All The Time You Need (24 page)

With renewed resolve, Annie opened the door to the third storeroom from the end and slipped inside to begin her hunt.

Two steps inside the room and she stumbled, her foot caught in a pile of cloth. As she kicked the impediment away, the scent of grain filled her nostrils, resulting in a violent sneeze. Followed by several more.

She wiped at wet, itchy eyes and attempted to breathe shallowly as she scanned the room. Damn, but it was dark in here. Almost as an afterthought, she remembered the lantern she carried and quickly lifted the shielding so that the candlelight shone out.

“Duh,” she chastised herself, as she carefully stepped over the empty grain sacks at her feet. “Much better.”

Wooden barrels lined the walls and piled high on top of them, cloth sacks, some folded neatly, some simply tossed inside. It didn’t take long to realize that the season was her ally. If she were in here at the beginning of autumn, all those sacks would be full and likely too heavy for her to lift out of her way.

At the back wall, she began to shift the barrels out of her way. Perspiration quickly beaded on her forehead from the physical exertion, but she couldn’t afford to take a break. As she struggled with a partially filled barrel, a noise from behind her drew her attention and she jerked around, heart pounding.

Stupidly, she’d left the door open a crack. Enough, apparently, that the wind must have caught it, because she could swear it was open wider than it had been before she’d started moving things around. She hurried to remedy that problem, crossing to close the door tightly, before returning to her search.

No openings were visible in the roughly plastered wall, not even when she lifted the lantern up high to cast its light over the cleared area.

“It has to be here.”

Unless it hadn’t been built yet. Unless it wouldn’t be built for heaven only knew how many centuries from now.

Shaking her head, she pushed away that line of thinking. She couldn’t afford to give up until she’d exhausted every inch of wall. Without the opening, she might never be able to find her way back to the time she’d come from.

She set the lantern down and went back to work.

When she shoved the next barrel away from the wall and leaned in for a closer inspection, she discovered the first sign. There, low down, where the wall met the floor, she spotted a small gap. Following it with her fingers, she could feel, though still not see, the fine line marking the doorway.

Squatting down, she tucked her fingers under the bottom and pulled for all she was worth. Her reward was a small movement beneath her hands and a shower of dust as the door began to give way. One more good tug and—

Success!

A stale, musty odor met her as the force of the door letting go tossed her over onto her bottom. It was a tumble well worth the effort of getting back up to her feet.

She retrieved her lantern and held it high over her head as she stepped through the door. A whiff of spider web against her face almost made her drop the lantern and head back to the keep, but she reminded herself of what fate waited there. Since the idea of marrying this thirteenth-century Peter was much worse than anything she could possibly encounter in this dark, damp tunnel, she forged ahead.

“Only ten feet,” she whispered to encourage herself. “The wall can’t be more than ten feet thick. I can stand anything for ten feet.”

Logic gave way to emotion as the eerie echo of her own voice ended up being more unsettling than the quiet had been. Pressing her lips tightly together to prevent another such attempt, she began moving slowly, scanning the floor for anything that might be waiting there to jump out at her. With her eyes fixed on her feet, she made her way forward, one step after another, until a solid wall loomed ahead of her.

This was it, her moment of truth. More accurately, only one of her moments of truth, but an important one, nevertheless. Her journey would end here if she couldn’t find an opening to the outside.

The exit proved much easier to locate than the entrance had been, the outline of the arch she remembered from her time clearly visible in her lantern’s light.

Opening the door was another matter entirely.

Now that she’d seen the spider webs, the idea of slipping her fingers under the door to try to pull it open was out of the question.

She set the lantern at her feet and ran her fingers over the line that marked the opening before stepping back to stare at the doorway to consider a different approach. Though she’d had to pull the door open from the other end, if she were inside, she’d have to push, not pull. Maybe, if she were really lucky, this end would work in the same way.

Putting her shoulder against the door, she silently counted to three and pushed. While it didn’t open freely, she definitely felt a small movement in the right direction.

The experiment left her giddy with the knowledge that she’d discovered the way to open it.

“Time and muscle,” she murmured, bracing her shoulder against the door and pushing for all she was worth.

Three more tries and the door gave way, sliding open a couple of inches to reveal a thick layer of foliage outside. No wonder it had been so difficult! Three more shoves and the opening was wide enough for her to push her way through.

The path to the arbor was there, just as it had been before, and she hurried to follow it to her destination, going as quickly as she could while still keeping her lantern lit. When she reached the arbor, she sent up a quick prayer of thanks for Lissa’s having remembered the key, and soon she was inside, pleased with herself that she’d been clever enough to avoid detection.

Everything had to be as it had been when she’d been tossed through time. She’d gone over those moments repeatedly, and the one thing that was clear was that nothing had happened until she’d put the stone heart in the hole in the bench. Somehow, that had triggered everything, meaning that putting the heart in the hole was her first step in getting home. But before she could do that, she had to find the stone heart.

Annie set about her task immediately, running her fingers inside the opening in the bench where the stone heart belonged. Empty. Next, she climbed up on the bench to more thoroughly search the pocket in the tree formed in the spot where the branches converged. She’d thought this step through in her mind, convinced that she’d somehow missed something when she’d been here with Alex.

She hadn’t.

If the heart wasn’t in its spot in the bench and it wasn’t in the tree where she’d found it the first time, maybe it had fallen free when the earth had moved all around her. Dropping to her hands and knees, she began a slow, careful search around the bench and in the nearby bushes, carrying her lantern along with her.

Again, she found nothing, but she wasn’t going to allow that to defeat her. She was determined to scour every inch of the arbor, even if it took her until the sun came back up. The stone heart had to be somewhere.

How long she’d been searching when she finally decided to give up, Annie couldn’t be sure. What she was sure of after all this time was that wherever the stone she needed was, that hiding place wasn’t in this arbor.

Though she didn’t understand how it worked, Annie knew that the heart was the key to her having come here in the first place. It was also the key to her finding her way home. Her grandmother’s journal had told her as much. Clearly, without the stone heart, she was stuck in this time.

What was that old saying about karma being a bitch? It certainly was turning out that way in her case. She’d run away from home to avoid marrying the Peter in her time, and now she would be forced to wed a much worse person, the Peter in this time.

What would she do now? What could she do? She needed a plan, but considering how badly all her plans up to this point had fared, she was fresh out of ideas.

Fresh out of long-term ideas, that is. As far as the short term, she knew exactly what she was going to do. She made her way to the bench and sat down heavily, tears already rolling down her cheeks one by one, their frequency increasing until she was in the middle of a good, heartfelt, ugly-faced cry, complete with air-sucking sobs.

It was as good a plan as any. And considering all she’d been through in the last few weeks, she was way overdue for a total meltdown.

* * *

If Annie was meant to be a spy, she was the worst one Alex had ever seen, bobbing along with the light of her lantern making her a perfect target for anyone who might be out here tonight.

With that light, she’d made it easy enough for him to follow her, and that was exactly what he’d done. From the moment he’d slipped into the storeroom behind her and had hidden behind those barrels, she hadn’t once been out of his sight.

Whatever she hoped to find in the arbor—and it was obvious to him now that it was a
something
not a
someone
she searched for—it had eluded her. He had watched as she had scoured the arbor on hands and knees, searching in vain.

Good. He could only hope that this time, at long last, she had satisfied herself that whatever she’d hoped to find simply wasn’t there. Whatever it was.

A way back to her own time, as Lissa had claimed?

The thought crept into his mind unbidden, and he rejected it as quickly as it had arrived.

Her story was completely without merit. Especially now that Peter Gordon had arrived and confirmed her identity.

A familiar trickle of doubt began to nag at him, curling around in his mind, seeping down into his chest. In truth, he could not bring himself to accept that the man waiting back at Dunellen had spoken in total honesty. There was something about him. Something about his manner of speaking and the way he avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. He wore an air of deception like any other man might wear a cloak.

But that was a detail for another time.

Alex shook away the worry and focused his concentration on the woman in the arbor. He was here now, and this was where his mind needed to be, too. Soon, she would give up this fruitless search and return to the castle. All he had to do was to wait and follow her back, seeing to it that she encountered no obstacles or dangers.

Hidden as he was, deep in the shrubbery outside the arbor gate, he’d have little issue with remaining unseen as she passed by. It would be easy enough to follow in secret as he had coming here. Certainly there was nothing to be gained in confronting her, especially since her visit to the arbor had apparently accomplished nothing.

His plan would have worked, too, had Annie not begun to weep.

With growing discomfort, he watched from his hiding spot, determined to remain where he was. He had a plan and he needed to stick with it.

But determination wasn’t always the strongest of emotions. His lasted only until her quiet weeping turned into great air-gasping sobs, shaking her whole body as she bent forward in her seat.

His conscience prodded him to action.

“Damnation,” he muttered, slipping from the shrubbery and into the arbor, to hurry to her side.

He stood over her only a moment or two before he was drawn to sit down next to her on the stone bench to offer comfort. Tentatively, he laid a hand on her shoulder, and she looked up at him, as if she’d only then realized she was no longer alone. A glow from the lantern shone on her dirt-streaked, tear-drenched face, revealing frustration more than fear in her expression.

“Perfect,” she said between sobs. “Just freakin’ perfect. Perfect end to a per—perfectly shitty day.”

Hiccups had overtaken her, stealing air from her between sobs, seeming to add to her misery.

Alex was torn between the desire to comfort her and a need to lecture her for the risk she had taken in coming out here alone, in the dark of the night, foolishly giving away her position with the lantern she carried.

In the end, it was the hiccups that determined his response. The hiccups that made her appear even more pathetic and helpless with each breath she took.

She didn’t resist when he folded her into his embrace. Before he knew it, he was holding her tightly to his chest, murmuring nonsense aimed at calming her, picking leaves and sticks from her hair and stroking her head like he might a skittish colt.

A skittish colt or someone in distress. Someone he cared for deeply.

A warm, wet feeling grew at the spot where her head cuddled against his shoulder, and he found himself gently rocking her, his chin protectively pressed to her cheek.

He had no idea how long they clung to one another, but, somewhere along the way, the hiccups ceased and the sobs slowed. At long last, she lifted her head from his chest to look up at him with swollen, waterlogged eyes.

“I really am stuck here. I can’t go home. I can’t find the heart anywhere so I can’t go back. I’m so scared, Alex. I feel trapped and so very, very lost.”

His heart thrummed in his chest, an unfamiliar emotion choking in his throat.

“Yer no’ lost, sweetling,” he said, absently brushing an errant strand of hair from her face. “And you’ve no call to be afraid. Yer safe here. I’d no’ allow anything to happen to you. No’ ever.”

Their eyes met, locked in a gaze that held him as surely as any stock or chain ever could. As if it were beyond his control to do anything else, he dipped his head toward hers until their lips met.