Linda Lael Miller Bundle (39 page)

Presently, the smell and sounds of sizzling bacon filled the air, along with the aroma of fresh coffee. Rue got up, struggled back into her clothes and peered around the blanket.

She could see Farley in the lean-to, standing at the stove. The sight of him, with his hair wetted down and combed, a meat fork in one hand, filled her with a tenderness so keen that it was painful.

Rue approached hesitantly. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to say.

Farley turned a strip of bacon in the black skillet and ran his turquoise eyes companionably over her length. For an instant, Rue was beneath him again, in the throes of complete physical and spiritual communion, and the sensation left her disconcerted.

The marshal made short work of her poetic mood. “If you’re sore,” he said, “I’ve got some balm out in the barn.”

Rue sighed. This was the same man who had evoked such violently beautiful responses from her the night before and had later held her snugly against his side, making no demands. Now he was offering her the same medicine he would use on a cow or a horse.

“Thanks,” she answered belatedly, “but I’ll be fine.”

Farley shrugged, took two plates down from a shelf and began dishing up breakfast.

“Interesting,” she murmured thoughtfully, pulling back a chair.

He set a plate filled with fried food in front her. “What’s interesting?”

“You,” Rue reflected. “You’re a nineteenth-century male, and here you are cooking for a woman. Even waiting table.”

Farley arched an eyebrow. “It’s that or risk letting you do the cooking,” he replied.

Rue laughed, but her amusement faded as daylight strengthened the thin glow of the lanterns and reality settled in around her. It was morning now; the enchanted night was over and she was stranded in the wrong century, with the wrong man.

“Farley, what am I going to do?” she asked again. “My money is gone, I don’t have anywhere to stay and it’s beginning to look like my cousin and her husband are going to make their home in San Francisco and never contact anybody in Pine River again.”

“Jon and Lizzie will come back when they’re ready,” Farley said with certainty. “And you can stay here with me.”

“Oh, right,” Rue snapped, irritated not with Farley for making the suggestion, but with herself for wanting to go on sharing his life and his bed for as long as possible. “The good women of Pine River will love that.”

Farley grinned. “No, they won’t.”

“You’re being pretty cocky right now,” Rue pointed out, annoyed, “but the truth is, you’re afraid of those women, Farley Haynes. They have the power to make both our lives miserable, and you know it.”

Farley’s smile tightened to a look of grim obstinance, and Rue wondered hopefully if the night before had worked some ancient, fundamental magic in the deepest parts of his being, the way it had in hers.

“Those old hens will just have to do their scratching and pecking in somebody else’s dooryard,” he said.

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Rue countered, reaching for another slice of crispy bacon. The man made love with the expertise of a bard taking up the pen, and he had some pretty modern attitudes, but sometimes he talked in cowboy riddles.

Farley got up to refill his coffee mug and Rue’s. “Hell,” he grumbled, “even the prissy Eastern lieutenants and captains I knew in the army didn’t boss a man around the way those old biddies do.”

Rue stifled a giggle, but said nothing.

Farley came back to the table, set their mugs down and shook an index finger at her. “Mind you don’t take to carrying on the way they do, because I won’t put up with it.”

Rue swallowed, unsure how to react. On the one hand, it was an affront, Farley’s presuming to issue orders that way. On the other, though she would have chewed one of Aunt Verity’s antique crystal doorknobs before admitting as much to him, she liked the gentle forcefulness of his manner. Here, at last, was a person as strong as she was.

“I don’t see where my actions are any concern of yours,” she finally managed to say.

He sighed and shook his head, as though marveling that someone so simpleminded could have reached adulthood without being seriously injured in the process. “After last night,” Farley told her, making an insulting effort at clarity as he spoke, “there’s nothing we can do but get married.”

Rue wouldn’t have been more stunned if he’d thrown his food all over her.
“Married?”
she squeaked. In that instant, she realized that it was the dearest, most secret wish of her heart to marry Farley Haynes. At the same time, she knew she’d have to be demented even to entertain the idea.

Okay, so she loved Farley, she thought. He didn’t feel the same way toward her; in mentioning marriage, he was probably just following the code of the West, or something like that. And there was still the matter of their coming from two different centuries, two different
worlds.
To love Farley, to stay in this time with him, would be to give up everything she knew and much of what she was.

Rue was a strong woman, and that was both her blessing and her curse. Not even for Farley and a lifetime of the tempestuous dances he’d taught her in the night just past could she give up her own identity. She was of another time; she was a journalist, a person with many more bridges to cross, both professionally and personally.

Of course, if she did marry the marshal, she would have a place to stay until she made contact with her cousin, found the necklace and returned to her own century. Farley would undoubtedly make thorough love to her practically every night, and the mere prospect of that brought all Rue’s feminine forces to a state of hypersensitivity.

“I’ll send somebody over to the next town for the justice of the peace,” Farley said, as if the matter had been settled.

“Now just a minute,” Rue protested, thumping the tabletop lightly with one fist. “I haven’t said yes to your proposal, if you can call it that. It just so happens that I don’t want to get married—I don’t even plan to stay around here, once I’ve seen my cousin.”

Farley looked untroubled by this announcement. “What if we made a baby last night?” he asked, figuratively pulling the rug out from under Rue’s feet. “I don’t think things are any different in Seattle or Boston or wherever it is you really come from. Life is damn near impossible for an unmarried woman with a child.”

Rue laid both her hands to her stomach. Nature might very well be knitting a tiny being in the warm safety of her womb. She was filled with wanting and fear. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

Farley stood and carried his plate to the sink. Then he came back to the table, stood beside Rue’s chair and bent to simultaneously taste her lips and rub her lower abdomen with one hand. “If there’s no baby inside you now,” he said huskily, “I’ll put one there when I get back.”

A hot shiver shook Rue; she was amazed anew at the depths of the passion this man could rouse in her with a few words and caresses. “When will that be?”

He nibbled at her lower lip before answering. “About noon, if nothing goes wrong,” he said. Then he walked away to strap on his gun belt, reload his pistol and shrug into his duster. Farley put on his battered hat and reached for his rifle in a smooth, practiced motion. “Try to stay out of trouble until I can get you married,” he urged, grinning slightly. Then he opened the door and left.

Rue was restless, and the choices confronting her seemed overwhelming. Go or stay. Love or pretend to be indifferent. Follow her heart or her head. Laugh or cry.

More to keep herself busy than because she was a devotee of neatness, Rue heated water on the cookstove, washed the dishes, wiped off the table and swept the floor. Following that, she made the bed. It was while she was doing that that she found the stash.

Her foot caught on a loose floorboard as she was plumping the pillows, and she crouched to press the plank back into place. The same curiosity that had made her such a good journalist made her a very bad houseguest; Rue couldn’t resist peeking underneath.

A cigar box was tucked away in the small, dark place, and Rue lifted the lid to find a respectable collection of five-dollar gold pieces. This money, surely, was meant to be the down payment on Farley’s ranch.

Kneeling now, Rue set the box on the side of the bed and studied one of the coins. Where she came from, the small, ornate bit of gold would be worth far more than five dollars, but here it was ordinary money.

Carefully, Rue closed the lid and set the box back in its place. If Farley had been anyone but who he was, she might have taken that money, used it to get to San Francisco, but she couldn’t steal his dreams.

The best thing to do was look for the necklace.

The day was chilly, and Rue wished for a shawl as she walked along the sidewalks of Pine River, searching for the lost piece of jewelry that was her only link with the world she knew.

She searched all morning without any luck, and her shoulders were sagging with discouragement when she started toward Farley’s office. Hopefully, since he was willing to give her a baby, he might also offer lunch.

As she was passing Ella Sinclair’s boarding house, Rue realized there was one place she hadn’t looked—the outhouse she’d materialized in. Her heart started to pound. She wasn’t sure which one it was, but she knew it was in this neighborhood.

Lifting her skirts, Rue dashed around the house she’d been passing, avoiding manure and mud in the yard as best she could, and hurtled herself into the outhouse she found there, but to no avail—the necklace wasn’t there. She began to run through backyards, entering and searching each outhouse she came to. So intent was she on finding the lost necklace that she was barely aware of the rumbles of consternation, shock and amusement around her.

When she spotted her pendant caught between two boards—thank the Lord—she let out a shriek of delighted triumph and snatched it up.

In practically the same instant, a strong arm curved around her from behind, and Rue was yanked backward against an impervious chest. She knew by the quivering in her spirit and the straightforward method of operation that she’d been apprehended by Farley Haynes. Again.

“I was only getting my necklace,” she told him, wriggling to get free. “I lost it in the back of this wagon the other day, when I hitched a ride into town.”

With his free arm, Farley swept off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “That’s just fine,” he drawled, obviously furious. “Now I suggest you start apologizing to these people you’ve been disturbing.”

Rue wanted to laugh and to cry, she was so relieved at finding the necklace. She dropped it into her skirt pocket. “Anything you say, Marshal,” she responded sweetly. “Are we still getting married?”

The question stirred a buzz in the crowd that had gathered, and Rue was amused. Farley had just assumed she was up to no good, plundering the good citizens’ outhouses for heaven only knew what scurrilous purpose, and she wouldn’t have put it past him to arrest her. Therefore, in her opinion, a little embarrassment served him right, because after the previous night’s activities, he should have trusted her more.

“Yes,” he said as grimly as a judge pronouncing a death sentence.

Rue smiled all the while as she offered her apology to the crowd, every once in a while reaching into her pocket to make sure the necklace was there. She could not yet return to her own time because she hadn’t found Elisabeth, but the door was no longer closed to her, and that was the important thing.

S
ome thoughtful citizen had brought fried chicken, biscuits and gravy for Farley’s lunch, and he shared the feast with the solitary prisoner and Rue. The marshal’s eyes were narrowed, however, as he regarded her across the surface of his messy desk.

“I thought I told you to stay out of trouble,” he said.

Rue’s cheeks pulsed a little as she thought of the episode. “I was only looking for my necklace, Farley,” she answered reasonably. She took a bite from a crispy fried chicken leg and chewed thoroughly before going on. “If you had any idea how important that pendant really is, you wouldn’t make such a big deal about a little disturbance.”

Farley’s frown deepened. He took another piece of chicken from the lunch basket, which was lined with a blue-and-white cotton napkin. “I know ladies like their trinkets,” he allowed. “My mother had a brooch made of marcasite and jet that she wouldn’t have parted with to save her own scalp. But I have a feeling this necklace of yours is important for some other reason.”

He was remarkably astute, Rue thought, but she wasn’t about to explain the necklace’s peculiar power—mainly because she didn’t begin to understand it herself.

She reached into her pocket and touched the twisted chain, and that was when she felt the strange warning vibration. By instinct, she realized that the pendant was up to its old tricks again; she was about to be sent helter-skelter into some other part of history, and not necessarily the one she belonged in, either.

No,
she thought desperately,
not now. Not without saying goodbye….

The room seemed to waver and shift, like a reflection in old bottle glass. Glimpses of the orchard behind Aunt Verity’s house were superimposed over the stove, the bars in the cell door, Farley himself. Rue wrenched her hand from her pocket and the visions faded instantly, along with the sense of an impending spiritual earthquake.

She gripped the edge of Farley’s desk with both hands, swaying slightly with mingled sickness and relief.

Farley immediately jumped up to bring her a dipperful of cold well water from the bucket near the stove.

“Are you sick?” he demanded. “Do you want me to go and get the doc?”

Rue smiled thinly and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, still trying to regain her equilibrium. “Yes. Find Dr. Jonathan Fortner, please,” she joked. “And his wife Elisabeth, while you’re at it.”

Farley crouched beside her chair, looking up into her face with troubled eyes, eyes of such a beautiful Arizona turquoise that it hurt Rue’s heart to return their gaze. “What just happened here?” he demanded quietly.

I almost left you,
Rue answered in stricken silence.

“Rue,” Farley insisted, setting the empty dipper on the desk and holding both her hands in his. “Are you suffering from some sickness of the head? Is that your big secret? Did you run away from one of those mental hospitals?”

Rue laughed, a little hysterically, but with genuine amusement. She could answer only one of his questions with an unequivocal no. The other two he would have to take on trust. She shook her head. “I didn’t escape from an asylum, Farley,” she said softly.

She could see by his face that he believed her, maybe only because he wanted to, and that was the biggest relief she’d had since finding the necklace in the outhouse.

“I sent for the justice of the peace,” he said. “He’ll be here in a few hours.”

Rue had never, in all her life, had to deal with such a degree of temptation. She wanted so much to marry Farley, to have the right to share his joys and sorrows, his table and his bed, but to vow eternal fidelity when she fully intended to return to her own time as soon as possible would be unthinkable. She would simply disappear, and Farley would be left to wonder, to the end of his days, what had become of her.

“We can’t,” she said.

“We will,” he replied, rising and walking away to hang the dipper on its nail near the bucket.

Nothing was resolved when, fifteen minutes later, Rue left the jailhouse. Since she had nowhere in particular to go, she set out for the house in the country where all this had begun. She meant to find a tree in the orchard, climb up as high as she could and sit there and think, her back to the rough trunk, the way she’d done as a child, in a time far in the future.

She was surprised to find a fancy carriage in the yard next to the farmhouse. There was lots of bustle and activity; a little girl ran full tilt, first in one direction, then another, her small arms outspread in a child’s joy at simply existing. A handsome, dark-haired man was taking bags and satchels from the vehicle’s boot….

It was only then that the belated realization struck Rue.

Elisabeth was back from San Francisco.

A tearful joy filled her. She struggled with the latch on the front gate, grew impatient and vaulted over the low fence, catching her skirts on the pickets. “Bethie!” she cried in breathless, exultant frustration; even though she had not yet caught sight of her cousin, she knew she was there somewhere.

Sure enough, Elisabeth came bursting through the doorway of one of the outbuildings at the sound of Rue’s voice. She heedlessly dropped the crock she was carrying to the ground, and her blond hair tumbled around her shoulders as she ran.

“Rue!” she shrieked, laughing and sobbing the name. “Rue!”

Rue was dimly aware of the man and the little girl looking on in confusion, but she could only think of Elisabeth in those moments. Elisabeth, her best friend, her only real family.

“Bethie,” Rue said, and then the two women were embracing and weeping, as women have always done, and probably will do, when meaningful separations end.

Finally, Bethie gripped Rue’s upper arms in hands that had been strengthened by life in simpler but more physically demanding times, her blue-green eyes shimmering with tears, her face bright with joy.

“What are you doing here?” she wanted to know.

Rue laughed even as she wiped her cheek with one palm. “I sort of stumbled onto the place, the way I suspect you did,” she confessed. “Once I got here, I was determined to find you, to make sure you were all right.”

“I’m more than all right,” Elisabeth answered, touching her stomach. “I never thought it was possible to be so happy, Rue. I’m going to have a baby.”

The man and the child gravitated toward the two cousins while Rue was absorbing this news. She felt a pang of jealousy, which surprised her, and she even went so far as to hope she was pregnant herself—which was ridiculous, because that could only complicate matters.

“This is my husband Jonathan,” Elisabeth said, and her skin took on the lustrous glow of a fine pearl as she introduced him. The child, who was as lovely as her father was handsome, huddled against Bethie’s side and smiled shyly up at Rue. “And this is Miss Trista Fortner,” Elisabeth added, as proudly as if she’d somehow produced the little girl herself, just that very moment. “Jonathan, Trista, I’d like you to meet my cousin Rue.”

Elisabeth’s husband was movie-star gorgeous, in a smooth, urbane way. Farley was just as good-looking, but he was the rugged type, exactly the kind of man Rue had always avoided.

“Hello,” Jonathan said. He started to offer his right hand, which was scarred, then shrugged, grinned sheepishly and eased his arm back to his side. Rue recalled Farley saying the doctor had been injured.

Bethie smiled and linked elbows with Rue, marching her double-time toward the house. “I want to hear everything,” she told her cousin.
“Everything.”

They sat at the kitchen table, and Rue, hardly knowing where to begin, told the story. She explained that the search had begun after she’d read Elisabeth’s amazing letters about traveling through time, and admitted she’d first thought her cousin needed professional help. Then she’d found the necklace on the floor of the upstairs hallway, she went on, and made the trip herself.

For some reason she didn’t fully understand—under normal circumstances Rue would have told Bethie
anything
—she didn’t mention the passion she’d developed for Farley Haynes.

Elisabeth told Rue about her honeymoon, blushing intermittently and looking impossibly happy, and explained how Jonathan had hurt his hand. A fire had broken out and, while Farley had dragged Elisabeth out, Jon and Trista had been trapped upstairs. Jon had had the necklace in his possession and he’d escaped with the little girl over the threshold into 1992. The flow of time did not run parallel on both sides of the threshold, as Rue had already discovered, and when Dr. Fortner and his child finally managed to return, they’d found Elisabeth on trial for their murder.

Jon had made a dramatic entrance, Elisabeth said, eyes glowing with the memory, thus exonerating her of all charges, and they’d been married that day.

With help from Rue and Trista, Elisabeth began preparing dinner. She did it as naturally as if she’d been born in the nineteenth century instead of the twentieth. By then, the cousins had begun to speculate about the necklace. Although she couldn’t explain why, Elisabeth believed the pendant’s magic was different, depending on whose hands it fell into. She cautioned Rue to be careful about her choices.

Lanterns were lit as twilight tumbled silently down around the house and rose past the windows, and Jonathan moved, whistling, between the house and the barn.

“You truly do belong here,” Rue marveled to her cousin later that night, when Jonathan had gone out to check on his regular patients and Trista was tucked away in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Elisabeth nodded, lifting a kerosene lamp from the center of the table and leading the way into the parlor. A cozy fire crackled on the hearth and one other light burned on the mantelpiece. “I never knew it was possible for a woman to love a man the way I love Jonathan,” she said softly, and there was a dreamy, faraway expression in her eyes as she gazed out the window toward the barn and the orchard and the covered bridge beyond. “It’s like I was never whole before I came here. I felt like the odd woman out in some game of musical chairs—there was never a place for me to sit in that other world. The place is like a dream to me now, and I might even have convinced myself I’d imagined it all if it hadn’t been for your appearance.”

Rue thought of Farley and wondered if he was worried about her or if he’d even noticed she wasn’t around. She sighed. “Don’t you ever get scared? I mean, if a thing like this can happen, it changes everything. We’re like players in some game, and none of us knows the rules.”

Elisabeth turned to meet Rue’s eyes. “They say that realizing how little we truly understand is the beginning of wisdom. But I’ve got a handle on this much—when you love with everything that’s inside you, you take a terrible risk. I’m vulnerable in a way I never was before I knew Jonathan and Trista, and, yes, that scares me.”

Reaching into her pocket, Rue found the necklace and brought it out, dangling it from her fingers. “Here’s your ticket out,” she said. “If you don’t want to be vulnerable, all you have to do is go back home.”

Elisabeth actually recoiled, her blue-green eyes round. “
This
is home,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, put that thing away before something awful happens.”

Rue smiled and hurriedly dropped the pendant back into her pocket. After her experience in the jailhouse at lunchtime, when she’d seen one world taking shape on top of another, she was still a little shy about holding it for too long.

“Then I guess you’ve decided the risk is worth taking,” she said, taking a place on a settee, resting one elbow on the arm and propping her chin in her hand. “Don’t you miss it, Bethie? Don’t you ever wish you could see a movie or eat frozen yogurt in a mall?”

Elisabeth moved to the fireplace and stood looking down at the fire on the hearth. “I miss hot baths,” she said, “and supermarkets and books on tape. I
don’t
miss traffic jams, jangling telephones and the probability of one marriage out of two biting the proverbial dust.”

“Would you want to go back if it weren’t for Jonathan and Trista?”

Bethie thought for a long time before answering, “I’m not sure. Things are difficult here—the old saying about a woman’s work never being done certainly holds true—but there’s an intensity to life, a
texture,
that I never found in the twentieth century. I feel as though I’ve come home from some long journey of the soul.”

Rue sighed. “Well, I guess this completes my mission,” she said. “I can go home now.”

Elisabeth looked alarmed. “Oh, please say you’ll stay for a few days, at least. After all, once you leave…” She paused, lowered her head for a moment, then finished bravely, “Once you leave, we may never see each other again.”

“I can’t stay,” Rue said miserably. She reminded Elisabeth how the power of the necklace seemed to be changing, how she no longer needed to step over the threshold to return to her own century, how she’d seen images of the orchard in the middle of Farley’s office that day.

In typical Victorian fashion, Elisabeth laid spread fingers to her bosom. “You’re right,” she said. “You mustn’t take the risk. Do you suppose it’s possible for a person to end up in another time period entirely, or another place? Say, medieval England, or Boston during Revolutionary days?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask, Bethie,” Rue answered. Her heart was aching at the prospect of leaving her cousin and, she could almost admit it to herself, of leaving Farley. “I don’t have any idea what laws govern this crazy situation, or even if there are any. Maybe it’s covered by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or something.”

Elisabeth’s beautiful eyes were glazed with tears. “A day won’t go by that I don’t think of you,” she said. “Oh, Rue, I want you to be as happy as I am. Will you try to go back tonight?”

Rue thought of Farley. “Yes, but there’s something I have to do first,” she said. She glanced at the clock on the mantel, then at the darkened windows. “Oh, my gosh! I forgot I was supposed to get married!”

“What?”

Rue was hurrying toward the front door. “I wasn’t really going to marry Marshal Haynes,” she babbled. “He just thought we should because we’ve slept together and everything.” She pulled open the door and would have bolted out into the starry night if Elisabeth hadn’t caught her firmly by the arm.