Your affectionate friend,
Caroline Gresham
For a moment Mac simply held the letter. Good Lord. Caroline Gresham was the woman Perry had married—Mac’s own great-great-grandmother—the daughter, Mac remembered, of a wealthy San Francisco businessman.
Mac looked inside the envelope again and found what she’d missed the first time. A photograph, new enough looking to have been recently taken. A photograph of a beautiful young woman with pale curling hair and flawless features and limpid eyes. She was almost too perfect to be real. And this was Liam’s “affectionate friend.”…
“What are you doing?”
Mac scooted around to face Liam, the letter and photo still in her hand.
“Who’s Caroline?” she demanded.
He stopped in his charge across the tent. “Caroline,” he said between his teeth, “is the woman I’m going to marry.”
Mac stared at him as the ramifications slid into place in her mind.
“Give me the letter,” Liam commanded.
Her hand was shaking when she complied. “So that’s why you fought,” she said unsteadily, “—why your friend left you here. It was over her.”
The delicate paper crackled in his grip. “Don’t play innocent, Mac. It’s a little too late for that.” His voice was deadly calm. “What were you looking for? Any money I’d left lying around? Or was it simple spying this time?”
She shook her head. “Two men in love with the same woman,” she said, trying to keep control of her rising alarm. “They fight, and one…” Tries to kill his rival. Oh shit. “One leaves the other with almost no supplies and goes home to his girlfriend.”
“Perry, in love with her?” he said harshly. “He’s in love with her inheritance. He’s a damned fortune hunter. But you know that, don’t you? As long as she’s my ward, he’ll get his hands on her over my dead body.”
His words were grotesquely appropriate. Caroline, Liam’s ward?
Oh, Homer, what did you get me into?
“He didn’t succeed in getting me out of the way,” Liam continued, oblivious to her shock. “And he’ll pay for his blunder.”
Mac felt for the camp stool beside the desk and sat down, weak-kneed. Maybe Perry had tried to kill him. And would have succeeded if not for Mac’s intervention.
Liam was alive when he should have been dead. He was alive to return to San Francisco and marry Caroline Gresham.
But Caroline and Perry were Mac’s great-great grandparents. If they didn’t marry, would Mac cease to exist? And what about Homer, who’d inspired so many young minds and uncovered secrets of the past; her father, who’d save an entire platoon of comrades in Vietnam—even Jason, who had made such promising discoveries in his search for new cancer treatments?
And would this mess even end with her family?
Greater changes might come from each smaller one, until all of history itself was affected.
Mac trembled. She’d saved Liam’s life, and she couldn’t regret it. But now that she knew the dire consequences of her act…
Only she could set things right again.
She bent over, sickened. There was no going home anymore. Even if she tried, she might never make it. She might simply disappear, never having existed. Leaving the screwup she’d made still intact.
If she couldn’t go home, what was she going to do?
The answer to that was obvious. She had to stop Liam from marrying Caroline. Impossible as it seemed, she didn’t have any choice.
The strength flooded back into her body, and she sat up. One by one the implications of her decision raced through her mind. To stop Liam meant being with him. Going with him back to 1884 San Francisco, where his ward-bride awaited him. Going without a plan, without knowing what she faced, alone and out of her own time.
“You’re going back to San Francisco to marry Caroline,” she said to Liam suddenly. “And to take revenge on your former partner.”
Crouched by his crates of supplies, he looked at her over his shoulder. “What’s it to you, Mac?” he said with a cynical twist of his mouth.
“Do you love your ward?” she asked flatly.
“I know what’s best for her—” Liam paused, gaze unfocused. “She’s a lady. She was meant to be protected all her life.”