his voice lower now, tense, as if fearing the answer.
“Just a woman who was enjoying a very fine dream before the cat yowled. Please stop yelling at me. You were so much more appealing half-asleep.”
He stares at me. Just stares. I’m about to speak again when he lunges and grabs me by the arm. I’m still in bed, kneeling, and his sudden yank topples me before I can object. Next thing I know, I’m on my feet, being dragged into a patch of moonlight. My nightshirt tears, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Fingers roughly grip my chin and wrest my face upward.
Then he stops. Goes completely still again and breathes, “Bronwyn.”
I look up into a face as familiar as his smell and his voice. I know them by heart, and yet do not know them at all. A broad face, hard edged and beard shadowed, with a knife-cut line between thick brows. A face that I remember as soft edges and smooth cheeks. Yet under that hard maturity, I see the boy I knew. I see his sky-blue eyes. I see the curve of his jaw. I see the dark hair curling over a wide forehead. I look at the man and instead gaze upon a boy I haven’t seen in twenty-three years.
“William,” I whisper, and he releases me, recoiling.
I fall backward, thumping to the floor, and when I look up, the man is gone.
3
I sit on my bedroom floor, blinking. A cat mews, and I jump, but it’s only the kitten, crawling onto my lap, as if wondering how I got on the floor.
Good question, kitten.
Obviously, I’d fallen out of bed after dreaming I’d been yanked from it by . . .
William.
Twenty-three years ago, I fled this house, screaming about a ghost. One episode, however, was not enough to land me in a psychiatric ward. That came when, in my grief and shock, I began babbling about other people I’d seen in Thorne Manor. About a boy who shared my room hundreds of years ago. A boy who’d been my friend . . . and then more than a friend.
William Thorne.
I don’t remember the first time we met. For me, William has always been as much a part of this house as the grandfather clock. My earliest memory of Thorne Manor is of being in a room that is mine and yet not mine. In William’s bedroom, the two of us, little more than toddlers, playing marbles as if we’ve known each other forever. In that memory, I sense that I’ve already been there many times, seen him many times, played this game many times.
I’d been too young to think anything odd about that. William was my friend at Auntie Judith’s summer house. If I closed my eyes and thought about him in my bedroom, I would open them to find myself in his room.
When we got older, we roamed farther afield. To the stables, to the hay barn, to the moors, to the attic, and the secret passage and every corner of this house. We avoided his family and staff. I was William’s secret, and he was mine.
Then came my parents’ divorce, and it was ten years before I returned. At fifteen I came back, and I had only to think of him while in my bedroom, and I stepped through, and there he was, my age again and as awkwardly sweet as any fifteen-year-old girl could want.
I fell in love that summer, and it was the most perfect first romance imaginable. We walked hand in hand through the moors. We kissed under a canopy of stars. We talked, endlessly talked, and wanted nothing more than to be together even if I was curled up in the stable with a book while he groomed his horses.
As for how I traveled back to William’s time, we didn’t need an explanation. The answer was obvious. He was real, and I was real, and therefore, what happened must be equally real—real magic. A shared room, a shared life. A reasonable explanation for a fifteen-year-old girl, madly in love with a boy who lived two centuries before her.
The truth was much harsher. After my uncle died and I babbled my confession about William, the doctors explained that stress had twisted memories of an imaginary childhood friend into vivid hallucinations of a teenage boy.
My father is a historian, and I caught the bug from him, and so, the doctors explained, I imagined a Thorne boy who once lived in my Thorne Manor