A Time for Everything
Ann Gimpel
Siobhan Macquire’s fortune has
attracted a string of men who are out to drain her for everything they can get.
Her last boyfriend was no exception. Furious at being used—again—she goes for a
walk in the Highlands.
With the weather worsening, she wanders
alone for hours. She’s soaking wet and starting to get scared when someone
calls out to her. A striking-looking man emerges from the mist.
Except there’s
something wrong. His kilt is way too long and he talks with an archaic accent.
Siobhan soon finds herself not only lost in the countryside but also in time.
Excerpt:
Sam pulled the draw cords of her hood tighter, squinting
against driving rain. She shivered, willing her legs to move faster. Even in
the northern latitudes, it got dark eventually during what passed for summer,
and the light was definitely fading. One foot sloughed into a hole. Cursing
roundly, she yanked it out, noting the mud added what felt like ten pounds to
her tired leg. Going on a ramble—as the locals called it—by herself had seemed
like a good idea earlier in the afternoon. Now she wasn’t so sure. It had been
hours since she’d seen another soul. The air felt heavy—and threatening,
somehow.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scolded herself. “My
imagination’s off the clock, working overtime.”
A flash off toward the river was followed almost
immediately by a rumbling crash. It started raining harder. The sky lit again,
casting the wet greenery and surrounding mountains in a macabre glow. Thunder
sounded so loud it made her ears ring. The next lightning flare sparked off a
rock not twenty feet away. Sam’s heart sped up. She stared at the mountains
ringed about her. Why wasn’t the storm up there? Lightning was supposed to be
drawn to high points, not meadows saturated with water.
As if determined to prove her wrong, another flash struck
the ground off to her left. She threw her hands over her ears but the thunder
reverberated in her brain as if someone had struck an anvil right next to her.
Shaking her head to try to make her ears stop hurting, she started walking
again. Lightning struck inches from her feet. Sam lurched to a stop, blinking
to clear the afterimage. Even as wet as it was, the air felt electrified, thick
with sharp edges. She could almost see marauding electrons reaching for her,
hungry little mouths wide open.
Fear raced along her nerve endings, making her feel as if
she’d downed half a dozen double espressos in a row. The breath whooshed out of
her and her head spun crazily.
The storm’s trying
to kill me.
Oh, please, she answered herself. Sam hated her tendency to engage in
two-way inner dialogue, but she’d done it all her life.
An excruciating twenty minutes and half a dozen lightning
strikes later, she thought it might be safe to move. It was raining like a son
of a bitch, but after striking what looked like a circle around where she
stood, the electrical part of the storm had left as quickly as it had come.
Guess the storm
gods didn’t want me, after all.
Why should they?
No one else does.
Sam sank into a funk. Shit,
could I possibly be any wetter? Weather in the British Isles had been
particularly wretched this summer. “Yeah, sort of like the rest of my life,”
she muttered as she tried to assess if she’d be better off staying on the track
or cutting cross-country toward where she thought a roadway was. Resolutely,
she struck out for the road and promptly stepped into calf-deep water. It ran
over the top of her boot and soaked her thick, woolen sock before she could
jerk her foot back to solid ground.
So much for that
idea. Obviously, there’d been so much rain
the ground on both sides of the track had turned into a bog. She’d never seen
one before this trip to Scotland. They were hideous. Miles of saturated ground
with water deep enough to reach her knees in some places. Sam glanced at her
watch and groaned. She’d been walking for close to five hours. No wonder it was
getting dark. The village she was aiming for shouldn’t actually be all that far
away. In fact, she should have been there long since. About to tuck her watch
back under her sleeve, she took one last look at it and realized the second
hand had stopped. She tapped the crystal with her finger but nothing happened.
Crap! Wonder when
it quit? Must be the damp.
Yes, another less pleasant voice piped up, it also means I have no idea how long I’ve been walking. Peering
through mist-shrouded countryside, she looked for some signs of Beauly Village
but all she saw were sheep.
Sam told herself to keep walking. It wasn’t as if there was
anywhere she could even sit to consider her options. Everything dripped water.
Her jacket and pants, which had always provided adequate protection from the
elements back in the States, were woefully inadequate here. She was afraid to
pull out her cell phone. Electronics and water definitely weren’t compatible. Yeah, just look what happened to my watch.
Dark thoughts crowded her mind. Why had she thought it would be romantic to
spend a year in Scotland?
You know why, an inner voice—the nasty one—sneered. It was your infatuation with Clint. Sam
gave her resident maven a point for accuracy. Clint, with his spiffy Scottish
intonations, dreamy blue eyes, and red-blonde curls, had sweet-talked her into
bankrolling a trip to his home. Between his ever-so-broad shoulders, washboard
abs, and nice, tight ass, he’d barely let her out of bed for a month. By the
time she’d figured out the reason he had so much time on his hands was because
he didn’t have a job, it was too late. She was head over heels in love. And hoping
desperately that this time it would lead her to the altar. After all, it wasn’t
as if he had to work. All he needed to do was treat her like a queen. She had
plenty of money for both of them.
Eager to grant her prince whatever he wanted, she’d readily
agreed when he’d talked longingly of going back to Scotland for a while. Except
he’d had a personality transplant practically the second they’d landed in
Glasgow. In the month-and-a-half since they’d arrived, she’d scarcely seen him.
He was always off with his mates, as
he called them, drinking or climbing. There were weeks when he hadn’t returned
to their rental flat in Inverness at all. Worse, she suspected some of those mates were gay. When she’d asked him if
he swung both ways his eyes had turned to blue ice chips. He’d twisted away and
slammed out of the house. That was the last time she’d seen him.
Water ran off the bill of her hood. Some of it dripped into
one eye. “Oh to hell with it,” she snarled. “I’m catching the first plane out
of here—without him.” She sighed, feeling sad and angry by turns. Clint was far
from the first man who’d taken advantage of her. As soon as they found out she
was an heiress to a whiskey fortune, they promised her the moon and then
fleeced her for everything they could get. She’d gotten pretty cagy in the
years between sixteen and her current twenty-five. She’d even rented a modest
apartment in Seattle and pretended she lived there when she met someone new.
Eventually, though, when she thought a guy might be
different, she took him to the Capitol Hill mansion she’d more-or-less
inherited after her parents relocated to one of their many other homes. No
matter how promising a relationship looked, the truth of that rambling mansion
was always the beginning of the end.
My Review:
For a short story it was pretty good. I wasn't real thrilled with the last few chapters though, it felt rushed and like so many different things were all just thrown in to hurry and make a happy ending. Sam agreeing to leave everything behind, accept the strangeness of being sent way back in time, and "marry" a complete stranger just so they can have sex was so unrealistic to me that it took away from my enjoyment of the story and left me frustrated with her. I really didn't care for her whiny personality either. Although the story is well-written and flows well through most of the book, I did not care much for it overall.
About the Author
Ann Gimpel is a mountaineer at heart. Recently retired from
a long career as a psychologist, she remembers many hours at her desk
where her body may have been stuck inside four walls, but her soul was planning
yet one more trip to the backcountry. Around the turn of the last century (that
would be 2000, not 1900!), she managed to finagle moving to
the Eastern Sierra, a mecca for those in love with the mountains. It was during
long backcountry treks that Ann’s writing evolved. Unlike some who see the
backcountry as an excuse to drag friends and relatives along, Ann prefers her
solitude. Stories always ran around in her head on those journeys, sometimes as
a hedge against abject terror when challenging conditions made her fear for her
life, sometimes for company. Eventually, she returned from a trip and sat down
at the computer. Three months later, a five hundred page novel emerged. Oh, it
wasn’t very good, but it was a beginning. And, she learned a lot between
writing that novel and its sequel.
Around that time, a friend of hers suggested she try her
hand at short stories. It didn’t take long before that first story found its
way into print and they’ve been accepted pretty regularly since then. A
trilogy, the Transformation Series, featuring Psyche’s Prophecy,
Psyche’s Search and Psyche’s Promise is complete. The
initial two books have been published, with the final volume scheduled for
release in 2012. One of Ann’s passions has always been ecology, so her tales
often have a green twist and the Transformation Series is no exception.
In addition to writing, Ann enjoys wilderness photography.
Part of her website is devoted to photos of her beloved Sierra. And she lugs
pounds of camera equipment in her backpack to distant locales every year. A
standing joke is that over ten percent of her pack weight is camera gear which
means someone else has to carry the food! That someone else is her husband.
They’ve shared a life together for a very long time. Children, grandchildren
and three wolf hybrids round out their family.
@AnnGimpel (for Twitter)
I received one or more books or products in the post above for review purposes only. I was in no way required to write a positive review. All my reviews are my honest and personal opinion. If you have any questions or comments, please see my FTC disclosure or Review Policy.
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