Page 71 of Beyond Dreams

“Okay, we’ll have to give that some thought eventually,” Gabby allowed. “But first, Holly, your story,” she requested, holding the pen at the ready.

Having listened to their stories and how similarly fantastic they were, Holly was able to relate her tale with far less apprehension than she might have been if they’d not shared. She started at the beginning, with her tour of the brochs, told them about waking up at the MacHeths and begin advised by Sidheag that if she wanted to get back home, she had to pretend to be Ceri MacHeth and marry Duncan MacQuillan, and then how he’d banished her when he learned the truth.

While she expected and was rewarded with some sympathy for Duncan’s harsh rejection, they were universally practical about the whole thing.

“Consider it from his perspective,” Gabby encouraged. “Of course he would think you’re nuts. As you would him, if he told the same tale to you if he’d come to our time.”

“Give him time,” Cora added.

“Give him time?” Holly scoffed. “Oh, like he gave me? I begged him to speak to me in private. I beg him to listen to me. He wouldn’t give me the time of day. I don’t want to be married to someone like that, who—who shoots first and asks questions later. And by the way, I don’t think we’re really married anyway so none of this matters. None of it matters,” she repeated heatedly. “I want to go home.”

“I’m so sorry, Holly,” Kayla whispered.

Holly waved off her concern. She and Duncan were done There was nothing there to even lament, she told herself. He’d made sure of that.

“But did any of you,” she asked then, “dream of...your husbands here, but while you were still there, in the twenty-first century?”

“Oh, that’s new,” Gabby commented, ducking her head to add that the journal.

No one had, which launched them into a discussion of the numerous differences—which had it’s own page on the notebook—between all their time-traveling adventures.

“Oh, and time is off,” Kayla advised. “It’s not the same here, or it doesn’t always match up.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I came here, Eloise had been missing for only a few weeks,” she said. “And when I found her—she’d been here for more than a year.”

Cora cautioned, “But we’re not sure it works like that all the time.”

“And another thing—” Gabby began.

She was interrupted by Lucas Thain poking his head into the room. His expression was returned to fierceness, his gray eyes smoldering with fire. He passed his gaze over all of them, announcing, “We’ve a visitor.”

Chapter Twenty

Holly followed thewomen out of the room and back downstairs, having noted how protective Lucas was of Cora. He led the party but held his wife close, her hand tight in his, while his other hand sat on the hilt of his sword.

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