Rendezvous With Yesterday (Gifted Ones, #2)

by Dianne Duvall

[EBookObsessed]

Dianne Duvall takes us on a journey into the past unparalleled by even your local Renaissance Faire. While Beth might lack the magical abilities that we saw in Alyssa in A Sorceress of His Own, there is nothing more entertaining then watching this modern woman working her own magic in this male dominated world of the thirteenth century.

For those who are also fans of Dianne’s Immortal Guardian series, this story was a long time coming. When we first met Marcus Grayden in Night Reigns, in 2011, Marcus was still emotionally scarred 800 years later over the fact that as a young squire, he had fallen in love with his knight’s wife, a woman who had come from the future, and more particularly, a woman who he had made sure was at the exact right place at the exact right time so that she could be sent into the past. Although he mourned his unrequited love for centuries, Marcus loved both Lord Robert and Bethany and never made his feelings known.

For those of us who follow both series, how excited are we to finally get Robert, Bethany and Marcus’s background story.

Bethany is a bounty hunter and she goes with her brother, Josh, into the woods of Texas on a long-shot tip to find two wanted killers. The tips pays off but Beth and Josh do not exactly take these guys by surprise and a shoot out leaves the killers dead and Beth and her brother in bad shape. As Beth loses consciousness, she isn’t certain she is going to wake up again.

But she does awaken, completely healed and in a section of forest which is more lush and green than the one she passed out in. What is missing is the cabin, the killers and more importantly, her injured brother. Beth frantically searches the woods, fearing Josh will bleed out from his injuries before she can find him. She then comes upon four men on horseback dressed in typical knight garb of chainmail. She tries to get their help, but they refuse to speak modern English and are only speaking Middle English. Lucky for Beth, her mother was a history professor and taught her and her brother how to communicate in Middle English. She believes they are simply a very obsessive reenactment group.

Lord Robert, the Earl of Fosterly, and his knights have been searching the forest for marauders who have been preying on his people. They believe these bandits attacked Beth and her brother and offer to help her search. The longer they are with Beth, the more they note that more than just her speech is odd and they start to believe she might be a little mad. They are fascinated by her and with all of the odd objects she has with her.

Both groups know that something is not quite right, but it is once they arrive at the castle that Beth realizes just how bad the situation is for her. She knows that time travel just isn’t possible, but there it no doubt when she sees the brand new castle and village full of people, all dressed the same and speaking Middle English, that something happened to her. There is no group that dedicated to their craft they would live like they actually are in the thirteenth century. There is also the fact that she hasn’t seen one thing that points to the modern world.

This is a standard fish-out-of-water story, but the fun here is less watching Beth learn how to navigate life in the thirteen century, but watching everyone’s reaction to this woman who is more than just unconventional. She is more openly affectionate than is acceptable. She speaks oddly and is very vivacious. She has a bizarre collection of items that are fascinating. She will also be bringing a little women’s lib to Fosterly a few centuries early.

I will say that the only thing I was disappointed about was that Dianne made Beth a virgin. She did have a reasonable excuse why Beth never engaged in casual sex and why she was still a virgin. But Beth was a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties and there really was no reason that Beth could not have been given a long-time love interest before she met Robert and they could have gone their separate ways for any number of reasons. Robert was no virgin and was written to have a prior love-interest who had died some years before. I would have like to see how thirteenth centuries morality would accept twenty-first century’s more tolerant values. Would Robert have delighted in Beth’s more creative and less conservative sexuality or would he have hesitated in offering marriage to a woman who wasn’t pure when she came to him? In making Beth a virgin, Robert accepting Beth into his bed and into his life caused him no moral dilemma. I would have like to see him spend some time overcoming his regimented beliefs that his bride needed to be pure and whether his love of Beth was enough to overcome the moral dogma of the time.

Overall, this was an entertaining and simply fun story with a sweet romance.

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