Linda Lael Miller Bundle (44 page)

And the danger of the necklace.

Perhaps because she was used to crises, Rue quickly regained her composure. There was no point in worrying about Wilbur until she’d heard something from the hospital, and she wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of the antique pendant.

“We can get married now,” she said with only a slight tremor in her voice, after showing him the paperwork. They were in the parlor, by the fire, sitting on the raised hearth and drinking hot coffee laced with Irish cream. She watched him closely after making the announcement.

“Today? Tomorrow?”

Rue was heartened by his response, but only a little. “I think there’s a three-day waiting period and, of course, it would be foolish to try to get into town today.”

Farley grinned. “We could make it if we went on horseback.”

Rue’s heartbeat quickened, but she sternly reminded herself how sneaky men could be. Words were cheap; it was what a person
did
that counted. “Okay, cowboy,” she said testily, thrusting out her chin. “You’re on.”

Farley looked at his feet and the gleaming hardwood floor immediately surrounding them. “On what?”

“I’m accepting your challenge. We’re going to put the Land Rover into four-wheel drive and head for town. Just don’t blame me if we get stuck and freeze to death!”

The marshal narrowed his eyes, not in hostility, but in confusion. “Wilbur was just saying the other day that women are odd creatures, and he was right. What the devil’s gotten into you, Rue?”

“You kept the necklace!” she cried, surprising herself as much as Farley. “How could you do that? How could you pretend that I meant something to you, that you were planning to stay here with me, when all the time you intended to go back!”

Farley gripped her shoulders and lifted her onto her toes. While the gesture was in no way painful, it was certainly intimidating. “I thought you’d forgotten the damn thing,” he said, his eyes darkening from turquoise to an intense blue. “I was trying to help.”

Rue longed to believe him, and she felt herself wavering. “Sure,” she threw out. “That’s why you didn’t mention it.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, jawline clamped down tight, and if he wasn’t feeling pure frustration, he was doing a good job of projecting that emotion. “It’s not every day a man jumps a hundred years like a square on a checkerboard, Rue. I’ve been thinking about electricity and gasoline engines and computers and supermarkets and shopping malls—and how much I want to sleep with you again. There just wasn’t room in my head for that blasted necklace!”

Rue felt herself sagging, on the inside at least. She wondered, not for the first time, whether this man sapped her strength or nurtured it. She let her forehead rest against his shoulder, and he slipped his arms lightly around her waist and kissed the top of her head.

“Let’s hitch up your Land Rover,” he said with a smile in his voice. “I think I’d better hurry up and marry you before you decide Wilbur’s the man for you.”

Rue laughed and cried and finally dried her eyes.

Then she grabbed the false papers proving Farley was a real person, smiling at the irony of that, and the two of them headed for town. The conditions were bad, but the snowplows and gravel trucks were out, and the Land Rover moved easily over the slippery highways.

At the courthouse in Pigeon Ridge, Farley and Rue applied for a marriage license, then went to the town’s only restaurant to celebrate. The establishment was called the Roost, to Rue’s amusement.

She called the hospital in the next town, while Farley’s cheeseburger and her nachos were being made, and asked about Wilbur. He had arrived, the nurse told her, but was still in the emergency room.

Farley was poking the buttons on the fifties-style jukebox at their table, frowning the way he always did when something puzzled him.

Rue smiled, fished a couple of coins out of her wallet and dropped them into the slot. “Push a button,” she said.

Farley complied, and a scratchy sound followed, then music. A country-western ballad filled the diner, an old song that would, of course, be totally new to the marshal. He grinned. “Cassette tapes,” he said triumphantly.

“Close,” Rue replied, fearing the strength of the love she felt for this man, the depth and height and breadth of it. She explained about 45-r.p.m. records and jukeboxes while they ate. After the meal, she called the hospital again.

Farley was having a second cup of coffee when she returned. “How is Wilbur?” he asked.

Rue sighed and slid back into the booth. “He’s going to make it, thank God. He definitely had a heart attack, but he could live a long time yet, if he takes care of himself. I mean to see that he does.”

“If Wilbur were a younger man, I’d be jealous.”

Rue smiled at Farley’s teasing, knowing he was trying to help her over a slick place, so to speak. “You should be. A guy like Wilbur can drive a woman mad with passion.”

“Can we see him?”

She shook her head. “Not today. He needs to rest.”

The trip back to the ranch was even more treacherous than the journey into town. Even with four-wheel drive, the Land Rover fishtailed on the icy highway, and finally Farley braced both hands against the dashboard and let out an involuntary yelp of alarm.

“For heaven’s sake, Farley,” Rue snapped, managing the steering wheel with a skill her grandfather had taught her, “get a grip!”

He thrust himself backward in the seat and pushed his hat down over his eyes, and Rue knew for certain that it wasn’t because he wanted to sleep.

She spared one hand from the wheel just long enough to thump Farley hard in the shoulder. “I suppose you think you could do better!”

He pushed the hat back and glared at her. “Lady, I
know
I could do better.”

“This superior, know-it-all attitude is one of the many things I don’t like about men!” Rue yelled. She wasn’t sure
why
she was yelling; maybe it was the stress inherent in the day’s events, the tension of driving on such dangerous roads or frustration because it would be three days before she and Farley could be married and he had suddenly decided he had to be a virgin groom. Then again, it could have been because she’d thought she’d escaped the power of Aunt Verity’s necklace, only to find that it had followed her.

Very carefully, she pulled to the side of the road.

“All right, wise guy,” she challenged, “you can drive the rest of the way home. But when we’re both in the emergency room, shot full of painkillers and wrapped in surgical tape and looking like a couple of fugitives from the King Tut exhibit, don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Farley had already unfastened his seat belt, and he was opening the door before Rue even finished speaking. “I don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about,” he said evenly, “but I know a dare when I hear one and, furthermore, I don’t care for your tone of voice.”

They traded places, Rue grimly certain they’d end up in the ditch before they’d traveled a mile, Farley quiet and determined. Much to Rue’s relief and, though she wouldn’t admit it, her disappointment, they reached the ranch without incident, and Soldier met them in the yard.

“There’s a blizzard blowing in,” Farley announced, looking up at the sky before he wrapped one arm around Rue and shuffled her toward the house. Even though the gesture was protective, there was something arrogant and proprietary about it, too.

Within an hour, the power had gone off. Farley built up the fire in the kitchen stove, and Rue lit a couple of kerosene lamps she’d found on the top shelf of the pantry. While she read the book she’d started earlier, Farley went over the account books for the ranch. He made notes, paused periodically to slip into deep thought, then went back to the study for more reports and files.

If Rue hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn he was auditing her income tax return.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“About what?” Farley asked without looking up. He was making notes on a pad of paper, and every once in a while, he stopped to touch the tip of the pencil to his tongue.

“For yelling before. It’s just that—well—it’s the necklace. It’s really bugging me.”

That made him lay down the pencil and regard her somberly. “‘Bugging’ you?”

“Troubling. Irritating. Farley, this is no time for a lesson in twentieth-century vocabulary. I love you, and I’m afraid. That necklace has the power to separate us.”

Farley reached across the table and took her hand in his. For a moment, she really thought he was going to say he loved her, too, she believed she saw the words forming in the motion of his vocal cords. In the end, though, he simply replied, “We’re going to be married. I don’t know how to make my intentions any plainer, Rue.”

She traced his large knuckles with the pad of her thumb. When Farley declared his love, it had to be by his own choice and not because she’d goaded him into it. She suspected, too, that men of his time had an even more difficult time talking about their feelings than the contemporary variety did.

“Okay,” she finally responded, “but I’m still scared.”

Farley gripped her hand and gently but firmly steered her out of her chair and around the table, then into his lap. “Don’t be,” he muttered, his lips almost touching hers. “Nothing and no one will hurt you as long as the blood in my veins is still warm.”

Rue could certainly vouch for the warmth of the blood in
her
veins. She ached with the need to give pleasure to Farley, and to take it, and when he kissed her, tentatively at first and then with the audacity of a plundering pirate, her whole body caught fire.

“Just tell me,” she pleaded breathlessly when Farley finally freed her mouth, “that you won’t go back to 1892 without me.”

The stillness descended on the room suddenly, with all the slicing, bitter impact of a mountain snowslide. Farley thrust Rue firmly off his lap and onto her feet. “I can’t promise that,” he said.

R
ue clenched her hands into fists and stood beside the table, staring down into Farley’s stubborn, guileless face. “What do you mean, you can’t promise you won’t go back without me?” The question was a whispery hiss, like the sound of water spilling onto a red-hot griddle.

Farley reached out and pulled her back onto his lap. He splayed his fingers between her shoulder blades, offering slight and awkward comfort. “Rue, I was the marshal of Pine River, and I had responsibilities. People trusted me. One day, I just vanished without a fare-thee-well to anybody. Sooner or later, I have to find a way to let those folks know I’m not lying in some gully with a bullet through my head, that I didn’t just ride out one day and desert them. I can’t make a new life with you until I’ve made things right back there.”

Rue looked away, but she didn’t have the strength to escape his embrace again. The day had been long and stressful, and she was drained. “So I was right in the first place,” she said miserably. It wasn’t often that Rue wanted to be wrong, but this time she would have given her overdraft privileges at the bank for it. “You brought the necklace to Ribbon Creek because you knew you were going back, just like I said. When you claimed you thought I’d forgotten it, well, that was just a smoke screen.”

Farley paused, obviously stuck on the term “smoke screen,” then he met Rue’s gaze squarely. “I’m not the kind of man the Presbyterians entirely approve of,” he confessed in a grave tone of voice, “but there’s one thing I’m definitely not, and that’s a liar. And if you’ll search your memory, you’ll find that I never promised to stay here.”

Rue was aghast. “We took out a marriage license today,” she whispered. “Didn’t that mean anything to you? Was it just something to do?”

He laid his strong hands to either side of her face, forcing her to look at him, making her listen. “There’s nothing I want more than to be your husband,” he said evenly. “Unless you change your mind and call off the wedding, we
will
be married. We’ll fill this big house with children, and I think I can even set aside my pride long enough to accept the fact that my place at Ribbon Creek came to me by marriage instead of honest effort. But the longer I talk, the more certain I get that I can’t leave that other life unfinished.”

Rue was exasperated, even though she could see the merit in his theory only too well. “What are you going to do, Farley?” she demanded, and something in her tone made Soldier whimper fretfully from his place on the hooked rug by the stove. “Grab the necklace, click your heels together, make a dramatic landing in 1892 and tell everybody you’re a time traveler now?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t talk about what really happened with anybody but Jon Fortner or your cousin Elisabeth.” He frowned, his brows knitting. “You don’t suppose they’re in any sort of trouble over our being gone all of a sudden like that, do you? After all, we were in their parlor when we disappeared.”

Rue was ashamed to realize that the possibility had never crossed her mind. “I imagine the townspeople think I spirited you away to some den of never-ending iniquity. Besides, Jon and Bethie had no motive for foul play. Jon is—was—your friend, and everybody knew—knows.”

Farley didn’t look reassured, and Rue was almost sorry she’d ever confronted him about the necklace. It was plain that if he’d had any intention of using the pendant to escape her and an admittedly hectic modern world, he hadn’t been consciously aware of the fact. No, the marshal had only begun to seriously consider returning to 1892 to tie up loose ends
after
Rue had reminded him that such a thing was possible.

She laid her head against his shoulder. “Don’t try to send me off to bed alone tonight, Marshal, because I’m not stepping out of reaching distance. If I have to attach myself to you like one sticky spoon behind another, I’ll do it. And I don’t give a damn about your silly ideas about keeping up appearances, either. Everybody within a fifty-mile radius of this ranch thinks we’re making mad, passionate love every chance we get.”

Farley kissed her forehead. “We’ll be married soon enough,” he said.

The house was cooling off rapidly, since the furnace wasn’t working, and the kitchen was the only logical place to sleep. Rue took one of the lamps and went in search of sleeping bags, making a point of going nowhere near the necklace. She returned sometime later to find Farley still absorbed in paperwork. He reminded her of Abraham Lincoln, sitting there in the light of a single lantern, reading with such solemn concentration.

She built up the fire in the wood stove and spread the sleeping bags within the warm aura surrounding it. “What are you doing?” she asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor to watch him.

He scribbled something onto a yellow legal pad and then glanced at her distractedly. “Doing? Oh, well, I’m just writing up some changes we could make—in the way the ranch is being run, I mean.”

Rue was heartened that he was thinking of the ranch from a long-range perspective, but her fear of being abandoned hadn’t abated. Afraid or not, though, she was tired, and after brushing her teeth and washing her face, she stripped to her T-shirt and stretched out on one of the sleeping bags.

The power outage wasn’t bothering Farley a bit; lantern light and wood fires were normal to him. Rue wasn’t above wishing he were a little spooked by the encroaching darkness and the incessant howl of the wind; she would have liked for him to join her in front of the stove. With his arms around her, she might have been able to pretend there was no danger, just for a little while.

She yawned and closed her eyes. Sleeping on the kitchen floor reminded her of other nights, long ago, when Aunt Verity had sometimes allowed Rue and Elisabeth to “camp out” on the rug in front of the parlor fire. They had turned out all the lights, munched popcorn and scared each other silly with made-up stories about ghosts and vampires and rampaging maniacs—never dreaming that something with equally mysterious powers, an old-fashioned pendant on a gold chain, lay hidden away among their aunt’s belongings.

Waiting.

Farley continued to read and work on the rough outline of his plans for the ranch, but every once in a while, his gaze strayed to Rue, who lay sleeping in a bedroll in front of the cookstove. Looking at her tightened his loins and made barbs catch in the tenderest parts of his heart, but he wouldn’t let himself approach her.

He sighed and took a cold, bitter sip from his mug, rather than pass Rue to get fresh coffee from the pot on the stove. If he got too close, he knew he’d end up pulling that peculiar-looking nightdress off over her head and making love to her until the sun came up.

The lights flared on just as dawn was about to break, and Farley switched them off so Rue wouldn’t be disturbed, then he went upstairs to shower and change clothes. After last night’s storm, there would be plenty to do.

As he entered the room he would soon be sharing with Rue, Farley looked at the big, welcoming bed and wondered if he was losing his mind. Rue was so beautiful, and he wanted her so much. Refusing to sleep with her now was like putting the lid back on the bin after the mice had gotten to the potatoes, and he knew she was right in believing that her reputation was long gone. Still, he wanted to offer her a tribute of some sort, and honor was all he had.

The necklace glittered on the nightstand, as if to attract his attention, and he reached for it, then drew back his hand. He’d be returning to 1892, all right, but only long enough to put his affairs in order. Then he would come straight back to Rue. He didn’t intend to go before he’d married her, at any rate, nor would he leave without saying goodbye.

He made his way into the bathroom, kicked off his boots and peeled away his clothes. By then he’d figured out the plumbing system, thanks to one of the books he’d found in the study, and when there was no hot water, he knew it was going to take a while for the big heater downstairs to return to the proper temperature.

Resigned, Farley went back to the bed, crawled under the covers because he was naked and the room was still frigidly cold, and immediately felt the fool for being afraid of a little geegaw like that necklace. He reached out and closed his hand over it and, in the next instant, the room rocked from side to side. It was as though somebody had grabbed the earth and yanked it out from under the house like a rug.

Farley felt the firm mattress go feathery soft beneath him, and he bolted upright with a shout. “Rue!” He was sweating, and he could feel his heart thundering against his breastbone, as if seeking a way to escape.

He knew immediately that he was in a different room, in a different house. He could make out blue wallpaper, and the bed, an old four-poster with a tattered canopy, faced in another direction. And those things were the least of his problems.

Not only had Farley landed in a strange bed, there was someone sharing it. At his shout, a plump middle-aged woman in a nightcap let out a shriek loud enough to hasten the Resurrection, bounced off the mattress and snatched up a poker from the nearby hearth.

She continued to scream while Farley frantically clutched the necklace and willed himself back to the 1990s and Rue. The poker was coming toward his head when the mattress turned hard again and the wallpaper changed to paneling. He hadn’t had more than two seconds to acclimatize himself when the bedroom door flew open and Rue burst in. She hurled herself over the foot of the bed and scrambled the rest of the way to Farley on her knees, throwing her arms around his neck when she reached him.

“I heard you yell. You saw something, didn’t you? Something happened.”

Farley tossed the necklace aside and embraced Rue. She was real and solid, thank God. “Yes,” he finally rasped when his breathing had slowed to the point where speech was possible. “Yes.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. A woman with a poker in her hand—”

Rue drew back, her hands resting on the sides of his face, her eyes full of questions. “You’re sure you weren’t dreaming?”

Farley laughed, though amusement was about the last thing he felt. “I wasn’t dreaming. That woman was as real as you are, and she wasn’t pleased to find a naked cowboy in her bed, I can tell you that. Another second and she would have changed the shape of my skull.”

Rue turned her head, looking at the necklace lying a few feet away on the carpet. “Farley, let’s throw the pendant away before something terrible—and irrevocable—happens. Surely the good people of Pine River hired a new marshal, and Jonathan and Elisabeth
must
have found a way to explain your disappearance.”

Farley gathered Rue close and held her, taking comfort from the soft, fragrant, womanly substance of her. “We can’t do that, Rue,” he reasoned after a long time. “There’s no way of predicting what the consequences might be. Suppose somebody found it, a child maybe? No, we’ve got to hide that pendant and make damn sure it stays put.”

She buried her face in his chest, that was all, but the surface of Farley’s skin quivered in response, and he felt himself come to attention. “I’m scared,” she said, her voice muffled by his flesh.

Farley wanted Rue more than ever, having been separated from her by a wall of time, but he was strong and stubborn, and so were his convictions. The next time he made love to Rue, she would bear his name as well as the weight of his body.

Her hand trailed slowly down over his chest and belly, leaving a sparkling trail of stardust in its wake. Then she captured him boldly.

He groaned in glorious despair. “Damn it, Rue, let go.”

She did not obey. “You’re bigger and stronger,” she teased in a whimpery voice. “But I declare, Marshal, I don’t see you trying to wrest yourself free of my sinful attentions.”

Farley fully intended to pull her fingers away, but his hands went instead to the sides of her head. With a strangled cry, he kissed her, his tongue invading her mouth, plundering. And still she worked him mercilessly with her hand.

He broke away from the kiss, gasping. “Oh, God,
Rue
—”

She teased his navel with the tip of her tongue. “You promised not to make love to me again until we were married,” she said, and he trembled in anticipation, knowing what was going to happen. “I, on the other hand, never said anything of the kind.”

Farley felt her moving downward and groaned, but he could not make himself stop her. When Rue took him, he gave a raspy cry of relief and surrendered to her.

Later, Farley left the bed, showered and went about the business of running a ranch. Rue took a pair of tweezers from her makeup case, picked up the necklace, which was still lying on the floor where Farley had thrown it after his unscheduled flight into history, and dropped it gingerly into a big envelope.

She held the envelope by a corner, carrying it downstairs and laying it on the desk in the study. She opened the safe hidden behind her grandmother’s bad painting of a bowl of grapes, expecting to find it empty since she had long since gone through all her grandfather’s papers. To her surprise, however, there was a thin envelope of white vellum inside, and when she pulled it out, a chill went through her.

The handwriting on the front was old and faded and very familiar, and it read, “Miss Rue Claridge, Ribbon Creek, Montana.” There was even a zip code, a fact that might have made Rue smile if she hadn’t been so shaken. The date on the postmark was 1892.

She let the other envelope, containing the necklace, drop forgotten to the floor and sank into a chair, her heart stuffed into her throat.

Apparently the letter had been delivered to Gramps, and he’d saved it for her, probably never noticing the postmark or the antiquated ink.

Rue drew in a deep breath and sat up very straight. If the letter had been delivered to the ranch, why hadn’t she found it before, when she’d settled Gramps’s affairs? Come to that, why was any of this happening at all?

The only explanation Rue could think of was that Farley was going back to 1892 in the near future, if he hadn’t done so already. And this was the only way he could contact her, by writing a letter that would be misplaced and passed from person to person for a hundred years.