Page 4 of Seductive Scot
Why didn’t you fasten your seat belt, babe?
He asked the same question every night, and every night, there was no answer.
Why didn’t you slow the hell down?Rhys’s voice whispered in his head as usual.
Christ, Rhys.
Rhys was gone. Greyson, too.
Reikart shifted in his bed. He hadn’t killed them, though.
Thank God for small favors,he thought with bitterness. No one had killed them. They’d time-traveled.
Doesn’t mean they’re not dead, his mind taunted.
Reikart’s thudding heartbeat filled the sudden silence of the room, his residual shock from what had happened hours earlier—was it hours ago?—making the darkness seem blacker. It was exactly like the night of the crash when he’d woken…after. For a moment, his breath caught deep in his chest where his guilt had taken up residence. The past blurred with the present, making what had happened four years ago and what had happened tonight—hell, in the last week—hard to distinguish.
He raised a shaking hand to his hair, his mind still teasing him that it was the night of the accident. There was no glass from a shattered car window, and his hair was cut short, not long like it had been back when Amanda was alive. He let out a relieved breath, and his coiled guilt struck him in the heart with a vicious bite for the audacity of being glad it was not the night of the crash.
Killer. Worthless killer.
Just because it wasn’t the night of the accident didn’t mean he wasn’t smack in the middle of a shitstorm. Damn, he wished his father weren’t lying in a coma in the hospital. He needed his advice and his forgiveness. Reikart would have never guessed he’d think either of those things, but then again, what sane person could have possibly fathomed that his dad had not lost his mind when he claimed their mom had traveled through time, as they all had when their mom had left. But she hadn’t left, after all. He now knew that to be a fact. She really had time-traveled.
How could they have known Dad’s crazy claims—No, damn it. Reikart clenched his jaw, his frustration mounting. He, his brothers, even the stockholders of their billion-dollar family business, McCaim Shipping, which their dad had built from the ground up, had all believed Dad had lost his mind to grief after Mom had disappeared. His insistence that she’d not walked out on them had been ludicrous. Both the police and the best private investigators that money could buy had concluded she had done just that. And when his dad refused to quit trying to prove that she had been snatched back to the thirteenth century, the time he’d told them she was from, he and his brothers had succumbed to the board’s demand to remove Dad as head of the company. They had betrayed him. Blackballed him. Abandoned him. Call it whatever the hell you wanted, the result was the same: they’d turned their backs on him, and he’d continued his quest. Now he lay in a coma in the hospital for his efforts, and Rhys and Greyson were gone. Just like Mom. Were they all in the thirteenth century?
Something compressed Reikart’s chest, making it hard to catch a breath. Fear. He pushed back at the fear as he’d been taught to do while training for his black belt years ago. Slowly, his chest loosened and he could take a deep breath.
Concentrate on facts, not fear.
Dad had not been crazy. Their mom had not left them.
Reikart laughed, the sound seeming unusually loud in his bedroom. After having two brothers vanish into thin air before his eyes in the last week, he would have assumed he wouldn’t feel insane thinking such thoughts. Still, it was hard as hell to shake twenty-nine years of believing time travel was impossible when it’d only been five days since he’d been confronted with the truth that time travel was irrefutably real.
Facts.
His mom had been sent through time by her sister, his aunt Grace, the healer, in 1286.
His mom had been holding a silver cross, which she had brought through time with her, when her sister had spoken an old traveling chant. Something had gone wrong because their mom had ended up in 1981 instead of her home in Perthshire in 1286, where her sister had been trying to send her.
Reikart squeezed his eyes shut, battling the delusional feeling. He wasn’t delusional. This shit was real. What else did they now know was true? His mind buzzed instead of answering, and he clenched his teeth. He knew how to analyze facts, for Christ’s sake. He’d studied history at Harvard and had been the youngest partner ever appointed at the top law firm in New York. He was damn good at discovering and analyzing facts. So what else did he know that could be classified as a fact?
Dad was in a coma.
Dad had begged them to find Mom.
Rhys was gone.
Greyson was gone.
The cross had stayed behind when his two brothers had time-traveled because there had been someone else still holding the cross in the present day each time. Okay, the last part was an educated guess and not necessarily a cold, hard fact.
Reikart looked down at his hands, recalling the feeling of wind blowing on him when both his brothers had vanished and how unnaturally cold the cross had felt in his grip five nights ago when he’d held it, when his brother Rhys had gone through and again last night when Greyson had gone through time. One minute the four of them had been standing there clutching the ancient cross that apparently was required to successfully activate the Gaelic Traveling Chant that his mom had written down for their father, and the next minute Rhys had disappeared and only three of them had been left holding the cross. It was the same thing again last night. Reikart had met Ian and Greyson at their dad’s house, they’d looked at the translation Rhys had written out—he was the only one of them who could read Gaelic—they had repeated the chant, and Greyson had disappeared.
Fact: just saying the chant and holding the cross is not enough to time-travel.
Deep in his gut, Reikart was certain it washowyou said the chant that mattered. He leaned over and grabbed his phone, scrolled to his video library, and pulled up the recording he’d made of last night’s attempt. He hit “play” and stared at himself, Greyson, and Ian in their dad’s study, all holding on to the cross. As he listened to them saying the chant, he watched Greyson’s lips. He narrowed his eyes, searching for a sign of how his brother might have said the chant differently from how he or Ian had.
“Talamh, èadhar, teine, uisge ga thilleadh dhachaigh.”
