Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

put us both at risk.
    I dropped my hand, eased back onto my heels,
and let out a steadying breath. Llywelyn took his chair, both of us
more composed. My plea had diffused whatever emotion had been about
to explode in the room, and for the first time I was glad I’d had
Trev to deal with all those years. At times, I’d been able to say
the right thing to calm him down, and weeks where I’d managed to
tiptoe around him without upsetting him.
    Unfortunately, there’d also been those days
when Trev hadn’t listened whether or not I’d held silent or begged
him to stop, allowing his own inner demons to overcome him without
regard to me. Now, with Llywelyn settled, I wanted to ask him more
about where I was, but didn’t know how to begin, and was afraid to
set him off again. In a way, the fact that he was pretending to be
a centuries dead Welsh prince didn’t even matter. He could think he
was a purple hippopotamus for all I cared. I just wanted to get out
of the room in one piece.
    Llywelyn, perhaps trying to be helpful,
tried again. “ Français ?”
    Relief flooded through me. “ Oui!” If
he refused to speak English and I didn’t know enough Welsh, at
least we could communicate in some fashion. It struck me that his
fantasy was remarkably consistent, in that the historical Llywelyn
would also have spoken French since it was the primary language of
the English court in the thirteenth century, as well as the French
one.
    Llywelyn smiled too. “You may not remember,”
he said, now in strangely accented but intelligible (to me) French,
“but your chariot ran aground in the marsh below the castle.
Moments after I retrieved you from the wreckage, it sank and
disappeared.”
    “Marsh? Castle?” I said. A befuddled fog
rose again to drive away my moment of clarity. “I was driving my
car to buy ice cream . . .” I stopped at the look Llywelyn wore on
his face—a look that said, ‘ your what to buy what?’
    “My vehicle,” I amended, hoping that the
word existed in medieval French.
    Llywelyn stood abruptly. “I won’t question
you more tonight. You must be hungry.” He strode to the door,
opened it, poked his head out, and waved one hand. Immediately, a
man hurried into the doorway and saluted.
    “ Mau Rhi?” the man said. My
lord?
    Llywelyn spoke words I couldn’t understand,
but I was only listening with half an ear anyway because this time
I was staring at the man who’d just appeared. He wore mail armor,
the little links catching the light with every shift of his body.
Over that, a white tunic adorned by three red lions decorated his
chest. He wore no helmet, and like Llywelyn, was clean shaven. He’d
clearly bought into—or was humoring—Llywelyn’s delusions.
    I crouched next to Anna’s bed, uncertain
what to do. It didn’t look like the door would get me very far, not
with a guard outside it. I checked the room for windows. It had
two, both covered with wooden shutters, though a light flashed
every now and then through the chinks between the wood and the
frame. In watching for it, I missed the rest of the men’s
conversation. Llywelyn shut the door. He returned to his chair, but
not before gesturing to me to sit again on the bed.
    “You must be tired,” he said, back to
French. “You can eat and it will make you feel better.”
    I couldn’t bear to just obey him. Yet, I
looked at my baby Anna, still sleeping, and didn’t dare disobey.
She lay quiet and desperately beautiful, a hostage to my good
behavior. Not knowing what else to do, I stood and walked past him
to the bed.
    I sat on its edge, more awkward than ever.
Neither of us spoke. I smoothed my nightgown over my thighs. Even
as I shivered, my palms sweated. I reached behind me to tug at one
of the blankets, wanting more warmth. Llywelyn leaned forward to
pull the blanket over my shoulders, before settling back in his
chair with a nod.
    “I’ll stoke the fire again before we sleep,”
he said.
    A sickening lump formed in my stomach