Giving one last longing look at the buffet, Tamsyn took the coffee from Bowen’s hands, draining the cup and then sitting the cup and the saucer on the table.
“If you’ll excuse us,” she said to Harri and Elspeth. “We have some work to do.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” she heard Harri mutter as she dragged Bowen from the room, and Bowen scowled even as he let himself be dragged out into the hallway.
“Stop looking like you want to punch your granddad,” Tamsyn said in a low voice, and Bowen glanced down at her.
“Punched my da once,” he told her. “And both my brothers. More than once. Lots more than once, actually. So a grandda doesn’t seem a bridge too far, if I’m being honest.”
Tamsyn thought of her own brother, Michael, and tried to imagine punching him, but the image literally wouldn’t come. They were as different as night and day—her with this bizarre but adventurous job, no family, no real home, no ties to anything; Michael with his husband, Josh, his insurance business, his condo, and his boat—but she loved him so fiercely that she was pretty sure she’d cut off her own hand before she’d raise it against him.
It was another reminder that she and Bowen were very different, and not just because he was a witch and she wasn’t. All the more reason to let things like last night be an anomaly, ne’er to be repeated.
All the more reason to focus on the task ahead.
“We want to get out of here, right?” she asked Bowen, and he stared at her in confusion before saying, “Well, we want to get out of this time, the place itself is actually cor—”
Tamsyn clamped a hand over his mouth, trying to ignore how warm his lips were, how his beard was so much softer than she’d remembered. “Fine. We want out of 1957. And I’ve watched enough time travel movies and TV shows to know that people end up in the past only because they have to fix something that went wrong, something that affects their future. What could affect your future more than your grandparents breaking up before they even get married, much less have your father?”
Bowen frowned, that trio of wrinkles appearing over his nose in the way she loved. “Don’t disagree, exactly,” he said slowly. “But Carys—”
Tamsyn shook her head. “Carys isn’t even here. That spell just took us. Which means we’re here for a reason. And I think I know what it is.”
Bowen watched her expectantly, and Tamsyn took a deep breath.
“We have to Parent Trap your grandparents.”
Chapter 14
“You need me to explain that reference, don’t you?” Tamsyn asked, and Bowen shook his head.
“I know The Parent Trap, Tamsyn,” he told her. He didn’t bother adding that the only reason he knew about it was because in the summer of 2000, Rhys had developed a crush on Lindsay Lohan and forced both his brothers to watch that movie many, many times. Let Tamsyn think he actually knew something about pop culture for once.
“Well, look at you, a part of the twenty-first century after all,” Tamsyn replied, slapping his shoulder, and Bowen would’ve reminded her that that movie—both the remake and the original—had come out in the twentieth century, actually, but he was pretty sure that would just get him one of those eye rolls, and besides, he was still trying to right his world on its axis because she’d touched him.
That’s where he was now—a slap on the shoulder was enough to have him practically swooning and falling at her feet.
But how could he look at her in her cheerful jumper, her nose adorably wrinkled because she was plotting and she always made that face when she was coming up with a scheme, and not think of last night?
The way those velvet curtains had cocooned them in darkness and warmth, the sounds of her gasps and her moans and her fingers working over her, the smell of her earthy and primal and so fucking good he’d come in his own fist like a teenage boy after only a few strokes.
How on the Goddess’s great green earth was he supposed to do anything now that he had been decimated so thoroughly?
And the worst of it was, she didn’t seem to be all that affected by what had happened. Maybe this kind of thing was old hat to her. Maybe she had dozens of lovers, one in every town she’d done a job in.
That was fine. More than fine. Good, really, exactly what a liberated and beautiful woman like Tamsyn should do if that’s what she wanted, and he was fine with it.
Just . . .
Very, very fine.
Bowen took Tamsyn’s elbow and gently steered her farther away from the breakfast room. It was dim in the hallway, the sconces doing nothing against the gloom outside, and it was hard to believe that it was just midmorning. Bowen could smell rain, probably sleet, too, on the air, and hoped there were no more plans for traipsing through the woods tonight as he said to Tamsyn, “I agree it’s worth a shot to see if getting my grandparents over . . . whatever this is gets us back to 2024. But I also think we need to find out a lot more about Y Seren and what powers it might have. Because no matter why we’re here, that’s the thing that sent us back.”
“Again, just so many words here in the fifties,” Tamsyn mused, then shrugged. “Agreed. No reason not to tackle both the why and the how. Where do you want to start?”
Three hours later, Bowen was greatly regretting his choice.
If they’d stuck with Tamsyn’s plan—Parent Trap first—they’d be back at the manor house, probably playing a game of sardines or something, anything that gave them an excuse to lock Harri and Elspeth away in a dark room until they remembered they were in love with each other and the wedding was back on.
Instead, Bowen was outside in the rapidly darkening afternoon as a steady drizzle of rain seeped through every item of clothing he was wearing.
And he was riding a fucking bicycle.
With a bell.
They’d spent over an hour in the dusty library at Tywyll House, a gloomy room with a gallery and a spiral staircase and about a million books, none of which had been opened in decades, if the dust was any indication.
But Bowen had figured it was best to start with books when it came to Y Seren. That’s where he always started, after all. Gather as much basic information as you can, suss out what’s good, what’s useful, what’s interesting but probably not true, and what is utter shite.
Once you had that locked down, then you could do the scary part of talking to people. Tamsyn had, of course, wanted to start there, to ask Lady Meredith outright about the jewel, but Bowen pointed out that might raise some suspicions, should the damn thing disappear if they needed it to get back home.
For once, Tamsyn hadn’t given him an argument, just a little salute that had been staggeringly erotic for reasons he was not going to look at too closely.
Then they’d searched and read and searched some more, all while Bowen tried to ignore the scent of her perfume, and the nearness of her, and the cozy room with its flickering lamps as the weather outside got nastier.
In the end, the books had yielded exactly one clue about Y Seren: that before the Merediths had purchased it sometime in the last decade, it had belonged to a family named Beddoe.
