The Sunstone Brooch : Time Travel Romance Katherine Logan (no david read aloud TXT) 📖

but with different stones. Each one is a time-traveling device with slightly different properties. I made my first trip back to the year 1881 when I was a teenager.”

He took a small stick from the kindling pile and sketched the brooch in the dirt. “I was with my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We went back to Napa to save the life of a young girl battling diabetes, which was a fatal disease at that time.”

“Did you save her?”

“We brought her home with us, and she’s now finishing her internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital.”

“Are you talking about your cousin Emily?”

He nodded.

“She’s from the nineteenth century?”

He nodded again.

“Unbelievable.” Ensley’s shoulders sagged as overwhelming relief suffused through her system. “That means I have a return trip stamped on my passport.”

He used his hand to wipe away the design he’d drawn, then tossed the stick into the fire. “For personal reasons, I decided to use your brooch, go back for you, and return home without involving my family. Since you left your brooch behind, I figured it had the same properties as the topaz brooch. When you activate that one, it gets too hot to hold. So I took precautions and wore an oven mitt.” He stopped and looked away, but after a pause, he turned back toward her. “Even with a mitt, it got too hot to hold.”

“I know. It got scalding hot for me, too. I couldn’t hold it—” And then the realization hit her with the force of a high-speed, rear-end collision and knocked her reality into a concrete wall. “Noooo!”

JC’s eyes were on her, but she looked away until she was ready to hear the truth that would shatter her hopes. She counted to ten, to twenty, to a hundred gazillion. He’d thrown her a life preserver, which wasn’t attached to a rope to keep her from drifting away. Tears trickled down her cheeks.

Finally, she turned to look daggers at him. “You dropped it, didn’t you? And now we have…” She took a deep breath. “We have no way to go home.” She forced her features to relax, hoping to erase traces of her growing fear and confusion. Calmly, she dried her tears and waited.

He opened his mouth to say something, but his expression froze as he stared back at her. She set her dandelion coffee aside and pushed to her feet, needing to think, and pacing always helped her uncouple fear from reason. She never once let him get away with anything while they were in college, and she wasn’t about to start now.

“Do you want to know my first impression of you?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me whether I want to hear it or not.”

“You’re right,” she said, crossing her arms. “I told my girlfriend, ‘See that good-looking guy over there? He’s a rich, spoiled, intelligent party boy.’ And now I can add irresponsible.”

“Of all the things I might be, I am not irresponsible.” His mouth tightened down at the corners, a sure sign that he was getting defensive and refusing to admit what was evident to her. “Why are you giving me such a hard time, anyway?” he asked. “I’m here, aren’t I? I came to rescue you.”

“Rescue implies freeing someone from confinement, danger, or evil. As far as I can tell, I’m still confined here.” Her foot bounced in a pissed-off allegro, her heart squeezed ripcord-tight and, for a moment, forgot to beat.

“I didn’t drop the brooch on purpose, Ensley, and if you don’t want me here, I’ll leave. I’ll head toward Elkhorn Ranch. If you change your mind, I’ll be there for a few days. After that, I’m going to Kentucky to visit my six- or seven-times-great-grandfather.”

“Great-grandfather?” That was a shock to her heart. “How?” She thumped her chest to calm the shock. “How could you possibly have a relative here?”

His reply was a coy smile as if he were secretly holding some mysterious piece of the puzzle and wasn’t ready to share. But after a moment, he teased, “It’s complicated.”

“Say anything, but don’t say that. I’m intelligent enough to untangle something complicated.”

“Okay, he’s the uncle of my mom’s several times great-grandmother.”

“What’s her name?”

“Kit MacKlenna Montgomery.”

Ensley rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t make any sense. He’s not your grandfather. He’s your uncle.” She plunked down at the bank of the river, her head starting to throb.

He sat down next to her. “It’s complicated because my mom’s several times great-grandmother is also my dad’s goddaughter.”

She rubbed her forehead. “You’re damn right. It’s complicated.”

“Let me just say that relationships get screwed up when people time travel. Kit Montgomery should have died by now from a brain tumor, but she came forward in time and is now a healthy woman in her late fifties.”

Ensley leaned her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm around her, and she leaned further into him. “We’ll have to get jobs. Can you practice law here?”

“Probably, but money isn’t a problem,” he said. “I’ve got gold nuggets with me, and if I wanted to practice, we could go to Napa and live at Montgomery Winery, and I could take over my uncle’s law practice in San Francisco.”

“Your uncle?”

“You’ve met Uncle Cullen and Uncle Braham. You wouldn’t know it, but they were both born in 1824, married women from the future, and came forward to live.”

“Seriously? Well, you’d never know it.” She sat up and looked across the river as the sun moved below the horizon. “Do you think it works in reverse?”

“What?” he asked.

“That people from the future can fit in as seamlessly in the past?”

“Kit did for thirty years. But look at TR. People out here think he’s odd, both in the way he dresses and speaks. We’ll sound different, too. But once we find out what year it is, we can consider our options.”

She took a deep breath and exhaled with an internal curse. “We don’t have any.”

“Sure, we do.” He capped his statement with a smile, putting a good spin on it, but