He glanced at Charlotte. She appeared a bit distracted. Was it because of him? He wanted to smile to reassure her. But he didn’t. He couldn’t reassure her when he didn’t know himself.

  “Colin,” he said, pushing the rest of his food away and signaling that supper was over. “You and Gerald go recruit some men. Men that you know and tr—”

  “Oh, send William instead,” Charlotte cut him off with a touch of her hand on his arm. “He is friendly enough and I need Gerald to help me in one of the rooms I was looking in. The shelves are very high, and since he is the tallest—”

  Michael held up his hand to stop her and looked at Colin. “Take William with you instead.”

  He then turned to Gerald. “Gerald, go see to Lady Charlotte’s needs,” he allowed and watched Gerald as he passed him. He was the taller of the two.

  Michael quirked his brow at her then shook his head slightly and escorted Colin and William out of the house, giving them instructions on the kinds of men he was looking for. Something was up with Charlotte and Gerald. He was going to find out.

  Left alone in the courtyard after the two men left, he thought about starting over here. Starting fresh, with no past. No ghosts.

  “Greetings, Detective,” Roldan Simeon’s voice broke through his thoughts and made him jump. “I do hope you’re not angry with me for staying away for so long. Apparently, taking Napoleon’s hat nearly started a war with one of his allies. Seems he likes his hats. I had to return it back to the exact moment I took it.”

  Michael would like to grab him and put him in a cell, but he wasn’t a criminal…at least, not in this century. “Tell me more about it later. Just don’t run away around Lady Charlotte. She thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Good.”

  “No. That’s not good. I don’t want her to think that.”

  “Ah, right, because she’s your true love,” Simeon reminded him with a melody in his voice and a grin curling his lips beneath his mustache.

  “No, it’s not that,” Michael said, trying to make light of it. “I have a reputation to uphold if I’m to be taken seriously here. And by the way, what are my chances of staying?”

  Simeon walked beside him when he picked up his steps. “True. True. You are an officer of the law. As for staying, Kestrel stayed, so I would assume it’s up to you whether you want to go back or not.”

  “But you don’t know for sure?”

  “No, I don’t,” Simeon told him. “You and Kestrel are the first to receive the brooch. I don’t know if there will be any more. I only know what I know about you both.”

  “Come inside. Meet Charlotte and tell me what you know about all this.”

  They reached the door as it opened. Charlotte stepped out and smiled. She looked at the man standing beside Michael. Simeon hadn’t disappeared. Michael breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Lady Charlotte,” Michael said. “May I introduce Mr. Roldan Simeon, a time traveler.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  They sat in the great hall. Her, Michael, and his friend. Michael had sent the others off to run some errands, so they were alone in the keep. Charlotte had lit more candles, though there was still enough sunlight coming through the windows to see.

  Michael had quietly asked her if Gerald was able to help her and how she knew him. He hadn’t asked how she knew the other men. She had to be more careful!

  So far, she did not know what to think of Mr. Simeon. He was handsome, a man of more years with long, black hair tied at the back and a long mustache and beard. His smile was distracting and contagious, but there was nothing extraordinary about him.

  “I don’t know if I want the men to know what you’re about to discover, Charlotte,” Michael said somberly now from his seat beside her.

  She nodded, not knowing what else to say and watched him motion to Mr. Simeon. “He can prove that I come from the future.”

  “No,” Mr. Simeon corrected, “I can prove that time travel is possible.”

  How was Michael ever going to face the truth with a man like Roldan Simeon feeding him lies? “How can you prove that, Mr. Simeon?” she asked with a practiced smile. “Time travel is im—”

  He disappeared before her eyes.

  “—possible,” came the rest in a whisper.

  How? She looked at Michael. “What is going on?” She squeaked like a wounded animal when Mr. Simeon appeared again in his chair.

  “He just did it, Charlotte.”

  “Did what?” she asked. Did her teeth just chatter?

  “I went to the past,” said Mr. Simeon softly. His large, dark eyes grew larger, rounder when he looked at her. “To your past. To prove that I can travel.”

  She opened her mouth to speak but what could she possibly say? He had just disappeared. “And?” she finally managed. Did she want to know?

  “You were unwanted,” he told her with mercy in his eyes.

  “Simeon.” Michael warned.

  “No. ’Tis all right,” Charlotte stopped any further admonishment. “He speaks the truth. But just because he knows something about me does not mean—”

  From behind his back, Mr. Simeon produced a small, soft blanket, knitted for her by Rosie, when Charlotte was a babe. She’d had it until she was eleven and then one day, not long after Rosie was thrown out, it disappeared. Charlotte never thought she’d see it again and now here it was as if brand new. “Where did you get this?” she asked him, holding it up to her face and remembering its comforting softness.

  “I took it from your pram while your nurse had you out for a stroll. I heard her telling another woman about your mother. Your father, she said, was broken-hearted by his wife’s treatment of you. He took you with him to the courts when he could.”

  That was true. He had taken her on many occasions, but she never liked that side of the law. And began waiting outside for him. That was where she had met Preston.

  All at once, she wanted to weep. Her blanket from Rosie, her father—no. This could not be real. “What kind of masterful trick is this, Mr. Simeon?” she demanded, handing him back the blanket.

  “It is no trick, dear girl. I was cursed by an old hag to leap through time and never stay too long in one place. It’s no way for a bond to grow between two people.”

  He looked so dejected that, for a moment, Charlotte felt terribly sorry for him. “Is there no way to break the curse?”

  “No. But I have enjoyed the days of my life otherwise. I have met almost everyone!” His smile was wide and genuine. All his smiles were. She liked Mr. Simeon. Was he telling the truth? No. It was too farfetched.

  But her blanket.

  “But no. There is no way to break the curse. At least, I don’t know of one as of yet.” His grin remained.

  “Well, if there is,” she told him, “Michael here is a detective. I’m sure he can discover the way.”

  “Thank you for your confidence in me,” Michael told her. His deep voice seduced her kneecaps off. Her smile warmed, as did his.

  Mr. Simeon cleared his throat. “Did Michael tell you about the brooch?”

  She nodded. They could have rehearsed the stories. Who was Michael Pendridge truly? “’Twas bequeathed to him,” she told him. “He read the name Pendragon on it and arrived here. Do I have it all?”

  “The important stuff,” Michael answered, watching her reaction to things. He was skilled at finding deception. She had to use more caution with him. She didn’t smile at or with him unless she genuinely felt something.

  “The brooch belonged to King Arthur Pendragon,” Mr. Simeon told her.

  “But those stories are not true. He is just a legend,” she argued. This was sounding more like nonsense every moment. He’d deceived her eyes and must have found her blanket somewhere here in the keep.

  “He is real, Lady Charlotte,” Mr. Simeon assured her. “His knights of the Round Table existed—still exist on a different realm than the one we know.”

  “You still with us, Charlotte?”

  Michael’s resonant voice seeped into her flesh and bone, low, like a drum or pulsebeat. She nodded and didn’t dare trust herself to look at him without completely losing herself.

  “Arthur,” Mr. Simeon continued, “used to live in Avalon with his knights and his wife and the sisters.”

  “The sisters?” Charlotte managed.

  “There are nine. They sometimes go by different names. But you may know of one. She is called Morgan. It has recently been verified that it was Morgan who fashioned the brooch. She made it in order to find Arthur if he ever left Avalon—as he had once before when he came here.”

  “You didn’t tell me all of this,” Michael brooded at their guest.

  “There was no time so I’m telling you now.”

  “What about Merlin?”

  Both men turned to face her. “What did you say?” Mr. Simeon asked.

  “Merlin,” she repeated. “The wizard. I have read the stories.”

  “The wizard,” Mr. Simeon repeated hollowly. “I…I don’t know.” He laughed at himself, but slightly. “I had completely forgotten about him. Odd.”

  He wasn’t the same for the next hour. His laughter was subdued and he rarely smiled. But he told them all about Morgan Le Fey’s obsession with Arthur. He had heard rumors that if she rose up, she would kill anyone in Arthur’s life. There were many other nasty things said about her that need not be repeated presently. She had to be kept from finding him. That was why, it is whispered, Arthur cast another, more powerful enchantment on the brooch.

  “What kind of enchantment?” Charlotte asked.

  “That the person holding the brooch and saying the name would be sent to his or her one true love.”

  Her eyes fixed on Michael’s. She drew in a deep breath, as if her lungs were starved for air. Had they somehow enchanted her? Is that why Michael didn’t want the others around? Why him? Why her? How could they be hundreds of years apart and still be the other’s true love? How could an enchantment be so powerful that it could bring two people together who were perhaps born at the wrong time?

  “So,” she remarked, staring at him, “you were sent here to meet…me?”

  He smiled but shielded his gaze behind his dusky lashes. “I don’t believe in stuff like this either, trust me. Some old, blackened piece of jewelry isn’t going to tell me who I love.”

  She straightened her shoulder. “Nor me.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Simeon said. “The question is, are Sir Gawaine and Arthur’s knights going to let him stay?”

  She smiled and did her best not to laugh. This was all so preposterous. They were talking like mad people. King Arthur and his knights…

  “If King Arthur’s own magic made Michael come here, I doubt he will change his mind now and send him back,” Charlotte said.

  “King Arthur has nothing to do with this personally,” Mr. Simeon told them. “He cannot be found. Morgan had sent for him and he never showed up. They have not seen him in Avalon in fifty years.”

  Charlotte didn’t care so much about Avalon and its king. She cared about building what Michael wanted here, a jail with officers, as he’d called them. She wanted to do what would make him stay. But at what cost? Preston? Michael and Preston didn’t belong in the same century. One of them would not survive. The thought of it made her want to weep. Her hands felt shaky.

  She had to warn Preston. Would Michael truly take her to Preston’s tomorrow?

  “I still do not understand how any of this proves that you are from the future,” she told Michael. She wished it did prove his story. But as Mr. Simeon had said, it only proved that Mr. Simeon could travel through time.

  Which was difficult to believe.

  “I’m not one hundred percent convinced you are telling me the truth, Mr. Simeon.”

  “Very well.” He took her blanket in his hand and held up his free index finger. “Be right back.”

  He disappeared, making her gasp and reach out to feel the air where he had been. She looked at Michael. “Is this real?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if you disappear like that one of these days?” she asked him, more worried than she would admit.

  He opened his arms, as if knowing she needed to be in them. She hurried to him and was engulfed in his strong embrace.

  Mr. Simeon appeared again a few feet from where he’d been. He smiled slightly when he saw her in Michael’s arms, then handed her the blanket.

  It was older, tattered, well loved. It looked the way it had just before it disappeared.

  “I returned it and then went back for it several years later.”

  “You truly did,” she breathed. ’Tis my blanket.” She broke away from Michael and took it and held it to her cheek to let it absorb her tears. “May I keep it?”

  “Yes, of course It’s yours.” Mr. Simeon replied then turned to Michael. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He vanished and she shook her head, doubting she would ever grow used to that.

  He appeared again, and this time he carried a small figure of a man. It was about twelve inches long and wore green clothes. It wore squishy boots and a hard hat on his head.

  “My GI Joe!” Michael took it in his hands when Mr. Simeon handed it to him. He looked it over lovingly for a moment and then his eyes shone with tears. “No. It’s Geoff’s.” He looked up at her. “It’s one of my brother’s toys.”

  “I took it from the room you and he shared when you were seven,” the time traveler told him.

  “Thank you,” Michael said.

  “GI Joe was a toy soldier from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Mr. Simeon told her. “This is his uniform, and this,” he pointed out, “is his machine-gun.”

  She took the toy and examined it. The workmanship! The masterful skill! Why, it was a tiny man with perfectly painted eyes and pink lips!

  “We played for hours when we were kids.”

  Her gaze misted when she set it on Michael. This belonged to his dead brother. She’d examined it enough and handed it back. “Very well. You have convinced me.”

  Mr. Simeon’s grin faded. “I must go—”

  He was gone before anyone had time to bid him farewell.

  “Forgive me for doubting you when he disappeared the first time,” she said after a moment, when they realized he wasn’t coming back.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Michael reassured. “I would have thought you were nuts if things were turned around.”

  “You told me you had no wife in your century,” she quipped, “so I will not ask you the same question, but was there someone you loved you left behind?”

  “No. No one.”

  “No one?” But he was so handsome, so mysterious and dark. Surely women in any century would want him.

  He took her hands and sat back down with her at the table. “The police force was my life, Charlotte. My father was a cop, and his father before him. My brother was a cop, too. It’s in my blood.”

  “Aye,” she responded softly, not too dejectedly, lest he think she wished it were not so. She looked around at the large table and the chairs on either side of it. He was preparing to build his force and bring the law into Croydon. It was still in his blood. Where would a wife fit in? Not that she wanted to become his or anyone else’s wife! But what if Preston never married her and Michael found someone else in the meantime? Oh, the very thought of it sickened her and angered her. Frighteningly, it was the part about Michael, not Preston that fired such emotion in her.

  “But it made me very unhappy,” he continued. He hadn’t been finished.

  She remembered him telling her that there was nothing good about his life that he could remember. “Why were you so unhappy, Michael? Because of Clements?”

  “Yeah. I think it began with him. Maybe with 9/11. I don’t know.” His gaze fell to the toy. She wanted to touch him. To make him look at her again.

  “What is 9/11?” she asked gently, “’Twas when your brother perished, aye?”

  “It is the eleventh day of the ninth month. September 11th. It was a day when some religious terrorists flew some planes—planes are very big metal…carriages that carry passengers from one faraway place to another. They have engines that propel them to fly and wings that keep them balanced in the air. These men flew two planes into two of my city’s tallest buildings and killed thousands of people. It began our war with the Middle East.”

  “Oh, Michael,” she cried. “Men do not change. They just have more powerful weapons with which to kill one another. ’Tis very disheartening.”

  “That’s exactly what I became. Disheartened. Things just stayed bad. My next partner was Kelly Harkin. We were friends on and off the job. I was invited to her daughter’s second and third birthdays. Kelly was also killed on the job by a child murderer we had been investigating. By this time, I pretty much hated the human race. I had become cynical and negative, expecting the worst in people because most of the people I was around were criminals.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, but then opened them again. She was what she was. She would not apologize for it.

  “Were there no criminals who committed their offenses for honorable purposes?”

  “You mean like robbing the rich to feed the poor?” he asked. “No. Only in stories. People robbed for themselves, or for drugs—”

  Oh, he must have been happy to leave such a place, such a time. She wanted to touch him and draw his attention back to her again and away from the distant memories of his dim past and the world’s future.

  “You said you did not want to go back,” she reminded him.

  “I did?” He smiled.

  “Aye. When William asked if you were going back. Is it true? Do you not want to? I would not want to go back.”

  “There isn’t much I have to go back to,” he told her. “A better gun and a place to put it every morning.”

  “Then stay here,” she said, tugging on his sleeve. His gaze swung to hers and he smiled.

  “What do you care if I stay?” he asked with a quirk of his mouth and his brow. “I’m the man you believe will cage you.”

  He was right! He was right! “I do not want you to be unhappy, Detective. Unlike you, I do not believe this drivel about the brooch bringing people to their true love. I do not need—”