Beyond Time: A Knights Through Time Travel Romance (Knights Through Time Travel #1)(16)

They spent the rest of the evening watching scary movies, eating way too much junk, and laughing until they cried. Amy had the ability to say the most outrageous things that made Mellie laugh until her stomach hurt and tears ran down her face. Her friend was always working on a project, she had the best parties, and Mellie envied Amy’s ability to make friends wherever she went. While Mellie herself was a serious introvert who’d rather read than socialize. She found it difficult to warm up to people. It took a while, long enough the person who’d made the overture would move on, tired of her being so standoffish.

Her thoughts vacillated between Greg, the Fourth of July family party, and, of course, him. She’d tried to call once to find out how he was doing, but no one would give her any information. And every time Mellie swore she’d put him out of her mind over the past week, those blue eyes kept coming back to haunt her. The look of utter betrayal on his face as the cops took him away. It was late, almost four in the morning, when Amy woke up.

“Are you looking at more Greg pictures?” Amy yawned.

“Nope.” Mellie shut the laptop and hid it under a pillow.

Amy snatched it, put it up on the top of the bookcase, and piled blankets on top.

“No more looking at Greg and Melinda, the witch,” she called out from the kitchen as she rummaged through the cabinets.

“I think it’s time for Pixy Stix and cotton candy.”

“For breakfast?”

Amy laughed. “Breakup food doesn’t count. You can eat it whenever you want and the calories don’t count, so we better enjoy it while we can.”

“You’re right. Let’s chow.”

“So what are you going to do about the big family event?”

Mellie sat cross-legged on the couch. “I thought about coming clean and telling my family what was going on, but then I decided there was no way I was listening to my brothers and their wives’ pitying comments and platitudes about how I’ll find the right guy, blah blah blah. I’m sick and tired of all their crap, so I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago…I’m going to make up a boyfriend.”

When Amy didn’t tell her she was losing it, Mellie went on, the story unfolding before her as she created the perfect man.

“He lives in another state, a corporate attorney who works all the time, so we only see each other on weekends. I figure I can keep him in play for the next month, which will get me to the big family reunion, and suddenly the night before the event, I’ll say we had a big fight and broke up.”

“Absolutely brilliant.” Amy clapped, a huge grin on her face, a piece of cotton candy stuck to her nose. “In fact, it’s so brilliant I think I’m going to use the same thing with my sister. Do you know what she told me the other day?”

Mellie shook her head, and pixy dust went up her nose, making her sneeze.

“She had the nerve to tell me that I was too pushy and too demanding, and I needed to look back to the fifties to learn how to keep a man.” Amy waggled her eyebrows. “Can you believe it? What am I supposed to do, bring him slippers and his pipe and greet him at the door with a cocktail as I’m wrapped in plastic wrap?”

Amy shook her head, agitated as she paced around the living room, Oreo crumbs flying like rain.

“I don’t think so. If anything, he can have a cocktail waiting for me when I come home from a hard day at the office.”

Mellie raised her glass. They’d run out of chocolate milk and had switched to mimosas. She touched her glass to Amy’s. “To fake boyfriends. May they make us incredibly happy.”

They touched glasses, giggling until their sides ached.





ELEVEN





For a se’nnight, they held Connor in the cell before they let him out. And when the guards opened the door, Connor wished they had not, for the wretches he encountered…this place made him wish he had been a better man when he was alive.

Witless souls, some of the men harmed themselves, while others talked to the walls, and a few stared at nothing, never saying a word. There were those who babbled in a language he could not understand. And all of them had been judged and sent to hell for eternity.

The demons looked like men, though there were a few female demons as well. The women told him they were nurses, but when he’d stared at their bosoms, they bellowed that they were not wet nurses. The women made him swallow a small, hard object every day. They said ’twas a “pill.”

Connor did not know what it was made of; he only knew when he swallowed the foul pebble, it wasn’t long after he could no longer gather his wits about him. When he hid the pill, for four days straight, he could think, had almost remembered what was so important, when the guards caught him tossing a pill into the bushes outside and made him swallow the awful-tasting objects again.

Since then, they’d checked every day, forcing him to take the vile pill. He shuffled out of the room, down the hallway, into a great hall where the others gathered. In this place, he did not talk to anyone, for he found when he did, it made him feel he was losing his wits, reminding him of one of the men in the village where he had been born and raised.

The clan called the man Big Ben, and he was kind and gentle. Though he was a huge man capable of great strength, he would not harm any animal or person, and would cry if he trampled wildflowers in the Highlands. There were many like him here.