Time Crossed: A Time Thief Novella (A Penguin Special from Signet) Read Online Free Page B

the place where you died?”
    “That would be a remarkably tall cliff indeed,” I murmured, making another note. “Perhaps that height is a slight exaggeration?”
    Gwen suddenly leaped to her feet and slapped her hands on her thighs. “Well, of course it’s an exaggeration. It’s supposed to tell you just how I feel about that cliff. One minute I was lying in an exquisite moment of summer bliss, and the next I found myself returned to the spot where I had been a few minutes before some unknown person flung me to my death.”
    “Mmm.”
    “Well, of course, what was I to think but that I’d gone crazy and hallucinated the whole thing? I mean, I’m not in the least bit psychic or anything, so that whole dying thing couldn’t have been an elaborate premonition of my death.” She paced across the room, turned, and paced back. “I figured I was losing it, or that Seawright had slipped me some sort of wacky juice when I wasn’t looking, or something like that. And I thought long and hard for about ten minutes about going back to the pub to have it out with Seawright, but that wouldn’t really answer the question of what really happened. I
had
to know, you know?”
    She waited for me to validate her curiosity.
    “You had to know who, if anyone, was waiting for you on that lower cliff top?”
    “Exactly. So after arguing with myself for a bit over that, and making sure I wasn’t hallucinating anything else, I went over to the edge of the cliff and started climbing down. Just as I arrived at the top of the lower level cliff, a man shot up over the lip of it—there was a wooden staircase that led down to the beach—and looked around wildly.”
    “Wildly?” I asked, glancing up from my tablet of paper.
    “Yeah, you know.” Her hands gestured vaguely in the air. “Wildly. He looked one way, then the other, and his hair was standing on end, and his eyes were as big as saucers.”
    “Did that make you feel threatened?”
    Gwen slapped her hands on her thighs again as she resumed pacing. “Of course I felt threatened! Here was a man right on the same spot where I had been thrown down to my death, and he looked like a madman, all wind-ruffled hair and crazy eyes.”
    “What did you do?”
    “He started asking me about the magic, and I told him I wasn’t going to give him anything, and was about to tell him just what I’d do if he continued to harass my moms, when a second guy popped up. Only he came out of the shrubs, so he must have been hiding there.”
    “You must have been greatly concerned about that situation: one man alone is dangerous. Two against one can be quite daunting.”
    “Well . . .” Her nose scrunched in thought. “Yes and no. The second guy didn’t give off a bad vibe. Not then, anyway. He was blond and had these really nice blue eyes, and a little cleft in his chin that just made me want to bite it.”
    “Do you think that was an appropriate reaction to have given those circumstances?”
    She gave me a look out of the corner of her eye as she strolled to the window. “Look, you deal with potentially murderous, handsome madmen the way you want to deal with them. I’m going to notice sexy chins. Where was I? Oh, so there was the crazy first guy, yammering on all sorts of threatening stuff, and all of sudden he grabs me, and the second guy pops up and punches him in the face. I mean, really nails him. Down goes the lawyer—did I mention that this guy who threatened my moms is a lawyer? How ironic is that? Down he goes, and I’m left standing on a windy cliff with this blond stranger. I’m no idiot, so I certainly wasn’t going to stand there and let this man kill me again—assuming I actually was killed the first time, and not premonitioning the whole thing. And also assuming that blondie was the one to kill me, not that I think he is now, because it seems to me the lawyer pretty much proved he was the bad guy, but I couldn’t know for sure, could I?”
    I tried to untangle