The Sapphire Brooch Katherine Logan (best beach reads TXT) 📖

gorgeous chestnut stallion with three white stockings trotted past her before stopping and lifting his head, his nostrils quivering as he sniffed the air.

“What do you smell, gorgeous?”

The stallion trotted toward her corner of the fence.

Charlotte sniffed the air, too—freshly turned earth, manure, magnolias—scents unchanging from one century to the next. The whiteness of the clouds was still as fierce against the dark blue of the sky as it had been in Washington. The blue was not as dark as Braham’s uniform, however. She sniffed again, this time to stop her runny nose. The pregnancy test was negative, and she had only herself to blame for dashed hopes. At thirty-eight the odds of getting pregnant without the use of fertility drugs were very low. Even with drugs, her chances were iffy.

“That’s Stormy. He’s a time-traveling stallion.”

She jumped when Elliott spoke from behind her. “Guess that means Kit either took him with her or brought him back.”

Elliott joined her at the fence and rested his forearms on the top plank. “Kit knew she’d need a horse to ride. Took a million-dollar stallion on a thousand-mile trip through the wilderness. Ye should have seen Stormy when he came home. Ribs were showing. Kit wasn’t in much better shape.” Elliott rubbed the horse’s forehead and Stormy flicked his ears in response.

“Why didn’t she take him back the second time?”

“She intended to, but at the last minute it came down to breeding. She didn’t want to introduce a twenty-first-century stallion’s bloodlines into the nineteenth century.”

“Is that an indirect way of asking me if I’m breeding?”

Elliott lifted only one shoulder in a shrug, and then he pursed his lips a little, as thoughts flashed half-formed across his face. After a moment, he said, “When Meredith and I were dating, she told me she never wanted to see me again. I wasn’t a very nice person, and I deserved the verbal blow to the jaw. A few weeks after she kicked my ass to the curb, she got clobbered with a double whammy.”

“Meredith told me she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time she found out she was pregnant.” Charlotte patted Stormy’s neck. Basking in the attention of two people, the stallion’s muscles relaxed and his eyelids began to droop. “If you were being a jerk, I’m surprised Meredith told you. She must have been very scared.”

“Aye, she was. Her doctor encouraged her to tell me in case she became too sick to care for the child. She showed up here one night and told me I was going to be a father. I was thrilled, of course. In the next breath, she told me she had breast cancer. I had recently lost Kit and my father, and I wasn’t going to lose Meredith, too. We had a difference of opinion about how to handle both situations. I wanted her to fight for her life. She wanted to fight for the baby’s.”

“Now she’s healthy, and you have little James Cullen.”

“Aye, it’s true. But the point I’m trying to make is we don’t understand why we have the trials we do. If we give up, we’ll never receive the blessings to come afterward.” Elliott gave the horse a final pat and linked his fingers, rubbing one thumb with the other in a distracted sort of way. “In the last few years, I’ve known two women who were pregnant in difficult circumstances. Both found a way to be joyful in spite of hardship. Whether ye’re pregnant or not, find yer place of joy and rest there. It’s where ye’ll truly be blessed.”

Charlotte stopped petting the horse, swallowed hard, and asked, “Do you think I can find it?”

Elliott turned his head to look at her, and his eyes held a depth of understanding she had never seen before. He gathered her into his arms, hugged her tightly, and the muscles in her back yielded slowly as tension subsided.

“I know ye will, lass. Now come inside. We have last-minute preparations. It’s almost time to go.”

She backed away from him, scarcely breathing, watching his eyes. The tension which had barely subsided ramped back up. “We’re going today?”

“We’re waiting for the FedEx truck. As soon as we receive the last delivery, all will be ready. Yer clothes arrived from the tailor. We’ve gathered every piece of relevant research, and David’s testing the drone.”

She stared at Elliott, baffled, and then simply blinked, making no sense whatever of this. It had only been two hours since she had mentioned a drone, jokingly. “He got one?”

Elliott nodded, eyes intent on hers. “It was either the first or second item he added to his want list.”

A warm ripple of shock thinned the air in her lungs. Why hadn’t he told her?

Evidently her thoughts showed, for Elliott said, “He ordered the drone to use for reconnaissance, but he’s leery of introducing a UFO and possibly PE-4 into the nineteenth century. He likely won’t use it, but he won’t leave anything to chance either”

“A drone and plastic explosives?”

“Kit took an assault rifle and saved a wagon train from a stampede. Nothing much came of it except a few journal entries about a mysterious gun.”

“Changing history wasn’t such a big concern when she was saving lives, I guess.”

A slight smile turned into a wry glance as Elliott’s mouth tucked in at one corner. “I told Kit she couldn’t go back in time and change history, since it might obliterate her life. When Jack returned to find his journal, he got caught up in something that changed yer family history.” Elliott took her arm. “Come on, let’s walk.” They turned toward the mansion, following a brick path around the paddock. “This will get tricky for ye, lass. When ye exonerate Jack, he’ll be coming home to a plantation which for ye doesn’t exist. Ye and David will be the only people in the world who will have any memory of the plantation being destroyed and never rebuilt.”

“But you’ll know, won’t you? I mean, we’re having a discussion about