Captured by Time (9 page)

He looked as if he was going to drop right in front of her suddenly, and she realized that he was sicker than she'd thought. On a hunch, she reached up and tried to tip him towards the bed, and he went over as if he hadn't the strength to prevent it—and he didn't.

Still, although his eyes were bleary and slightly unfocused, he seemed to be mentally right there with her. "I shot a man, you know," he said, as she rooted around in her own bag and shook a penicillin pill out into her palm, then looked about them for a canteen and found one hanging from a nail in the wall.

"Here, take this," she said, not giving him much of a choice but glad when he simply did as she asked.

"I've killed lots of men. That's what Rangers do."

"I've heard that," she said matter-of-factly, as she got everything she thought she would need together before coming to the side of the bed his wound was on in order to treat it. It looked much worse than she'd imagined; swollen and sore and oozing blood.

And it also looked much older than just a day or two. He had gotten this somewhere else and had left it untreated, or been unable to treat it. She had to hope that he would be ultra-sensitive to the antibiotic, since he'd never had one before, and it had never been in any of the food he'd eaten either, so he was less likely to be allergic to it, which was good.

Unfortunately, he was just as irascible as always, and tried to sit up while she was getting ready to clean out his wound and stitch him up.

"Well, I'll be! You
are
a doctor, aren't you?"

He sounded so incredulous that she had to smile. "I am."

"You should smile more often, you know. You're very pretty when you smile."

She took the flattery with a large grain of salt, considering just how sick he was, and continued to do so, saying, "Thank you. You're pretty handsome, yourself."

"Yes, I am," he agreed badly, and she laughed. Then he tried to peer at the makeshift tray she'd created beside her to hold the instruments she was going to use. He had a good fire going, and that was going to be helpful to sterilize things. "What is all that?" he said. "What's a Buh–Baannn–Band Aid?"

His big eager fingers tried to reach for one, but she crammed two pain pills down his mouth before he could object, giving him a swig of water to wash them down with. "This is going to make you sleepy," she said.

He was down before the pills hit his stomach, but she wasn't going to look a gift two hundred and some odd pound unconscious man in the mouth. She simply set about doing what she needed to do to save him, hopefully before he woke up.

Even though she was a doctor and a consummate professional, she had to stop herself from drooling on him as she operated, considering that his shirt was wide open and she could really get a good look at the vast expanse of his chest. He was friggin' built! She'd said that he was handsome, but he was only just passable; not that that mattered to her in the least. He had a high, intelligent forehead, a head full of black hair, and not a lot of chest hair over prominent plates of muscles. Her mouth watered before she brought herself up short and returned to work, covering him more completely so as not to distract herself again.

When she was done, there was nothing left to do but to wait until he came around, wiping the sweat off his brow when his fever broke after she'd been able to coax an aspirin down his throat, and generally doting on him to an extent she'd never done before with anyone else, ever.

When Jude finally woke up, it was to an incredible thirst. He sat bolt upright in bed and demanded water. He didn't seem to know or care where he was, but clearly he knew what he wanted.

He also seemed surprised to see that she was still there and watched her avidly, his eyes surprisingly clear as she reached out the door of the cabin and grabbed a canteen she had stuck out there specifically so that it would be cool for him when he woke, then returned to the bed immediately while unscrewing the cap.

When she got there, before she had a chance to sit down beside him, his big strong hands reached up and grabbed her, pulling her down to where she'd been aiming for anyway. "Don't leave the cabin," he ordered, holding her much too tightly.

He had been in the act of trying to get up, she realized, trying to follow her and stop her from leaving him, despite his injury. He must have thought she was going to disappear the same way she had before, and although she didn't want to foster false hopes in him, since she didn't really know how to control when she went or stayed, she promised him what she could. "I'll do my best to stay with you."

She could see that Jude wasn't very happy with that idea, but he was too busy gulping down the water she'd brought to continue the argument—for now.

"Hey, don't drink that all at once. Save some for the rest of us. Besides, you'll make yourself sick." She was able to wrestle it away from him, but she knew that was only because he'd allowed it. She put it back outside where it would remain cold, then came immediately came back to his side.

Although she knew he was going to have questions about all her equipment, she had bought something in the Walmart at Settler's Bluff that even a doctor in the 1880s would have had; a glass thermometer, oral, of course.

She stuck this into his mouth just as he was opening it to ask her questions she figured she didn't want to answer, and took his pulse while they waited, then went into her bag and got her stethoscope, which thankfully didn't look all that much different from those of the mid-eighteen hundreds. His lungs sounded great, his pulse was regular, and his forehead was cool.

"How are you feeling?"

He gave her a jaundiced look. "Better than I was before, but not as good as I should."

"I'm glad you're feeling better." She reached into her bag of tricks and unwrapped a nutrition bar and protein bar before she brought them out. She didn't have many of them, but she figured he needed them, especially since she knew that—even if they were both starving to death—she wasn't going to be the one who went out and killed tiny animals for their food. Nuts and berries she could do—although it was the wrong season and the wrong state, and she'd probably bring them back something poisonous—but she was no hunter.

"Why don't you lie back and rest?" she asked, trying to push him in that direction.

He surprised her by doing as she wanted, but at the same time, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her down with him. "I'll rest, but if you want me to keep quiet, you're going to have to answer some questions. Where'd you say you were from?"

"Massachusetts."

No hesitation there at all.

"And why did you come here, to Twain Ridge?"

"To visit a friend." She didn't bother correcting him about where she had arrived originally. She didn't want to mention a town she wasn't sure was in existence yet at this time.

"Who?"

"Her name is Eva Rivera." It wasn't exactly a lie. Her cousin was her friend, too.

"Do you live with your parents?"

"No, both of them are gone," Cimmy said.

"Where did you go to school; what college made a woman a doctor?"

She had to chuckle at his almost outrage at the thought. "Harvard."

She wasn't at all sure that they did that for women in this time—as a matter of fact she was pretty sure they didn't. But he didn't seem to worry about it.

"What were those things you gave me, the tiny white things you made me swallow?"

Cimmy tried to pull away from him, but he held her close to him simply by contracting the arm that was around her. "You know the headache powders that are out there, like…" she remembered one from her residency in Knoxville. The taste was an abomination. No wonder some smart cookie had come up with pills. "Goody's and the like?"

Jude nodded.

"Well, that was just a compressed form of the powder; a pill."

He seemed to mull over all of what she'd said to him, then came out with, "I don't know what's wrong with you, but there's something different about you. Besides the fact that you like being spanked."

She opened her mouth to argue with him, but he gave her a look that said that that wouldn't be welcomed.

"You're… there's something I can't quite put my finger on, but you're going to tell me what it is, Cimmy."

Totally ignoring his injury, he lifted her onto him, then locked his legs over her calves and his wrists at the small of her back, very effectively trapping her there.

But she turned the tables on him, relaxing there atop him and saying, "I agree to do that if you'll tell me why you're on the lam." What the hell? she thought. She'd saved his life, so she couldn't see him having her committed. He owed her. And he was a smart enough man. He would figure it out himself eventually if they stayed together.

His jaw set in a way she'd seen before, when he was at his most stubborn and/or most resolved. But then he grunted. "Deal. I was going to tell you, anyway."

She muttered quickly under her breath; something about the fact that she hadn't ever intended to tell him her secret, but he either didn't hear it or didn't think it was worth following up.

"You first," she suggested, settling down for a good yarn.

"It should be ladies first, shouldn't it?"

"Not in this case," she answered back, then before he had a chance to get even more set in his way, she batted her eyelashes at him and said, "Please?"

"I was–am–a Texas Ranger, and I was working with a," she heard him swallow hard, "a former friend trying to bring in a gang who had killed and maimed and robbed their way across Texas and into New Mexico and Arizona, then down towards Mexico."

She could tell how hard it was for him to talk about this by how many times he paused and stumbled in his speech, which was unusual for him. "We came upon a very remote village near the border, out in the middle of the desert, where we had been told that they were hiding. Our orders were to get them, dead or alive, but we—or I—always tried to make sure that as few innocents got killed as was possible in bringing someone back to justice." He paused and studied her before continuing. "It didn't help that we discovered that they were sitting on top of a silver mine, and my partner was in debt to some very… unsavory characters."

He cleared his throat, and Cimmy offered him water. He took a small swallow, then gave it back.

"It turned out that they weren't there, and I rode on. He said he was going to play a hunch and double back, and I didn't think anything of it." His voice became almost as hoarse as hers as he spoke his next sentence. "He killed almost everyone in the village—men, women and children alike—and framed me for it, and when we hit the next town, the sheriff arrested me. My friend and I looked a bit alike, and he had stolen an outfit of mine, worn it for the massacre and put it back in my rucksack covered in blood. Then he went back, months later, and bought the land, which no one wanted since such a tragedy had occurred on it anyway, and made a fortune from the silver while I rotted in jail."

Cimmy was stunned.

"I escaped, and set about getting the evidence I needed to clear my name. One person from that village survived, and she had watched him kill her parents up close, from where she'd been smart enough to play dead. I was able to get an affidavit from her about the fact that it wasn't my horse, the fact that he was much shorter and slighter than I was. She even had a bullet she had carved out of the wall of her house and saved, which was from a type of gun that I didn't use but he did. So the bag you were ready to fight me for that first night had my salvation in it, which is why I couldn't let you have it or even look into it. Until I get that evidence to Texas—I'm not even going to bother with Arizona courts, which are even more corrupt than the Texas ones—and Col. Dawson, I'm walking dead."

All of a sudden, he reached out and pulled her up his body, so that they were nose to nose. "And if you hadn't come back, I would have died right here in this cabin, I have no doubt. Thank you for saving my life."

Cimmy looked anywhere but at him, embarrassed by his thanks and hoping he wouldn't ask what she knew he was going to, now that he had spilled his guts to her.

"So why did you come back? Was it for the luxurious living? The sumptuous food? The gentlemanly company?" One finger came to rest along her jaw and guided her gaze back to his eyes, which were much clearer than the last time she'd looked into them. "Or was it the spankings and my mouth between your legs that brought you back to me? And just where did you go, and how did you get there, and how did you get back?"

Surprisingly, she thought it would be much easier to talk to him about time travel, which she wasn't sure she believed in herself, and had very little idea about how it worked, than to deal with his questions about the reasons why she had returned to him.

"If I told you that I'm from another time, would you think I was a witch?" she asked tentatively.

That had him rolling her off him, to instead tuck her beneath him. She wasn't exactly sure what he thought he was accomplishing by doing that—besides hurting himself by the movement, which had her wincing for him—but it must have made him feel safer somehow.

"I don't believe in witches," he said.

"Good. Neither do I. But I was in Cherry's room that night because it was–is–my room. But not in this year. Not even in this century."

His eyes widened above her. "Where… when do you come from?"

"Are you sure you want to know?"

Jude nodded, clearly curious.

"I come from the year 2015."

If he'd been wearing a cowboy hat, she could picture him tipping it back in amazement. As it was, he had to settle with scratching his forehead just under where it would have sat. He gave a long, low wolf whistle, then asked, "Are things very different?"

It was Cimmy's turn to pause, albeit for a very different reason than he had. Unlike him, she wasn't talking about anyone dying. "It's busier, and more connected."

"How so?"

"Well, everyone talks with everyone else they know all the time. Either by phone or by typing to each other over… another means of communication." She didn't feel like getting into computers and texting with him, especially since she wasn't very interested in or good at either.

He looked excited. "I went to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia a few years ago and saw Mr. Bell's telephone invention."

She was duly impressed. "Well, it kind of takes over the world. No more Pony Express. No more two and three weeks or more to get a letter to someone who's just across the country. You can call anywhere in the world as long as you know the phone number for the person or business. Everyone—pretty much everyone—has a phone number, and your friends or family can get in touch with you any time, which can be good and bad." She touched his side gently, where his bandages were. "There have been a lot of medical advances, namely what saved you, which are called antibiotics. They fight infections and are generally readily available, so much so that new infections that are resistant to them have risen."

He looked amazed and intrigued and curious, and plied her with questions long after he should have been asleep.

But even then, when she was trying to get him to settle down, he clung to consciousness, as if he was worried that she wouldn't be there when he got up.

"We're going to talk more about that tomorrow, Cimmy. I want to hear everything. I want to know everything about you." His voice deepened and he spoke, even as he drifted off, in a tone that had a shiver running down her spine, tightening her nipples and making the area between her legs contract. "And we're going to discuss what I found you doing to yourself too, after I know I told you not to."

She stayed in bed with him until she knew he was truly asleep, then slipped out from his hold and perched instead on the somewhat unsteady table. She didn't trust that if she fell asleep in his arms, she might not end up back at the hotel again. She had a hunch that it was sensual feelings and the sleep that almost always followed them that triggered her travels, but she couldn't be absolutely sure, and she didn't want to leave him again.

Given the chance, she'd
never
leave him again.

She let him sleep for as long as he wanted to while she inventoried her stocks. Everything she had carefully laid out on top of herself before she'd fallen asleep had arrived with her, and the one item that had been on the bed but not touching her—a tin of breath mints that she'd just been using for experimentation purposes—hadn't. So at least she knew that; if she wanted something to go back with her, that was how she had to do it. She couldn't imagine why or what she would need to bring forward, but she assumed it would work the same way.