Page 110 of No Place in Time

“I see you’ve thought about this,” he said.

“Yes.”

Her parents exchanged one of their long, wordless glances, a silent conversation Cecily had watched her whole life. She had grown up in the strength of that bond, and now, after everything she had seen, she felt she finally understood it.

“She’s not wrong,” Rosamund said at last to Thomas. “Cecily’s behavior, as childish and selfish as it was, may work to her benefit if Lord Veyron knows of it.”

Thomas did not exactly smile, but his face softened. “Agreed.” He looked at Cecily. “We’ll tell him you need more time to mature. That a girl who rides off alone without warning is perhaps not yet ready for the responsibilities of a great house.” A faint, dry note entered his voice. “He won’t like it. But it’s harder to argue with than an outright refusal.”

“And in the meantime?” Cecily asked.

“In the meantime,” her father said, “you stay close, you behave impeccably in company, and you let us handle Lord Alard.” He held her gaze. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Cecily said. “But wouldn’t you like me to misbehave a little? Just to make the story true?”

They gazed at her somberly, her father frowning. A corner of Cecily’s mouth twitched, then lifted into a small, sure smile. “Of course I agree,” she said, a lightness in her voice that surprised them both. “I will behave myself.”

Her mother rose and came to her then, and Cecily stood to meet her. Rosamund took her face in both hands the way she had when Cecily was small. Her mother looked at her for a long moment.

“You came back different,” she said. It was not an accusation, but an observation.

Cecily held her gaze. “I grew up a little.”

Her mother nodded slowly, as though she recognized the truth of it, even if she didn’t understand it. Then she pulled her close, and Cecily laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and felt her father’s hand come to rest gently on her hair.

Outside, Malethurst Hall went about its business. Somewhere a door banged. A dog barked once and fell silent. The fire crackled in the hearth.

Cecily closed her eyes.

She had been Lady Veyron, dying. She had been a fugitive, a servant, a woman with no name and no home, and no one who knew her whole story. She had crossed nearly sixty years in a single breath and come back to find this—this ordinary room, these ordinary sounds, these two people who loved her without condition or agenda.

She had almost thrown it away.

51

CECILY

1239

Two years. Two years to manage her father’s negotiations, two years to prove her patience, two years until Finn could ask for her hand.

Their entire plan rested on a single fact they’d learned in another life: in two years, Alard de Veyron would be dead.

Cecily stood before the small glass in her chamber and let her maid fasten the last of the ties on the blue gown.

Two years felt like forever and like nothing at all. She let herself imagine it sometimes, in the quiet moments before sleep. Finn coming to her father, formally, properly, to ask for her hand in marriage. The look on her mother’s face. The wedding, small, she thought, in the chapel at Malethurst, with her parents, her brother, and Anton and Beja. And after that, Veyron Hall as it should be, warm, well-run, open to the tenants who needed it. Children someday, she thought, and felt her cheeks warm. Children with Finn’s dark eyes and, God help them, her stubbornness. She would do great things for the region. She would make her parents proud. She would be exactly the kind of mistress of a great house she’d been trained to be, and Finn would be beside her.

She had known what she wanted since the morning she’d woken in a freezing barn with her head on his shoulder and felt, for the first time in her life, perfectly safe. The kiss at the physician’s house had only confirmed it.

Waiting had never been her gift. It felt possible now because she had waited before, across centuries, across timelines, across a separation she had not believed she would survive, and she had come through it.

She smoothed her skirts. Outside, a carriage was rolling through the gates, and she could hear her father’s voice in the yard below.

She had her parents back. She had Finn. She had a plan that might actually work.

Two years, she told herself again. She could manage that.

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