Time Travel Romances Boxed Set (80 page)

“
They must have to bring
everything in,” Justine murmured.

“
We’re supposed to leave in
six minutes,” Blake added. They looked simultaneously at the long
line snaking along the dock and road. Morgan eyed the waiting
vehicles and couldn’t believe the man in charge would manage to get
them all in, let alone on schedule.

Justine’s thoughts obviously took the same
direction. “There’s not another ferry until this afternoon. Those
people aren’t going to be very happy when they don’t get on.”

“
Good thing we made a
reservation last night and came early,” Blake said.

The loading expert indicated a car pulling a
camping trailer and guided the driver to park it under the wings of
the passenger deck at an angle. Another one was parked on the
opposite side. Two rows of individual cars were waved in rapidly to
fill the space in between. Passengers scurried to get out of their
cars while they could still escape.

Vans went behind the cars, then a bakery
truck, and a good twenty bikers were dispatched to lock their
mountain bikes around the perimeter. Only two Volkswagen vans
remained on the dock.

“
There’s only room for
one,” Blake declared.

But the man wasn’t going to give up that
easily. The first van had to move back and forth seven times before
he was satisfied with its position. When he pointed to the second
one, Blake shook his head.

“
No way.”

But the man had obviously been doing this
job for a long time. The last van ended up parked horizontally
across the dock, with appeared to be room to spare.

The loading dock rose with a creak and
clanged into its vertically locked position. The loading expert
nodded satisfaction and Morgan almost wanted to give him a round of
applause. The ferry’s engines rumbled underfoot, the ship vibrated,
ropes were cast off, and they eased away from the dock.

Blake glanced at his watch and nodded his
approval. “Right on time.”

“
Amazing.” Morgan turned to
Alasdair, only to find that he was gone. With the noise of the
engines, she hadn’t even heard him leave.

She excused herself and darted up the
stairs, guessing that he wouldn’t have gone into either the
restaurant or the lounge. Morgan made her way to the front of the
ferry, where the wind was already whipping at the few stalwart
souls standing there. She was rewarded by a glimpse of plaid.

She ducked around the corner and was
buffeted by the wind coming off the sea. Alasdair stood with his
hands braced on the rail, his feet planted firmly on the deck. His
hair blew back from his face, his expression was uncompromising,
and he stared into the fathomless silver blue arrayed before
them.

He looked superbly alone, isolated from
everything and everyone around him. The sight of him there, gold
and red, every vibrant line of him such a contrast to the cold
white metal of the ferry and the relentless gray of the sea, was
the epitome of loneliness.

Alasdair was alone, more alone than Morgan
could ever imagine, a man lost from his own time, a man separated
by centuries from everything he held dead.

Maybe she should paint him like this, Morgan
thought. The idea made a hard lump rise in her throat and she
almost turned away. She told herself that she didn’t want to
intrude, but she knew that the strength of her compassion for the
highlander’s plight had startled her.

Alasdair turned in that moment, as though he
known all along that she stood there. The roar of the wind in her
ears was so loud that Morgan knew he couldn’t have heard her.

“’
Tis a powerful witchery
you summon here,” he finally said, though his voice was strained.
Morgan heard the doubt in his tone. “There was no need for such a
show of wizardry.”

“
It’s not magic, Alasdair.”
Morgan shook her head. “It seems like magic to me sometimes, but
it’s not. Just the marvels of modern engineering.”

Alasdair looked to the sea again and his
brows drew tightly together. “I fear, my lady” – he admitted so
softly that Morgan had to move closer to hear the words – “I fear
that I have made a grievous error.”

Morgan chewed her lip and didn’t know what
to do other than listen.

Alasdair took a shuddering breath. “I fear I
erred in leaving my son, seven years past.” He swallowed but said
no more.

The confidence he had exuded since they
first met had ebbed. Morgan couldn’t stand to see this proud man
defeated, and she wanted only to make things right. “We’ll figure
it out,” she said, trying to sound convinced of that. “Things that
are muddled up can always be sorted out somehow or other.”

Alasdair looked dubious but Morgan nodded
with authority. “Trust me. I know.”

A fleeting smile touched his lips, and the
heat of his hand closed over her own. His thumb slid across
Morgan’s knuckles. “You do have a talent for finding a muddle and
making it your own, my lady,” he murmured. Morgan’s breath caught
at the affectionate undercurrent in his tone.

It made her heart beat faster. “You couldn’t
have known, you know,” she said, in a rush to reassure him. “It’s
not as though this kind of thing happens to people all the time. I
wouldn’t have believed it.”

Alasdair flicked a fierce glance her way.
“And still ’tis naught but a fear. I will know when I stand upon my
own soil and see what has been wrought.” His words echoed with
resolve. “I will know the truth when I am home.”

Morgan ached at how hard the truth would be
for him. Her grip tightened on his arm in sympathy, but Alasdair
glared down at her.

She thought she saw a shimmer of tears in
his eyes. “Do you think me a feckless fool to believe only what I
see with my own eyes?” he demanded.

She shook her head and smiled that he could
even imagine such a thing. “No.”

Far from it. Morgan thought Alasdair was
just plain wonderful.

The simple truth flooded Morgan’s heart as
she held his steady gaze. Alasdair was the kind of man she’d always
longed to find, the kind of man who took her weaknesses in stride
and savored her strengths. There were times when he seemed to find
Morgan as fascinating as she found him.

Even more important, he was the kind of man
a woman could count on.

But he was a man whose heart was already
claimed. Alasdair would never be happy so long as his obligations
were seven centuries away.

That made Morgan suddenly want to cry, even
if she didn’t want to think about exactly why.

Alasdair stared into her eyes as if he
couldn’t look away, and Morgan wondered how much he saw. His grip
tightened on her hand, as though he would reassure her, and her
tears welled up. She stared back at him wordlessly for a long
moment, then Alasdair pulled her closer, a silent plea in his
eyes.

He was alone, but he didn’t want to be.
Morgan couldn’t have denied him the comfort of a human touch. And
there was nowhere else she’d rather be than here with him.

Alasdair tucked Morgan between himself and
the ferry’s rail, the scent of his skin rising to embrace her. Her
back was against his broad chest, and Morgan trembled slightly with
the power of this man’s effect upon her.

“
You will be cold,”
Alasdair murmured in her ear and wrapped his arms around her waist,
folding her against his warmth. Morgan leaned back against him as
they silently watched the sea together.

She could only hope that Alasdair was
unaware of the two warm tears that meandered down her cold
cheeks.

*

Lewis was starkly different from Skye,
primal and harsh. The hills were lower, the wind was colder, the
vegetation sparse. The icy bite of the north wind mingled with the
tang of the sea, the colors that greeted Alasdair’s eye were
scrubbed to clean blues and greens.

Yet, the raw, powerful curves of the land
were compelling.

Alasdair felt recognition of his home stir
within his very bones from first glimpse of land. He clenched the
rail of the ferry as the craft slid into port and felt his
anticipation rise. Perhaps the veil of Faerie was thinner here;
perhaps he but drew near a critical portal.

Whatever the case, Alasdair’s conviction
grew with every passing moment that he was truly coming home. Not
only had Blake Advisor kept his word, but Morgaine’s tale of
traveling through the centuries was certainly wrong.

The town Blake called Tarbert might be
jostling with unfamiliar structures, but still Alasdair knew this
land. The faces of the locals waiting at the landing were lined,
their clothes sturdy and plain, but there was a glint of merriment
in more than one fiercely blue eye. Life was challenging here, a
feat for the strong alone, and those who survived oft had a
powerful sense of humor.

The Micra lunged from ferry to road as
though it too was intent on seeing the highlander finally home.
Alasdair leaned forward in the seat, and anxiously directed Blake
across the island. The glossy black roads followed the lines of
tracks he had walked with his sheep during days that seemed an
eternity ago.

But every curve was yet familiar.

’
Twas the towns that
revealed Morgaine’s hand, for though they were sited as Alasdair
recalled, they bore little resemblance to the places he knew. The
land though, the land, had escaped her magical touch and was
achingly familiar on all sides. Alasdair anticipated every mount,
every valley and its view, his excitement rising with each passing
moment.

He was nearly home. His heart began to pound
with anticipation. How tall was his son? What tales had his gran to
tell? How fared the cottage, the garden, the sheep? When Alasdair
glimpsed the standing stones in the distance, his heart nearly
stopped.

They alone were precisely as he
recalled.

“
There,” he breathed to
Morgaine, hating the way his finger trembled when he indicated the
stones ahead. “There, my lady, are your standing stones, as ever
they have been.”

Morgaine looked to the enigmatic circle,
then back to Alasdair, a gleam of anticipation lurking in her
magnificent eyes. Her fingers closed over his own and squeezed, the
gesture making Alasdair’s heart leap.

Nay, ’twas only that he was nearly home.
Indeed, his humble crofter’s cottage lingered just over the far
hill. Seven years fell away and Alasdair remembered pausing on this
very rise to look back one last time.

He would not consider that it might truly
have been his last time. Only now did Alasdair question the
nobility of that impulse, only now did he wonder what he might have
sacrificed by following Robert the Bruce.

Had he the chance to do it all again,
Alasdair vowed silently, he would not stay away those seven years.
Countless opportunities there had been to turn back and go home,
but Alasdair had pressed on, determined to see the quest fulfilled,
determined to prove his honor beyond doubt.

One of those expanses of black was spread
before standing stones - as it did not in the world Alasdair knew -
and half a dozen chariots parked there. Alasdair refused to accept
the incongruity and directed Blake determinedly down a road just
beyond.

They neared the portal between their worlds,
he knew it as surely as he knew his own name. When he was safely
home, Alasdair vowed silently, he would set his many wrongs to
right.

The road turned to gravel within moments and
narrowed with familiar ease. The surface became rougher and the
Micra bounced along at much slower speed. A light drizzle of rain
had begun and a mist obscured the road ahead, a road that Alasdair
knew as well as the back of his own hand.

A heavy mist closed the space before them, a
space where Alasdair knew the hills framed a view of the endless
sea. And here, he now understood, was the place Morgaine’s world
touched his own.

At least, it did in this moment. Alasdair
recalled well enough from his gran’s tales that the portals to the
world of Faerie were oft moved capriciously by immortal
denizens.

But now, ’twas here.

One lone sheep glanced toward the Micra, the
expression on her dark face almost knowing. Then she turned and
skipped nervously along the road, ahead of the chariot. The mist
swallowed her whole and she disappeared with nary a bleat.

Alasdair’s mouth went dry. She was gone,
home to his world.

As he soon would follow.

When they bounced out of a particularly deep
rut, Blake stopped the Micra and glanced over his shoulder. “Are
you sure this is the right way? It doesn’t look as though anyone
has passed here for a while.”

“
Other than the sheep,”
Justine commented.

Alasdair would have expected naught else for
a portal between the worlds. “’Tis the right way, but I would walk
this last.”

As soon as the words left his lips, Alasdair
knew he had made the right choice. He would return as he had left,
upon his own two feet and not in some magical chariot.

He would simply walk through the mist and
arrive home. Tales of those lost to Faerie returning home years
after their disappearance flooded into his mind and for the first
time, Alasdair feared what he would find at his own hearth.

Had a year passed for every day he had been
in Morgaine’s domain? Would Angus have grown to manhood? Would his
gran have passed away without knowing where he had gone?

Alasdair could linger no longer without
knowing the whole of the truth. Justine let him out into the rain
and Alasdair suddenly wished he had his great woolen cloak. It had
served him well for many a winter and he regretted casting it aside
in that exploration of Edinburgh’s great keep.

“
I’ll come with you,”
Morgaine declared with quiet determination.