Page 16 of Her Highland Prophecy
Her sister. A second tear rolled down her cheek as she thought of Grace. They had probably already woken up, and she realized that she was missing.
She must be frantic, wondering where I have gone.
She would probably never see her again. Or Louisa and Peggy. Her father and other friends. Her home.
It was too much, and her tears started in earnest as she thought of all that she had lost.
“Are ye all right?” Gordain asked her gently. “What’s the matter? Why is the year so important to ye?”
“You’ll never believe me,” she answered, her voice cracking on a sob. She was not even certain if she would be able to explain if she tried.
Her mind was going a million miles per hour trying to remember as much as she could about Scotland in the seventeenth century. It was before the Jacobite rebellion, so that was a positive thing. They wouldn’t be quite so wary of an English woman despite their general dislike for England.
Tears dropped from her cheeks as she tried to comprehend the enormity of what was occurring. Long minutes passed where the only sound was her shuddering breathing and Gordain’s soft reassurances.
He had been so caring since the moment that he found her that she felt the urge to confess to him, despite the possibility he would think her insane and run as far away from her as possible at the first opportunity. She rolled her options around in her head before speaking.
“You will think I’m mad if I tell you.”
“I promise ye that I willnae do such a thing,” he said gently, still rubbing her back. Her sniffles were slowly stopping, her breath no longer hiccupping in her chest. “Tell me, lass. What has ye so frightened?”
She looked up at him with an appraising look. If she told him, would he abandon her alone, to fend for herself? Despite her resolution to tell him, before she wasn’t certain if she could take the risk.
“Tell me,” he repeated, his voice low and coaxing.
Hoping that revealing the truth to him would not cost her the only ally that she had made in this time, she took a deep breath to steel herself and told him.
“Yesterday when I went to bed the year was nineteen twenty-eight. Somehow I travelled to the past and I have no idea how I got here or how to get home.”
6
He stared at her in complete disbelief. Her green eyes were still wet with tears from before and even now, a small hiccupping sob escaped her every few seconds. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. He was glad that Taranis was a steady horse because he didn’t think he could guide him anywhere at that moment.
He wasn’t sure what to believe about the girl sitting in front of him. She seemed sane when she spoke, but no sane person would claim to have come from nearly three hundred years in the future so seriously, unless they were completely delusional.
An old memory surfaced in his mind. He was a small child, eyes wide with awe as Granny Boyd sat him on her knee and told him stories of people who had gone with the faeries and then returned from the past or the future with strange tales of what they had seen.
But he was no longer a child and he no longer believed in faeries. Nor did he believe in witches, which is what most people would call Diana if she repeated her tale to the wrong person. His arm tightened around her reflexively to protect her from an inexistent threat.
He kept going around in his mind, the possibilities of an endless loop of unanswered questions.
“Well?” she questioned when the silence had stretched for a few minutes. “Will you say something?”
“I am nay sure if I want to call ye a witch or a liar,” he responded truthfully.
“I don’t lie!” she said so indignantly that he instantly believed her. “And there is no such thing as a witch.”
“I agree with ye, lass, but what ye claim to be is nay more than a faerie story.”
“It’s the truth! I went to a fair in Ballachulish yesterday, in nineteen twenty-eight and somehow woke up here in the past. And even though I have never believed in witches, I think that one must have cursed me!”
He raised a brow skeptically and scoffed.
“I am not lying to you. A gypsy gave me this medallion and told me to go to a cave with it and place it in a specific spot. I passed out and the next thing I know, I am being accosted by men with swords!”
On the one hand, he was glad that she was no longer crying, but he also disliked being the target of her ire. He was not the one who was talking about being cursed by a witch like a child reciting a bedtime story.
“Did ye always believe ye came from the future or did ye bump yer heid earlier?”
