I guess I should go alone from here.” She smiled awkwardly, having given no thought to their goodbye, and clumsily thrust her hand at him. “Goodbye, Reid. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done, and well, for not burning me at the stake or something like that.”
Reid stared at her hand, a frown growing.
Really on edge—and she knew exactly why—Charlotte picked up Reid’s hand and joined it with hers, and then pumped her hand up and down twice. “Goodbye,” she repeated, pertly now, before withdrawing her hand and nodding tightly at him. With that, she turned and began the march uphill.
“Charlotte, wait,” Reid called behind her.
Her heart fluttered and she paused, swirling around rather quickly to face him again, hardly able to contain the wildly expectant expression on her face.
“Take my flask,” he offered, walking toward her, extending his hand and the horn. “Ye dinna ken how long ye’ll have to wait.”
She was struck by several things, first and foremost how vast was her disappointment that he hadn’t stopped her for any other reason. And next, how the normally overprotective, overly cautious Reid Nicholson didn’t offer to accompany her up the mountain.
Charlotte tilted her head at him as she accepted the flask, secretly glad to have this memento of him. “Are you afraid ifyou go up there with me you might be moved around in time as well?” Her next thought was, if she were to moved to some other place or time that was foreign to her, she’d be so much less frightened with Reid at her side.
Reid did not deny his concern. “Aye, I’ve considered that, having seen—”
He stopped abruptly and clamped his jaw.
Charlotte frowned now. “Having seen what?”
He fought against saying more, his jaw working side to side.
Charlotte slapped her hands on her hips and asked again in a stern voice, “Having seen what?”
Reid glanced around him, as if to make sure no one eavesdropped. “I told ye, did I nae, that I saw the woman, Autumn, disappear? The one who sounded similar to ye? But she did nae go by herself, but with her went my friend, Marcus, a man of this time.”
Charlotte gasped. “When did this happen?”
“More than a year ago,” Reid said, his voice laced with anger now, “and Marcus is nae here, has nae been seen since then. It’s as if he...simply ceased to exist.”
“But...but he didn’t, in all likelihood,” Charlotte offered. “He’s with her, that woman. I mean, what do I know about any of this except what’s happened to me? But I’ll bet you ten bucks he went wherever she did. I’m sure they’re together.” At Reid’s continued skepticism—fear for his friend—Charlotte was compelled to remind him, “If I—little old me—can survive being thrown back seven-hundred years, I’m willing to bet your friend is just fine, wherever—whenever—he is, especially if they’re together.” Her jaw fell open then, some weird thing tickling at the back of her brain. She struggled to pull it forward, trying to make sense of it. “Holy shit, I just remembered something.” Aghast at the idea forming in her head, Charlotte covered herlips with shaking fingers, still struggling to piece information together in her mind.
“Charlotte?” Reid growled. “If ye ken something about Marcus...?”
“No, I don’t,” she whispered, her brows drawing down. “Or—shit—maybe I do.” Raising her gaze to Reid, she tried to explain what she did know, what she’d been reminded of. “There was a woman named Autumn who’d gone missing,” she told him, a bit of urgency in her voice. “Reid, she went missing from my time in Scotland. It was all over the news for weeks.” She slapped her palm against her cheek, things starting to make sense. “Okay, bear with me, while I try to recall everything. She—Autumn—had come to Scotland searching for another American woman who had gone missing. And then she disappeared. When she was found or was recovered—I don’t know the whole story, obviously—she was with this guy. Wow, I could swear his name was Marcus. They did a press conference together. I remember stumbling across it on social media. It had gone viral because the guy was so...”she started to explain to Reid, but paused, having been about to say that the reels and footage had created such a storm because the guy with Autumn had been so hot, like super sexy, not at all unlike Reid. “Holy shit,” she repeated, stunned by what her brain chose to remember now. “Okay, let me think. She said she’d gotten lost in a forest and that the guy—I’m sure his name was Marcus—had found her and brought her safely out of the forest.”
The story had been huge, but mostly because Autumn was a semi-public figure, since she worked for a Chicago news channel and surely, Charlotte had thought, because Autumn and Marcus were such a striking, beautiful couple. They were like the missing persons version of Brad and Angie, they were so easy to look at.
“'Tis nae possible,” was Reid’s tepid, distrusting response to Charlotte’s magnificent news.
“But it is, “Charlotte countered. “I’m here, so we know it is possible to travel through time. Reid, if your friend Marcus has longish hair and a mean face—like, he scowls the same as you—and is as fierce as you, then he’s safe and happy to be with Autumn in the twenty-first century. Oh, I just remembered something else—he has piercing green eyes, doesn’t he? The camera just zoomed right in on them.” Charlotte had thought at the time that a) it must have been a woman behind that particular camera at the press conference for the way the camera had been hyper-focused on the striking man, and b) that she wouldn’t have minded getting lost in the forest if her rescuer would be drop dead gorgeous.
Her heart flopped in her chest, and she considered Reid Nicholson again.
I guess I got what I wanted.
“Come with me, Reid,” she said without thought.
“How can ye say he is happy?” Reid asked at the same time.
Unprepared for the question, and while Reid looked astonished at her spontaneous request—by which she was instantly and heartily embarrassed—Charlote shook her head, knowing he wouldn’t like her explanation. “It was the way he looked at her, the way Marcus watched Autumn. He struck me as someone really uncomfortable in front of the camera, like I swear to God he was growling at the reporters asking all the questions, but whenever he looked at Autumn, which was often, and always when she was speaking... I don’t know, I could tell that he loved her. That was the only time he didn’t look like he was about to commit some violent act, when he looked at her.”
Indeed, Reid didn’t like her reasoning, or he wasn’t sold on it, her intuition about the subject. His scowl multiplied by ten.
