Gray considered the information. “It may mean nothing. Perhaps you’re reading her wrong.”
“I’m not,” Michael responded.
Gray opened his mouth to respond, but Damien cut him off. “He’s not. He’d know best. Michael and Celine were sort of a couple for a bit.”
“I thought you said Celine was married to Gray for over two centuries?” Alexander queried.
“She was, she is,” Damien began. “It’s complicated. She was Celine and then she wasn’t and then she was again. When she wasn’t Celine, she and Michael were together, but then when she was Celine again there was no question who she was in love with.” Damien glanced to Michael. “Sorry, buddy.” Michael waved his hand at him to dismiss it.
“You’re making no sense,” Gray responded.
“I told you, it’s complicated. Never mind, it’s not important. The important part is she is in love with you and has been for centuries. We’re sure this Celine is, too. Michael is correct. The most genuine expression I’ve seen on her face since we’ve met this Celine is when she looks at you.”
“Are you telling me you don’t have any feelings toward her at all?” Michael asked Gray.
Gray didn’t respond for a moment. “She’s a married woman, I hadn’t considered it.”
“I don’t buy that story for a second,” Michael answered.
“Yeah, mister ‘I’ll walk you home for companionship,’” Damien chimed in. “You want us to believe you have no interest in her?”
“She’s beautiful, I’ll admit it. But she’s married.”
“And if she weren’t?” Alexander inquired.
Gray took a moment before he answered. “She is.”
“But if she weren’t?”
“If she weren’t, I’d have married her in a heartbeat. Is that what you want to hear?”
Michael and Damien glanced to each other, grinning. “Yep, that’s what we wanted to hear,” Damien responded.
As dinner approached, Celine appeared downstairs, dressed in a different gown for the event. They made light conversation over cocktails before entering the dining room. Once they were seated for dinner, Alexander continued his discussion about the estate.
After a brief pause in the conversation, Celine said, “Gentlemen, do you plan to continue discussing trivial pleasantries all evening? My husband will arrive in less than twenty-four hours. I hoped to learn by then what you know and how you came to this knowledge.”
The men glanced to one another before Alexander spoke. “My apologies, Celine. I did not care to ruin your meal with such discussions. They must be painful for you to endure.”
“Duke Northcott is the source of the pain, not you. Thereby you cannot ruin my meal by speaking the truth.”
They were silent another moment until Damien spoke up. “Well, I guess it’s our turn then,” he said, clearing his throat. Celine rested her crystal blue eyes on him. “Like I said before, we knew about your father because we were with you that night.”
“That I cannot understand. No one accompanied me that fateful night.”
“It’s a long story,” Damien responded.
“I have twenty-four hours. Unless the story is longer than that, please explain.”
“Well,” Damien began, glancing to Michael. Michael nodded to him. “We aren’t from this time. We’re from the future.”
“How did you come to be in this time?” Celine inquired.
“We’re not sure,” Michael answered. “We’ve traveled through time before. In the other two instances when we time traveled, you sent us back. The first time to help you on your sixteenth birthday and retrieve The Book of the Dead and the second time to stop the Duke from stealing a painting that contained a shard of your soul.”
Damien picked up where he left off. “This time we have no memory of you sending us back. We think some electrical pulse hit us and sent us back here. But everything here is completely different than it was where we came from. In the future we came from, we’re good friends. And you never married the Duke.”
“That’s right,” Michael continued. “On your sixteenth birthday, we were there. We helped you escape from him and took his book to our time where you used it to send him back to Hell.”
“But when that shock wave hit us and we woke up here, we found Alexander and he said you were married to the Duke!”
“How did you know to seek out Alexander? How is he connected to this?” she glanced to Alexander. “Are you, too, from the future?”
He shook his head. “No, I am not.”
“We’re ALL really good friends in the future,” Damien said, motioning to encompass all of them. “We knew Alexander from our time.”
“How have I survived until your time if I did not surrender to Marcus’ demands that night?” Celine asked.
“When you took the book and ran, the man who killed your father chased you. He stabbed you and you almost died. The Duke happened upon you and revived you. You then stabbed him, hence drawing blood during the ceremony, and that turned you into what you are,” Damien explained.
“And then?” Celine inquired, her face a mask of confusion.
“We’re not one hundred percent sure of what happened after. You sent us back to our time right after that. We left you on the beach in Martinique,” Michael described.
“Reluctantly,” Damien pointed out.
“Yes, we didn’t want to leave you, but you said you couldn’t leave, and you’d be okay.”
“Anyway, in the years that followed, you were meant to meet and marry… someone else. You’ll spend centuries with that person. That’s beside the point. The point is, Celine, you were never supposed to marry the Duke. You were never supposed to be on his side. Something is wrong here. And we assume we were sent to this time to fix it.”
“We obviously need your help to return to our time, so at the very least, we needed to meet you and get you to agree to help us return to the future,” Michael said. “But Damien is correct, this isn’t the way things were supposed to happen.”
Celine paused for a moment before responding. “Well, I must admit, gentlemen, this is quite incredible. Your
