Page 125 of The Reluctant Viking

He fell back then, heavily, his hand still clutching hers tightly. Ruby didn’t have to touch his chest to know the truth.

Thork was dead.

Ruby screamed and threw herself over Thork, shaking him, trying desperately to get him to awaken. Then, as if rising outside her own body, Ruby saw Aud, Dar, Tykir and Eirik staring at her and Thork from the other side of the bed—pitifully—with tears streaming down all their faces.

Ruby heard a high-pitched, wailing scream somewhere. It got louder and louder, closer and closer, seemed to move inside her head, swirling, swirling. Then it exploded.

Utter, eternal silence billowed over her like a soft, comforting cloud.

Chapter Twenty-two

“Click! Click! Click!”

Ruby opened her eyes slowly, reluctantly, and looked down. She blinked disbelievingly.

A cassette player lay in her lap, clicking away. The motivational tape had run its course. Ruby pressed the off-button with a dull robotlike movement.

Not sure if she was still dreaming, or finally awake, Ruby put a palm to her chest as if to calm her wildly thudding heart. Goosebumps swept her skin like slow-moving dominoes as awareness crept into her consciousness degree by infinitesimal degree.

She had returned to the twentieth century.

Or had she ever left?

Ruby could no longer separate the dream from reality. Sitting up straight, she put the tape player aside and held a hand to her forehead, trying desperately to understand what had happened to her.

Jack had left her, Ruby remembered with a groan of despair. She’d come into his library and put one of his motivational tapes in the machine, hoping pathetically to come up with some answers to the mess she’d made of her life. The speaker on the tape had promised that anything in life was possible if a person willed it strongly enough, and Ruby had foolishly wished she were twenty years younger and could live her life over knowing what she did today.

Oh, Lord!

Had she really traveled back in time? No, it wasn’t possible.

Searching her brain for other alternatives, she wondered if she might be having a nervous breakdown. It was a definite possibility, but people having nervous breakdowns flipped out totally, didn’t they? Oh, well, if there was such a thing as “walking pneumonia,” maybe she was having a “walking nervous breakdown.”

Disoriented, Ruby frantically searched Jack’s study for clues. Everything remained the same, just as it always was. The clock on the shelf above the desk ticked away. Five o’clock. Oh, my God! Only two hours since Jack had left! How was that possible?

Suddenly, memory rolled over Ruby like a tidal wave, and she cried aloud with the pain of it.

“Thork! Oh, please, God, don’t let Thork be dead.” She frowned. What was she saying? Thork didn’t exist. Jack did.

Ruby raked the splayed fingers of both hands through her hair and held them there. Rocking back and forth, she wailed sorrowfully in desolation over the death of her Viking husband. An inner, nagging voice viewed her mourning as irrational, and yet, at the same time, Ruby could not stop herself.

Her head pounding with the beginnings of a killer migraine, she stood and walked woodenly to the downstairs bathroom for an aspirin. As she filled a cup with water, about to put the pill in her mouth, Ruby looked into the mirror above the sink. The cup and aspirin fell from her shaking hands.

A tear-streaked, thirty-eight-year-old face stared back at her with its chic Sassoon hairstyle. It was an attractive face, but with the first stages of those hated tiny laugh lines flanking her eyes and mouth.

Thirty-eight! Hell!

Ruby looked down at her son’s Brass Balls T-shirt and her jeans. She hesitated, sensing what she’d find, then undid the waistband of her jeans and peeked below.

Yup! Stretch marks!

“Shit!” Ruby said aloud.

She could almost guarantee that if she pulled the jeans down farther she’d find the beginnings of cellulite on her thighs. Well, just a little! Ruby told herself with near-hysterical irrelevance. A slight grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. Criminey! She was having a nervous breakdown and making jokes with herself.

The hall phone rang, jarring Ruby’s senses. She picked it up on the second ring. Maybe it was Jack.

It wasn’t.