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He looked at the guests and sighed. “I suppose, Lord Angus, ye want to set up a different wedding?”
* * *
“Nae,” Angus said. “The guests are here. The bride is here. We have the feast ready.” He took Rogene’s hands in his, and that jolt of electricity darted through her again. “If the bride would have me…”
Her smile spreading on her face, she swallowed a knot, her throat tight from emotion. “Of course I would.”
Angus lit up like a Christmas tree.
Father Nicholas shook his head and chuckled. “’Tis most unprecedented—”
“Hold on a minute!” David cried. He’d already put the backpack down on the ground and strode towards Rogene, looking more like a protective warrior than the boy he’d been just a few months earlier. “Can I talk to you in private?” he said as he came to stand next to her.
Angus cocked his head in careful apprehension. “Who’s that, Rogene?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s my brother, David.”
“Ah…” Angus’s eyes burned with curiosity. He clapped David’s shoulder in a universal sign of manly approval. “Welcome, lad…”
But David blocked Angus’s arm and shoved him back. “Don’t you touch me or her.”
“David!” Rogene gasped.
“You kidnapped my sister, hurt her. Held her here in this weird role-playing game thing. Keep your hands off her, or you’ll answer to me.”
Rogene blinked. David was tall but lean, not yet a mountain of a man like Angus, though he might be once he’d filled out more. And yet, he glared at Angus, his neck cords standing out, his lips tight in a snarl, ready to protect her with his life. She loved her brother so much at that moment.
“Calm down, lad. I love yer sister and want to marry her.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that. Rogene, come with me.”
David took her by the elbow and dragged her behind the corner of the church.
“Rory, what the actual fuck?” he growled.
“Language!”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Time travel…marrying a guy who hurt you…this medieval reality… I don’t know what is really going on or where we are, but I won’t let that guy hurt you again.”
She hugged him tight, then pulled away and looked up into his worried face. “Look, say time travel was possible…by some miracle, by an advanced alien technology or whatever…by things we can’t explain,” she said. “Can you imagine for a moment that this is real and we are back in the fourteenth century?”
He rubbed his forehead but kept silent.
“If this was real, what would you do?” she asked.
“Go back to the twenty-first century, of course! I got the scholarship to Northwestern.”
She nodded. “That’s what I want for you, too. These times are too dangerous, and I’d want you safe.”
“But I don’t believe this…”
“You do, a little bit. Don’t you?”
He sighed. “I do think that there are things we can’t always explain. After all, at one point people thought the earth was flat, didn’t they?”
“Yes. I think, around this time, actually.”
He looked around. “But…are you seriously going to marry that dude? Wasn’t he about to marry someone else?”
