She and Yolande and Gabrielle usually started their cooking lessons after couvre-feu, and she had been going to bed at about ten—not that she was exactly sure it was ten, but it felt like ten. Which was why, at the moment, she was pretty sure it was about eleven.
For someone who was used to digital clocks and watches with second hands and last-minute plane flights and thirty-minute workouts and overnight mail service and two-minute microwave meals and faxes and modems and the dizzying pace of life in Chicago and New York and Paris and London, it was frustrating and weird to never know exactly what time it was.
On the other hand, it was kind of nice.
She set Groucho down in front of the hearth, folding her note and tucking it beneath the pillow he had been using as a bed. As she stood and picked up her cloak, she felt a painful tug at her heart. It was going to be hard to leave her kitten behind. And her hats. She glanced at the lovely little collection she had gathered, stacked on a trunk at the foot of her bed, all in wonderfully outlandish shapes and colors.
And Yolande and Gabrielle. She would miss them, too. It was surprising how attached she had become to this place and its people in only a matter of weeks. She would miss Etienne, with his youthful enthusiasm and wide-eyed hero worship. And Captain Royce and his sense of humor ...
And Gaston. Who was she kidding? Fool that she was, she would miss Gaston. More than she had ever missed anything or anyone in her life.
With a resolute shake of her head, she forced that feeling to the smallest, deepest, most secret reaches of her heart. Putting on her cloak to conceal the teddy she wore, she picked up a candle and tiptoed out into the hall, toward the guest room a few doors away—and her “window of opportunity.”
Her mental clock was already ticking past eleven.
When she opened the door, the first thing she noticed was the light of the waning full moon seeping through a crack in the shutters. She blew out the candle in her hand, welcoming the darkness—because darkness prevented her from seeing the bed, remembering how she had first awakened in it, nestled in Gaston’s arms. The way he had teased her. Their first kiss ...
She moved past the bed to the window, trying to think of every detail of what she had been doing in 1993 when she had been sent here: standing just a few inches from the glass, looking at the lights in the town below, when the moonlight struck her and she fell backward into—
The year 1300. She stepped closer to open the shutters, but found a trunk in her way, beneath the window right where she needed to stand. That damned trunk again. She remembered it from before. She had knocked her knee against it very painfully when she had scrambled out of Gaston’s arms. Well, it was in the way and it would have to go.
She bent over and tried to push it, but it didn’t budge. “What’s in this thing?” she wheezed. “Bricks?”
She decided it might be easier to move if she took out some of the heavy contents. Unfortunately, she discovered it was locked.
She muttered one of Gaston’s favorite medieval curses under her breath. All she could do was throw her entire weight against the trunk, so she did, straining with the exertion. Slowly, the heavy object began to inch along the wall. The clank of metal against metal helped her guess what was in it: probably plates and candlesticks and other valuables, of silver or gold. Without banks, she had learned, medieval tycoon types relied on safe, portable investments that could be melted down.
With the trunk out of the way, she opened the shutters. Moonlight spilled into the chamber, making her blink in the brightness. The eclipse had already begun, a small slice of black eating into one edge of the moon’s surface.
Breathing hard, she let her cloak slide from her shoulders, and waited for midnight. Her heart started pounding. Had she thought of everything? She couldn’t afford to make a mistake.
When she lifted her hand to dab at perspiration on her upper lip, a sparkle in the moonlight caught her eye, and she realized she hadn’t thought of everything.
Her wedding ring. She was still wearing the gold band Gaston had placed on her finger when they said their vows.
With shaking fingers, she took it off, stepped away from the window, and set it on the trunk. She had to duplicate exactly the moment she had been sent here from 1993. She could not let anything medieval hold her back.
Turning again to the window, she waited, breathing, thinking of home. Of all the reasons she desperately wanted to go home. To have her operation. To be safe again. To see her family, her overprotective mom and dad, and Jackie, and her brother-in-law, Harry, and sweet little Nicholas. She thought of her friends, her fiber-arts studio, her car. Movies. Television. Chocolate. Her condo with its central heating and well-stocked fridge. Was someone taking care of her cats?