Heart of Time (Knight Traveler) by Regan Black Read Free Book Online Page A

spells, and time-traveling are real . This knight and his greyhound are our best bet at this point.”
    She rolled her eyes, but the dismissive gesture failed when her gaze tangled with the strange man. This Gawain-Wayne person put on a good show with his peculiar accent and archaic manners she had to assume were appropriate in the sixth century. But it was his face that made her skin prickle with an inexplicable awareness. They’d never met - she wouldn’t have forgotten him - but he was familiar. His eyes were the perfect blue of a bright October sky, framed by the strong bones of his face. His golden brown hair was pulled back and a thick, overgrown beard softened the edges of a square jawline.
    It was as if he’d stepped out of a classic painting, minus the armor, horse, and lance. She must be associating him with her youthful fascination with the history and stories of the era Nick said he’d come from.
    He couldn’t be real, not the way Nick implied. Time travel wasn’t possible. No more possible than her awkward sense of acquaintance. Uncomfortable, she aimed all her discomfort and irritation at her cousin. “A police report is our best bet,” she countered. “Alerting museums and pawn shops isn’t a bad idea either.” This stunt sure as hell wouldn’t get the dagger back.
    “No,” Nick insisted. “That’s a recipe for disaster. I know a place we can talk, safely.”
    She bristled at his lofty tone. Older than her by only two weeks, he had no right to toss around all this judgment. Twenty-four hours ago she’d been minding the family pub in Brooklyn Heights. Her life had been normal and going along well enough. Then the dagger had up and disappeared from her locked office between shifts. Not once in the history of the O’Malley family had the dagger gone missing. It wasn’t a matter of misplacing it. The narrow, seven-inch blade with a simple hilt topped with a dull, uncut ruby, wasn’t a particularly beautiful piece yet it was a revered heirloom connecting each generation to the one previous.
    She remembered the electric mix of fear and excitement when the dagger had officially become her responsibility. Her earliest memories involved watching her father use the dagger for opening mail at the pub as had his father before him. When it was her turn, he’d sat in that tiny office and handed over the dagger along with a far more serious version of the family fairytale.
    Her mother, Siobhan, had been at his side, her hand on his shoulder while he’d revealed a new and solemn chapter to the story she’d learned as a child. The truth, as he’d put it was an ongoing war of light versus dark, gallant knights and treacherous sorcery, and an unquenchable determination to see that good prevailed. By accepting the dagger, she’d been charged with keeping the potent relic safe. Her mother, eyes misty, quietly added that Tara should contact Nick if anything strange happened to her or the dagger.
    The exchange had rattled her, haunted her day and night. For weeks she jumped at shadows, paranoid she’d be the first O’Malley to fail the family. Siobhan, seeing straight to the heart of the matter as was her habit, reminded her that the O’Malley dagger had been safely passed from each firstborn to the next since the sixth century. Tara merely had to maintain the status quo.
    Apparently it only took the first girl in the line to screw it up, though she’d believed she had everything under control. As months passed without any trouble she’d relaxed, focusing more on the honor and joy of her new business challenges, and releasing the stressful burden of safeguarding the heirloom with a murky, mystical history.
    Like most of her siblings and cousins, she’d taken the tale of the grand O’Malley family origins with a grain of salt as she’d grown up. The idyllic notion of an ancestor in service to Gawain the Gallant of King Arthur’s Round Table striving against dark forces to create a peaceful, just world