Wakening the Past: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

he came into the house.

Chapter Five
    He hugged her before asking, “Long night?”
    “It was okay. We had plenty of wood and some candles. Heat and light what more could we want?”
    “I heard wolves howling.” The sound of Bobbi’s voice behind them startled them both into pulling apart.
    “Those were only coyotes, Bobbie,” Hart told her.
    She made a show of shivering. “They sounded vicious.”
    Looping his right arm around his wife, Alistair addressed her sternly. “You’re in big trouble, young lady. I wouldn’t be surprised if your mom and dad aren’t already boarding a plane heading in this direction.”
    She considered that as she followed them into the living room. “Not my mom and dad. They can’t leave their patients suddenly like that. They’ll send Granny.”
    Hart looked so stricken that she quickly added, “It’s not that they don’t love me. It’s just that they have important responsibilities and Granny’s always been the one who looks after me. We’re good buddies, Granny and me.”
    Alistair nodded his understanding. “My Granddad and I were always especially close. Something about skipping a generation, I guess.”
    “Does he live here?”
    It was an odd question. Obviously he and Hart were the only occupants of the house. “He died long ago when I was about twelve.” Funny how he couldn’t say that even after all the years that had passed without feeling a sense of loss.
    “Oh. But did he live here?”
    Alistair frowned. “This was his ranch, though there was a smaller house during his lifetime.” He nodded to the west. “Over near the shelter belt. My mom and dad built this house.”
    She nodded as though he had satisfied some carefully considered question. Strange child, he thought.
    He told them he could only stay for a few minutes, long enough to bring more wood in, though he reported seeing electrical crews working on the lines only half a mile away who said power should be back on at the farm within the hour. The cooperative that operated the cell phones was indicating a state wide outage and would make no predictions as to when they would be up, but he told Bobbi she needn’t worry about her family as he’d been in contact with them.
    Her look of disgust told him that she hadn’t been so much worried about calling her mom and dad as her friends.
    He wished she would go away for a little so he could spend the few minutes he had home snuggling with Hart, but she seemed determined to hang close so the three of them brought in more logs to stack in the wood box in the living room and then he had no choice but to head back out on the roads.
    “What about Mr. Jeffers?” Hart asked as she kissed him goodbye.
    He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.
     
    Alistair hadn’t been gone ten minutes when the power came back on. The lights in the kitchen gave the first clue and after that Hart heard the low hum of the central heat beginning to function.
    Bobbi raced to turn on the television in the living room and snorted with disbelief when all the stations seemed to be carrying live broadcasts of the statewide ice storm.
    Hart placed bacon strips in a cast iron skillet to begin making a second, more palatable breakfast for the girl who hadn’t eaten a bite of her cereal and relaxed a little when she heard the distinctive ring tone of Bobbi’s phone. Good! Things were getting back to normal.
    She began to turn over the quickly sizzling bacon strips, their scent starting to fill the kitchen and her memory. Since last November, she’d had no more of experiences such as this she began to feel overwhelming her morning with all its supposed normality.
    Almost she had trusted that it would not happen again, that she’d seen the last of her long gone family members now that the soul called Hart was gone and she was left to stand in her place.
    Given no time to safeguard herself against the quick cooking bacon or the fact that she was standing over the kitchen range, Hart saw