Free Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] by The Mists of Time

sorcerer. But this is not true. The people are just people. They gamble and argue and strut in front of the opposite sex. The passage of time has made things so different they only seem like magic.”
    “Speaking of magic, how is it that you learned the language in so short a time? And don’t tell me it was from listening to the television.” She wanted to know this for a couple of reasons.
    “But it was. I told you. That is my gift.”
    Diana narrowed her eyes. “Gift? No one has
that
good an ear for languages.”
    “My mother was a witch. That is the magic I have from her, to hear a language and understand it. To understand the way of a people and mimic it.”
    His mother was a witch. Right. Well, he was from the fifth century, and they believed stuff like that back then. Diana had learned the language quickly, too, but that was just a child’s natural facility. It didn’t explain Medraut.
    They finished the meal in silence as she tried to think. In some ways his belief in magic was what she had gone back in time to find. She smiled ruefully to herself. It hadn’t worked. Medraut believed in magic, but she still didn’t.
    As she was cleaning up the kitchen, suddenly the whole situation got too much and she found herself crying, for the fact that the stalker had shot at someone tonight, if not at her, and for the fact that she had brought aman back from the fifth century out of a kind heart and that seemed so foolhardy she wondered if someone else had done it.
And let’s not forget the creepy dreams I’m having
. More fun waited in her dreams tonight, no doubt. She could hardly wait.
    Medraut came and put his good arm around her. “Shhussh. It will be well. I will thrive here; you will see. And then”—here he held her away from him—“because you are alone, you will need a man. I will be your man.”
    Revulsion washed over her. He wasn’t coming on to her. He kept his promise. But that didn’t seem to change her reaction. “No,” she said, and slipped out of an embrace that was only meant to be comforting.
    Anger flashed across his face. “You reject my offer of protection?” Then his face rearranged itself into sympathy, as if he had made a conscious effort. “I understand. You are not ready. I will be here when you become ready.”
    She would never be ready. She ran into her room and shut the door. In the living room, the television came on. It was tuned to another crime show. She locked her bedroom door.
    “Get out of my dreams!” she shouted. He pulled her to him with the little chain, which apparently was a lot stronger than it looked, because twist and try as she might, she couldn’t break it. His eyes were gray like the fog, or maybe green, or maybe both. They glowed through the fog like he was some otherworldly beast.
    “You’re just a man,” she breathed, more to herself than him, when he had drawn her close enough to clamp her upper arms in a grip that would probably leave bruises. The most horrible part of all was that half of her craved his touch. The bottom half apparently. Her hands moved over his forearms of their own accord. He wore the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up. Her palmsscraped the crisp dark hair. The corded muscles felt more masculine than she had ever imagined a man’s forearms could. And she’d imagined how forearms felt. She was a romance writer after all.
    Of course this was just a dream. And the fact that she knew it was a dream meant that it would soon be ending.
    “Don’t you know me?” he asked as he searched her face “Don’t you remember?”
    She shook her head convulsively. “Remember what?” But he did remind her of someone. Someone she had seen just recently . . . She couldn’t think. It wouldn’t come.
    “I am here to protect you.”
    “You . . . you frighten me.”
    His face took on a hard resolve. “You must talk to me. You must believe me. And then you must trust me. Trust me. Remember that.” And with that he began to dissolve