Page 77 of Her Highland Prophecy
She kept asking, branching out to ask the people who didn’t seem to her to be gypsies, but each time it was the same response.
“Do ye want to sell it, Lass?” a redheaded man with a big, bushy beard asked. “It would fetch ye a bonnie price.”
“No, thank you,” she replied before moving along.
Disheartened, she sat down at one of the benches and pulled out the necklace to look at it. She traced its unusual shape, wondering how she would get home if no one could give her any information. Would simply going to the cave at dawn and placing it in the same spot she had before be enough?
She sat there for a few minutes, watching as the sun was starting to set behind the mountains in the distance before she became aware of eyes on her. She couldn’t find them immediately, but as she searched, her eyes fell upon a frail gypsy woman, half-hidden behind one of the stalls, her eyes fixed on where she held the medallion in her hands.
The old woman looked up and found Diana staring back at her and then quickly darted away.
“No! Wait!” Diana exclaimed and rushed to follow her, but as soon as she reached the place she had seen the woman she was already several feet away and heading toward the woods behind her.
“Wait, please!” Diana cried again, but despite her apparent age, the woman was quick and light on her feet and Diana lost sight of her in the trees.
“Please,” she said again, loudly, hoping that the woman would come back when she heard her.
No one answered her call. Diana waited for a few minutes, still holding on to her hope. Just as she decided that she would return to the inn and try again the next morning, this time using the woman’s description to try and find her, she became aware of male voices arguing not too far from her.
Curious, she headed in that direction.
“Ye are lying,” the one man said, and she realized with a jolt that it was Gordain who was speaking.
What’s going on?
She crept through the undergrowth carefully, her eyes widened when she took note of the scene before her and then rushed headfirst into the small clearing.
28
Gordain had not wanted to leave her in the room, but he could not bear it otherwise. She was temptation itself. Her blonde hair was mussed from both sleep and his hands, and her half-lidded eyes pleaded with him to stay with her. He fled the room as soon as possible, only pausing by the tavern to buy a bannock before heading directly to the fair that was already showing signs of life as the sellers set up their displays.
“Can I interest ye in something for yer lady?” a gypsy asked him as he passed, a small array of trinkets on a folding case in front of him.
Gordain shook his head and thanked the man. His mind shied away from the idea of buying something for the woman he had left at the inn. Much as he would have loved to present her with something to take with her, nothing he could buy at the fair seemed good enough and there was no time to get anything else. He would just have to show her how he felt in a different way.
Loud bangs echoed from the smithy as he passed by, barely covering the sound of talking between the smith and one of his customers. Snatches of conversation were audible between the loud clangs.
“Two dirks!”
“…verra expensive…”
“…quality.”
He walked away from the loud noises, casually perusing the items on sale from the various gypsies and merchants that had come to the fair that year. It was not as many as there had been the previous year, but then again, that was to be expected after the winter they had just had. There just wasn’t as much to go around.
His mind inevitably kept circling back to the woman he had left on the bed in the inn. She was most likely somewhere among the people wandering the fair by now, trying to find any information she could about the gypsy’s medallion.
If he were being honest with himself, he could not bear to pretend that everything was great as they searched for the person that would help take her away from him. He knew she was anxious to return to her own time, and even though all he wanted was for her to be happy, he couldn’t bring himself to assist her beyond bringing her to the fair.
So he wandered around the fair’s grounds, venturing out to the nearby woods when he didn’t see anything that captured his fancy. He could still see and hear the comings and goings of the fair from where he sat, but it was quiet enough where he could think.
Now that they had come this far he was reticent to let Diana go, no matter how much he could see she wanted it. He wouldn’t do anything to stop her, but he was coming to realize that, somewhere deep inside him, he has not believed that she would actually leave and now that the time was upon them he was having a hard time accepting it.
So here he sat, rather than being with her as she found her gypsy.
Coward.
He ignored the small, insidious voice inside of him that was becoming more and more insistent as he sat on the small boulder.
