“I’m busy,” she muttered, then tried to push past him.
Of course, he didn’t budge. She could have shoved him with all of her might, and he wouldn’t have moved an inch.
“Hunter, I have a child to look after,” she tried again. “And I can’t have this conversation right now. I need to see Freya.”
With some reluctance, Hunter took a step away, allowing her to turn the handle and walk into his daughter’s room.
Maybe it wasn’t wise to pressure Nancy, but the thought of her choosing anything but marriage to him was beginning to drive him a little mad. He’d meant it when he said that when he liked something, he strove to keep it. And she had become something he didn’t want to lose.
Will ye just trust me, lass? Will ye just trust that I can handle what’s comin’?
He didn’t know how to explain to her that he had seen more battles than he cared to count, that he had been attacked and injured and cornered almost weekly for years, yet he had survived. He had been in a thousand situations that had seemed impossible to win, and yet he had survived.
But she wasn’t from this time, he knew that now. So, how could he explain what she hadn’t experienced? Nothing he said would reassure her when she was so fixated on this silly tapestry.
However, from his perspective, if a person could travel through time, then anything was possible. Changing his fate wasn’t an exception; he would prove it to her if she would just agree to stay to see it.
With a sigh, he retreated from the doorway.
First, whiskey. Second, I need to have a word with Jack.
“Your daddy is as stubborn as a donkey,” Nancy murmured as she lay beside Freya on a blanket on the floor, dangling her keys for the child’s amusement. “Part of me hopes you inherit that, the other part of me hopes you don’t.”
Freya smacked the keys with a gurgle, her face a picture of happiness.
“He’s clearly a good fighter,” Nancy went on, “but this is… cosmic intervention. He can’t fight what has already happened. I mean, I do not doubt that my mom wanted to change things and come back to me, but the… magic or whatever wouldn’t let her. What if it won’t let him?”
Unless all roads always lead here.
The thought sent a horrible shiver down her spine.
She didn’t want to think that the powers-that-be were that conniving and that complex, but what if her mother had been trapped in this world so that she would eventually wish to find her, and be brought to this world too?
Sure, it seemed ridiculous, but Nancy had learned that fate and this time-traveling force were long-term planners and organized ones at that.
If Jane hadn’t become an archaeologist and the Scottish government hadn’t wanted to send a team to Castle Culloch to excavate, so they could turn it into a tourist destination, and Jane hadn’t been in the right place at the right time tobeon that team, she wouldn’t have been sent back in time. If a team hadn’t been sent in 2004 and hadn’t found the tapestry of her husband, she might not have been thinking of him when she went down the ancient stairs and got transported.
If Adeline hadn’t chosen to be a doctor and hadn’t gotten drunk and angry the night her ‘superior’ made an indecent proposal, throwing the snow globe against the wall, she wouldn’t have been hurtled back in time to her little island. She wouldn’t have arrived in time to save the island from a plague. And that was without taking into account how the snow globe had come into her possession, and how many hands it had been passed down from before it got to her. Or, rather, who had made the snow globe in the first place.
All the pieces had to be in the right order, no detail spared.
Wait…
“The plague,” Nancy whispered, her heart leaping.
It stood to reason that the plague that had threatened Adeline’s island home should have killed everyone, or a lot of the residents at least. During their talks over the past couple of days, Adeline had mentioned that it had been simple enough to treat, but when people weren’t aware of modern medicine or even washing their hands, it became a big problem.
People who should have been dead are still alive because of her.
“People who should have been dead are still alive,” she repeated out loud, as she sat up and scooped the baby into her arms, kissing her chubby little cheeks. “If that didn’t break the universe, my sweet angel, then how can I? It’s just one person, not a whole island!”
Freya stared at her with her big eyes, clearly bewildered.
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said as she got to her feet, baby in her arms, and gently lay the child down in her crib. “I’ll be back very soon. I just have to speak to your daddy.”
With her heart pounding and her head swimming with possibilities, a tiny flame of hope wavering with all its might in her chest, she darted out of the nursery and called for a maid. One emerged from a nearby room, rubbing her eyes as if she’d been napping.
“Is somethin’ wrong, Miss Kane?” the maid asked.
