Forever Young: Time Travel Romance

by Gloria Gay

  To my daughter, Mariana Gay Hughes

  CHAPTER 1

  Along with the tourists and the employees of T of A, Kate Shallot listened avidly as the agency’s supervisor and her boss, Roberta Bowlen, informed the huge group of a change in their tour plans, her voice rising above the din at the airport.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her forceful voice once everyone had quieted down: “I have a bit of bad news, but not too bad, so don’t panic. The thing is, because of heavy air traffic, our flight to France has been forced to take a detour to England, rather than going straight to Paris as we had planned.”

  “It will only add four or five hours to our journey,” Roberta assured them. We’ll land at Heathrow Airport and from there we’ll be taken in shuttle buses to Gadwick Airport and then on to Paris.”

  “You’ll be able to say you’ve been to Great Britain—for those of you who haven’t been,” she added with a wide grin, “although the only part of England you’ll see is a bit of country and not even a town to gaze at from the motorway, for it is less than an hour between the two airports.”

  ***

  Airports always made Kate tense. Probably because she seldom travelled. Ironic, since she worked for T of A, the largest tour and flight scheduling company in San Diego. But she had always worked at the company’s office, not as an agent. Her last trip had been to New York, on a discounted ticket, to visit her sister, Stacy.

  She and Stacy hated living in opposite coasts, but because of the economy, jobs were very hard to come by. For this reason, when Stacy graduated, she had despaired of ever finding a job in anthropology.

  It had been a wonderful surprise to them both that once Stacy stopped trying to find a job in California and sent out her resumes throughout the country she had been accepted at a museum of antiquities in New York.

  That same year, Kate had met Alex and married him in what she had mistakenly thought was a whirlwind romance.

  It had been, but only on her part.

  So, once this trip to France was over, Kate would stop in New York instead of continuing on to San Diego with the tour group and her co-workers, and visit with Stacy for a few days.

  It would be the first time she would visit with her sister since her divorce and both were eager for the visit.

  ***

  The overseas flight to England was twelve long hours. Kate was sore from the confined seat space and tired from making unwanted conversations with the tour guests and guides.

  At one point, she wanted to scream to them to let her take a nap in peace.

  Not exactly tour agent material, she thought, smiling wryly to herself, especially since she was here because she had wanted to advance to agent. She had eagerly looked forward to a larger salary and more interesting work.

  But this experience had definitely decided her. Tour work, which she had aspired to before, was definitely not for her. If she had no patience with her co-workers, whom she knew well, when packed uncomfortably with them for many hours, much less patience would she have with the tourists she would spend so many hours with as a tour agent.

  Gazing at the cloud cover, she decided that instead, she was going back to college, or at least night school, and get another major—in journalism—which she should have gone ahead and done before, rather than be pulled away from her plan by her disastrous marriage to Alex.

  Finally, and to her great relief, the large tour group arrived at Heathrow Airport.

  A quick sandwich and a cup of coffee later, Kate waited patiently in line as the whole tour tribe boarded several shuttle buses that would take them from Heathrow on to the quick fifty-minute hop to Gadwick Airport that Roberta had described as their shuttle trip.

  ***

  After reading the tour pamphlet, Kate had dozed off and was woken suddenly to a shrill sound so loud it made her cover her ears.

  Brought out of her grogginess by panic she looked around and realized she was falling through space!

  Had the bus had an accident?

  Horror gripped her as she realized she was hurling alone through space and no one else was falling alongside with her!

  She was going to die! No one could fall this distance without smashing on landing!

  Yet how was it possible that she was able to form a coherent thought even as she fell?

  The fall lasted only a few more seconds, then Kate landed with a soft thump on an area strewn with grass, dead leaves and tall trees.

  She stood up from the dead leaves and nettles and touched herself all over to see if she was harmed.

  Then she realized she was completely naked!

  She examined herself for any clothes item. Nothing. The only thing that had survived the fall was a small jade ring she had placed on her wedding ring finger to replace the wedding rings she had removed.

  She had taken off all other jewels from her body as she always did when she surfed and had forgotten to replace them.

  How could she have survived that awful fall without hurting herself? And why had her clothes disappeared?

  And where was the rest of the large tour group?

  Trembling with fear, she looked around and wondered where her shuttle bus had ended at. For some strange reason, she had fallen through space into a forested area by herself with no sign of the tour bus she had been in.

  Some odd things were going on. She wondered if her incredible experience was connected to the visit she had made to a strange psychic’s place a few days before, a place she had read about in a journal her mother had left for her and Stacy, with instructions that it be opened only five years after her death.

  The psychic woman she had met, Madame Enlia, must be responsible for this. Nothing even remotely supernatural had ever happened to Kate before she met that woman.

  Otherwise, how on earth would she fall through space and not come to harm? It was a fall no one could expect to survive, yet she had.

  Kate had read her mother’s strange journal and was certain nothing like this had happened to her mother or she would have included it in the diary.

  She glanced up at the intimidatingly tall trees and again her mind revolved around the same question:

  Why had she, alone, been separated from her tour shuttle and been hurled through space?Unable to find the answer to this she pulled her mind back to the present and her immediate problem: no clothes.

  She gazed up through a gap in the trees and realized with horror that sunset was rapidly advancing.

  Beyond, in a clearing, was a meadow where the sun bathed everything it touched with waning red-gold tones. Wildflowers were everywhere but the puffy white clouds she had seen from the tour bus were gone. Instead there was that sunset light that was fading as the sun raced to sink below the horizon.

  What would she do, alone in the forest? From what she knew of English forests, they did not house animals greater than foxes, rabbits or squirrels but in the approaching gloom even a hedgehog would seem more sinister and scary.

  Also, this forest had to be near London, for they had not gone too long from one airport to the other before the accident happened. They had probably been about to arrive.

  She breathed in. The air was fragrant with pine, laurel, grass and—something else—farm animals?

  Kate looked down and saw that she was standing on a horse trail that meandered along the forest, for there were some old horse droppings.

  She couldn’t imagine where the bus had ended at, but wherever it was it was minus one passenger. She hoped they would start looking for her when they realized she had disappeared.

  But while they did she must concentrate on her immediate problem: survival.

  If there was a horse trail there must be
a farm somewhere near this forest. She would go there and ask to borrow some clothes. But she couldn’t arrive at that place completely naked.She looked around and saw that near the edge of a meadow there was a tree that had large heart-shaped leaves. She recognized it as a linden tree as she walked toward it.

  ”Hello, Eve,” she exclaimed, as she started snapping off the large leaves from the tree. After a while she had a large stack of them.

  She sat on a fallen tree trunk with the leaves and some rushes she had found. Rushes meant that there was a stream nearby, which was important if she got thirsty.

  The leaves had sturdy stems and by making a small hole in the place where each stem grew and forcing a leaf through it, pretty soon she had woven for herself a skirt of leaves, which she attached to her waist by weaving rushes through the same holes where she had threaded the leaves.

  She then completed her outfit by making a halter in the same way. Her long chestnut hair that had become horribly mussed in the fall she straightened out by running her fingers through it. With one of the rushes she had gathered she made a chain of pretty wildflowers and tied it around her head to hold her hair in place.

  Her leaf dress was fragile but at least it covered her enough so that she could try to borrow some clothes from a nearby farm without alarming anyone. They would be alarmed enough that she was dressed in leaves but at least not naked anymore.

  ”Thank you, Mom,” she said under her breath. Her mother had taught her to sew as a teen and she had gone on to sew many items of clothing for herself. She had carried the fundamentals of sewing to fashion this outfit for herself.

  Once she had finished donning her attire, which had taken some time to make, Kate started to walk along the horse trail, making sure she didn’t step on any horse dung.

  All around her were sounds and scents. Birds twittered and pigeons cooed. The sudden hoot of an owl made her look up to a branch and there she located the owl, looking down at her as if checking her steps. She saw squirrels and rabbits dashing or jumping away from her as she approached.

  The scent of the forest was like a refreshing mint in her throat and now and then she saw with alarm that the red slivers of sunset she had seen before had almost disappeared. She felt a slight chill on her arms and legs and feared that dusk was rapidly taking over.

  She realized she could not leave the forest, which at least represented relative safety, to wander dressed in leaves along the trails outside of the woods, to look for a farm, not when night would soon fall on the area. Roberta had emphasized that the tour group was not to see even a house along the route.

  Her search would have to be done in the morning, where she could see where she was going for she could not knock on a farm door dressed in leaves at night. Such a plan was best carried out in plain daylight when she did not scare the dickens out of whoever answered her knock.

  Besides, she realized, she would soon have difficulty seeing her hand in front of her. She felt a chill shiver as the sun was hurrying to sink and would soon leave her in complete darkness.

  She rushed to take advantage of the waning shadowy light to find a hideout bush in which to spend the night and sighed with relief when she found a huddle of bushes, the outside circle so tight she had to pull two of them aside with force in order to get through them.

  Once inside the bush circle she sighed with relief, for the place formed a cozy hideout in its middle.

  Rushing back out, now that she knew how to get in, she went back to the linden tree, following the trail so that she would not get lost, and in the waning light rushed to collect as big an armful of the large linden tree leaves as she could manage and went back to her bush hideout with them.

  There, she made a bed of the leaves and covered herself with the rest of them, hoping she would not freeze. Thankfully, it was nearing the beginning of Spring, so the cold was not too extreme. She hoped the leaves would be cover enough to ward off the chill she had felt as the sun had started to sink.

  In the morning, she would follow the trail through the forest to where it started. She hoped it would lead her out of the woods and toward a farm or a town. There must surely be some houses some distance around, since there were horse droppings in the woods.

  She hoped more for a farm, where she could explain her leaf dress without alarming anyone and beg for the use of a telephone.

  She was thankful for the trail that ran through the forest, for otherwise she could be going in circles, as she walked in the gathering gloom.

  Lying under her blanket of leaves, she struggled to understand what had happened, imagining a scenario that went like this: she had dozed off and the bus then climbed along a mountain, then it had gone off a cliff and she had been hurled out of it.

  She couldn’t imagine just how that could have happened, but obviously, some magic had to be involved. Nothing else could explain how she fell through space and into the forest, unharmed.

  She figured that as she was dazed, she must have wandered away from the bus, half-stunned with temporary amnesia, while the ambulances dealt with the other passengers. She had then fallen off a cliff and into the forest she was in. This was a convoluted theory but she could not think of anything else that could explain her predicament.

  As she had nothing to do but think, she went on with her imagined scenario:

  With so many tour passengers no one had noticed she was missing. Then her co-workers along with the tourists in the tour, had most probably been crammed into the buses that had not been harmed and together with the ambulances had taken off, not bothering to check to see if all the tour group passengers as well as their guides, were accounted for.

  Not very responsible of Roberta, but Kate must make allowances for things being different when an accident took place. She was well aware of the extreme precautions tour group guides took to make certain no tourist was left behind anywhere anytime. This must be an exception to that iron-clad rule.

  She hoped that once they reached the airport or hospital and did a head count they would send some people back to where the accident happened and look for the missing passengers, if other passengers along with Kate had been left behind.

  Or maybe she was the only one missing from her group. She shivered at this thought.

  She was getting a headache from all these problems and no solutions to them. She might as well settle in for the night and not try to make sense of a senseless situation.

  Morning always brought sanity, as her mother used to say.

  She hoped she was not making up a story that made sense parallel to the one that didn’t because it was more comforting than the reality.

  Her mind struggled away from the other explanation. And that explanation included Madame Enlia and her magic. It included the supernatural which Kate did not want to accept.

  She should never have insisted on following on her mother’s footsteps and gone to the strange psychic place that had changed her mother’s life.

  But it was too late for lamenting her actions. If Madame Enlia had something to do with this predicament Kate was in, then it was Kate’s fault for giving in to her obsession.

  Her one-year marriage had ended when arriving unannounced to her husband’s office after hours, she had discovered him in the throes of adultery. She had found out later that the affair had been going on for quite a while, almost from the beginning of her marriage to Alex.

  After her divorce, Kate had moved back to Dolphin Beach where by chance her old apartment was again available, to her great relief. She had been very happy there, she would be happy again.

  She loved the California sea and sun and her apartment was just a few houses away from the beach. Good old DB, where you could still be near the beach without leaving your month’s salary.

  The only bad thing was that her only sister, Stacy, lived in the opposite coast. They were in constant touch with each other but it was just not the same.

  Kate had begun to surf again and to do things she had given up when she married Alex.
As Alex’s wife, she had been kept busy with endless cocktail and lawn parties related to his work. Little by little she had been pulled away from the activities she loved, like surfing, swimming and walks along the beach, to help Alex and his partners promote their fledgling business, while her plans for continuing on to a journalism major had been put on hold.

  She had not realized how stifled she had become in that life with Alex until it had ended.

  Her new life included walks along the water’s edge and breathing the salty sea air. She had taken up surfing again and swam without caring for the time and she had spent hours sinking her toes in wet sand among the seaweed, gathering seashells and sitting or lying for hours under an umbrella.

  She yearned to be in that same life again.

  She closed her eyes and hoped the night would flit by without any unpleasant surprises with foxes or large fat raccoons.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wrapped in the schedule for the day that he was outlining in his mind, Michael Sorville, Earl of Lanquest, followed the well-worn trail through the forest for his customary early morning ride.

  He started and ducked at the shriek of a hawk flying low over his head and halted his horse almost upon someone.

  Stunned, he saw emerging from a swath of mist what looked like a wood nymph, a beautiful girl who seemed to be floating about, unmindful of him or anything else.

  When the shreds of mist started to part, he saw that she was dressed in an extremely short gown of large green leaves. She wore a crown made of wildflowers on the alluringly rich chestnut waves of her hair that fell over her bare shoulders. Her skin was a sun-kissed hue and when the mist had drifted away completely, he saw that her shapely legs were fully exposed under her skimpy dress.

  She appeared strong and fit and not nymph-like or ethereal at all now that he could see her clearly and a pleasant shiver cut through him and to his groin, with a sudden physical awareness of the girl before him.

  Her deep blue eyes turned to him and made him gasp in unfamiliar intense pleasure. Never in his life had he had such a physical awareness of a woman.